A Companion to Grice -- in six volumes, vol. II

 Arminius, Jacobus (1560–1609), Dutch theologian who, as a Dutch Reformed pastor and later professor at the University of Leiden, challenged Calvinist orthodoxy on predestination and free will. After his death, followers codified Arminius’s views in a document asserting that God’s grace is necessary for salvation, but not irresistible: the divine decree depends on human free choice. This bece the basis for Arminianism, which was condemned by the Dutch ReAristotle, commentaries on Arminius, Jacobus 51 -   51 formed synod but vigorously debated for centuries ong Protestant theologians of different denominations. The term ‘Arminian’ is still occasionally applied to theologians who defend a free human response to divine grace against predestinationism. R.H.K. Armstrong, David M. (b.1926), Australian philosopher of mind and metaphysician, and until his retirement Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney, noted for his allegiance to a physicalist account of consciousness and to a realist view of properties conceived as universals. A Materialist Theory of the Mind (1968) develops a scientifically motivated version of the view that mental states are identical with physical states of the central nervous system. Universals and Scientific Realism (1978) and What Is a Law of Nature? (1983) argue that a scientifically adequate ontology must include universals in order to explain the status of natural laws. Armstrong contends that laws must be construed as expressing relations of necessitation between universals rather than mere regularities ong particulars. However, he is only prepared to acknowledge the existence of such universals as are required for the purposes of scientific explanation. Moreover, he adopts an “immanent” or “Aristotelian” (as opposed to a “transcendent” or “Platonic”) realism, refusing to accept the existence of uninstantiated universals and denying that universals somehow exist “outside” space and time. More recently, Armstrong has integrated his scientifically inspired physicalism and property realism within the overall frework of an ontology of states of affairs, notably in A World of States of Affairs (1997). Here he advocates the truthmaker principle that every truth must be made true by some existing state of affairs and contends that states of affairs, rather than the universals and particulars that he regards as their constituents, are the basic building blocks of reality. Within this ontology, which in some ways resembles that of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, necessity and possibility are accommodated by appeal to combinatorial principles. As Armstrong explains in A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility (1989), this approach offers an ontologically economical alternative to the realist conception of possible worlds defended by David Lewis.

Arnauld, Antoine (1612–94), French theologian and philosopher, perhaps the most important and best-known intellectual associated with the Jansenist community at Port-Royal, as well as a staunch and orthodox chpion of Cartesian philosophy. His theological writings defend the Augustinian doctrine of efficacious grace, according to which salvation is not earned by one’s own acts, but granted by the irresistible grace of God. He also argues in favor of a strict contritionism, whereby one’s absolution must be based on a true, heartfelt repentance, a love of God, rather than a selfish fear of God’s punishment. These views brought him and Port-Royal to the center of religious controversy in seventeenth-century France, as Jansenism ce to be perceived as a subversive extension of Protestant reform. Arnauld was also constantly engaged in philosophical disputation, and was regarded as one of the sharpest and most philosophically acute thinkers of his time. His influence on several major philosophers of the period resulted mainly from his penetrating criticism of their systems. In 1641, Arnauld was asked to comment on Descartes’s Meditations. The objections he sent – regarding, ong other topics, the representational nature of ideas, the circularity of Descartes’s proofs for the existence of God, and the apparent irreconcilability of Descartes’s conception of material substance with the Catholic doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation – were considered by Descartes to be the most intelligent and serious of all. Arnauld offered his objections in a constructive spirit, and soon bece an enthusiastic defender of Descartes’s philosophy, regarding it as beneficial both to the advancement of human learning and to Christian piety. He insists, for exple, that the immortality of the soul is well grounded in Cartesian mind– body dualism. In 1662, Arnauld composed (with Pierre Nicole) the Port-Royal Logic, an influential treatise on language and reasoning. After several decades of theological polemic, during which he fled France to the Netherlands, Arnauld resumed his public philosophical activities with the publication in 1683 of On True and False Ideas and in 1685 of Philosophical and Theological Reflections on the New System of Nature and Grace. These two works, opening salvos in what would become a long debate, constitute a detailed attack on Malebranche’s theology and its philosophical foundations. In the first, mainly philosophical treatise, Arnauld insists that ideas, or the mental representations that mediate human knowledge, are nothing but acts of the mind that put us in direct cognitive and perceptual contact with things in the world. (Malebranche, as Arnauld reads him, Armstrong, David M. Arnauld, Antoine 52 -   52 argues that ideas are immaterial but nonmental objects in God’s understanding that we know and perceive instead of physical things. Thus, the debate is often characterized as between Arnauld’s direct realism and Malebranche’s representative theory.) Such mental acts also have representational content, or what Arnauld (following Descartes) calls “objective reality.” This content explains the act’s intentionality, or directedness toward an object. Arnauld would later argue with Pierre Bayle, who ce to Malebranche’s defense, over whether all mental phenomena have intentionality, as Arnauld believes, or, as Bayle asserts, certain events in the soul (e.g., pleasures and pains) are non-intentional. This initial critique of Malebranche’s epistemology and philosophy of mind, however, was intended by Arnauld only as a prolegomenon to the more important attack on his theology; in particular, on Malebranche’s claim that God always acts by general volitions and never by particular volitions. This view, Arnauld argues, undermines the true Catholic system of divine providence and threatens the efficacy of God’s will by removing God from direct governance of the world. In 1686, Arnauld also entered into discussions with Leibniz regarding the latter’s Discourse on Metaphysics. In the ensuing correspondence, Arnauld focuses his critique on Leibniz’s concept of substance and on his causal theory, the preestablished harmony. In this exchange, like the one with Malebranche, Arnauld is concerned to preserve what he takes to be the proper way to conceive of God’s freedom and providence; although his remarks on substance (in which he objects to Leibniz’s reintroduction of “substantial forms”) is also clearly motivated by his commitment to a strict Cartesian ontology – bodies are nothing more than extension, devoid of any spiritual element. Most of his philosophical activity in the latter half of the century, in fact, is a vigorous defense of Cartesianism, particularly on theological grounds (e.g., demonstrating the consistency between Cartesian metaphysics and the Catholic dogma of real presence in the Eucharist), as it bece the object of condemnation in both Catholic and Protestant circles.  BAYLE, DESCARTES, LEIBNIZ, MALEBRANCHE. S.N. Arouet, François-Marie.VOLTAIRE. a round.Appendix of Special Symbols. arrow paradox.

ZENO’S PARADOXES. Arrow’s paradox, also called Arrow’s (impossibility) theorem, a major result in social choice theory, ned for its discoverer, economist Kenneth Arrow. It is intuitive to suppose that the preferences of individuals in a society can be expressed formally, and then aggregated into an expression of social preferences, a social choice function. Arrow’s paradox is that individual preferences having certain well-behaved formalizations demonstrably cannot be aggregated into a similarly well-behaved social choice function satisfying four plausible formal conditions: (1) collective rationality – any set of individual orderings and alternatives must yield a social ordering; (2) Pareto optimality – if all individuals prefer one ordering to another, the social ordering must also agree; (3) non-dictatorship – the social ordering must not be identical to a particular individual’s ordering; and (4) independence of irrelevant alternatives – the social ordering depends on no properties of the individual orderings other than the orders themselves, and for a given set of alternatives it depends only on the orderings of those particular alternatives. Most attempts to resolve the paradox have focused on aspects of (1) and (4). Some argue that preferences can be rational even if they are intransitive. Others argue that cardinal orderings, and hence, interpersonal comparisons of preference intensity, are relevant. 

DECISION THEORY, SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY. A.N. Arrow’s theorem.ARROW’s PARADOX. art, philosophy of.AESTHETICS. art, representational theory of.MIMESIS. artifactuality.INSTITUTIONAL THEORY OF ART. artificial intelligence, also called AI, the scientific effort to design and build intelligent artifacts. Since the effort inevitably presupposes and tests theories about the nature of intelligence, it has implications for the philosophy of mind – perhaps even more than does empirical psychology. For one thing, actual construction ounts to a direct assault on the mind–body problem; should it succeed, some form of materialism would seem to be vindicated. For another, a working model, even a limited one, requires a more global conception of what intelligence is than do experiments to test specific hypotheses. In fact, psychology’s own overview of its domain Arouet, François-Marie artificial intelligence 53 -   53 has been much influenced by fundental concepts drawn from AI. Although the idea of an intelligent artifact is old, serious scientific research dates only from the 1950s, and is associated with the development of progrmable computers. Intelligence is understood as a structural property or capacity of an active system; i.e., it does not matter what the system is made of, as long as its parts and their interactions yield intelligent behavior overall. For instance, if solving logical problems, playing chess, or conversing in English manifests intelligence, then it is not important whether the “implementation” is electronic, biological, or mechanical, just as long as it solves, plays, or talks. Computers are relevant mainly because of their flexibility and economy: software systems are unmatched in achievable active complexity per invested effort. Despite the generality of progrmable structures and the variety of historical approaches to the mind, the bulk of AI research divides into two broad cps – which we can think of as language-oriented and pattern-oriented, respectively. Conspicuous by their absence are significant influences from the conditionedresponse paradigm, the psychoanalytic tradition, the mental picture idea, empiricist (atomistic) associationism, and so on. Moreover, both AI cps tend to focus on cognitive issues, sometimes including perception and motor control. Notably omitted are such psychologically important topics as affect, personality, aesthetic and moral judgment, conceptual change, mental illness, etc. Perhaps such matters are beyond the purview of artificial intelligence; yet it is an unobvious substantive thesis that intellect can be cordoned off and realized independently of the rest of human life. The two main AI paradigms emerged together in the 1950s (along with cybernetic and information-theoretic approaches, which turned out to be dead ends); and both are vigorous today. But for most of the sixties and seventies, the language-based orientation dominated attention and funding, for three signal reasons. First, computer data structures and processes themselves seemed languagelike: data were syntactically and semantically articulated, and processing was localized (serial). Second, twentieth-century linguistics and logic made it intelligible that and how such systems might work: automatic symbol manipulation made clear, powerful sense. Finally, the sorts of performance most enable to the approach – explicit reasoning and “figuring out” – strike both popular and educated opinion as particularly “intellectual”; hence, early successes were all the more impressive, while “trivial” stumbling blocks were easier to ignore. The basic idea of the linguistic or symbol manipulation cp is that thinking is like talking – inner discourse – and, hence, that thoughts are like sentences. The suggestion is venerable; and Hobbes even linked it explicitly to computation. Yet, it was a major scientific achievement to turn the general idea into a serious theory. The account does not apply only, or even especially, to the sort of thinking that is accessible to conscious reflection. Nor is the “language of thought” supposed to be much like English, predicate logic, LISP, or any other filiar notation; rather, its detailed character is an empirical research problem. And, despite fictional stereotypes, the aim is not to build superlogical or inhumanly rational automata. Our human tendencies to take things for granted, make intuitive leaps, and resist implausible conclusions are not weaknesses that AI strives to overcome but abilities integral to real intelligence that AI aspires to share. In what sense, then, is thought supposed to be languagelike? Three items are essential. First, thought tokens have a combinatorial syntactic structure; i.e., they are compounds of welldefined atomic constituents in well-defined (recursively specifiable) arrangements. So the constituents are analogous to words, and the arrangements are analogous to phrases and sentences; but there is no supposition that they should resemble any known words or grmar. Second, the contents of thought tokens, what they “mean,” are a systematic function of their composition: the constituents and forms of combination have determinate significances that together determine the content of any wellformed compound. So this is like the meaning of a sentence being determined by its grmar and the meanings of its words. Third, the intelligent progress or sequence of thought is specifiable by rules expressed syntactically – they can be carried out by processes sensitive only to syntactic properties. Here the analogy is to proof theory: the formal validity of an argument is a matter of its according with rules expressed formally. But this analogy is particularly treacherous, because it immediately suggests the rigor of logical inference; but, if intelligence is specifiable by formal rules, these must be far more permissive, context-sensitive, and so on, than those of formal logic. Syntax as such is perfectly neutral as to how the constituents are identified (by sound, by artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 54 -   54 shape, by magnetic profile) and arranged (in time, in space, via address pointers). It is, in effect, a free pareter: whatever can serve as a bridge between the semantics and the processing. The account shares with many others the assumptions that thoughts are contentful (meaningful) and that the processes in which they occur can somehow be realized physically. It is distinguished by the two further theses that there must be some independent way of describing these thoughts that mediates between (simultaneously determines) their contents and how they are processed, and that, so described, they are combinatorially structured. Such a description is syntactical. We can distinguish two principal phases in language-oriented AI, each lasting about twenty years. Very roughly, the first phase emphasized processing (search and reasoning), whereas the second has emphasized representation (knowledge). To see how this went, it is important to appreciate the intellectual breakthrough required to conceive AI at all. A machine, such as a computer, is a deterministic system, except for random elements. That is fine for perfectly constrained domains, like numerical calculation, sorting, and parsing, or for domains that are constrained except for prescribed randomness, such as statistical modeling. But, in the general case, intelligent behavior is neither perfectly constrained nor perfectly constrained with a little random variation thrown in. Rather, it is generally focused and sensible, yet also fallible and somewhat variable. Consider, e.g., chess playing (an early test bed for AI): listing all the legal moves for any given position is a perfectly constrained problem, and easy to progr; but choosing the best move is not. Yet an intelligent player does not simply determine which moves would be legal and then choose one randomly; intelligence in chess play is to choose, if not always the best, at least usually a good move. This is something between perfect determinacy and randomness, a “between” that is not simply a mixture of the two. How is it achievable in a machine? The crucial innovation that first made AI concretely and realistically conceivable is that of a heuristic procedure. (The term ‘heuristic’ derives from the Greek word for discovery, as in Archimedes’ exclation “Eureka!”) The relevant point for AI is that discovery is a matter neither of following exact directions to a goal nor of dumb luck, but of looking around sensibly, being guided as much as possible by what you know in advance and what you find along the way. So a heuristic procedure is one for sensible discovery, a procedure for sensibly guided search. In chess, e.g., a player does well to bear in mind a number of rules of thumb: other things being equal, rooks are more valuable than knights, it is an asset to control the center of the board, and so on. Such guidelines, of course, are not valid in every situation; nor will they all be best satisfied by the se move. But, by following them while searching as far ahead through various scenarios as possible, a player can make generally sensible moves – much better than random – within the constraints of the ge. This picture even accords fairly well with the introspective feel of choosing a move, particularly for less experienced players. The essential insight for AI is that such roughand-ready (ceteris paribus) rules can be deterministically progrmed. It all depends on how you look at it. One and the se bit of computer progr can be, from one point of view, a deterministic, infallible procedure for computing how a given move would change the relative balance of pieces, and from another, a generally sensible but fallible procedure for estimating how “good” that move would be. The substantive thesis about intelligence – human and artificial alike – then is that our powerful but fallible ability to form “intuitive” hunches, educated guesses, etc., is the result of (largely unconscious) search, guided by such heuristic rules. The second phase of language-inspired AI, dating roughly from the mid-1970s, builds on the idea of heuristic procedure, but dratically changes the emphasis. The earlier work was fred by a conception of intelligence as finding solutions to problems (good moves, e.g.). From such a perspective, the specification of the problem (the rules of the ge plus the current position) and the provision of some heuristic guides (domain-specific rules of thumb) are merely a setting of the pareters; the real work, the real exercise of intelligence, lies in the intensive guided search undertaken in the specified terms. The later phase, impressed not so much by our problem-solving prowess as by how well we get along with “simple” common sense, has shifted the emphasis from search and reasoning to knowledge. The motivation for this shift can be seen in the following two sentences: We gave the monkey the banana because it was ripe. We gave the monkey the banana because it was hungry. artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 55 -   55 The word ‘it’ is biguous, as the terminal adjectives make clear. Yet listeners effortlessly understand what is meant, to the point, usually, of not even noticing the biguity. The question is, how? Of course, it is “just common sense” that monkeys don’t get ripe and bananas don’t get hungry, so . . . But three further observations show that this is not so much an answer as a restatement of the issue. First, sentences that rely on common sense to avoid misunderstanding are anything but rare: conversation is rife with them. Second, just about any odd fact that “everybody knows” can be the bit of common sense that understanding the next sentence depends on; and the range of such knowledge is vast. Yet, third, dialogue proceeds in real time without a hitch, almost always. So the whole range of commonsense knowledge must be somehow at our mental fingertips all the time. The underlying difficulty is not with speed or quantity alone, but with relevance. How does a system, given all that it knows about aardvarks, Alaba, and ax handles, “home in on” the pertinent fact that bananas don’t get hungry, in the fraction of a second it can afford to spend on the pronoun ‘it’? The answer proposed is both simple and powerful: common sense is not just randomly stored information, but is instead highly organized by topics, with lots of indexes, cross-references, tables, hierarchies, and so on. The words in the sentence itself trigger the “articles” on monkeys, bananas, hunger, and so on, and these quickly reveal that monkeys are mmals, hence animals, that bananas are fruit, hence from plants, that hunger is what animals feel when they need to eat – and that settles it. The ount of search and reasoning is minimal; the issue of relevance is solved instead by the antecedent structure in the stored knowledge itself. While this requires larger and more elaborate systems, the hope is that it will make them faster and more flexible. The other main orientation toward artificial intelligence, the pattern-based approach – often called “connectionism” or “parallel distributed processing” – reemerged from the shadow of symbol processing only in the 1980s, and remains in many ways less developed. The basic inspiration comes not from language or any other psychological phenomenon (such as imagery or affect), but from the microstructure of the brain. The components of a connectionist system are relatively simple active nodes – lots of them – and relatively simple connections between those nodes – again, lots of them. One important type (and the easiest to visualize) has the nodes divided into layers, such that each node in layer A is connected to each node in layer B, each node in layer B is connected to each node in layer C, and so on. Each node has an activation level, which varies in response to the activations of other, connected nodes; and each connection has a weight, which determines how strongly (and in what direction) the activation of one node affects that of the other. The analogy with neurons and synapses, though imprecise, is intended. So imagine a layered network with finely tuned connection weights and random (or zero) activation levels. Now suppose the activations of all the nodes in layer A are set in some particular way – some pattern is imposed on the activation state of this layer. These activations will propagate out along all the connections from layer A to layer B, and activate some pattern there. The activation of each node in layer B is a function of the activations of all the nodes in layer A, and of the weights of all the connections to it from those nodes. But since each node in layer B has its own connections from the nodes in layer A, it will respond in its own unique way to this pattern of activations in layer A. Thus, the pattern that results in layer B is a joint function of the pattern that was imposed on layer A and of the pattern of connection weights between the two layers. And a similar story can be told about layer B’s influence on layer C, and so on, until some final pattern is induced in the last layer. What are these patterns? They might be any number of things; but two general possibilities can be distinguished. They might be tantount to (or substrata beneath) representations of some filiar sort, such as sentencelike structures or images; or they might be a kind (or kinds) of representation previously unknown. Now, people certainly do sometimes think in sentences (and probably images); so, to the extent that networks are taken as complete brain models, the first alternative must be at least partly right. But, to that extent, the models are also more physiological than psychological: it is rather the implemented sentences or images that directly model the mind. Thus, it is the possibility of a new genus of representation – sometimes called distributed representation – that is particularly exciting. On this alternative, the patterns in the mind represent in some way other than by mimetic imagery or articulate description. How? An important feature of all network models is that there are two quite different categories of pattern. On the one hand, there are the relatively ephemeral patterns of activation in various artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 56 -   56 groups of nodes; on the other, there are the relatively stable patterns of connection strength ong the nodes. Since there are in general many more connections than nodes, the latter patterns are richer; and it is they that determine the capabilities of the network with regard to the former patterns. Many of the abilities most easily and “naturally” realized in networks can be subsumed under the heading pattern completion: the connection weights are adjusted – perhaps via a training regime – such that the network will complete any of the activation patterns from a predetermined group. So, suppose some fraction (say half) of the nodes in the net are clped to the values they would have for one of those patterns (say P) while the remainder are given random (or default) activations. Then the network, when run, will reset the latter activations to the values belonging to P – thus “completing” it. If the unclped activations are regarded as variations or deviations, pattern completion ounts to normalization, or grouping by similarity. If the initial or input nodes are always the se (as in layered networks), then we have pattern association (or transformation) from input to output. If the input pattern is a memory probe, pattern completion becomes access by content. If the output pattern is an identifier, then it is pattern recognition. And so on. Note that, although the operands are activation patterns, the “knowledge” about them, the ability to complete them, is contained in the connection patterns; hence, that ability or know-how is what the network represents. There is no obvious upper bound on the possible refinement or intricacy of these pattern groupings and associations. If the input patterns are sensory stimuli and the output patterns are motor control, then we have a potential model of coordinated and even skillful behavior. In a system also capable of language, a network model (or component) might account for verbal recognition and content association, and even such “nonliteral” effects as trope and tone. Yet at least some sort of “symbol manipulation” seems essential for language use, regardless of how networklike the implementation is. One current speculation is that it might suffice to approximate a battery of symbolic processes as a special subsystem within a cognitive system that fundentally works on quite different principles. The attraction of the pattern-based approach is, at this point, not so much actual achievement as it is promise – on two grounds. In the first place, the space of possible models, not only network topologies but also ways of construing the patterns, is vast. Those built and tested so far have been, for practical reasons, rather small; so it is possible to hope beyond their present limitations to systems of significantly greater capability. But second, and perhaps even more attractive, those directions in which patternbased systems show the most promise – skills, recognition, similarity, and the like – are ong the areas of greatest frustration for languagebased AI. Hence it remains possible, for a while at least, to overlook the fact that, to date, no connectionist network can perform long division, let alone play chess or solve symbolic logic problems. 

artificial life, an interdisciplinary science studying the most general character of the fundental processes of life. These processes include self-organization, self-reproduction, learning, adaptation, and evolution. Artificial life (or ALife) is to theoretical biology roughly what artificial intelligence (AI) is to theoretical psychology – computer simulation is the methodology of choice. In fact, since the mind exhibits many of life’s fundental properties, AI could be considered a subfield of ALife. However, whereas most traditional AI models are serial systems with complicated, centralized controllers making decisions based on global state information, most natural systems exhibiting complex autonomous behavior are parallel, distributed networks of simple entities making decisions based solely on their local state information, so typical ALife models have a corresponding distributed architecture. A computer simulation of evolving “bugs” can illustrate what ALife models are like. Moving around in a two-dimensional world periodically laden with heaps of “food,” these bugs eat, reproduce, and sometimes perish from starvation. Each bug’s movement is genetically determined by the quantities of food in its immediate neighborhood, and random mutations and crossovers modify these genomes during reproduction. Simulations started with random genes show spontaneous waves of highly adaptive genetic novelties continuously sweeping through the population at precisely quantifiable rates.C. Langston et al., eds., Artificial Life II (1991). artificial language artificial life 57 -   57 ALife science raises and promises to inform many philosophical issues, such as: Is functionalism the right approach toward life? When, if ever, is a simulation of life really alive? When do systems exhibit the spontaneous emergence of properties? 

ascriptivism, the theory that to call an action voluntary is not to describe it as caused in a certain way by the agent who did it, but to express a commitment to hold the agent responsible for the action. Ascriptivism is thus a kind of noncognitivism as applied to judgments about the voluntariness of acts. Introduced by Hart in “Ascription of Rights and Responsibilities,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1949), ascriptivism was given its ne and attacked in Geach’s “Ascriptivism,” Philosophical Review (1960). Hart recanted in the Preface to his Punishment and Responsibility (1968). 

associationism, the psychological doctrine that association is the sole or primary basis of learning as well as of intelligent thought and behavior. Association occurs when one type of thought, idea, or behavior follows, or is contingent upon, another thought, idea, or behavior or external event, and the second somehow bonds with the first. If the idea of eggs is paired with the idea of h, then the two ideas may become associated. Associationists argue that complex states of mind and mental processes can be analyzed into associated elements. The complex may be novel, but the elements are products of past associations. Associationism often is combined with hedonism. Hedonism explains why events associate or bond: bonds are forged by pleasant experiences. If the pleasantness of eating eggs is combined with the pleasantness of eating h, then ideas of h and eggs associate. Bonding may also be explained by various non-hedonistic principles of association, as in Hume’s theory of the association of ideas. One of these principles is contiguity in place or time. Associationism contributes to the componential analysis of intelligent, rational activity into non-intelligent, non-rational, mechanical processes. People believe as they do, not because of rational connections ong beliefs, but because beliefs associatively bond. Thus one may think of London when thinking of England, not because one possesses an inner logic of geographic beliefs from which one infers that London is in England. The two thoughts may co-occur because of contiguity or other principles. Kinds of associationism occur in behaviorist models of classical and operant conditioning. Certain associationist ideas, if not associationism itself, appear in connectionist models of cognition, especially the principle that contiguities breed bonding. Several philosophers and psychologists, including Hume, Hartley, and J. S. Mill ong philosophers and E. L. Thorndike (1874–1949) and B. F. Skinner (1904–90) ong psychologists, are associationists. 

Astell, Mary (1666–1731), an early English feminist and author of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694 and 1697) and Some Reflections on Marriage (1700). These works argue that women’s shortcomings are not due to a lack of intellectual ability, since women have rational souls, and present an educational progr to fit them rationally for their religious duties. Astell entered as well into the philosophical, theological, and political controversies of her day. Her Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695) is a correspondence with the ascriptivism Astell, Mary 58 -   58 English Malebranchian, John Norris, over such issues as Norris’s contention that our duty is to God only. Her most substantial work, The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), lays out her views on the grounds and implications of natural and revealed religion. This work includes considerable critical attention to John Locke’s ideas, and both this and the Letters called forth refutations from Locke’s friend, Daris Cudworth. 

Athanasius (c.297–373), early Christian father, bishop in Alexandria (though frequently exiled), and a leading protagonist in the fourth-century disputes concerning Christ’s relationship to God. Through major works like On the Incarnation, Against the Arians, and Letters on the Holy Spirit, Athanasius contributed greatly to the classical doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Opposing all forms of Arianism, which denied Christ’s divinity and reduced him to a creature, Athanasius taught, in the language of the Nicene Creed, that Christ the Son, and likewise the Holy Spirit, were of the se being as God the Father (homoousios). Thus with terminology and concepts drawn from Greek philosophy, he helped to forge the distinctly Christian and un-Hellenistic doctrine of the eternal triune God, who bece enfleshed in time and matter and restored humanity to immortality, forfeited through sin, by involvement in its condition of corruption and decay.  ARIANISM. A.E.L. atheism (from Greek a-, ‘not’, and theos, ‘god’), the view that there are no gods. A widely used sense denotes merely not believing in God and is consistent with agnosticism. A stricter sense denotes a belief that there is no God; this use has become the standard one. In the Apology Socrates is accused of atheism for not believing in the official Athenian gods. Some distinguish between theoretical atheism and practical atheism. A theoretical atheist is one who self-consciously denies the existence of a supreme being, whereas a practical atheist may believe that a supreme being exists but lives as though there were no god. L.P.P. Atheismusstreit.FICHTE. Athenian Academy.DASCIUS. Athenian School.

MIDDLE PLATONISM. A-theory of time.TIME. Atman, in Hindu thought, the individual, viewed by Advaita Vedanta as numerically identical to, and by other varieties of Vedanta as dependent on and capable of worship of, Brahman. Sometimes in Hinduism conceived as inherently conscious and possessed of intrinsic mental qualities, and sometimes viewed as having mental qualities only in the sense that the composite of Atman-embodied-in-a-physical-body has this feature, Atman beginninglessly transmigrates from life to life (or, for Advaita, appears to do so). It is embodied in successive bodies, accumulating karma and possibly achieving enlightenment with its consequent release from ssara, the transmigratory wheel. K.E.Y. atomism, ancient.

attribution theory, a theory in social psychology concerned with how and why ordinary people explain events. People explain by attributing causal powers to certain events rather than others. The theory attempts to describe and clarify everyday commonsense explanation, to identify criteria of explanatory success presupposed by common sense, and to compare and contrast commonsense explanation with scientific explanation. The heart of attribution theory is the thesis that people tend to attribute causal power to factors personally important to them, which they believe covary with alleged effects. For exple, a woman may designate sexual discrimination as asymmetrical attribution theory 59 -   59 the cause of her not being promoted in a corporation. Being female is important to her and she believes that promotion and failure covary with gender. Males get promoted; females don’t. Causal attributions tend to preserve self-esteem, reduce cognitive dissonance, and diminish the attributor’s personal responsibility for misdeeds. When attributional styles or habits contribute to emotional ill-being, e.g. to chronic, inappropriate feelings of depression or guilt, attribution theory offers the following therapeutic recommendation: change attributions so as to reduce emotional ill-being and increase well-being. Hence if the woman bles herself for the failure, and if self-ble is part of her depressive attributional style, she would be encouraged to look outside herself, perhaps to sexual discrimination, for the explanation.

Augustine, Saint, known as Augustine of Hippo (354–430), Christian philosopher and church father, one of the chief sources of Christian thought in the West; his importance for medieval and modern European philosophy is impossible to describe briefly or ever to circumscribe. Matters are made more difficult because Augustine wrote voluminously and dialectically as a Christian theologian, treating philosophical topics for the most part only as they were helpful to theology – or as corrected by it. Augustine fashioned the narrative of the Confessions (397–400) out of the events of the first half of his life. He thus supplied later biographers with both a seductive selection of biographical detail and a compelling story of his successive conversions from adolescent sensuality, to the image-laden religion of the Manichaeans, to a version of Neoplatonism, and then to Christianity. The story is an unexcelled introduction to Augustine’s views of philosophy. It shows, for instance, that Augustine received very little formal education in philosophy. He was trained as a rhetorician, and the only philosophical work that he mentions ong his early reading is Cicero’s (lost) Hortensius, an exercise in persuasion to the study of philosophy. Again, the narrative makes plain that Augustine finally rejected Manichaeanism because he ce to see it as bad philosophy: a set of sophistical fantasies without rational coherence or explanatory force. More importantly, Augustine’s final conversion to Christianity was prepared by his reading in “certain books of the Platonists” (Confessions 7.9.13). These Latin translations, which seem to have been anthologies or manuals of philosophic teaching, taught Augustine a form of Neoplatonism that enabled him to conceive of a cosmic hierarchy descending from an immaterial, eternal, and intelligible God. On Augustine’s judgment, philosophy could do no more than that; it could not give him the power to order his own life so as to live happily and in a stable relation with the now-discovered God. Yet in his first years as a Christian, Augustine took time to write a number of works in philosophical genres. Best known ong them are a refutation of Academic Skepticism (Contra academicos, 386), a theodicy (De ordine, 386), and a dialogue on the place of human choice within the providentially ordered hierarchy created by God (De libero arbitrio, 388/391–95). Within the decade of his conversion, Augustine was drafted into the priesthood (391) and then consecrated bishop (395). The thirty-five years of his life after that consecration were consumed by labors on behalf of the church in northern Africa and through the Latin-speaking portions of the increasingly fragmented empire. Most of Augustine’s episcopal writing was polemical both in origin and in form; he composed against authors or movements he judged heretical, especially the Donatists and Pelagians. But Augustine’s sense of his authorship also led him to write works of fundental theology conceived on a grand scale. The most fous of these works, beyond the Confessions, are On the Trinity (399–412, 420), On Genesis according to the Letter (401–15), and On the City of God (413–26). On the Trinity elaborates in subtle detail the distinguishable “traces” of Father, Son, and Spirit in the created world and particularly in the human soul’s triad of memory, intellect, and will. The commentary on Genesis 1–3, which is meant to be much more than a “literal” commentary in the modern sense, treats many topics in philosophical psychology and anthropology. It also teaches such cosmological doctrines as the “seed-reasons” (rationes seminales) by which creatures are given intelligible form. The City of God begins with a critique of the bankruptcy of pagan civic religion and its attendant philosophies, but it ends with the depiction of human history as a combat between forces of self-love, conceived as a diabolic city of earth, and the graced love of God, which founds that heavenly city within which alone peace is possible. attributive pluralism Augustine 60 -   60 A number of other, discrete doctrines have been attached to Augustine, usually without the dialectical nuances he would have considered indispensable. One such doctrine concerns divine “illumination” of the human intellect, i.e., some active intervention by God in ordinary processes of human understanding. Another doctrine typically attributed to Augustine is the inability of the human will to do morally good actions without grace. A more authentically Augustinian teaching is that introspection or inwardness is the way of discovering the created hierarchies by which to ascend to God. Another authentic teaching would be that time, which is a distension of the divine “now,” serves as the medium or narrative structure for the creation’s return to God. But no list of doctrines or positions, however authentic or inauthentic, can serve as a faithful representation of Augustine’s thought, which gives itself only through the carefully wrought rhetorical forms of his texts. 

Austin, John (1790–1859), English legal philosopher known especially for his command theory of law. His career as a lawyer was unsuccessful but his reputation as a scholar was such that on the founding of University College, London, he was offered the chair of jurisprudence. In 1832 he published the first ten of his lectures, compressed into six as The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Although he published a few papers, and his somewhat fragmentary Lectures on Jurisprudence (1863) was published posthumously, it is on the Province that his reputation rests. He and Benth (his friend, London neighbor, and fellow utilitarian) were the foremost English legal philosophers of their time, and their influence on the course of legal philosophy endures. Austin held that the first task of legal philosophy, one to which he bends most of his energy, is to make clear what laws are, and if possible to explain why they are what they are: their rationale. Until those matters are clear, legislative proposals and legal arguments can never be clear, since irrelevant considerations will inevitably creep in. The proper place for moral or theological considerations is in discussion of what the positive law ought to be, not of what it is. Theological considerations reduce to moral ones, since God can be assumed to be a good utilitarian. It is positive laws, “that is to say the laws which are simply and strictly so called, . . . which form the appropriate matter of general and particular jurisprudence.” They must also be distinguished from “laws metaphorical or figurative.” A law in its most general senseis “a rule laid down for the guidance of an intelligent being by an intelligent being having power over him.” It is a command, however phrased. It is the commands of men to men, of political superiors, that form the body of positive law. General or comparative jurisprudence, the source of the rationale, if any, of particular laws, is possible because there are commands nearly universal that may be attributed to God or Nature, but they become positive law only when laid down by a ruler. The general model of an Austinian analytic jurisprudence built upon a frework of definitions has been widely followed, but cogent objections, especially by Hart, have undermined the command theory of law. 

Austin: English philosopher, a leading exponent of postwar “linguistic” philosophy. Educated primarily as a classicist at Shrewsbury and Balliol, Oxford, he taught philosophy at Magdalen College. During World War II he served at a high level in military intelligence, which earned him the O.B.E., Croix de Guerre, and Legion of Merit. In 1952 he bece White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, and in 1955 and 1958 he held visiting appointments at Harvard and Berkeley, respectively. In his relatively brief career, Austin published only a few invited papers; his influence was exerted mainly through discussion with his colleagues, whom he dominated more by critical intelligence than by any preconceived view of what philosophy should be. Unlike some others, Austin did not believe that philosophical problems all arise out of aberrations from “ordinary language,” nor did he necessarily find solutions there; he dwelt, rather, on the authority of the vernacular as a source of nice and pregnant distinctions, and held that it deserves much closer attention than it commonly receives from philosophers. It is useless, he thought, to pontificate at large about knowledge, reality, or existence, for exple, without first exining in detail how, and when, the words ‘know’, ‘real’, and ‘exist’ are employed in daily life. In Sense and Sensibilia (1962; compiled from lecture notes), the sense-datum theory comes under withering fire for its failings in this respect. Austin also provoked controversy with his well-known distinction between “performative” and “constative” utterances (‘I promise’ makes a promise, whereas ‘he promised’ merely reports one); he later recast this as a threefold differentiation of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary “forces” in utterance, corresponding (roughly) to the meaning, intention, and consequences of saying a thing, in one context or another. Though never very stable or fully worked out, these ideas have since found a place in the still-evolving study of speech acts. 

Australian materialism.SMART. autarkia, ancient Greek term meaning ‘self-sufficiency’. Autarkia was widely regarded as a mark of the human good, happiness (eudaimonia). A life is self-sufficient when it is worthy of choice and lacks nothing. What makes a life self-sufficient – and thereby happy – was a matter of controversy. Stoics maintained that the mere possession of virtue would suffice; Aristotle and the Peripatetics insisted that virtue must be exercised and even, perhaps, accompanied by material goods. There was also a debate ong later Greek thinkers over whether a self-sufficient life is solitary or whether only life in a community can be self-sufficient.  ARISTOTLE, STOICISM. E.C.H. authenticity.EXISTENTIALISM, HEIDEGGER. autological.SEMANTIC PARADOXES. automata theory.COMPUTER THEORY, SELFREPRODUCING AUTOMATON. automatism, conscious.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. automaton.COMPUTER THEORY, SELF-REPRODUCING AUTOMATON. automaton, cellular.SELF-REPRODUCING AUTOMATON. automaton, finite.COMPUTER THEORY, TURING MACHINE. automaton, self-reproducing.SELF-REPRODUCING AUTOMATON. autonomy.FREE WILL PROBLEM, KANT, POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FREEDOM. autonomy of biology.UNITY OF SCIENCE. autonomy of ethics.ETHICS. autonomy of psychology.PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY. avatar (from Sanskrit avatara), in Hindu thought, any of the repeated “descents” of the Supreme Being into the physical world as an animal, human being, or combination thereof, to destroy evil and restore order. Predominately identified as the actions of the god Vishnu, these entrances into the world indicate that Vishnu as lord will adjust the cycle of karma. Its earliest reference is in the Bhagavad Gita (150 B.C.), where Krishna says that whenever dharma languishes he incarnates in age after age to destroy evildoers and promote the good. Later lists of avatars of Vishnu cite ten, twenty, or more, with Krishna and the Buddha as fous exples. The inclusion of prominent local deities in the list brought them under the influence of Vishnu devotees, and today even Jesus and Muhmad may be included. Modern philosophers such as Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) redefine the concept non-theistically, identifying an avatar as a human being who has attained enlightenment. R.N.Mi. Avempace.IBN BAJJA. Avenarius, Richard (1843–96), German philosopher. He was born in Paris and educated at the University of Leipzig. He bece a professor at Leipzig and succeeded Windelband at the University of Zürich in 1877. For a time he was editor of the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. His earliest work was Über die beiden ersten Phasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus (1868). His major work, Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Critique of Pure Experience, 2 vols., 1888–90), was followed by his last study, Der menschliche Weltbegriffe (1891). In his post-Kantian Kritik Avenarius presented a radical positivism that sought to base philosophy on scientific principles. This “empirio-criticism” emphasized “pure experience” and descriptive and general definitions of experience. Metaphysical claims to transcend experience were rejected as mere creations of the mind. Like Hume, Avenarius denied the ontological validity of substance and causality. Seeking a scientific empiricism, he endeavored to delineate a descriptive determination of the form and content of pure experience. He thought that the subAustralian materialism Avenarius, Richard 62 -   62 ject–object dichotomy, the separation of inner and outer experiences, falsified reality. If we could avoid “introjecting” feeling, thought, and will into experience (and thereby splitting it into subject and object), we could attain the original “natural” view of the world. Although Avenarius, in his Critique of Pure Experience, thought that changes in brain states parallel states of consciousness, he did not reduce sensations or states of consciousness to physiological changes in the brain. Because his theory of pure experience undermined dogmatic materialism, Lenin attacked his philosophy in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1952). His epistemology influenced Mach and his emphasis upon pure experience had considerable influence on Jes. 

SUBJECT–OBJECT DICHOTOMY. G.J.S. Averroes, in Arabic, Ibn Rushd (1126–98), Islic philosopher, jurist, and physician. Scion of a long line of qadis (religious judges), he was born at Córdova and educated in Islic law. Introduced to the Almohad ruler by Ibn Tufayl, author of the philosophical allegory Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, he feigned ignorance of philosophy, only to learn that the leader of the dynasty so feared for its orthodoxy was thoroughly at home with philosophical issues. He was given a robe of honor and a mount and later invited to write his fous commentaries on Aristotle and made qadi of Seville, finally succeeding Ibn Tufayl as royal physician and becoming chief qadi of Córdova. He was persecuted when the sultan’s successor needed orthodox support in his war with Christian Spain, but died in the calm of Marrakesh, the edicts against him rescinded. His works, most often preserved in Hebrew or Latin translations (‘Averroes’ reflects efforts to Latinize ‘Ibn Rushd’), include medical and astronomical writings; short, middle, and long commentaries on Aristotle (“his was the ultimate human mind”); a commentary on Plato’s Republic; and spirited juridical and conceptual defenses of philosophy: The Decisive Treatise and Incoherence of the Incoherence. The former argues that philosophy, although restricted to the adept, is mandated by the Koranic (59:2) injunction to reflect on God’s design. The latter answers alGhazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers, defending naturalism and its presumed corollary, the world’s eternity, but often cutting adrift the more Platonizing and original doctrines of Avicenna, al-Ghazali’s chief stalking horse. Thus Averroes rejects Avicenna’s idea that the world itself is contingent if it is necessitated by its causes, arguing that removing the necessity that is the hallmark of God’s wisdom would leave us no way of inferring a wise Author of nature. Ultimately Averroes rejects emanation and seeks to return natural theology to the physics of matter and motion, discrediting Avicenna’s metaphysical approach and locating God’s act in the ordering of eternal matter. On bodily resurrection, individual providence, and miracles, he takes refuge in authority, fudge, and bluff; and even his defense of causal necessity smacks of a dogmatism expressive of the awkwardness of his position and the stiffening of Peripatetic thought. Yet he retains the idea that the intellect is immortal, indeed impersonal: since only matter differentiates individuals, all minds are ultimately one; they reach fulfillment and beatitude by making contact (ittifal; cf. Plotinus’s aphe) with the Active Intellect. Many Jewish philosophers like Narboni and Albalag followed Averroes’ arguments explicitly, reinterpreting Maimonides accordingly. But Averroes’ efforts to accommodate rhetorical and dialectical along with philosophical discourse led to the branding of his Christian followers as exponents of a “double truth,” although no text advances such a doctrine. Siger of Brabant, Boethius of Dacia, and Bernier of Nivelles were condemned for Averroistic heresies at Paris in the 1270s. But from the thirteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries Latin scholars regularly read Aristotle with Averroes’ commentaries. His philosophic respondents include Ibn Taymiyya (d.1327), Gersonides, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas. Spinoza’s dogged eternalism links him vividly to Averroes.  ARABIC PHILOSOPHY. L.E.G. aversion therapy.BEHAVIOR THERAPY. Avicebron.IBN GABIROL. Avicenna, in Arabic, Ibn Sina (980–1037), Islic philosopher and physician. Born near Bukhara, where his father served as a provincial governor, Avicenna ce to manhood as the Persian Sanid dynasty was crumbling and spent much of his life fleeing from court to court to avoid the clutches of the rapacious conqueror Mhmad of Ghazna. His autobiography describes him as an intuitive student of philosophy and other Greek sciences who could not see the point of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, until he read a tiny essay by al-Farabi(870–950), who showed him what it means to seek the nature of being as such. Averroes Avicenna 63 -   63 It was in metaphysics that Avicenna made his greatest contributions to philosophy, brilliantly synthesizing the rival approaches of the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition with the creationist monotheism of Islic dialectical theology (kal). Where Aristotle sought and found being in its fullest sense in what was changeless in its nature (above all, in the species of things, the heavenly bodies, the cosmos as a whole), kal understood being as the immediately given, allowing no inference beyond a single contingent datum to any necessary properties, correlatives, continuators, or successors. The result was a stringent atomist occasionalism resting ultimately on an early version of logical atomism. Avicenna preserved an Aristotelian naturalism alongside the Scriptural idea of the contingency of the world by arguing that any finite being is contingent in itself but necessary in relation to its causes. He adapted al-Farabi’s Neoplatonic emanationism to this schematization and naturalized in philosophy his own distinctive version of the kal argument from contingency: any being must be either necessary or contingent, but if contingent, it requires a cause; since no infinite causal regress is possible, there must be a Necessary Being, which is therefore simple, the ultimate cause of all other things. Avicenna found refuge at the court of one ‘Ala al-Dawla, who bravely resisted the military pressures of Mahmud against his lands around Isfahan and made the philosopher and savant his vizier. Here Avicenna completed his fous philosophic work the Shifa’ (known in Latin as the Sufficientia) and his Qanun fi Tibb, the Galenic Canon, which remained in use as a medical textbook until finally brought down by the weight of criticisms during the Renaissance. Avicenna’s philosophy was the central target of the polemical critique of the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali (1058–1111) in his Incoherence of the Philosophers, mainly on the grounds that the philosopher’s retention of the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world was inconsistent with his claim that God was the author of the world. Avicenna’s related affirmations of the necessity of causation and universality of God’s knowledge, al-Ghazali argued, made miracles impossible and divine governance too impersonal to deserve the ne. Yet Avicenna’s philosophic works (numbering over a hundred in their Arabic and sometimes Persian originals) continued to exercise a major influence on Muslim and Jewish philosophers and (through Latin translations) on philosophers in the West.

 ARABIC PHILOSOPHY. L.E.G. avidya, Sanskrit word meaning ‘ignorance’, ‘lack of wisdom’. Avidya is a key concept in India’s philosophical systems, which attempted to explain the reasons for karmic bondage leading to suffering and release from such bondage through spiritual liberation. The general idea was that karmic fetters arise because of avidya, which is ignorance of the true nature of reality. When wisdom dispells avidya, the individual is freed from bondage. There was intense speculation in Indian philosophy regarding the nature and the metaphysical status of avidya. If avidya causes bondage that traps the individual in the transmigratory cycle of life and death (ssara), then where does avidya reside and how does it come into being? D.K.C. awareness, consciousness, a central feature of our lives that is notoriously difficult to characterize. You experience goings-on in the world, and, turning inward (“introspecting”), you experience your experiencing. Objects of awareness can be external or internal. Pressing your finger on the edge of a table, you can be aware of the table’s edge, and aware of the feeling of pressure (though perhaps not simultaneously). Philosophers from Locke to Nagel have insisted that our experiences have distinctive qualities: there is “something it is like” to have them. It would seem important, then, to distinguish qualities of objects of which you are aware from qualities of your awareness. Suppose you are aware of a round, red tomato. The tomato, but not your awareness, is round and red. What then are the qualities of your awareness? Here we encounter a deep puzzle that divides theorists into intransigent cps. Some materialists, like Dennett, insist that awareness lacks qualities (or lacks qualities distinct from its objects: the qualities we attribute to experiences are really those of experienced objects). This opens the way to a dismissal of “phenomenal” qualities (qualia), qualities that seem to have no place in the material world. Others (T. Nagel, Ned Block) regard such qualities as patently genuine, preferring to dismiss any theory unable to accommodate them. Convinced that the qualities of awareness are ineliminable and irreducible to respectable material properties, some philosophers, following Frank Jackson, contend they are “epiphenomenal”: real but causally inefficacious. Still others, including Searle, point to what they regard as a fundental distinction between the “intrinsically subjecavidya awareness 64 -   64 tive” character of awareness and the “objective,” “public” character of material objects, but deny that this yields epiphenomenalism.  PHENOMENOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, QUALIA. J.F.H. axiology.VALUE THEORY. axiom.AXIOMATIC METHOD. axiomatic method, originally, a method for reorganizing the accepted propositions and concepts of an existent science in order to increase certainty in the propositions and clarity in the concepts. Application of this method was thought to require the identification of (1) the “universe of discourse” (domain, genus) of entities constituting the primary subject matter of the science, (2) the “primitive concepts” that can be grasped immediately without the use of definition, (3) the “primitive propositions” (or “axioms”), whose truth is knowable immediately, without the use of deduction, (4) an immediately acceptable “primitive definition” in terms of primitive concepts for each non-primitive concept, and (5) a deduction (constructed by chaining immediate, logically cogent inferences ultimately from primitive propositions and definitions) for each nonprimitive accepted proposition. Prominent proponents of more or less modernized versions of the axiomatic method, e.g. Pascal, Nicod (1893–1924), and Tarski, emphasizing the critical and regulatory function of the axiomatic method, explicitly open the possibility that axiomatization of an existent, preaxiomatic science may lead to rejection or modification of propositions, concepts, and argumentations that had previously been accepted. In many cases attempts to realize the ideal of an axiomatic science have resulted in discovery of “smuggled premises” and other previously unnoted presuppositions, leading in turn to recognition of the need for new axioms. Modern axiomatizations of geometry are much richer in detail than those produced in ancient Greece. The earliest extant axiomatic text is based on an axiomatization of geometry due to Euclid (fl. 300 B.C.), which itself was based on earlier, nolonger-extant texts. Archimedes (287–212 B.C.) was one of the earliest of a succession of postEuclidean geometers, including Hilbert, Oswald Veblen (1880–1960), and Tarski, to propose modifications of axiomatizations of classical geometry. The traditional axiomatic method, often called the geometric method, made several presuppositions no longer widely accepted. The advent of non-Euclidean geometry was particularly important in this connection. For some workers, the goal of reorganizing an existent science was joined to or replaced by a new goal: characterizing or giving implicit definition to the structure of the subject matter of the science. Moreover, subsequent innovations in logic and foundations of mathematics, especially development of syntactically precise formalized languages and effective systems of formal deductions, have substantially increased the degree of rigor attainable. In particular, critical axiomatic exposition of a body of scientific knowledge is now not thought to be fully adequate, however successful it may be in realizing the goals of the original axiomatic method, so long as it does not present the underlying logic (including language, semantics, and deduction system). For these and other reasons the expression ‘axiomatic method’ has undergone many “redefinitions,” some of which have only the most tenuous connection with the original meaning.  CATEGORICITY, DEDUCTION, FORMALIZATION. J.Cor.

axiomatic system.AXIOMATIC METHOD, DEDUCTION. axiom of abstraction.AXIOM OF COMPREHENSION. axiom of choice.LÖWENHEIM-SKOLEM THEOREM, SET THEORY. axiom of comprehension, also called axiom of abstraction, the axiom that for every property, there is a corresponding set of things having that property; i.e., (f) (DA) (x) (x 1 A È f x), where f is a property and A is a set. The axiom was used in Frege’s formulation of set theory and is the axiom that yields Russell’s paradox, discovered in 1901. If fx is instantiated as x 2 x, then the result that A 1 A È A 2 A is easily obtained, which yields, in classical logic, the explicit contradiction A 1 A & A 2 A. The paradox can be avoided by modifying the comprehension axiom and using instead the separation axiom, (f) (DA) (x) (x 1 A È(fx & x 1 B)). This yields only the result that A 1 A È(A 2 A & A 1 B), which is not a contradiction. The paradox can also be avoided by retaining the comprehension axiom but restricting the symbolic language, so that ‘x 1 x’ is not a meaningful formula. Russell’s type theory, presented in Principia Mathematica, uses this approach.  FREGE, RUSSELL, SET THEORY, TYPE THEORY. V.K. axiology axiom of comprehension 65 -   65 axiom of consistency, an axiom stating that a given set of sentences is consistent. Let L be a formal language, D a deductive system for L, S any set of sentences of L, and C the statement ‘S is consistent’ (i.e., ‘No contradiction is derivable from S via D’). For certain sets S (e.g., the theorems of D) it is interesting to ask: Can C be expressed in L? If so, can C be proved in D? If C can be expressed in L but not proved in D, can C be added (consistently) to D as a new axiom? Exple (from Gödel): Let L and D be adequate for elementary number theory, and S be the axioms of D; then C can be expressed in L but not proved in D, but can be added as a new axiom to form a stronger system D’. Sometimes we can express in L an axiom of consistency in the semantic sense (i.e., ‘There is a universe in which all the sentences in S are true’). Trivial exple: suppose the only non-logical axiom in D is ‘For any two sets B and B’, there exists the union of B and B’ ’. Then C might be ‘There is a set U such that, for any sets B and B’ in U, there exists in U the union of B and B’ ’.  CONSISTENCY, PROOF THEORY. D.H. axiom of extensionality.SET THEORY. axiom of infinity.SET THEORY. axiom of reducibility.TYPE THEORY. axiom of replacement.

SET THEORY. axiom of separation.AXIOM OF COMPREHENSION, SET THEORY. axiom schema.TRANSFORMATION RULE. Ayer, A(lfred) J(ules) (1910–89), British philosopher, one of the most important of the British logical positivists. He continued to occupy a dominant place in analytic philosophy as he gradually modified his adherence to central tenets of the view. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and, after a brief period at the University of Vienna, bece a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church in 1933. After the war he returned to Oxford as fellow and dean of Wadh College. He was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University of London (1946–59), Wykeh Professor of Logic in the University of Oxford and a fellow of New College (1959–78), and a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford (1978–83). Ayer was knighted in 1973 and was a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. His early work clearly and forcefully developed the implications of the positivists’ doctrines that all cognitive statements are either analytic and a priori, or synthetic, contingent, and a posteriori, and that empirically meaningful statements must be verifiable (must admit of confirmation or disconfirmation). In doing so he defended reductionist analyses of the self, the external world, and other minds. Value statements that fail the empiricist’s criterion of meaning but defy naturalistic analysis were denied truth-value and assigned emotive meaning. Throughout his writings he maintained a foundationalist perspective in epistemology in which sense-data (later more neutrally described) occupied not only a privileged epistemic position but constituted the subject matter of the most basic statements to be used in reductive analyses. Although in later works he significantly modified many of his early views and abandoned much of their strict reductionism, he remained faithful to an empiricist’s version of foundationalism and the basic idea behind the verifiability criterion of meaning. His books include Language, Truth and Logic; The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge; The Problems of Knowledge; Philosophical Essays; The Concept of a Person; The Origins of Pragmatism; Metaphysics and Common Sense; Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage; The Central Questions of Philosophy; Probability and Evidence; Philosophy in the Twentieth Century; Russell; Hume; Freedom and Morality, Ludwig Wittgenstein; and Voltaire. 

B

Babbage, Charles (1792–1871), English applied mathematician, inventor, and expert on machinery and manufacturing. His chief interest was in developing mechanical “engines” to compute tables of functions. Until the invention of the electronic computer, printed tables of functions were important aids to calculation. Babbage invented the difference engine, a machine that consisted of a series of accumulators each of which, in turn, transmitted its contents to its successor, which added to them to its own contents. He built only a model, but George and Edvard Scheutz built difference engines that were actually used. Though tables of squares and cubes could be calculated by a difference engine, the more commonly used tables of logarithms and of trigonometric functions could not. To calculate these and other useful functions, Babbage conceived of the analytical engine, a machine for numerical analysis. The analytical engine was to have a store (memory) and a mill (arithmetic unit). The store was to hold decimal numbers on toothed wheels, and to transmit them to the mill and back by means of wheels and toothed bars. The mill was to carry out the arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division mechanically, greatly extending the technology of small calculators. The operations of the mill were to be governed by pegged drums, derived from the music box. A desired sequence of operations would be punched on cards, which would be strung together like the cards of a Jacquard loom and read by the machine. The control mechanisms could branch and execute a different sequence of cards when a designated quantity changed sign. Numbers would be entered from punched cards and the answers punched on cards. The answers might also be imprinted on metal sheets from which the calculated tables would be printed, thus avoiding the errors of proofreading. Although Babbage formulated various partial plans for the analytical engine and built a few pieces of it, the machine was never realized. Given the limitations of mechanical computing technology, building an analytical engine would probably not have been an economical way to produce numerical tables. The modern electronic computer was invented and developed completely independently of Babbage’s pioneering work. Yet because of it, Babbage’s work has been publicized and he has become fous. 

Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962), French philosopher of science and literary analyst. His philosophy of science (developed, e.g., in The New Scientific Spirit, 1934, and Rational Materialism, 1953) began from reflections on the relativistic and quantum revolutions in twentieth-century physics. Bachelard viewed science as developing through a series of discontinuous changes (epistemological breaks). Such breaks overcome epistemological obstacles: methodological and conceptual features of commonsense or outdated science that block the path of inquiry. Bachelard’s emphasis on the discontinuity of scientific change strikingly anticipated Thomas Kuhn’s focus, many years later, on revolutionary paradigm change. However, unlike Kuhn, Bachelard held to a strong notion of scientific progress across revolutionary discontinuities. Although each scientific frework rejects its predecessors as fundentally erroneous, earlier freworks may embody permanent achievements that will be preserved as special cases within subsequent freworks. (Newton’s laws of motion, e.g., are special limit-cases of relativity theory.) Bachelard based his philosophy of science on a “non-Cartesian epistemology” that rejects Descartes’s claim that knowledge must be founded on incorrigible intuitions of first truths. All knowledge claims are subject to revision in the light of further evidence. Similarly, he rejected a naive realism that defines reality in terms of givens of ordinary sense experience and ignores the ontological constructions of scientific concepts and instrumentation. He maintained, however, that denying this sort of realism did not entail accepting idealism, which makes only the mental ultimately real. Instead he argued for an “applied rationalism,” which recognizes the active role of reason in constituting objects of knowledge while admitting that any constituting act of reason must be directed toward an antecedently given object. 67 B -   67 Although Bachelard denied the objective reality of the perceptual and imaginative worlds, he emphasized their subjective and poetic significance. Complementing his writings on science are a series of books on imagination and poetic imagery (e.g., The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 1938; The Poetics of Space, 1957) which subtly unpack the meaning of archetypal (in Jung’s sense) images. He put forward a “law of the four elements,” according to which all images can be related to the earth, air, fire, and water posited by Empedocles as the fundental forms of matter. Together with Georges Canguilhem, his successor at the Sorbonne, Bachelard had an immense impact on several generations of French students of philosophy. He and Canguilhem offered an important alternative to the more fashionable and widely known phenomenology and existentialism and were major influences on (ong others) Althusser and Foucault. 

Bacon, Francis (1561–1626), English philosopher, essayist, and scientific methodologist. In politics Bacon rose to the position of lord chancellor. In 1621 he retired to private life after conviction for taking bribes in his official capacity as judge. Bacon chpioned the new empiricism resulting from the achievements of early modern science. He opposed alleged knowledge based on appeals to authority, and on the barrenness of Scholasticism. He thought that what is needed is a new attitude and methodology based strictly on scientific practices. The goal of acquiring knowledge is the good of mankind: knowledge is power. The social order that should result from applied science is portrayed in his New Atlantis(1627). The method of induction to be employed is worked out in detail in his Novum Organum (1620). This new logic is to replace that of Aristotle’s syllogism, as well as induction by simple enumeration of instances. Neither of these older logics can produce knowledge of actual natural laws. Bacon thought that we must intervene in nature, manipulating it by means of experimental control leading to the invention of new technology. There are well-known hindrances to acquisition of knowledge of causal laws. Such hindrances (false opinions, prejudices), which “anticipate” nature rather than explain it, Bacon calls idols (idola). Idols of the tribe (idola tribus) are natural mental tendencies, ong which are the idle search for purposes in nature, and the impulse to read our own desires and needs into nature. Idols of the cave (idola specus) are predispositions of particular individuals. The individual is inclined to form opinions based on idiosyncrasies of education, social intercourse, reading, and favored authorities. Idols of the marketplace (idola fori) Bacon regards as the most potentially dangerous of all dispositions, because they arise from common uses of language that often result in verbal disputes. Many words, though thought to be meaningful, stand for nonexistent things; others, although they ne actual things, are poorly defined or used in confused ways. Idols of the theater (idola theatri) depend upon the influence of received theories. The only authority possessed by such theories is that they are ingenious verbal constructions. The aim of acquiring genuine knowledge does not depend on superior skill in the use of words, but rather on the discovery of natural laws. Once the idols are eliminated, the mind is free to seek knowledge of natural laws based on experimentation. Bacon held that nothing exists in nature except bodies (material objects) acting in conformity with fixed laws. These laws are “forms.” For exple, Bacon thought that the form or cause of heat is the motion of the tiny particles making up a body. This form is that on which the existence of heat depends. What induction seeks to show is that certain laws are perfectly general, universal in application. In every case of heat, there is a measurable change in the motion of the particles constituting the moving body. Bacon thought that scientific induction proceeds as follows. First, we look for those cases where, given certain changes, certain others invariably follow. In his exple, if certain changes in the form (motion of particles) take place, heat always follows. We seek to find all of the “positive instances” of the form that give rise to the effect of that form. Next, we investigate the “negative instances,” cases where in the absence of the form, the qualitative change does not take place. In the operation of these methods it is important to try to produce experimentally “prerogative instances,” particularly striking or typical exples of the phenomenon under investigation. Finally, in cases where the object under study is present to some greater or lesser degree, we must be able to take into account why these changes occur. In the exple, quantitative changes in degrees of heat will be correlated to quantitative changes in the speed of the motion of the particles. This method implies that backward causation Bacon, Francis 68 -   68 in many cases we can invent instruments to measure changes in degree. Such inventions are of course the hoped-for outcome of scientific inquiry, because their possession improves the lot of human beings. Bacon’s strikingly modern (but not entirely novel) empiricist methodology influenced nineteenth-century figures (e.g., Sir John Herschel and J. S. Mill) who generalized his results and used them as the basis for displaying new insights into scientific methodology. 

Bacon, Roger (c.1214–c.1293), English philosopher who earned the honorific title of Doctor Mirabilis. He was one of the first medievals in the Latin West to lecture and comment on newly recovered work by Aristotle in natural philosophy, physics, and metaphysics. Born in Somerset and educated at both Oxford University and the University of Paris, he bece by 1273 a master of arts at Paris, where he taught for about ten years. In 1247 he resigned his teaching post to devote his energies to investigating and promoting topics he considered neglected but important insofar as they would lead to knowledge of God. The English “experimentalist” Grosseteste, the Frenchman Peter of Maricourt, who did pioneering work on magnetism, and the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum influenced Roger’s new perspective. By 1257, however, partly from fatigue, Roger had put this work aside and entered the Franciscan order in England. To his dismay, he did not receive within the order the respect and freedom to write and teach he had expected. During the early 1260s Roger’s views about reforming the university curriculum reached Cardinal Guy le Gos de Foulques, who, upon becoming Pope Clement IV in 1265, demanded to see Roger’s writings. In response, Roger produced the Opus maius (1267) – an encyclopedic work that argues, ong other things, that (1) the study of Hebrew and Greek is indispensable for understanding the Bible, (2) the study of mathematics (encompassing geometry, astronomy, and astrology) is, with experimentation, the key to all the sciences and instrumental in theology, and (3) philosophy can serve theology by helping in the conversion of non-believers. Roger believed that although the Bible is the basis for human knowledge, we can use reason in the service of knowledge. It is not that rational argument can, on his view, provide fullblown proof of anything, but rather that with the aid of reason one can formulate hypotheses about nature that can be confirmed by experience. According to Roger, knowledge arrived at in this way will lead to knowledge of nature’s creator. All philosophical, scientific, and linguistic endeavors are valuable ultimately for the service they can render to theology. Roger summarizes and develops his views on these matters in the Opus minus and the Opus tertium, produced within a year of the Opus maius. Roger was altogether serious in advocating curricular change. He took every opportunity to rail against many of his celebrated contemporaries (e.g., Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas) for not being properly trained in philosophy and for contributing to the demise of theology by lecturing on Peter Lombard’s Sentences instead of the Bible. He also wrote both Greek and Hebrew grmars, did important work in optics, and argued for calendar reform on the basis of his (admittedly derivative) astronomical research. One should not, however, think that Roger was a good mathematician or natural scientist. He apparently never produced a single theorem or proof in mathematics, he was not always a good judge of astronomical competence (he preferred al-Bitruji to Ptolemy), and he held alchemy in high regard, believing that base metals could be turned into silver and gold. Some have gone so far as to claim that Roger’s renown in the history of science is vastly overrated, based in part on his being confusedly linked with the fourteenthcentury Oxford Calculators, who do deserve credit for paving the way for certain developments in seventeenth-century science. Roger’s devotion to curricular reform eventually led to his imprisonment by Jerome of Ascoli (the future Pope Nicholas IV), probably between 1277 and 1279. Roger’s teachings were said to have contained “suspect novelties.” Judging from the date of his imprisonment, these novelties may have been any number of propositions condemned by the bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, in 1277. But his imprisonment may also have had something to do with the anger he undoubtedly provoked by constantly abusing the members of his order regarding their approach to education, or with his controversial Joachimite views about the apocalypse and the imminent coming of the Antichrist. Given Roger’s interest in educational reform and his knack for systematization, it is not unlikely that he was abreast of and had something to say about most of the central philosophical issues of the day. If so, his writings could be Bacon, Roger Bacon, Roger 69 -   69 an important source of information about thirteenth-century Scholastic philosophy generally. In this connection, recent investigations have revealed, e.g., that he may well have played an important role in the development of logic and philosophy of language during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the course of challenging the views of certain people (some of whom have been tentatively identified as Richard of Cornwall, Lbert of Auxerre, Siger of Brabant, Henry of Ghent, Boethius of Dacia, Willi Sherwood, and the Magister Abstractionum) on the nature of signs and how words function as signs, Roger develops and defends views that appear to be original. The pertinent texts include the Sumule dialectices (c.1250), the De signis (part of Part III of the Opus maius), and the Compendium studii theologiae (1292). E.g., in connection with the question whether Jesus could be called a man during the three-day entombment (and, thus, in connection with the related question whether man can be said to be animal when no man exists, and with the sophism ‘This is a dead man, therefore this is a man’), Roger was not content to distinguish words from all other signs as had been the tradition. He distinguished between signs originating from nature and from the soul, and between natural signification and conventional (ad placitum) signification which results expressly or tacitly from the imposition of meaning by one or more individuals. He maintained that words signify existing and non-existing entities only equivocally, because words conventionally signify only presently existing things. On this view, therefore, ‘man’ is not used univocally when applied to an existing man and to a dead man. 

bad faith, (1) dishonest and bleworthy instances of self-deception; (2) inauthentic and self-deceptive refusal to admit to ourselves and others our full freedom, thereby avoiding anxiety in making decisions and evading responsibility for actions and attitudes (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1943); (3) hypocrisy or dishonesty in speech and conduct, as in making a promise without intending to keep it. One self-deceiving strategy identified by Sartre is to embrace other people’s views in order to avoid having to form one’s own; another is to disregard options so that one’s life appears predetermined to move in a fixed direction. Occasionally Sartre used a narrower, fourth sense: self-deceptive beliefs held on the basis of insincere and unreasonable interpretations of evidence, as contrasted with the dishonesty of “sincerely” acknowledging one truth (“I  disposed to be a thief”) in order to deny a deeper truth (“I  free to change”). 

Bain, Alexander (1818–1903), British philosopher and reformer, biographer of Jes Mill (1882) and J. S. Mill (1882) and founder of the first psychological journal, Mind (1876). In the development of psychology, Bain represents in England (alongside Continental thinkers such as Taine and Lotze) the final step toward the founding of psychology as a science. His significance stems from his wish to “unite psychology and physiology,” fulfilled in The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859), abridged in one volume, Mental and Moral Science (1868). Neither Bain’s psychology nor his physiology were particularly original. His psychology ce from English empiricism and associationism, his physiology from Johannes Muller’s (1801–58) Elements of Physiology (1842). Muller was an early advocate of the reflex, or sensorimotor, conception of the nervous system, holding that neurons conduct sensory information to the brain or motor commands from the brain, the brain connecting sensation with appropriate motor response. Like Hartley before him, Bain grounded the laws of mental association in the laws of neural connection. In opposition to faculty psychology, Bain rejected the existence of mental powers located in different parts of the brain (On the Study of Character, 1861). By combining associationism with modern physiology, he virtually completed the movement of philosophical psychology toward science. In philosophy, his most important concept was his analysis of belief as “a preparation to act.” By thus entwining conception and action, he laid the foundation for pragmatism, and for the focus on adaptive behavior central to modern psychology. 

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895–1975), Russian philosopher and cultural theorist whose influence is pervasive in a wide range of academic disciplines – from literary hermeneutics to the epistemology of the human sciences, cultural theory, and feminism. He may legitimately be called a philosophical anthropologist in the venerable Continental tradition. Because of his seminal work on Rabelais and Dostoevsky’s poetics, Baden School Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 70 -   70 his influence has been greatest in literary hermeneutics. Without question dialogism, or the construal of dialogue, is the hallmark of Bakhtin’s thought. Dialogue marks the existential condition of humanity in which the self and the other are asymmetrical but double-binding. In his words, to exist means to communicate dialogically, and when the dialogue ends, everything else ends. Unlike Hegelian and Marxian dialectics but like the Chinese correlative logic of yin and yang, Bakhtin’s dialogism is infinitely polyphonic, open-ended, and indeterminate, i.e., “unfinalizable” – to use his term. Dialogue means that there are neither first nor last words. The past and the future are interlocked and revolve around the axis of the present. Bakhtin’s dialogism is paradigmatic in a threefold sense. First, dialogue is never abstract but embodied. The lived body is the material condition of social existence as ongoing dialogue. Not only does the word become enfleshed, but dialogue is also the incorporation of the self and the other. Appropriately, therefore, Bakhtin’s body politics may be called a Slavic version of Tantrism. Second, the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin’s dialogism incorporates points to the “jesterly” politics of resistance and protest against the “priestly” establishment of officialdom. Third, the most distinguishing characteristic of Bakhtin’s dialogism is the primacy of the other over the self, with a twofold consequence: one concerns ethics and the other epistemology. In modern philosophy, the discovery of “Thou” or the primacy of the other over the self in asymmetrical reciprocity is credited to Feuerbach. It is hailed as the “Copernican revolution” of mind, ethics, and social thought. Ethically, Bakhtin’s dialogism, based on heteronomy, signals the birth of a new philosophy of responsibility that challenges and transgresses the Anglo-erican tradition of “rights talk.” Epistemologically, it lends our welcoming ears to the credence that the other may be right – the attitude that Gader calls the soul of dialogical hermeneutics.  BUBER, FEUERBACH, GADER, HERMENEUTICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY. H.Y.J. Bakunin, Mikhail (1814–76), Russian revolutionary anarchist. He lived in Western Europe in 1840–49 and again in 1861–76 after an intervening period in Western and Russian prisons and Siberian exile. Bakunin is best known for his vigorous if incoherent anarchist-socialist views. On the one hand, he claimed that the masses’ “instinct for freedom” would spark the social revolution; on the other, he claimed that the revolution would be the work of a conspiratorial elite of disciplined professionals. Still, Bakunin made two significant if limited philosophic contributions. (1) In the early 1840s he spoke of the “incessant self-immolation of the positive in the pure fle of the negative,” and ce to see that “fle” as a necessary dialectical component of revolutionary action. His sharpest criticism was directed not at conservative attempts to defend the existing order but rather at (Hegelian) attempts to reconcile positive and negative and “liberal” efforts to find a “modest and harmless place” for the negative within the positive. For Bakunin the negative is absolutely justified in its “constructive” elimination of the positive. Writing in German (in 1842) he exploited both senses of the word Lust, nely “joy” and “urge,” declaring that the Lust to destroy is at the se time a creative Lust. (2) From 1861 until the end of his life Bakunin was committed to scientism, materialism, and atheism. But in the late 1860s he formulated a forceful critique of the political and social role of scientific elites and institutions. Individual life is concrete and particular; science is abstract and general and incapable of understanding or valuing living individuals. Instead, it tends to ignore or to exploit them. Bakunin, who had preached an anarchist revolt against church and state, now preached a “revolt of life against science, or rather against government by science.” This was related to his anarchist critique of Marx’s statism and technicism; but it raised the more general question – one of continuing relevance and urgency – of the role of scientific experts in decisions about public policy. 

Bañez, Domingo (1528–1604), Spanish Dominican theologian and philosopher. Born in Valladolid, he studied at Salanca, where he also taught for many years. As spiritual director of St. Teresa of Ávila, he exerted considerable influence on her views. He is known for his disputes with Molina concerning divine grace. Against Molina he held physical predetermination, the view that God physically determines the secondary causes of human action. This renders grace intrinsically efficacious and independent of human will and merits. He is also known for his Bakunin, Mikhail Bañez, Domingo 71 -   71 understanding of the centrality of the act of existence (esse) in Thomistic metaphysics. Bañez’s most important works are his commentaries on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption.  AQUINAS, FREE WILL PROBLEM, METAPHYSICS, MOLINA. J.J.E.G. Barbara.ARISTOTLE, SYLLOGISM. barber paradox.PARADOX. Barcan formula.MODAL LOGIC. bare particular.METAPHYSICS. bargaining theory, the branch of ge theory that treats agreements, e.g., wage agreements between labor and management. In the simplest bargaining problems there are two bargainers. They can jointly realize various outcomes, including the outcome that occurs if they fail to reach an agreement. Each bargainer assigns a certain ount of utility to each outcome. The question is, what outcome will they realize if they are rational? Methods of solving bargaining problems are controversial. The best-known proposals are Nash’s and Kalai and Smorodinsky’s. Nash proposes maximizing the product of utility gains with respect to the disagreement point. Kalai and Smorodinsky propose maximizing utility gains with respect to the disagreement point, subject to the constraint that the ratio of utility gains equals the ratio of greatest possible gains. These methods of selecting an outcome have been axiomatically characterized. For each method, there are certain axioms of outcome selection such that that method alone satisfies the axioms. The axioms incorporate principles of rationality from cooperative ge theory. They focus on features of outcomes rather than bargaining strategies. For exple, one axiom requires that the outcome selected be Pareto-optimal, i.e., be an outcome such that no alternative is better for one of the bargainers and not worse for the other. Bargaining problems may become more complicated in several ways. First, there may be more than two bargainers. If unanimity is not required for beneficial agreements, splinter groups or coalitions may form. Second, the protocol for offers, counteroffers, etc., may be relevant. Then principles of non-cooperative ge theory concerning strategies are needed to justify solutions. Third, the context of a bargaining problem may be relevant. For instance, opportunities for side payments, differences in bargaining power, and interpersonal comparisons of utility may influence the solution. Fourth, simplifying assumptions, such as the assumption that bargainers have complete information about their bargaining situation, may be discarded. Bargaining theory is part of the philosophical study of rationality. It is also important in ethics as a foundation for contractarian theories of morality and for certain theories of distributive justice.  DECISION THEORY, GE THEORY. P.We. Barthes, Roland (1915–80), French post-structuralist literary critic and essayist. Born in Cherbourg, he suffered from numerous ailments as a child and spent much of his early life as a semiinvalid. After leaving the military, he took up several positions teaching subjects like classics, grmar, and philology. His interest in linguistics finally drew him to literature, and by the mid-1960s he had already published what would become a classic in structural analysis, The Elements of Semiology. Its principal message is that words are merely one kind of sign whose meaning lies in relations of difference between them. This concept was later ended to include the reading subject, and the structuring effect that the subject has on the literary work – a concept expressed later in his S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text. Barthes’s most mature contributions to the post-structuralist movement were brilliant and witty interpretations of visual, tactile, and aural sign systems, culminating in the publication of several books and essays on photography, advertising, film, and cuisine.  POSTMODERN, SEMIOSIS, STRUCTURALISM. M.Ro. base, supervenience.SUPERVENIENCE. base clause.MATHEMATICAL INDUCTION. basic action.ACTION THEORY. basic belie

f.BERKELEY, FOUNDATIONALISM, LOGICAL POSITIVISM, PLANTINGA. basic norm, also called Grundnorm, in a legal system, the norm that determines the legal validity of all other norms. The content of such an ultimate norm may provide, e.g., that norms created by a legislature or by a court are legally valid. The validity of such an ultimate norm cannot be established as a matter of social fact (such as the social fact that the norm is accepted by some Barbara basic norm 72 -   72 group within a society). Rather, the validity of the basic norm for any given legal system must be presupposed by the validity of the norms that it legitimates as laws. The idea of a basic norm is associated with the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen.  JURISPRUDENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF LAW. M.S.M. basic particular.STRAWSON. basic proposition.EPISTEMOLOGY. basic sentence.

FOUNDATIONALISM. basic statement.FOUNDATIONALISM. Basilides (A.D. c.120–40), Syrian Christian gnostic teacher in Alexandria who rivaled Valentinus. He improved on Valentinus’s doctrine of emanations, positing 365 (the number of days in a year) levels of existence in the Pleroma (the fullness of the Godhead), all descending from the ineffable Father. He taught that the rival God was the God of the Jews (the God of the Old Testent), who created the material world. Redemption consists in the coming of the first begotten of the Father, Noûs (Mind), in human form in order to release the spiritual element imprisoned within human bodies. Like other gnostics he taught that we are saved by knowledge, not faith. He apparently held to the idea of reincarnation before the restoration of all things to the Pleroma.  GNOSTICISM, VALENTINUS. L.P.P. basing relation, also called basis relation, the relation between a belief or item of knowledge and a second belief or item of knowledge when the latter is the ground (basis) of the first. It is clear that some knowledge is indirect, i.e., had or gained on the basis of some evidence, as opposed to direct knowledge, which (assuming there is any) is not so gained, or based. The se holds for justified belief. In one broad sense of the term, the basing relation is just the one connecting indirect knowledge or indirectly justified belief to the evidence: to give an account of either of the latter is to give an account of the basing relation. There is a narrower view of the basing relation, perhaps implicit in the first. A person knows some proposition P on the basis of evidence or reasons only if her belief that P is based on the evidence or reasons, or perhaps on the possession of the evidence or reasons. The narrow basing relation is indicated by this question: where a belief that P constitutes indirect knowledge or justification, what is it for that belief to be based on the evidence or reasons that support the knowledge or justification? The most widely favored view is that the relevant belief is based on evidence or reasons only if the belief is causally related to the belief or reasons. Proponents of this causal view differ concerning what, beyond this causal relationship, is needed by an account of the narrow basing relation.  COHERENTISM, FOUNDATIONALISM, INFERENTIAL KNOWLEDGE. G.S.P. basis clause.MATHEMATICAL INDUCTION. basis relation.BASING RELATION. Bataille, Georges (1897–1962), French philosopher and novelist with enormous influence on post-structuralist thought. By locating value in expenditure as opposed to accumulation, Bataille inaugurates the era of the death of the subject. He insists that individuals must transgress the limits imposed by subjectivity to escape isolation and communicate. Bataille’s prewar philosophical contributions consist mainly of short essays, the most significant of which have been collected in Visions of Excess. These essays introduce the central idea that base matter disrupts rational subjectivity by attesting to the continuity in which individuals lose themselves. Inner Experience (1943), Bataille’s first lengthy philosophical treatise, was followed by Guilty (1944) and On Nietzsche (1945). Together, these three works constitute Bataille’s Summa Atheologica, which explores the play of the isolation and the dissolution of beings in terms of the experience of excess (laughter, tears, eroticism, death, sacrifice, poetry). The Accursed Share (1949), which he considered his most important work, is his most systematic account of the social and economic implications of expenditure. In Erotism (1957) and The Tears of Eros (1961), he focuses on the excesses of sex and death. Throughout his life, Bataille was concerned with the question of value. He located it in the excess that lacerates individuals and opens channels of communication. 

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1714–62), German philosopher. Born in Berlin, he was educated in Halle and taught at Halle (1738–40) and Frankfurt an der Oder (1740–62). Baumgarten was brought up in the Pietist circle of A. H. Francke but adopted the anti-Pietist rationalism of Wolff. He wrote textbooks in metabasic particular Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 73 -   73 physics (Metaphysica, 1739) and ethics (Ethica Philosophica, 1740; Initia Philosophiae Practicae Prima [“First Elements of Practical Philosophy”], 1760) on which Kant lectured. For the most part, Baumgarten did not significantly depart from Wolff, although in metaphysics he was both further and yet closer to Leibniz than was Wolff: unlike Leibniz, he argued for real physical influx, but, unlike Wolff, he did not restrict preestablished harmony to the mind–body relationship alone, but (paradoxically) reextended it to include all relations of substances. Baumgarten’s claim to fe, however, rests on his introduction of the discipline of aesthetics into German philosophy, and indeed on his introduction of the term ‘aesthetics’ as well. Wolff had explained pleasure as the response to the perception of perfection by means of the senses, in turn understood as clear but confused perception. Baumgarten subtly but significantly departed from Wolff by redefining our response to beauty as pleasure in the perfection of sensory perception, i.e., in the unique potential of sensory as opposed to merely conceptual representation. This concept was first introduced in his dissertation Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (“Philosophical Meditations on some Matters pertaining to Poetry,” 1735), which defined a poem as a “perfect sensate discourse,” and then generalized in his twovolume (but still incomplete) Aesthetica (1750– 58). One might describe Baumgarten’s aesthetics as cognitivist but no longer rationalist: while in science or logic we must always prefer discursive clarity, in art we respond with pleasure to the maximally dense (or “confused”) intimation of ideas. Baumgarten’s theory had great influence on Lessing and Mendelssohn, on Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas, and even on the aesthetics of Hegel.  WOLFF. P.Gu. Bayesian.BAYESIAN RATIONALITY, CONFIRMATION. Bayesian rationality, minimally, a property a system of beliefs (or the believer) has in virtue of the system’s “conforming to the probability calculus.” “Bayesians” differ on what “rationality” requires, but most agree that (i) beliefs come in degrees (of firmness); (ii) these “degrees of belief” are (theoretically or ideally) quantifiable; (iii) such quantification can be understood in terms of person-relative, time-indexed “credence functions” from appropriate sets of objects of belief (propositions or sentences) – each set closed under (at least) finite truth-functional combinations – into the set of real numbers; (iv) at any given time t, a person’s credence function at t ought to be (usually: “on pain of a Dutch book argument”) a probability function; that is, a mapping from the given set into the real numbers in such a way that the “probability” (the value) assigned to any given object A in the set is greater than or equal to zero, and is equal to unity (% 1) if A is a necessary truth, and, for any given objects A and B in the set, if A and B are incompatible (the negation of their conjunction is a necessary truth) then the probability assigned to their disjunction is equal to the sum of the probabilities assigned to each; so that the usual propositional probability axioms impose a sort of logic on degrees of belief. If a credence function is a probability function, then it (or the believer at the given time) is “coherent.” On these matters, on conditional degrees of belief, and on the further constraint on rationality many Bayesians impose (that change of belief ought to accord with “conditionalization”), the reader should consult John Earman, Bayes or Bust? A Critical Exination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory (1992); Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach (1989); and Richard Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision (1965). 

BAYES’S THEOREM, DECISION THEORY, DUTCH BOOK ARGUMENT, PROBABILITY, RATIONALITY. D.A.J. Bayes’s rule.BAYES’s THEOREM. Bayes’s theorem, any of several relationships between prior and posterior probabilities or odds, especially (1)–(3) below. All of these depend upon the basic relationship (0) between contemporaneous conditional and unconditional probabilities. Non-Bayesians think these useful only in narrow ranges of cases, generally because of skepticism about accessibility or significance of priors. According to (1), posterior probability is prior probability times the “relevance quotient” (Carnap’s term). According to (2), posterior odds are Bayesian Bayes’s theorem 74 -   74 prior odds times the “likelihood ratio” (R. A. Fisher’s term). Relationship (3) comes from (1) by expanding P (data) via the law of total probability. Bayes’s rule (4) for updating probabilities has you set your new unconditional probabilities equal to your old conditional ones when fresh certainty about data leaves probabilities conditionally upon the data unchanged. The corresponding rule (5) has you do the se for odds. In decision theory the term is used differently, for the rule “Choose so as to maximize expectation of utility.” 

DECISION THEORY, PROBABILITY. R.J. Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706), French philosopher who also pioneered in disinterested, critical history. A Calvinist forced into exile in 1681, Bayle nevertheless rejected the prevailing use of history as an instrument of partisan or sectarian interest. He achieved fe and notoriety with his multivolume Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695). For each subject covered, Bayle provided a biographical sketch and a dispassionate exination of the historical record and interpretive controversies. He also repeatedly probed the troubled and troubling boundary between reason and faith (philosophy and religion). In the article “David,” the seemingly illicit conduct of God’s purported agent yielded reflections on the morals of the elect and the autonomy of ethics. In “Pyrrho,” Bayle argued that self-evidence, the most plausible candidate for the criterion of truth, is discredited by Christianity because some self-evident principles contradict essential Christian truths and are therefore false. Finally, provoking Leibniz’s Theodicy, Bayle argued, most relentlessly in “Manichaeans” and “Paulicians,” that there is no defensible rational solution to the problem of evil. Bayle portrayed himself as a Christian skeptic, but others have seen instead an ironic critic of religion – a precursor of the French Enlightenment. Bayle’s purely philosophical reflections support his self-assessment, since he consistently maintains that philosophy achieves not comprehension and contentment, but paradox and puzzlement. In making this case he proved to be a superb critic of philosophical systems. Some exples are “Zeno of Elea” – on space, time, and motion; “Rorarius” – on mind and body and animal mechanism; and “Spinoza” – on the perils of monism. Bayle’s skepticism concerning philosophy significantly influenced Berkeley and Hume. His other important works include Pensées diverses de la comète de 1683 (1683); Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus Christ: contrain les d’entrer (1686); and Réponse aux questions d’un provincial(1704); and an early learned periodical, the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (1684– 87). 

LEIBNIZ. P.D.C. Beattie, Jes (1735–1803), Scottish philosopher and poet who, in criticizing Hume, widened the latter’s audience. A member of the Scottish school of common sense philosophy along with Oswald and Reid, Beattie’s major work was An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1771), in which he criticizes Hume for fostering skepticism and infidelity. His positive view was that the mind possesses a common sense, i.e., a power for perceiving self-evident truths. Common sense is instinctive, unalterable by education; truth is what common sense determines the mind to believe. Beattie cited Hume and then claimed that his views led to moral and religious evils. When Beattie’s Essay was translated into German (1772), Kant could read Hume’s discussions of personal identity and causation. Since these topics were not covered in Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Beattie provided Kant access to two issues in the Treatises of Human Nature critical to the development of transcendental idealism.  HUME, SCOTTISH COMMON SENSE PHILOSOPHY. P.K. beauty, an aesthetic property commonly thought of as a species of aesthetic value. As such, it has been variously thought to be (1) a simple, indefinable property that cannot be defined in terms of any other properties; (2) a property or set of properties of an object that makes the object capable of producing a certain sort of pleasurable experience in any suitable perceiver; or (3) whatever produces a particular sort of pleasurable experience, even though what produces the experience may vary from individual to individual. It is in this last sense that beauty is thought to be “in the eye of the beholder.” If beauty is a simple, indefinable property, as in (1), then it cannot be defined conceptually and has to be apprehended by intuition or taste. Beauty, on this account, would be a particular sort of aesthetic property. If beauty is an object’s Bayle, Pierre beauty 75 -   75 capacity to produce a special sort of pleasurable experience, as in (2), then it is necessary to say what properties provide it with this capacity. The most favored candidates for these have been formal or structural properties, such as order, symmetry, and proportion. In the Philebus Plato argues that the form or essence of beauty is knowable, exact, rational, and measurable. He also holds that simple geometrical shapes, simple colors, and musical notes all have “intrinsic beauty,” which arouses a pure, “unmixed” pleasure in the perceiver and is unaffected by context. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many treatises were written on individual art forms, each allegedly governed by its own rules. In the eighteenth century, Hutcheson held that ‘beauty’ refers to an “idea raised in us,” and that any object that excites this idea is beautiful. He thought that the property of the object that excites this idea is “uniformity in variety.” Kant explained the nature of beauty by analyzing judgments that something is beautiful. Such judgments refer to an experience of the perceiver. But they are not merely expressions of personal experience; we claim that others should also have the se experience, and that they should make the se judgment (i.e., judgments that something is beautiful have “universal validity”). Such judgments are disinterested – determined not by any needs or wants on the part of the perceiver, but just by contemplating the mere appearance of the object. These are judgments about an object’s free beauty, and making them requires using only those mental capacities that all humans have by virtue of their ability to communicate with one another. Hence the pleasures experienced in response to such beauty can in principle be shared by anyone. Some have held, as in (3), that we apply the term ‘beautiful’ to things because of the pleasure they give us, and not on the basis of any specific qualities an object has. Archibald Alison held that it is impossible to find any properties common to all those things we call beautiful. Santayana believed beauty is “pleasure regarded as a quality of a thing,” and made no pretense that certain qualities ought to produce that pleasure. The Greek term to kalon, which is often translated as ‘beauty’, did not refer to a thing’s autonomous aesthetic value, but rather to its “excellence,” which is connected with its moral worth and/or usefulness. This concept is closer to Kant’s notion of dependent beauty, possessed by an object judged as a particular kind of thing (such as a beautiful cat or a beautiful horse), than it is to free beauty, possessed by an object judged simply on the basis of its appearance and not in terms of any concept of use. 

AESTHETIC PROPERTY, AESTHETICS. S.L.F. Beauvoir, Simone de.EXISTENTIALISM. Beccaria, Cesare (1738–94), Italian criminologist and judicial and penal reformer. He studied in Parma and Pavia and taught political economy in Milan. Here, he met Pietro and Alessandro Verri and other Milanese intellectuals attempting to promote political, economical, and judiciary reforms. His major work, Dei delitti e delle pene (“On Crimes and Punishments,” 1764), denounces the contemporary methods in the administration of justice and the treatment of criminals. Beccaria argues that the highest good is the greatest happiness shared by the greatest number of people; hence, actions against the state are the most serious crimes. Crimes against individuals and property are less serious, and crimes endangering public harmony are the least serious. The purposes of punishment are deterrence and the protection of society. However, the employment of torture to obtain confessions is unjust and useless: it results in acquittal of the strong and the ruthless and conviction of the weak and the innocent. Beccaria also rejects the death penalty as a war of the state against the individual. He claims that the duration and certainty of the punishment, not its intensity, most strongly affect criminals. Beccaria was influenced by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condillac. His major work was translated into many languages and set guidelines for revising the criminal and judicial systems of several European countries. P.Gar. becoming.TIME. becoming, temporal.TIME. Bedeutung.FREGE. begging the question.CIRCULAR REASONING. Begriff.HEGEL. behavioral equivalence.

TURING MACHINE. behavioralism.JURISPRUDENCE. behaviorism, broadly, the view that behavior is fundental in understanding mental phenomena. The term applies both to a scientific research Beauvoir, Simone de behaviorism 76 -   76 progr in psychology and to a philosophical doctrine. Accordingly, we distinguish between scientific (psychological, methodological) behaviorism and philosophical (logical, analytical) behaviorism. Scientific behaviorism. First propounded by the erican psychologist J. B. Watson (who introduced the term in 1913) and further developed especially by C. L. Hull, E. C. Tolman, and B. F. Skinner, it departed from the introspectionist tradition by redefining the proper task of psychology as the explanation and prediction of behavior – where to explain behavior is to provide a “functional analysis” of it, i.e., to specify the independent variables (stimuli) of which the behavior (response) is lawfully a function. It insisted that all variables – including behavior as the dependent variable – must be specifiable by the experimental procedures of the natural sciences: merely introspectible, internal states of consciousness are thus excluded from the proper domain of psychology. Although some behaviorists were prepared to admit internal neurophysiological conditions ong the variables (“intervening variables”), others of more radical bent (e.g. Skinner) insisted on environmental variables alone, arguing that any relevant variations in the hypothetical inner states would themselves in general be a function of variations in (past and present) environmental conditions (as, e.g., thirst is a function of water deprivation). Although some basic responses are inherited reflexes, most are learned and integrated into complex patterns by a process of conditioning. In classical (respondent) conditioning, a response already under the control of a given stimulus will be elicited by new stimuli if these are repeatedly paired with the old stimulus: this is how we learn to respond to new situations. In operant conditioning, a response that has repeatedly been followed by a reinforcing stimulus (reward) will occur with greater frequency and will thus be “selected” over other possible responses: this is how we learn new responses. Conditioned responses can also be unlearned or “extinguished” by prolonged dissociation from the old eliciting stimuli or by repeated withholding of the reinforcing stimuli. To show how all human behavior, including “cognitive” or intelligent behavior, can be “shaped” by such processes of selective reinforcement and extinction of responses was the ultimate objective of scientific behaviorism. Grave difficulties in the way of the realization of this objective led to increasingly radical liberalization of the distinctive features of behaviorist methodology and eventually to its displacement by more cognitively oriented approaches (e.g. those inspired by information theory and by Chomsky’s work in linguistics). Philosophical behaviorism. A semantic thesis about the meaning of mentalistic expressions, it received its most sanguine formulation by the logical positivists (particularly Carnap, Hempel, and Ayer), who asserted that statements containing mentalistic expressions have the se meaning as, and are thus translatable into, some set of publicly verifiable (confirmable, testable) statements describing behavioral and bodily processes and dispositions (including verbalbehavioral dispositions). Because of the reductivist concerns expressed by the logical positivist thesis of physicalism and the unity of science, logical behaviorism (as some positivists preferred to call it) was a corollary of the thesis that psychology is ultimately (via a behavioristic analysis) reducible to physics, and that all of its statements, like those of physics, are expressible in a strictly extensional language. Another influential formulation of philosophical behaviorism is due to Ryle (The Concept of Mind, 1949), whose classic critique of Cartesian dualism rests on the view that mental predicates are often used to ascribe dispositions to behave in characteristic ways: but such ascriptions, for Ryle, have the form of conditional, lawlike statements whose function is not to report the occurrence of inner states, physical or non-physical, of which behavior is the causal manifestation, but to license inferences about how the agent would behave if certain conditions obtained. To suppose that all declarative uses of mental language have a fact-stating or -reporting role at all is, for Ryle, to make a series of “category mistakes” – of which both Descartes and the logical positivists were equally guilty. Unlike the behaviorism of the positivists, Ryle’s behaviorism required no physicalistic reduction of mental language, and relied instead on ordinary language descriptions of human behavior. A further version of philosophical behaviorism can be traced to Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, 1953), who argues that the epistemic criteria for the applicability of mentalistic terms cannot be private, introspectively accessible inner states but must instead be intersubjectively observable behavior. Unlike the previously mentioned versions of philosophical behaviorism, Wittgenstein’s behaviorism seems to be consistent with metaphysical mind–body dualism, and is thus also non-reductivist. behaviorism behaviorism 77 -   77 Philosophical behaviorism underwent severe criticism in the 1950s and 1960s, especially by Chisholm, Charles Taylor, Putn, and Fodor. Nonetheless it still lives on in more or less attenuated forms in the work of such diverse philosophers as Quine, Dennett, Armstrong, David Lewis, U. T. Place, and Dummett. Though current “functionalism” is often referred to as the natural heir to behaviorism, functionalism (especially of the Armstrong-Lewis variety) crucially differs from behaviorism in insisting that mental predicates, while definable in terms of behavior and behavioral dispositions, nonetheless designate inner causal states – states that are apt to cause certain characteristic behaviors.

behavior therapy, a spectrum of behavior modification techniques applied as therapy, such as aversion therapy, extinction, modeling, redintegration, operant conditioning, and desensitization. Unlike psychotherapy, which probes a client’s recollected history, behavior therapy focuses on immediate behavior, and aims to eliminate undesired behavior and produce desired behavior through methods derived from the experimental analysis of behavior and from reinforcement theory. A chronic problem with psychotherapy is that the client’s past is filtered through limited and biased recollection. Behavior therapy is more mechanical, creating systems of reinforcement and conditioning that may work independently of the client’s long-term memory. Collectively, behavior-therapeutic techniques compose a motley set. Some behavior therapists adapt techniques from psychotherapy, as in covert desensitization, where verbally induced mental images are employed as reinforcers. A persistent problem with behavior therapy is that it may require repeated application. Consider aversion therapy. It consists of pairing painful or punishing stimuli with unwelcome behavior. In the absence, after therapy, of the painful stimulus, the behavior may recur because association between behavior and punishment is broken. Critics charge that behavior therapy deals with immediate disturbances and overt behavior, to the neglect of underlying problems and irrationalities.  COGNITIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY. G.A.G. being.HEIDEGGER, METAPHYSICS, TRANSCENDENTALS. belief, a dispositional psychological state in virtue of which a person will assent to a proposition under certain conditions. Propositional knowledge, traditionally understood, entails belief. A behavioral view implies that beliefs are just dispositions to behave in certain ways. Your believing that the stove is hot is just your being disposed to act in a manner appropriate to its being hot. The problem is that our beliefs, including their propositional content indicated by a “that”-clause, typically explain why we do what we do. You avoid touching the stove because you believe that it’s dangerously hot. Explaining action via beliefs refers indispensably to propositional content, but the behavioral view does not accommodate this. A state-object view implies that belief consists of a special relation between a psychological state and an object of belief, what is believed. The objects of belief, traditionally understood, are abstract propositions existing independently of anyone’s thinking of them. The state of believing is a propositional attitude involving some degree of confidence toward a propositional object of belief. Such a view allows that two persons, even separated by a long period of time, can believe the se thing. A state-object view allows that beliefs be dispositional rather than episodic, since they can exist while no action is occurring. Such a view grants, however, that one can have a disposition to act owing to believing something. Regarding mental action, a belief typically generates a disposition to assent, at least under appropriate circumstances, to the proposition believed. Given the central role of propositional content, however, a state-object view denies that beliefs are just dispositions to act. In addition, such a view should distinguish between dispositional believing and a mere disposition to believe. One can be merely disposed to believe many things that one does not actually believe, owing to one’s lacking the appropriate psychological attitude to relevant propositional content. Beliefs are either occurrent or non-occurrent. Occurrent belief, unlike non-occurrent belief, requires current assent to the proposition believed. If the assent is self-conscious, the belief is an explicit occurrent belief; if the assent is not self-conscious, the belief is an implicit occurrent behaviorism, supervenient belief 78 -   78 belief. Non-occurrent beliefs permit that we do not cease to believe that 2 ! 2 % 4, for instance, merely because we now happen to be thinking of something else or nothing at all.  ACT-OBJECT PSYCHOLOGY, BEHAVIORISM, DISPOSITION, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. P.K.M. belief, basic.BERKELEY, FOUNDATIONALISM, LOGICAL POSITIVISM. belief, degree of.BAYESIAN RATIONALITY. belief, ethics of.CLIFFORD. belief, partial.PROBABILITY. belief, properly basic.EVIDENTIALISM, PLANTINGA. belief-desire model.INTENTION. belief revision, the process by which cognitive states change in light of new information. This topic looms large in discussions of Bayes’s Theorem and other approaches in decision theory. The reasons prompting belief revision are characteristically epistemic; they concern such notions as quality of evidence and the tendency to yield truths. Many different rules have been proposed for updating one’s belief set. In general, belief revision typically balances risk of error against information increase. Belief revision is widely thought to proceed either by expansion or by conceptual revision. Expansion occurs in virtue of new observations; a belief is changed, or a new belief established, when a hypothesis (or provisional belief) is supported by evidence whose probability is high enough to meet a favored criterion of epistemic warrant. The hypothesis then becomes part of the existing belief corpus, or is sufficient to prompt revision. Conceptual revision occurs when appropriate changes are made in theoretical assumptions – in accordance with such principles as simplicity and explanatory or predictive power – by which the corpus is organized. In actual cases, we tend to revise beliefs with an eye toward advancing the best comprehensive explanation in the relevant cognitive domain. 

Beneke, Friedrich Eduard (1798–1854), German philosopher who was influenced by Herbart and English empiricism and criticized rationalistic metaphysics. He taught at Berlin and published some eighteen books in philosophy. His major work was Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft (1833). He wrote a critical study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and another on his moral theory; other works included Psychologie Skizzen (1825), Metaphysik und Religionphilosophie (1840), and Die neue Psychologie (1845). The “new psychology” developed by Beneke held that the hypostatization of “faculties” led to a mythical psychology. He proposed a method that would yield a natural science of the soul or, in effect, an associationist psychology. Influenced by the British empiricists, he conceived the elements of mental life as dynic, active processes or impulses (Trieben). These “elementary faculties,” originally activated by stimuli, generate the substantial unity of the nature of the psychic by their persistence as traces, as well as by their reciprocal adjustment in relation to the continuous production of new forces. In what Beneke called “pragmatic psychology,” the psyche is a bundle of impulses, forces, and functions. Psychological theory should rest on inductive analyses of the facts of inner perception. This, in turn, is the foundation of the philosophical disciplines of logic, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. In this regard, Beneke held a psychologism. He agreed with Herbart that psychology must be based on inner experience and must eschew metaphysical speculation, but rejected Hebart’s mathematical reductionism. Beneke sought to create a “pragmatic philosophy” based on his psychology. In his last years he contributed to pedagogic theory. 

ASSOCIATIONISM. G.J.S. benevolence.VIRTUE ETHICS. Benth, Jeremy (1748–1832), British philosopher of ethics and political-legal theory. Born in London, he entered Queen’s College, Oxford, at age 12, and after graduation entered Lincoln’s Inn to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1767 but never practiced. He spent his life writing, advocating changes along utilitarian lines (maximal happiness for everyone affected) of the whole legal system, especially the criminal law. He was a strong influence in changes of the British law of evidence; in abolition of laws permitting imprisonment for indebtedness; in the belief, basic Benth, Jeremy 79 -   79 reform of Parlientary representation; in the formation of a civil service recruited by exination; and in much else. His major work published during his lifetime was An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). He bece head of a “radical” group including Jes Mill and J. S. Mill, and founded the Westminster Review and University College, London (where his embalmed body still reposes in a closet). He was a friend of Catherine of Russia and John Quincy Ads, and was made a citizen of France in 1792. Pleasure, he said, is the only good, and pain the only evil: “else the words good and evil have no meaning.” He gives a list of exples of what he means by ‘pleasure’: pleasures of taste, smell, or touch; of acquiring property; of learning that one has the goodwill of others; of power; of a view of the pleasures of those one cares about. Benth was also a psychological hedonist: pleasures and pains determine what we do. Take pain. Your state of mind may be painful now (at the time just prior to action) because it includes the expectation of the pain (say) of being burned; the present pain (or the expectation of later pain – Benth is undecided which) motivates action to prevent being burned. One of a person’s pleasures, however, may be sympathetic enjoyment of the well-being of another. So it seems one can be motivated by the prospect of the happiness of another. His psychology here is not incompatible with altruistic motivation. Benth’s critical utilitarianism lies in his claim that any action, or measure of government, ought to be taken if and only if it tends to augment the happiness of everyone affected – not at all a novel principle, historically. When “thus interpreted, the words ought, and right and wrong . . . have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none.” Benth evidently did not mean this statement as a purely linguistic point about the actual meaning of moral terms. Neither can this principle be proved; it is a first principle from which all proofs proceed. What kind of reason, then, can he offer in its support? At one point he says that the principle of utility, at least unconsciously, governs the judgment of “every thinking man . . . unavoidably.” But his chief answer is his critique of a widely held principle that a person properly calls an act wrong if (when informed of the facts) he disapproves of it. (Benth cites other language as coming to the se thesis: talk of a “moral sense,” or common sense, or the understanding, or the law of nature, or right reason, or the “fitness of things.”) He says that this is no principle at all, since a “principle is something that points out some external consideration, as a means of warranting and guiding the internal sentiments of approbation. . . .” The alleged principle also allows for widespread disagreement about what is moral. So far, Benth’s proposal has not told us exactly how to determine whether an action or social measure is right or wrong. Benth suggests a hedonic calculus: in comparing two actions under consideration, we count up the pleasures or pains each will probably produce – how intense, how long-lasting, whether near or remote, including any derivative later pleasures or pains that may be caused, and sum them up for all persons who will be affected. Evidently these directions can provide at best only approximate results. We are in no position to decide whether one pleasure for one hour is greater than another pleasure for half an hour, even when they are both pleasures of one person who can compare them. How much more when the pleasures are of different persons? Still, we can make judgments important for the theory of punishment: whether a blow in the face with no lasting dage for one person is more or less painful than fifty lashes for his assailant! Benth has been much criticized because he thought that two pleasures are equal in value, if they are equally intense, enduring, etc. As he said, “Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.” It has been thought (e.g., by J. S. Mill) that some pleasures, especially intellectual ones, are higher and deserve to count more. But it may be replied that the so-called higher pleasures are more enduring, are less likely to be followed by satiety, and open up new horizons of enjoyment; and when these facts are taken into account, it is not clear that there is need to accord higher status to intellectual pleasures as such. A major goal of Benth’s was to apply to the criminal law his principle of maximizing the general utility. Benth thought there should be no punishment of an offense if it is not injurious to someone. So how much punishment should there be? The least ount the effect of which will result in a greater degree of happiness, overall. The benefit of punishment is primarily deterrence, by attaching to the thought of a given act the thought of the painful sanction – which will deter both the past and prospective lawbreakers. The punishment, then, must be severe enough to outweigh the benefit of the offense to the agent, making allowance, by addition, for the uncertainty that the punishment will actually occur. There are some harmful acts, however, that it is Benth, Jeremy Benth, Jeremy 80 -   80 not beneficial to punish. One is an act needful to produce a greater benefit, or avoid a serious evil, for the agent. Others are those which a penal prohibition could not deter: when the law is unpublished or the agent is insane or an infant. In some cases society need feel no alarm about the future actions of the agent. Thus, an act is criminal only if intentional, and the agent is excused if he acted on the basis of beliefs such that, were they true, the act would have caused no harm, unless these beliefs were culpable in the sense that they would not have been held by a person of ordinary prudence or benevolence. The propriety of punishing an act also depends somewhat on its motive, although no motive e.g., sexual desire, curiosity, wanting money, love of reputation – is bad in itself. Yet the propriety of punishment is affected by the presence of some motivations that enhance public security because it is unlikely that they – e.g., sympathetic concern or concern for reputation – will lead to bad intentional acts. When a given motive leads to a bad intention, it is usually because of the weakness of motives like sympathy, concern for avoiding punishment, or respect for law. In general, the sanction of moral criticism should take lines roughly similar to those of the ideal law. But there are some forms of behavior, e.g., imprudence or fornication, which the law is hardly suited to punish, that can be sanctioned by morality. The business of the moral philosopher is censorial: to say what the law, or morality, ought to be. To say what is the law is a different matter: what it is is the commands of the sovereign, defined as one whom the public, in general, habitually obeys. As consisting of commands, it is imperatival. The imperatives may be addressed to the public, as in “Let no one steal,” or to judges: “Let a judge sentence anyone who steals to be hanged.” It may be thought that there is a third part, an explanation, say, of what is a person’s property; but this can be absorbed in the imperatival part, since the designations of property are just imperatives about who is to be free to do what. Why should anyone obey the actual laws? Benth’s answer is that one should do so if and only if it promises to maximize the general happiness. He eschews contract theories of political obligation: individuals now alive never contracted, and so how are they bound? He also opposes appeal to natural rights. If what are often mentioned as natural rights were taken seriously, no government could survive: it could not tax, require military service, etc. Nor does he accept appeal to “natural law,” as if, once some law is shown to be immoral, it can be said to be not really law. That would be absurd. 

HEDONISM, PHILOSOPHY OF LAW, UTILITARIANISM. R.B.B. Berdyaev, Nicolas (1874–1948), Russian religious thinker. He began as a “Kantian Marxist” in epistemology, ethical theory, and philosophy of history, but soon turned away from Marxism (although he continued to accept Marx’s critique of capitalism) toward a theistic philosophy of existence stressing the values of creativity and “meonic” freedom – a freedom allegedly prior to all being, including that of God. In exile after 1922, Berdyaev appears to have been the first to grasp clearly (in the early 1920s) that the Marxist view of historical time involves a morally unacceptable devaluing and instrumentalizing of the historical present (including living persons) for the sake of the remote future end of a perfected communist society. Berdyaev rejects the Marxist position on both Christian and Kantian grounds, as a violation of the intrinsic value of human persons. He sees the historical order as marked by inescapable tragedy, and welcomes the “end of history” as an “overcoming” of objective historical time by subjective “existential” time with its free, unobjectified creativity. For Berdyaev the “world of objects” – physical things, laws of nature, social institutions, and human roles and relationships – is a pervasive threat to “free spiritual creativity.” Yet such creativity appears to be subject to inevitable frustration, since its outward embodiments are always “partial and fragmentary” and no “outward action” can escape ultimate “tragic failure.” Russian Orthodox traditionalists condemned Berdyaev for claiming that all creation is a “divine-human process” and for denying God’s omnipotence, but such Western process theologians as Hartshorne find Berdyaev’s position highly congenial.

Bergmann, Gustav: H. P. Grice, “Bergmann and the English futilitarians” -- Austrian philosopher, the youngest member of the Vienna Circle. Born in Vienna, he received his doctorate in mathematics in 1928 from the University of Vienna. Originally influenced by logical positivism, he bece a phenomenalist who also posited mental acts irreducible to sense-data (see his The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, 1954). Although he eventually rejected phenomenalism, his ontology of material objects remained structurally phenomenalistic. Bergmann’s world is one of momentary bare (i.e. natureless) particulars exemplifying (phenomenally) simple Berdyaev, Nicolas Bergmann, Gustav 81 -   81 universals, relational as well as non-relational. Some of these universals are non-mental, such as color properties and spatial relations, while others, such as the “intentional characters” in virtue of which some particulars (mental acts) intend or represent the facts that are their “objects,” are mental. Bergmann insisted that the world is independent of both our experience of it and our thought and discourse about it: he claimed that the connection of exemplification and even the propositional connectives and quantifiers are mind-independent. (See Meaning and Existence, 1959; Logic and Reality, 1964; and Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong, 1967.) Such extreme realism produced many criticisms of his philosophy that are only finally addressed in Bergmann’s recently, and posthumously, published book, New Foundations of Ontology (1992), in which he concedes that his atomistic approach to ontology has inevitable limitations and proposes a way of squaring this insight with his thoroughgoing realism. 

Bergson, Henri Louis (1859–1941), French philosopher, the most influential of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Paris and educated at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, he began his teaching career at Clermont-Ferrand in 1884 and was called in 1900 to the Collège de France, where his lectures enjoyed unparalleled success until his retirement in 1921. Ideally placed in la belle époque of prewar Paris, his ideas influenced a broad spectrum of artistic, literary, social, and political movements. In 1918 he received the Légion d’honneur and was admitted into the French Academy. From 1922 through 1925 he participated in the League of Nations, presiding over the creation of what was later to become UNESCO. Forced by crippling arthritis into virtual seclusion during his later years, Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928. Initially a disciple of Spencer, Bergson broke with him after a careful exination of Spencer’s concept of time and mechanistic positivism. Following a deeply entrenched tradition in Western thought, Spencer treats time (on an analogy with space) as a series of discrete numerical units: instants, seconds, minutes. When confronted with experience, however – especially with that of our own psychological states – such concepts are, Bergson concludes, patently inadequate. Real duration, unlike clock time, is qualitative, dynic, irreversible. It cannot be “spatialized” without being deformed. It gives rise in us, moreover, to free acts, which, being qualitative and spontaneous, cannot be predicted. Bergson’s dratic contrast of real duration and geometrical space, first developed in Time and Free Will (1890), was followed in 1896 by the mind –body theory of Matter and Memory. He argues here that the brain is not a locale for thought but a motor organ that, receiving stimuli from its environment, may respond with adaptive behavior. To his psychological and metaphysical distinction between duration and space Bergson adds, in An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), an important epistemological distinction between intuition and analysis. Intuition probes the flow of duration in its concreteness; analysis breaks up duration into static, fragmentary concepts. In Creative Evolution (1907), his best-known work, Bergson argues against both Larck and Darwin, urging that biological evolution is impelled by a vital impetus or élan vital that drives life to overcome the downward entropic drift of matter. Biological organisms, unlike dice, must compete and survive as they undergo permutations. Hence the unresolved dilemma of Darwinism. Either mutations occur one or a few at a time (in which case how can they be “saved up” to constitute new organs?) or they occur all at once (in which case one has a “miracle”). Bergson’s vitalism, popular in literary circles, was not accepted by many scientists or philosophers. His most general contention, however – that biological evolution is not consistent with or even well served by a mechanistic philosophy – was broadly appreciated and to many seemed convincing. This aspect of Bergson’s writings influenced thinkers as diverse as Lloyd Morgan, Alexis Carrel, Sewall Wright, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and A. N. Whitehead. The contrasts in terms of which Bergson developed his thought (duration/space, intuition/ analysis, life/entropy) are replaced in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) by a new duality, that of the “open” and the “closed.” The Judeo-Christian tradition, he contends, if it has embraced in its history both the open society and the closed society, exhibits in its great saints and mystics a profound opening out of the human spirit toward all humanity. Bergson’s distinction between the open and the closed society was popularized by Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies. While it has attracted serious criticism, Bergson’s philosophy has also significantly affected subsequent thinkers. Novelists as diverse as Bergson, Henri Louis Bergson, Henri Louis 82 -   82 Nikos Kazantzakis, Marcel Proust, and Willi Faulkner; poets as unlike as Charles Péguy, Robert Frost, and Antonio Machado; and psychologists as dissimilar as Pierre Janet and Jean Piaget were to profit significantly from his explorations of duration, conceptualization, and memory. Both French existentialism and erican process philosophy bear the imprint of his thought.

Berkeley, George (1685–1753), Irish philosopher and bishop in the Anglican Church of Ireland, one of the three great British empiricists along with Locke and Hume. He developed novel and influential views on the visual perception of distance and size, and an idealist metaphysical system that he defended partly on the seemingly paradoxical ground that it was the best defense of common sense and safeguard against skepticism. Berkeley studied at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he graduated at nineteen. He was elected to a fellowship at Trinity in 1707, and did the bulk of his philosophical writing between that year and 1713. He was made dean of Derry in 1724, following extensive traveling on the Continent; he spent the years 1728–32 in Rhode Island, waiting in vain for promised Crown funds to establish a college in Bermuda. He was made bishop of Cloyne, Ireland, in 1734, and he remained there as a cleric for nearly the remainder of his life. Berkeley’s first major publication, the Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), is principally a work in the psychology of vision, though it has important philosophical presuppositions and implications. Berkeley’s theory of vision bece something like the received view on the topic for nearly two hundred years and is a landmark work in the history of psychology. The work is devoted to three connected matters: how do we see, or visually estimate, the distances of objects from ourselves, the situation or place at which objects are located, and the magnitude of such objects? Earlier views, such as those of Descartes, Malebranche, and Molyneux, are rejected on the ground that their answers to the above questions allow that a person can see the distance of an object without having first learned to correlate visual and other cues. This was supposedly done by a kind of natural geometry, a computation of the distance by determining the altitude of a triangle formed by light rays from the object and the line extending from one retina to the other. On the contrary, Berkeley holds that it is clear that seeing distance is something one learns to do through trial and error, mainly by correlating cues that suggest distance: the distinctness or confusion of the visual appearance; the feelings received when the eyes turn; and the sensations attending the straining of the eyes. None of these bears any necessary connection to distance. Berkeley infers from this account that a person born blind and later given sight would not be able to tell by sight alone the distances objects were from her, nor tell the difference between a sphere and a cube. He also argues that in visually estimating distance, one is really estimating which tangible ideas one would likely experience if one were to take steps to approach the object. Not that these tangible ideas are themselves necessarily connected to the visual appearances. Instead, Berkeley holds that tangible and visual ideas are entirely heterogeneous, i.e., they are numerically and specifically distinct. The latter is a philosophical consequence of Berkeley’s theory of vision, which is sharply at odds with a central doctrine of Locke’s Essay, nely, that some ideas are common to both sight and touch. Locke’s doctrines also receive a great deal of attention in the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). Here Berkeley considers the doctrine of abstract general ideas, which he finds in Book III of Locke’s Essay. He argues against such ideas partly on the ground that we cannot engage in the process of abstraction, partly on the ground that some abstract ideas are impossible objects, and also on the ground that such ideas are not needed for either language learning or language use. These arguments are of fundental importance for Berkeley, since he thinks that the doctrine of abstract ideas helps to support metaphysical realism, absolute space, absolute motion, and absolute time (Principles, 5, 100, 110–11), as well as the view that some ideas are common to sight and touch (New Theory, 123). All of these doctrines Berkeley holds to be mistaken, and the first is in direct conflict with his idealism. Hence, it is important for him to undermine any support these doctrines might receive from the abstract ideas thesis. Berkeleyan idealism is the view that the only existing entities are finite and infinite perceivers each of which is a spirit or mental substance, and entities that are perceived. Such a thesis implies that ordinary physical objects exist if and only if they are perceived, something Berkeley encapsulates in the esse est percipi principle: for all senBerkeley, George Berkeley, George 83 -   83 sible objects, i.e., objects capable of being perceived, their being is to be perceived. He gives essentially two arguments for this thesis. First, he holds that every physical object is just a collection of sensible qualities, and that every sensible quality is an idea. So, physical objects are just collections of sensible ideas. No idea can exist unperceived, something everyone in the period would have granted. Hence, no physical object can exist unperceived. The second argument is the socalled master argument of Principles 22–24. There Berkeley argues that one cannot conceive a sensible object existing unperceived, because if one attempts to do this one must thereby conceive that very object. He concludes from this that no such object can exist “without the mind,” that is, wholly unperceived. Many of Berkeley’s opponents would have held instead that a physical object is best analyzed as a material substratum, in which some sensible qualities inhere. So Berkeley spends some effort arguing against material substrata or what he sometimes calls matter. His principal argument is that a sensible quality cannot inhere in matter, because a sensible quality is an idea, and surely an idea cannot exist except in a mind. This argument would be decisive if it were true that each sensible quality is an idea. Unfortunately, Berkeley gives no argument whatever for this contention in the Principles, and for that reason Berkeleyan idealism is not there well founded. Nor does the master argument fare much better, for there Berkeley seems to require a premise asserting that if an object is conceived, then that object is perceived. Yet such a premise is highly dubious. Probably Berkeley realized that his case for idealism had not been successful, and certainly he was stung by the poor reception of the Principles. His next book, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713), is aimed at rectifying these matters. There he argues at length for the thesis that each sensible quality is an idea. The master argument is repeated, but it is unnecessary if every sensible quality is an idea. In the Dialogues Berkeley is also much concerned to combat skepticism and defend common sense. He argues that representative realism as held by Locke leads to skepticism regarding the external world and this, Berkeley thinks, helps to support atheism and free thinking in religion. He also argues, more directly, that representative realism is false. Such a thesis incorporates the claim that somesensible ideas represent real qualities in objects, the so-called primary qualities. But Berkeley argues that a sensible idea can be like nothing but another idea, and so ideas cannot represent qualities in objects. In this way, Berkeley eliminates one main support of skepticism, and to that extent helps to support the commonsensical idea that we gain knowledge of the existence and nature of ordinary physical objects by means of perception. Berkeley’s positive views in epistemology are usually interpreted as a version of foundationalism. That is, he is generally thought to have defended the view that beliefs about currently perceived ideas are basic beliefs, beliefs that are immediately and non-inferentially justified or that count as pieces of immediate knowledge, and that all other justified beliefs in contingent propositions are justified by being somehow based upon the basic beliefs. Indeed, such a foundationalist doctrine is often taken to help define empiricism, held in common by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. But whatever the merits of such a view as an interpretation of Locke or Hume, it is not Berkeley’s theory. This is because he allows that perceivers often have immediate and noninferential justified beliefs, and knowledge, about physical objects. Hence, Berkeley accepts a version of foundationalism that allows for basic beliefs quite different from just beliefs about one’s currently perceived ideas. Indeed, he goes so far as to maintain that such physical object beliefs are often certain, something neither Locke nor Hume would accept. In arguing against the existence of matter, Berkeley also maintains that we literally have no coherent concept of such stuff because we cannot have any sensible idea of it. Parity of reasoning would seem to dictate that Berkeley should reject mental substance as well, thereby threatening his idealism from another quarter. Berkeley is sensitive to this line of reasoning, and replies that while we have no idea of the self, we do have some notion of the self, that is, some lessthan-complete concept. He argues that a person gains some immediate knowledge of the existence and nature of herself in a reflex act; that is, when she is perceiving something she is also conscious that something is engaging in this perception, and this is sufficient for knowledge of that perceiving entity. To complement his idealism, Berkeley worked out a version of scientific instrumentalism, both in the Principles and in a later Latin work, De Motu (1721), a doctrine that anticipates the views of Mach. In the Dialogues he tries to show how his idealism is consistent with the biblical account of the creation, and consistent as well with common sense. Berkeley, George Berkeley, George 84 -   84 Three later works of Berkeley’s gained him an enormous ount of attention. Alciphron (1734) was written while Berkeley was in Rhode Island, and is a philosophical defense of Christian doctrine. It also contains some additional comments on perception, supplementing earlier work on that topic. The Analyst (1734) contains trenchant criticism of the method of fluxions in differential calculus, and it set off a flurry of pphlet replies to Berkeley’s criticisms, to which Berkeley responded in his A Defense of Free Thinking in Mathematics. Siris (1744) contains a detailed account of the medicinal values of tar-water, water boiled with the bark of certain trees. This book also contains a defense of a sort of corpuscularian philosophy that seems to be at odds with the idealism elaborated in the earlier works for which Berkeley is now fous. In the years 1707–08, the youthful Berkeley kept a series of notebooks in which he worked out his ideas in philosophy and mathematics. These books, now known as the Philosophical Commentaries, provide the student of Berkeley with the rare opportunity to see a great philosopher’s thought in development. 

HUME, IDEALISM, LOCKE, PERCEPTION, PHENOMENALISM. G.S.P. Berlin, Isaiah (1909–97), British philosopher and historian of ideas. He is widely acclaimed for his doctrine of radical objective pluralism; his writings on liberty; his modification, refinement, and defense of traditional liberalism against the totalitarian doctrines of the twentieth century (not least Marxism-Leninism); and his brilliant and illuminating studies in the history of ideas from Machiavelli and Vico to Marx and Sorel. A founding father with Austin, Ayer, and others of Oxford philosophy in the 1930s, he published several influential papers in its general spirit, but, without abandoning its empirical approach, he ce increasingly to dissent from what seemed to him its unduly barren, doctrinaire, and truthdenying tendencies. From the 1950s onward he broke away to devote himself principally to social and political philosophy and to the study of general ideas. His two most important contributions in social and political theory, brought together with two other valuable essays in Four Essays on Liberty (1969), are “Historical Inevitability” (1954) and his 1958 inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” The first is a bold and decisive attack on historical determinism and moral relativism and subjectivism and a ringing endorsement of the role of free will and responsibility in human history. The second contains Berlin’s enormously influential attempt to distinguish clearly between “negative” and “positive” liberty. Negative liberty, foreshadowed by such thinkers as J. S. Mill, Constant, and above all Herzen, consists in making minimal assumptions about the ultimate nature and needs of the subject, in ensuring a minimum of external interference by authority of any provenance, and in leaving open as large a field for free individual choice as is consonant with a minimum of social organization and order. Positive liberty, associated with monist and voluntarist thinkers of all kinds, not least Hegel, the German Idealists, and their historical progeny, begins with the notion of self-mastery and proceeds to make dogmatic and far-reaching metaphysical assumptions about the essence of the subject. It then deduces from these the proper paths to freedom, and, finally, seeks to drive flesh-and-blood individuals down these preordained paths, whether they wish it or not, within the frework of a tight-knit centralized state under the irrefragable rule of rational experts, thus perverting what begins as a legitimate human ideal, i.e. positive self-direction and self-mastery, into a tyranny. “Two Concepts of Liberty” also sets out to disentangle liberty in either of these senses from other ends, such as the craving for recognition, the need to belong, or human solidarity, fraternity, or equality. Berlin’s work in the history of ideas is of a piece with his other writings. Vico and Herder (1976) presents the emergence of that historicism and pluralism which shook the two-thousand-yearold monist rationalist faith in a unified body of truth regarding all questions of fact and principle in all fields of human knowledge. From this profound intellectual overturn Berlin traces in subsequent volumes of essays, such as Against the Current (1979), The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990), and The Sense of Reality (1996), the growth of some of the principal intellectual movements that mark our era, ong them nationalism, fascism, relativism, subjectivism, nihilism, voluntarism, and existentialism. He also presents with persuasiveness and clarity that peculiar objective pluralism which he identified and made his own. There is an irreducible plurality of objective human values, many of which are incompatible with one another; hence the ineluctable need for absolute choices by individuals and groups, a need that confers supreme value upon, and forms one of the major justifications of, his conception of negative liberty; Berlin, Isaiah Berlin, Isaiah 85 -   85 hence, too, his insistence that utopia, nely a world where all valid human ends and objective values are simultaneously realized in an ultimate synthesis, is a conceptual impossibility. While not himself founder of any definable school or movement, Berlin’s influence as a philosopher and as a human being has been immense, not least on a variety of distinguished thinkers such as Stuart Hpshire, Charles Taylor, Bernard Willis, Richard Wollheim, Gerry Cohen, Steven Lukes, David Pears, and many others. His general intellectual and moral impact on the life of the twentieth century as writer, diplomat, patron of music and the arts, international academic elder statesman, loved and trusted friend to the great and the humble, and dazzling lecturer, conversationalist, and animateur des idées, will furnish inexhaustible material to future historians.

 FREE WILL PROBLEM, LIBERALISM, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FREEDOM. R.Hau. Bernard of Chartres (fl. 1114–26), French philosopher. He was first a teacher (1114–19) and later chancellor (1119–26) of the cathedral school at Chartres, which was then an active center of learning in the liberal arts and philosophy. Bernard himself was renowned as a grmarian, i.e., as an expositor of difficult texts, and as a teacher of Plato. None of his works has survived whole, and only three fragments are preserved in works by others. He is now best known for an image recorded both by his student, John of Salisbury, and by Willi of Conches. In Bernard’s image, he and all his medieval contemporaries were in relation to the ancient authors like “dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants.” John of Salisbury takes the image to mean both that the medievals could see more and further than the ancients, and that they could do so only because they had been lifted up by such powerful predecessors. M.D.J. Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint (1090–1153), French Cistercian monk, mystic, and religious leader. He is most noted for his doctrine of Christian humility and his depiction of the mystical experience, which exerted considerable influence on later Christian mystics. Educated in France, he entered the monastery at Cîteaux in 1112, and three years later founded a daughter monastery at Clairvaux. According to Bernard, honest self-knowledge should reveal the extent to which we fail to be what we should be in the eyes of God. That selfknowledge should lead us to curb our pride and so become more humble. Humility is necessary for spiritual purification, which in turn is necessary for contemplation of God, the highest form of which is union with God. Consistent with orthodox Christian doctrine, Bernard maintains that mystical union does not entail identity. One does not become God; rather, one’s will and God’s will come into complete conformity.  MYSTICISM. W.E.M. Bernoulli’s theorem, also called the (weak) law of large numbers, the principle that if a series of trials is repeated n times where (a) there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1, on each trial, (b) the probability p of 0 is the se on each trial, and (c) this probability is independent of the outcome of other trials, then, for arbitrary positive e, as the number n of trials is increased, the probability that the absolute value Kr/n – pK of the difference between the relative frequency r/n of 0’s in the n trials and p is less than e approaches 1. The first proof of this theorem was given by Jakob Bernoulli in Part IV of his posthumously published Ars Conjectandi of 1713. Simplifications were later constructed and his result has been generalized in a series of “weak laws of large numbers.” Although Bernoulli’s theorem derives a conclusion about the probability of the relative frequency r/n of 0’s for large n of trials given the value of p, in Ars Conjectandi and correspondence with Leibniz, Bernoulli thought it could be used to reason from information about r/n to the value of p when the latter is unknown. Speculation persists as to whether Bernoulli anticipated the inverse inference of Bayes, the confidence interval estimation of Peirce, J. Neyman, and E. S. Pearson, or the fiducial argument of R. A. Fisher. 

PROBABILITY. I.L. Berry’s paradox.SEMANTIC PARADOXES. Bertrand’s box paradox, a puzzle concerning conditional probability. Imagine three boxes with two drawers apiece. Each drawer of the first box contains a gold medal. Each drawer of the second contains a silver medal. One drawer of the third contains a gold medal, and the other a silver medal. At random, a box is selected and one of its drawers is opened. If a gold medal appears, what is the probability that the third box was selected? The probability seems to be ½, because the box is either the first or the third, and they seem equally probable. But a gold medal is less probable from the third box than from the first, Bernard of Chartres Bertrand’s box paradox 86 -   86 so the third box is actually less probable than the first. By Bayes’s theorem its probability is 1 /3. Joseph Bertrand, a French mathematician, published the paradox in Calcul des probabilités (Calculus of Probabilities, 1889).  BAYES’s THEOREM, PROBABILITY. P.We. Bertrand’s paradox, an inconsistency arising from the classical definition of an event’s probability as the number of favorable cases divided by the number of possible cases. Given a circle, a chord is selected at random. What is the probability that the chord is longer than a side of an equilateral triangle inscribed in the circle? The event has these characterizations: (1) the apex angle of an isosceles triangle inscribed in the circle and having the chord as a leg is less than 60°, (2) the chord intersects the dieter perpendicular to it less than ½ a radius from the circle’s center, and (3) the chord’s midpoint lies within a circle concentric with the original and of ¼ its area. The definition thus suggests that the event’s probability is 1 /3, 1 /2, and also ¼. Joseph Bertrand, a French mathematician, published the paradox in Calcul des probabilités (1889).  PROBABILITY. P.We. Beth’s definability theorem, a theorem for firstorder logic. A theory defines a term t implicitly if and only if an explicit definition of the term, on the basis of the other primitive concepts, is entailed by the theory. A theory defines a term implicitly if any two models of the theory with the se domain and the se extension for the other primitive terms are identical, i.e., also have the se extension for the term. An explicit definition of a term is a sentence that states necessary and sufficient conditions for the term’s applicability. Beth’s theorem was implicit in a method to show independence of a term that was first used by the Italian logician Alessandro Padoa (1868–1937). Padoa suggested, in 1900, that independence of a primitive algebraic term from the other terms occurring in a set of axioms can be established by two true interpretations of the axioms that differ only in the interpretation of the term whose independence has to be proven. He claimed, without proof, that the existence of two such models is not only sufficient for, but also implied by, independence. Tarski first gave a proof of Beth’s theorem in 1926 for the logic of the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell, but the result was only obtained for first-order logic in 1953 by the Dutch logician Evert Beth (1908–64). In modern expositions Beth’s theorem is a direct implication of Craig’s interpolation theorem. In a variation on Padoa’s method, Karel de Bouvère described in 1959 a one-model method to show indefinability: if the set of logical consequences of a theory formulated in terms of the remaining vocabulary cannot be extended to a model of the full theory, a term is not explicitly definable in terms of the remaining vocabulary. In the philosophy of science literature this is called a failure of Rsey-eliminability of the term. 

MODEL THEORY. Z.G.S. Bhagavad Gita (from Sanskrit Bhagavadgita, ‘song of the blessed one/exalted lord’), Hindu devotional poem composed and edited between the fifth century B.C. and the second century A.D. It contains eighteen chapters and seven hundred verses, and forms the sixth book (Chapters 23– 40) of the Indian epic Mahabharata. In its narrative, the warrior Arjuna, reluctantly waiting to wage war, receives a revelation from the Lord Krishna that emphasizes selfless deeds and bhakti, or devotion. Strictly classified as smrti or fallible tradition, the Gita is typically treated as shruti or infallible revelation. Such major thinkers as Shankara, Ranuja, and Madhva wrote commentaries on this beloved book. Shankara reads it as teaching that enlightenment comes through right (Advaita Vedanta) knowledge alone even without performance of religious duties. Ranuja takes it to hold that enlightenment comes through performance of religious duties, particularly devotion to God for whose sake alone all other duties must be performed if one’s sins are to be washed away. Such devotion leads to (or at its zenith includes) self-knowledge and knowledge of personal Brahman. Madhva sees the Gita as emphasizing divine uniqueness and the necessity of love and attachment to God and not to oneself or the consequences of one’s deeds. K.E.Y. bhakti (Sanskrit), in Hindu theistic thought systems, devotion. Bhakti includes the ideas of faith, surrender, love, affection, and attachment. Its most common form of expression is worship by means of offerings, puja. Theistic thinkers such as Ranuja and Madhva argue that devotion is the key element that solves the human predicent. As a result the deity responds with grace or kindness (prasad) and thereby causes the devotee to prosper or attain moksha. The Bhakti Sutras (twelfth century A.D.) distinguish “lower bhakti,” i.e., devotion with personal goals in mind, from “higher bhakti,” i.e., selfless devotion practiced only to please the deity. The latter is libBertrand’s paradox bhakti 87 -   87 eration. Modern Hindu philosophers, following Shankara and the modern Hindu apologist Swi Vivekananda (1862–1902), often relegate bhakti to a lower path than knowledge (jnana) for those who are unable to follow philosophy, but in the philosophical systems of many theists it is defended as the highest path with the main obstacle as unbelief, not ignorance.  HINDUISM. R.N.Mi. bhavanga, a subliminal mode of consciousness, according to Theravada Buddhist philosophers, in which no mental activity occurs. The continued existence of the bhavanga-mind in states where there is no intentional mental activity (e.g., dreless sleep) is what guarantees the continuance of a particular mental continuum in such states. It operates also in ordinary events of sensation and conceptualization, being connected with such intentional mental events in complex ways, and is appealed to as an explanatory category in the accounts of the process leading from death to rebirth. Some Buddhists also use it as a soteriological category, identifying the bhavanga-mind with mind in its pure state, mind as luminous and radiant.  ALAYAVIJÑANA, NIRODHA-SAPATTI. P.J.G. biconditional, the logical operator, usually written with a triple-bar sign (S) or a doubleheaded arrow (Q), used to indicate that two propositions hav

e the se truth-value: that either both are true or else both are false. The term also designates a proposition having this sign, or a natural language expression of it, as its main connective; e.g., P if and only if Q. The truth table for the biconditional is The biconditional is so called because its application is logically equivalent to the conjunction ‘(P-conditional-Q)-and-(Q-conditional-P)’.  TRUTH TABLE. R.W.B. biconditional, Tarskian.TARSKI. bilateral reduction sentence.REDUCTION SENTENCE. binary quantifier.

PLURALITIVE LOGIC. bioethics, the subfield of ethics that concerns the ethical issues arising in medicine and from advances in biological science. One central area of bioethics is the ethical issues that arise in relations between health care professionals and patients. A second area focuses on broader issues of social justice in health care. A third area concerns the ethical issues raised by new biological knowledge or technology. In relations between health care professionals and patients, a fundental issue is the appropriate role of each in decision making about patient care. More traditional views assigning principal decision-making authority to physicians have largely been replaced with ideals of shared decision making that assign a more active role to patients. Shared decision making is thought to reflect better the importance of patients’ self-determination in controlling their care. This increased role for patients is reflected in the ethical and legal doctrine of informed consent, which requires that health care not be rendered without the informed and voluntary consent of a competent patient. The requirement that consent be informed places a positive responsibility on health care professionals to provide their patients with the information they need to make informed decisions about care. The requirement that consent be voluntary requires that treatment not be forced, nor that patients’ decisions be coerced or manipulated. If patients lack the capacity to make competent health care decisions, e.g. young children or cognitively impaired adults, a surrogate, typically a parent in the case of children or a close fily member in the case of adults, must decide for them. Surrogates’ decisions should follow the patient’s advance directive if one exists, be the decision the patient would have made in the circumstances if competent, or follow the patient’s best interests if the patient has never been competent or his or her wishes are not known. A major focus in bioethics generally, and treatment decision making in particular, is care at or near the end of life. It is now widely agreed that patients are entitled to decide about and to refuse, according to their own values, any lifesustaining treatment. They are also entitled to have desired treatments that may shorten their lives, such as high doses of pain medications necessary to relieve severe pain from cancer, although in practice pain treatment remains inadequate for many patients. Much more controversial is whether more active means to end life such as physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia are morally permissible in indibhavanga bioethics 88 -   88 vidual cases or justified as public policy; both remain illegal except in a very few jurisdictions. Several other moral principles have been central to defining professional–patient relationships in health care. A principle of truth telling requires that professionals not lie to patients. Whereas in the past it was common, especially with patients with terminal cancers, not to inform patients fully about their diagnosis and prognosis, studies have shown that practice has changed substantially and that fully informing patients does not have the bad effects for patients that had been feared in the past. Principles of privacy and confidentiality require that information gathered in the professional–patient relationship not be disclosed to third parties without patients’ consent. Especially with highly personal information in mental health care, or information that may lead to discrimination, such as a diagnosis of AIDS, assurance of confidentiality is fundental to the trust necessary to a wellfunctioning professional–patient relationship. Nevertheless, exceptions to confidentiality to prevent imminent and serious harm to others are well recognized ethically and legally. More recently, work in bioethics has focused on justice in the allocation of health care. Whereas nearly all developed countries treat health care as a moral and legal right, and ensure it to all their citizens through some form of national health care system, in the United States about 15 percent of the population remains without any form of health insurance. This has fed debates about whether health care is a right or privilege, a public or individual responsibility. Most bioethicists have supported a right to health care because of health care’s fundental impact on people’s well-being, opportunity, ability to plan their lives, and even lives themselves. Even if there is a moral right to health care, however, few defend an unlimited right to all beneficial health care, no matter how small the benefit and how high the cost. Consequently, it is necessary to prioritize or ration health care services to reflect limited budgets for health care, and both the standards and procedures for doing so are ethically controversial. Utilitarians and defenders of cost-effectiveness analysis in health policy support using limited resources to maximize aggregate health benefits for the population. Their critics argue that this ignores concerns about equity, concerns about how health care resources and health are distributed. For exple, some have argued that equity requires giving priority to treating the worst-off or sickest, even at a sacrifice in aggregate health benefits; moreover, taking account in prioritization of differences in costs of different treatments can lead to ethically problematic results, such as giving higher priority to providing very small benefits to many persons than very large but individually more expensive benefits, including life-saving interventions, to a few persons, as the state of Oregon found in its initial widely publicized prioritization progr. In the face of controversy over standards for rationing care, it is natural to rely on fair procedures to make rationing decisions. Other bioethics issues arise from dratic advances in biological knowledge and technology. Perhaps the most prominent exple is new knowledge of human genetics, propelled in substantial part by the worldwide Human Genome Project, which seeks to map the entire human genome. This project and related research will enable the prevention of genetically transmitted diseases, but already raises questions about which conditions to prevent in offspring and which should be accepted and lived with, particularly when the means of preventing the condition is by abortion of the fetus with the condition. Looking further into the future, new genetic knowledge and technology will likely enable us to enhance normal capacities, not just prevent or cure disease, and to manipulate the genes of future children, raising profoundly difficult questions about what kinds of persons to create and the degree to which deliberate human design should replace “nature” in the creation of our offspring. A dratic exple of new abilities to create offspring, though now limited to the animal realm, was the cloning in Scotland in 1997 of a sheep from a single cell of an adult sheep; this event raised the very controversial future prospect of cloning human beings. Finally, new reproductive technologies, such as oocyte (egg) donation, and practices such as surrogate motherhood, raise deep issues about the meaning and nature of parenthood and filies.  DIGNITY, ETHICS, EUTHANASIA, INFORMED CONSENT. D.W.B. biological naturalism.SEARLE. biology, autonomy of.UNITY OF SCIENCE. biology, philosophy of.PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY. biology, social.SOCIAL BIOLOGY. Birkhoff–von Neumann logic.

QUANTUM LOGIC. biological naturalism Birkhoff–von Neumann logic 89 -   89 bit (from binary digit), a unit or measure of information. Suggested by John W. Tukey, a bit is both an ount of information (a reduction of eight equally likely possibilities to one generates three bits [% log2 8] of information) and a system of representing that quantity. The binary system uses 1’s and 0’s.  INFORMATION THEORY. F.A. bivalence, principle of.PRINCIPLE OF BIVALENCE. black box, a hypothetical unit specified only by functional role, in order to explain some effect or behavior. The term may refer to a single entity with an unknown structure, or unknown internal organization, which realizes some known function, or to any one of a system of such entities, whose organization and functions are inferred from the behavior of an organism or entity of which they are constituents. Within behaviorism and classical learning theory, the basic functions were taken to be generalized mechanisms governing the relationship of stimulus to response, including reinforcement, inhibition, extinction, and arousal. The organism was treated as a black box realizing these functions. Within cybernetics, though there are no simple input–output rules describing the organism, there is an emphasis on functional organization and feedback in controlling behavior. The components within a cybernetic system are treated as black boxes. In both cases, the details of underlying structure, mechanism, and dynics are either unknown or regarded as unimportant.  BEHAVIORISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, THEORETICAL TERM. R.C.R. bleen

.GRUE PARADOX. blindsight, a residual visual capacity resulting from lesions in certain areas of the brain (the striate cortex, area 17). Under routine clinical testing, persons suffering such lesions appear to be densely blind in particular regions of the visual field. Researchers have long recognized that, in primates, comparable lesions do not result in similar deficits. It has seemed unlikely that this disparity could be due to differences in brain function, however. And, indeed, when human subjects are tested in the way non-human subjects are tested, the disparity vanishes. Although subjects report that they can detect nothing in the blind field, when required to “guess” at properties of items situated there, they perform remarkably well. They seem to “know” the contents of the blind field while remaining unaware that they know, often expressing astonishment on being told the results of testing in the blind field. 

PERCEPTION. J.F.H. Bloch, Ernst (1885–1977), German philosopher. Influenced by Marxism, his views went beyond Marxism as he matured. He fled Germany in the 1930s, but returned after World War II to a professorship in East Germany, where his increasingly unorthodox ideas were eventually censured by the Communist authorities, forcing a move to West Germany in the 1960s. His major work, The Principle of Hope (1954–59), is influenced by German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Neoplatonism, utopianism, and numerous other sources besides Marxism. Humans are essentially unfinished, moved by a cosmic impulse, “hope,” a tendency in them to strive for the as-yet-unrealized, which manifests itself as utopia, or vision of future possibilities. Despite his atheism, Bloch wished to retrieve the sense of self-transcending that he saw in the religious and mythical traditions of humankind. His ideas have consequently influenced theology as well as philosophy, e.g. the “theology of hope” of Jurgen Moltmann. R.H.K. Blondel, Maurice (1861–1949), French Christian philosopher who discovered the deist background of human action. In his main work, Action (1893, 2d rev. ed. 1950), Blondel held that action is part of the very nature of human beings and as such becomes an object of philosophy; through philosophy, action should find its meaning, i.e. realize itself rationally. An appropriate phenomenology of action through phenomenological description uncovers the phenomenal level of action but points beyond it. Such a supraphenomenal sense of action provides it a metaphysical status. This phenomenology of action rests on an immanent dialectics of action: a gap between the aim of the action and its realization. This gap, while dissatisfying to the actor, also drives him toward new activities. The only immanent solution of this dialectics and its consequences is a transcendent one. We have to realize that we, like other humans, cannot grasp our own activities and must accept our limitations and our finitude as well as the insufficiency of our philosophy, which is now understood as a philosophy of insufficiency and points toward the existence of the supernatural element in every human act, nely God. Human activity is the outcome of divine grace. Through action bit Blondel, Maurice 90 -   90 one touches the existence of God, something not possible by logical argumentation. In the later phase of his development Blondel deserted his early “anti-intellectualism” and stressed the close relation between thought and action, now understood as inseparable and mutually interrelated. He ce to see philosophy as a rational instrument of understanding one’s actions as well as one’s insufficiency. G.Fl. bodily continuity.

PERSONAL IDENTITY. Bodin, Jean (c.1529–96), French political philosopher whose philosophy centers on the concept of sovereignty. His Six livres de la république (1577) defines a state as constituted by common public interests, filies, and the sovereign. The sovereign is the lawgiver, who stands beyond the absolute rights he possesses; he must, however, follow the law of God, natural law, and the constitution. The ideal state was for Bodin a monarchy that uses aristocratic and democratic structures of government for the sake of the common good. In order to achieve a broader empirical picture of politics Bodin used historical comparisons. This is methodologically reflected in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566). Bodin was clearly a theorist of absolutism. As a member of the Politique group he played a practical role in emancipating the state from the church. His thinking was influenced by his experience of civil war. In his Heptaplomeres (posthumous) he pleaded for tolerance with respect to all religions, including Isl and Judaism. As a public prosecutor, however, he wrote a manual for judges in witchcraft trials (De la démonomanie des sorciers, 1580). By stressing the peacemaking role of a strong state Bodin was a forerunner of Hobbes.  HOBBES, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. H.P. body, objective.EMBODIMENT. body, phenomenal.EMBODIMENT. Boehme, Jakob (1575–1624), German Protestant speculative mystic. Influenced especially by Paracelsus, Boehme received little formal education, but was successful enough as a shoemaker to devote himself to his writing, explicating his religious experiences. He published little in his lifetime, though enough to attract charges of heresy from local clergy. He did gather followers, and his works were published after his death. His writings are elaborately symbolic rather than argumentative, but respond deeply to fundental problems in the Christian worldview. He holds that the Godhead, omnipotent will, is as nothing to us, since we can in no way grasp it. The Mysterium Magnum, the ideal world, is conceived in God’s mind through an impulse to selfrevelation. The actual world, separate from God, is created through His will, and seeks to return to the peace of the Godhead. The world is good, as God is, but its goodness falls away, and is restored at the end of history, though not entirely, for some souls are dned eternally. Human beings enjoy free will, and create themselves through rebirth in faith. The Fall is necessary for the selfknowledge gained in recovery from it. Recognition of one’s hidden, free self is a recognition of God manifested in the world, so that human salvation completes God’s act of self-revelation. It is also a recognition of evil rooted in the blind will underlying all individual existence, without which there would be nothing except the Godhead. Boehme’s works influenced Hegel and the later Schelling. 

MYSTICISM, PARACELSUS. J.Lo. Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (c.480– 525), Roman philosopher and Aristotelian translator and commentator. He was born into a wealthy patrician fily in Rome and had a distinguished political career under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric before being arrested and executed on charges of treason. His logic and philosophical theology contain important contributions to the philosophy of the late classical and early medieval periods, and his translations of and commentaries on Aristotle profoundly influenced the history of philosophy, particularly in the medieval Latin West. His most fous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, composed during his imprisonment, is a moving reflection on the nature of human happiness and the problem of evil and contains classic discussions of providence, fate, chance, and the apparent incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free choice. He was known during his own lifetime, however, as a brilliant scholar whose knowledge of the Greek language and ancient Greek philosophy set him apart from his Latin contemporaries. He conceived his scholarly career as devoted to preserving and making accessible to the Latin West the great philosophical achievement of ancient Greece. To this end he announced an bitious plan to translate into Latin and write commenbodily continuity Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 91 -   91 taries on all of Plato and Aristotle, but it seems that he achieved this goal only for Aristotle’s Organon. His extant translations include Porphyry’s Isagoge (an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories) and Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. He wrote two commentaries on the Isagoge and On Interpretation and one on the Categories, and we have what appear to be his notes for a commentary on the Prior Analytics. His translation of the Posterior Analytics and his commentary on the Topics are lost. He also commented on Cicero’s Topica and wrote his own treatises on logic, including De syllogismis hypotheticis, De syllogismis categoricis, Introductio in categoricos syllogismos, De divisione, and De topicis differentiis, in which he elaborates and supplements Aristotelian logic. Boethius shared the common Neoplatonist view that the Platonist and Aristotelian systems could be harmonized by following Aristotle in logic and natural philosophy and Plato in metaphysics and theology. This plan for harmonization rests on a distinction between two kinds of forms: (1) forms that are conjoined with matter to constitute bodies – these, which he calls “images” (imagines), correspond to the forms in Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of corporeal substances; and (2) forms that are pure and entirely separate from matter, corresponding to Plato’s ontologically separate Forms. He calls these “true forms” and “the forms themselves.” He holds that the former, “enmattered” forms depend for their being on the latter, pure forms. Boethius takes these three sorts of entities – bodies, enmattered forms, and separate forms – to be the respective objects of three different cognitive activities, which constitute the three branches of speculative philosophy. Natural philosophy is concerned with enmattered forms as enmattered, mathematics with enmattered forms considered apart from their matter (though they cannot be separated from matter in actuality), and theology with the pure and separate forms. He thinks that the mental abstraction characteristic of mathematics is important for understanding the Peripatetic account of universals: the enmattered, particular forms found in sensible things can be considered as universal when they are considered apart from the matter in which they inhere (though they cannot actually exist apart from matter). But he stops short of endorsing this moderately realist Aristotelian account of universals. His commitment to an ontology that includes not just Aristotelian natural forms but also Platonist Forms existing apart from matter implies a strong realist view of universals. With the exception of De fide catholica, which is a straightforward credal statement, Boethius’s theological treatises (De Trinitate, Utrum Pater et Filius, Quomodo substantiae, and Contra Euthychen et Nestorium) show his commitment to using logic and metaphysics, particularly the Aristotelian doctrines of the categories and predicables, to clarify and resolve issues in Christian theology. De Trinitate, e.g., includes a historically influential discussion of the Aristotelian categories and the applicability of various kinds of predicates to God. Running through these treatises is his view that predicates in the category of relation are unique by virtue of not always requiring for their applicability an ontological ground in the subjects to which they apply, a doctrine that gave rise to the common medieval distinction between so-called real and non-real relations. Regardless of the intrinsic significance of Boethius’s philosophical ideas, he stands as a monumental figure in the history of medieval philosophy rivaled in importance only by Aristotle and Augustine. Until the recovery of the works of Aristotle in the mid-twelfth century, medieval philosophers depended almost entirely on Boethius’s translations and commentaries for their knowledge of pagan ancient philosophy, and his treatises on logic continued to be influential throughout the Middle Ages. The preoccupation of early medieval philosophers with logic and with the problem of universals in particular is due largely to their having been tutored by Boethius and Boethius’s Aristotle. The theological treatises also received wide attention in the Middle Ages, giving rise to a commentary tradition extending from the ninth century through the Renaissance and shaping discussion of central theological doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation. 

Boltzmann, Ludwig (1844–1906), Austrian physicist who was a spirited advocate of the atomic theory and a pioneer in developing the kinetic theory of gases and statistical mechanics. Boltzmann’s most fous achievements were the transport equation, the H-theorem, and the probabilistic interpretation of entropy. This work is summarized in his Vorlesungen über Gastheorie (“Lectures on the Theory of Gases,” 1896–98). He held chairs in physics at the universities of Graz, Vienna, Munich, and Leipzig before returning to Vienna as professor of theoretical physics in 1902. In 1903 he succeeded Mach at Boltzmann, Ludwig Boltzmann, Ludwig 92 -   92 Vienna and lectured on the philosophy of science. In the 1890s the atomic-kinetic theory was attacked by Mach and by the energeticists led by Wilhelm Ostwald. Boltzmann’s counterattack can be found in his Populäre Schriften (“Popular Writings,” 1905). Boltzmann agreed with his critics that many of his mechanical models of gas molecules could not be true but, like Maxwell, defended models as invaluable heuristic tools. Boltzmann also insisted that it was futile to try to eliminate all metaphysical pictures from theories in favor of bare equations. For Boltzmann, the goal of physics is not merely the discovery of equations but the construction of a coherent picture of reality. Boltzmann defended his H-theorem against the reversibility objection of Loschmidt and the recurrence objection of Zermelo by conceding that a spontaneous decrease in entropy was possible but extremely unlikely. Boltzmann’s views that irreversibility depends on the probability of initial conditions and that entropy increase determines the direction of time are defended by Reichenbach in The Direction of Time (1956). 

Bolzano, Bernard (1781–1848), Austrian philosopher. He studied philosophy, mathematics, physics, and theology in Prague; received the Ph.D.; was ordained a priest (1805); was appointed to a chair in religion at Charles University in 1806; and, owing to his criticism of the Austrian constitution, was dismissed in 1819. He composed his two main works from 1823 through 1841: the Wissenschaftslehre (4 vols., 1837) and the posthumous Grössenlehre. His ontology and logical semantics influenced Husserl and, indirectly, Lukasiewicz, Tarski, and others of the Warsaw School. His conception of ethics and social philosophy affected both the cultural life of Bohemia and the Austrian system of education. Bolzano recognized a profound distinction between the actual thoughts and judgments (Urteile) of human beings, their linguistic expressions, and the abstract propositions (Sätze an sich) and their parts which exist independently of those thoughts, judgments, and expressions. A proposition in Bolzano’s sense is a preexistent sequence of ideas-as-such (Vorstellungen an sich). Only propositions containing finite ideas-as-such are accessible to the mind. Real things existing concretely in space and time have subsistence (Dasein) whereas abstract objects such as propositions have only logical existence. Adherences, i.e., forces, applied to certain concrete substances give rise to subjective ideas, thoughts, or judgments. A subjective idea is a part of a judgment that is not itself a judgment. The set of judgments is ordered by a causal relation. Bolzano’s abstract world is constituted of sets, ideas-as-such, certain properties (Beschaffenheiten), and objects constructed from these. Thus, sentence shapes are a kind of ideas-as-such, and certain complexes of ideas-as-such constitute propositions. Ideas-as-such can be generated from expressions of a language by postulates for the relation of being an object of something. Analogously, properties can be generated by postulates for the relation of something being applied to an object. Bolzano’s notion of religion is based on his distinction between propositions and judgments. His Lehrbuch der Religionswissenschaft (4 vols., 1834) distinguishes between religion in the objective and subjective senses. The former is a set of religious propositions, whereas the latter is the set of religious views of a single person. Hence, a subjective religion can contain an objective one. By defining a religious proposition as being moral and imperatives the rules of utilitarianism, Bolzano integrated his notion of religion within his ontology. In the Grössenlehre Bolzano intended to give a detailed, well-founded exposition of contemporary mathematics and also to inaugurate new domains of research. Natural numbers are defined, half a century before Frege, as properties of “bijective” sets (the members of which can be put in one-to-one correspondence), and real numbers are conceived as properties of sets of certain infinite sequences of rational numbers. The analysis of infinite sets brought him to reject the Euclidean doctrine that the whole is always greater than any of its parts and, hence, to the insight that a set is infinite if and only if it is bijective to a proper subset of itself. This anticipates Peirce and Dedekind. Bolzano’s extension of the linear continuum of finite numbers by infinitesimals implies a relatively constructive approach to nonstandard analysis. In the development of standard analysis the most remarkable result of the Grössenlehre is the anticipation of Weirstrass’s discovery that there exist nowhere differentiable continuous functions. The Wissenschaftslehre was intended to lay the logical and epistemological foundations of Bolzano’s mathematics. A theory of science in Bolzano’s sense is a collection of rules for delimiting the set of scientific textbooks. Whether a Bolzano, Bernard Bolzano, Bernard 93 -   93 class of true propositions is a worthwhile object of representation in a scientific textbook is an ethical question decidable on utilitarian principles. Bolzano proceeded from an expanded and standardized ordinary language through which he could describe propositions and their parts. He defined the semantic notion of truth and introduced the function corresponding to a “replacement” operation on propositions. One of his major achievements was his definition of logical derivability (logische Ableitbarkeit) between sets of propositions: B is logically derivable from A if and only if all elements of the sum of A and B are simultaneously true for some replacement of their non-logical ideas-as-such and if all elements of B are true for any such replacement that makes all elements of A true. In addition to this notion, which is similar to Tarski’s concept of consequence of 1936, Bolzano introduced a notion corresponding to Gentzen’s concept of consequence. A proposition is universally valid (allgemeingültig) if it is derivable from the null class. In his proof theory Bolzano formulated counterparts to Gentzen’s cut rule. Bolzano introduced a notion of inductive probability as a generalization of derivability in a limited domain. This notion has the formal properties of conditional probability. These features and Bolzano’s characterization of probability density by the technique of variation are reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s inductive logic and Carnap’s theory of regular confirmation functions. The replacement of conceptual complexes in propositions would, if applied to a formalized language, correspond closely to a substitutionsemantic conception of quantification. His own philosophical language was based on a kind of free logic. In essence, Bolzano characterized a substitution-semantic notion of consequence with a finite number of antecedents. His quantification over individual and general concepts ounts to the introduction of a non-elementary logic of lowest order containing a quantification theory of predicate variables but no set-theoretical principles such as choice axioms. His conception of universal validity and of the semantic superstructure of logic leads to a semantically adequate extension of the predicate-logical version of Lewis’s system S5 of modal logic without paradoxes. It is also possible to simulate Bolzano’s theory of probability in a substitution-semantically constructed theory of probability functions. Hence, by means of an ontologically parsimonious superstructure without possible-worlds metaphysics, Bolzano was able to delimit essentially the realms of classical logical truth and additive probability spaces. In geometry Bolzano created a new foundation from a topological point of view. He defined the notion of an isolated point of a set in a way reminiscent of the notion of a point at which a set is well-dimensional in the sense of Urysohn and Menger. On this basis he introduced his topological notion of a continuum and formulated a recursive definition of the dimensionality of non-empty subsets of the Euclidean 3-space, which is closely related to the inductive dimension concept of Urysohn and Menger. In a remarkable paragraph of an unfinished late manuscript on geometry he stated the celebrated curve theorem of Jordan.  .

Bonaventure, Saint (c.1221–74), Italian theologian. Born John of Fidanza in Bagnorea, Tuscany, he was educated at Paris, earning a master’s degree in arts and a doctorate in theology. He joined the Franciscans about 1243, while still a student, and was elected minister general of the order in 1257. Made cardinal bishop of Albano by Pope Gregory X in 1274, Bonaventure helped organize the Second Ecumenical Council of Lyons, during the course of which he died, in July 1274. He was canonized in 1482 and ned a doctor of the church in 1587. Bonaventure wrote and preached extensively on the relation between philosophy and theology, the role of reason in spiritual and religious life, and the extent to which knowledge in God is obtainable by the “wayfarer.” His basic position is nicely expressed in De reductione artium ad theologi (“On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology”): “the manifold wisdom of God, which is clearly revealed in sacred scripture, lies hidden in all knowledge and in all nature.” He adds, “all divisions of knowledge are handmaids of theology.” But he is critical of those theologians who wish to sever the connection between faith and reason. As he argues in another fous work, Itinerarium mentis ad deum (“The Mind’s Journey unto God,” 1259), “since, relative to our life on earth, the world is itself a ladder for ascending to God, we find here certain traces, certain images” of the divine hand, in which God himself is mirrored. Although Bonaventure’s own philosophical outlook is Augustinian, he was also influenced by Aristotle, whose newly available works he both read and appreciated. Thus, while upholdBonaventure, Saint Bonaventure, Saint 94 -   94 ing the Aristotelian ideas that knowledge of the external world is based on the senses and that the mind comes into existence as a tabula rasa, he also contends that divine illumination is necessary to explain both the acquisition of universal concepts from sense images, and the certainty of intellectual judgment. His own illuminationist epistemology seeks a middle ground between, on the one hand, those who maintain that the eternal light is the sole reason for human knowing, providing the human intellect with its archetypal and intelligible objects, and, on the other, those holding that the eternal light merely influences human knowing, helping guide it toward truth. He holds that our intellect has certain knowledge when stable; eternal archetypes are “contuited by us [a nobis contuita],” together with intelligible species produced by its own fallible powers. In metaphysics, Bonaventure defends exemplarism, the doctrine that all creation is patterned after exemplar causes or ideas in the mind of God. Like Aquinas, but unlike Duns Scotus, he argues that it is through such ideas that God knows all creatures. He also adopts the emanationist principle that creation proceeds from God’s goodness, which is self-diffusive, but differs from other emanationists, such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, in arguing that divine emanation is neither necessary nor indirect (i.e., accomplished by secondary agents or intelligences). Indeed, he sees the views of these Islic philosophers as typical of the errors bound to follow once Aristotelian rationalism is taken to its extreme. He is also well known for his anti-Aristotelian argument that the eternity of the world – something even Aquinas (following Maimonides) concedes as a theoretical possibility – is demonstrably false. Bonaventure also subscribes to several other doctrines characteristic of medieval Augustinianism: universal hylomorphism, the thesis, defended by Ibn Gabirol and Avicenna (ong others), that everything other than God is composed of matter and form; the plurality of forms, the view that subjects and predicates in the category of substance are ordered in terms of their metaphysical priority; and the ontological view of truth, according to which truth is a kind of rightness perceived by the mind. In a similar vein, Bonaventure argues that knowledge ultimately consists in perceiving truth directly, without argument or demonstration. Bonaventure also wrote several classic works in the tradition of mystical theology. His bestknown and most popular mystical work is the aforementioned Itinerarium, written in 1259 on a pilgrimage to La Verna, during which he beheld the six-winged seraph that had also appeared to Francis of Assisi when Francis received the stigmata. Bonaventure outlines a seven-stage spiritual journey, in which our mind moves from first considering God’s traces in the perfections of irrational creatures, to a final state of peaceful repose, in which our affections are “transferred and transformed into God.” Central to his writings on spiritual life is the theme of the “three ways”: the purgative way, inspired by conscience, which expels sin; the illuminative way, inspired by the intellect, which imitates Christ; and the unitive way, inspired by wisdom, which unites us to God through love. Bonaventure’s writings most immediately influenced the work of other medieval Augustinians, such as Matthew of Aquasparta and John Peckh, and later, followers of Duns Scotus. But his modern reputation rests on his profound contributions to philosophical theology, Franciscan spirituality, and mystical thought, in all three of which he remains an authoritative source.  ARISTOTLE, AUGUSTINE. J.A.Z. boo-hurrah theory.EMOTIVISM. Book of Changes.I-CHING. book of life, expression found in Hebrew and Christian scriptures signifying a record kept by the Lord of those destined for eternal happiness (Exodus 32:32; Psalms 68; Malachi 3:16; Daniel 12:1; Philippians 4:3; Revelation 3:5, 17:8, 20:12, 21:27). Medieval philosophers often referred to the book of life when discussing issues of predestination, divine omniscience, foreknowledge, and free will. Figures like Augustine and Aquinas asked whether it represented God’s unerring foreknowledge or predestination, or whether some nes could be added or deleted from it. The term is used by some contemporary philosophers to mean a record of all the events in a person’s life.  FREE WILL PROBLEM. R.H.K. Boole, George.BOOLEAN ALGEBRA, LOGICAL FORM. Boolean algebra, (1) an ordered triple (B,†,3), where B is a set containing at least two elements and † and 3 are unary and binary operations in B such that (i) a 3 b % b 3 a, (ii) a 3 (b 3 c) % (a 3 b) 3 c, (iii) a 3 † a % b 3 † b, and (iv) a 3 b = a if and only if a 3 † b % a 3 † a; (2) the theboo-hurrah theory Boolean algebra 95 -   95 ory of such algebras. Such structures are modern descendants of algebras published by the mathematician G. Boole in 1847 and representing the first successful algebraic treatment of logic. (Interpreting † and 3 as negation and conjunction, respectively, makes Boolean algebra a calculus of propositions. Likewise, if B % {T,F} and † and 3 are the truth-functions for negation and conjunction, then (B,†,3) – the truth table for those two connectives – forms a two-element Boolean algebra.) Picturing a Boolean algebra is simple. (B,†,3) is a full subset algebra if B is the set of all subsets of a given set and † and 3 are set complementation and intersection, respectively. Then every finite Boolean algebra is isomorphic to a full subset algebra, while every infinite Boolean algebra is isomorphic to a subalgebra of such an algebra. It is for this reason that Boolean algebra is often characterized as the calculus of classes. 

SET THEORY, TRUTH TABLE. G.F.S. borderline case, in the logical sense, a case that falls within the “gray area” or “twilight zone” associated with a vague concept; in the pragmatic sense, a doubtful, disputed, or arguable case. These two senses are not mutually exclusive, of course. A moment of time near sunrise or sunset may be a borderline case of daytime or nighttime in the logical sense, but not in the pragmatic sense. A sufficiently freshly fertilized ovum may be a borderline case of a person in both senses. Fermat’s hypothesis, or any of a large number of other disputed mathematical propositions, may be a borderline case in the pragmatic sense but not in the logical sense. A borderline case per se in either sense need not be a limiting case or a degenerate case.  DEGENERATE CASE, LIMITING CASE, VAGUENESS. J.Cor. Born interpretation.QUANTUM MECHANICS. Bosanquet, Bernard (1848–1923), British philosopher, the most systematic British absolute idealist and, with F. H. Bradley, the leading British defender of absolute idealism. Although he derived his ne from Huguenot ancestors, Bosanquet was thoroughly English. Born at Altwick and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford, he was for eleven years a fellow of University College, Oxford. The death of his father in 1880 and the resulting inheritance enabled Bosanquet to leave Oxford for London and a career as a writer and social activist. While writing, he taught courses for the London Ethical Society’s Center for University Extension and donated time to the Charity Organization Society. In 1895 he married his coworker in the Charity Organization Society, Helen Dendy, who was also the translator of Christoph Sigwart’s Logic. Bosanquet was professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews from 1903 to 1908. He gave the Gifford Lectures in 1911 and 1912. Otherwise he lived in London until his death. Bosanquet’s most comprehensive work, his two-volume Gifford Lectures, The Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual, covers most aspects of his philosophy. In The Principle of Individuality and Value he argues that the search for truth proceeds by eliminating contradictions in experience. (For Bosanquet a contradiction arises when there are incompatible interpretations of the se fact.) This involves making distinctions that harmonize the incompatible interpretations in a larger body of knowledge. Bosanquet thought there was no way to arrest this process short of recognizing that all human experience forms a comprehensive whole which is reality. Bosanquet called this totality “the Absolute.” Just as conflicting interpretations of the se fact find harmonious places in the Absolute, so conflicting desires are also included. The Absolute thus satisfies all desires and provides Bosanquet’s standard for evaluating other objects. This is because in his view the value of an object is determined by its ability to satisfy desires. From this Bosanquet concluded that human beings, as fragments of the Absolute, acquire greater value as they realize themselves by partaking more fully in the Absolute. In The Value and Destiny of the Individual Bosanquet explained how human beings could do this. As finite, human beings face obstacles they cannot overcome; yet they desire the good (i.e., the Absolute) which for Bosanquet overcomes all obstacles and satisfies all desires. Humans can best realize a desire for the good, Bosanquet thinks, by surrendering their private desires for the sake of the good. This attitude of surrender, which Bosanquet calls the religious consciousness, relates human beings to what is permanently valuable in reality and increases their own value and satisfaction accordingly. Bosanquet’s defense of this metaphysical vision rests heavily on his first major work, Logic or the Morphology of Knowledge (1888; 2d ed., 1911). As the subtitle indicates, Bosanquet took the subject matter of Logic to be the structure of knowledge. Like Hegel, who was in many ways his inspiration, Bosanquet thought that the nature of knowledge was defined by structures repeated in different parts of knowledge. He borderline case Bosanquet, Bernard 96 -   96 called these structures forms of judgment and tried to show that simple judgments are dependent on increasingly complex ones and finally on an all-inclusive judgment that defines reality. For exple, the simplest element of knowledge is a demonstrative judgment like “This is hot.” But making such a judgment presupposes understanding the contrast between ‘this’ and ‘that’. Demonstrative judgments thus depend on comparative judgments like “This is hotter than that.” Since these judgments are less dependent on other judgments, they more fully embody human knowledge. Bosanquet claimed that the series of increasingly complex judgments are not arranged in a simple linear order but develop along different branches finally uniting in disjunctive judgments that attribute to reality an exhaustive set of mutually exclusive alternatives which are themselves judgments. When one contained judgment is asserted on the basis of another, a judgment containing both is an inference. For Bosanquet inferences are mediated judgments that assert their conclusions based on grounds. When these grounds are made fully explicit in a judgment containing them, that judgment embodies the nature of inference: that one must accept the conclusion or reject the whole of knowledge. Since for Bosanquet the difference between any judgment and the reality it represents is that a judgment is composed of ideas that abstract from reality, a fully comprehensive judgment includes all aspects of reality. It is thus identical to reality. By locating all judgments within this one, Bosanquet claimed to have described the morphology of knowledge as well as to have shown that thought is identical to reality. Bosanquet removed an objection to this identification in History of Aesthetics (1892), where he traces the development of the philosophy of the beautiful from its inception through absolute idealism. According to Plato and Aristotle beauty is found in imitations of reality, while in objective idealism it is reality in sensuous form. Drawing heavily on Kant, Bosanquet saw this process as an overcoming of the opposition between sense and reason by showing how a pleasurable feeling can partake of reason. He thought that absolute idealism explained this by showing that we experience objects as beautiful because their sensible qualities exhibit the unifying activity of reason. Bosanquet treated the political implications of absolute idealism in his Philosophical Theory of the State (1898; 3d ed., 1920), where he argues that humans achieve their ends only in communities. According to Bosanquet, all humans rationally will their own ends. Because their ends differ from moment to moment, the ends they rationally will are those that harmonize their desires at particular moments. Similarly, because the ends of different individuals overlap and conflict, what they rationally will are ends that harmonize their desires, which are the ends of humans in communities. They are willed by the general will, the realization of which is self-rule or liberty. This provides the rational ground of political obligation, since the most comprehensive system of modern life is the state, the end of which is the realization of the best life for its citizens.

 HEGEL, IDEALISM. J.W.A. Boscovich, Roger Joseph, or Rudjer Josip Bos v kovic’ (1711–87), Croatian physicist and philosopher. Born of Serbian and Italian parents, he was a Jesuit and polymath best known for his A Theory of Natural Philosophy Reduced to a Single Law of the Actions Existing in Nature. This work attempts to explain all physical phenomena in terms of the attractions and repulsions of point particles (puncta) that are indistinguishable in their intrinsic qualitative properties. According to Boscovich’s single law, puncta at a certain distance attract, until upon approaching one another they reach a point at which they repel, and eventually reach equilibrium. Thus, Boscovich defends a form of dynism, or the theory that nature is to be understood in terms of force and not mass (where forces are functions of time and distance). By dispensing with extended substance, Boscovich avoided epistemological difficulties facing Locke’s natural philosophy and anticipated developments in modern physics. ong those influenced by Boscovich were Kant (who defended a version of dynism), Faraday, Jes Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin. Boscovich’s theory has proved to be empirically inadequate to account for phenomena such as light. A philosophical difficulty for Boscovich’s puncta, which are physical substances, arises out of their zero-dimensionality. It is plausible that any power must have a basis in an object’s intrinsic properties, and puncta appear to lack such support for their powers. However, it is extensional properties that puncta lack, and Boscovich could argue that the categorial property of being an unextended spatial substance provides the needed basis. J.Ho. & G.Ro. bottom-up.COGNITIVE SCIENCE. bound variable.ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT, VARIABLE. Boscovich, Roger Joseph bound variable 97 -   97 Bouwsma, O(ets) K(olk) (1898–1978), erican philosopher, a practitioner of ordinary language philosophy and celebrated teacher. Through work on Moore and contact with students such as Norman Malcolm and Morris Lazerowitz, whom he sent from Nebraska to work with Moore, Bouwsma discovered Wittgenstein. He bece known for conveying an understanding of Wittgenstein’s techniques of philosophical analysis through his own often humorous grasp of sense and nonsense. Focusing on a particular pivotal sentence in an argument, he provided imaginative surroundings for it, showing how, in the philosopher’s mouth, the sentence lacked sense. He sometimes described this as “the method of failure.” In connection with Descartes’s evil genius, e.g., Bouwsma invents an elaborate story in which the evil genius tries but fails to permanently deceive by means of a totally paper world. Our inability to imagine such a deception undermines the sense of the evil genius argument. His writings are replete with similar stories, analogies, and teases of sense and nonsense for such philosophical standards as Berkeley’s idealism, Moore’s theory of sensedata, and Anselm’s ontological argument. Bouwsma did not advocate theories nor put forward refutations of other philosophers’ views. His talent lay rather in exposing some central sentence in an argument as disguised nonsense. In this, he went beyond Wittgenstein, working out the details of the latter’s insights into language. In addition to this appropriation of Wittgenstein, Bouwsma also appropriated Kierkegaard, understanding him too as one who dispelled philosophical illusions – those arising from the attempt to understand Christianity. The ordinary language of religious philosophy was that of scriptures. He drew upon this language in his many essays on religious themes. His religious dimension made whole this person who gave no quarter to traditional metaphysics. His papers are published under the titles Philosophical Essays, Toward a New Sensibility, Without Proof or Evidence, and Wittgenstein Conversations 1949–51. His philosophical notebooks are housed at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas.  ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY, WITTGENSTEIN. R.E.H. Boyle, Robert (1627–91), British chemist and physicist who was a major figure in seventeenthcentury natural philosophy. To his contemporaries he was “the restorer” in England of the mechanical philosophy. His progr was to replace the vacuous explanations characteristic of Peripateticism (the “quality of whiteness” in snow explains why it dazzles the eyes) by explanations employing the “two grand and most catholic principles of bodies, matter and motion,” matter being composed of corpuscles, with motion “the grand agent of all that happens in nature.” Boyle wrote influentially on scientific methodology, emphasizing experimentation (a Baconian influence), experimental precision, and the importance of devising “good and excellent” hypotheses. The dispute with Spinoza on the validation of explanatory hypotheses contrasted Boyle’s experimental way with Spinoza’s way of rational analysis. The 1670s dispute with Henry More on the ontological grounds of corporeal activity confronted More’s “Spirit of Nature” with the “essential modifications” (motion and the “seminal principle” of activity) with which Boyle claimed God had directly endowed matter. As a chpion of the corpuscularian philosophy, Boyle was an important link in the development before Locke of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. A leading advocate of natural theology, he provided in his will for the establishment of the Boyle Lectures to defend Protestant Christianity against atheism and materialism.  MECHANISTIC EXPLANATION, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, SPINOZA. A.G. bracketing.HUSSERL, PHENOMENOLOGY. Bradley, F(rancis) H(erbert) (1846–1924), the most original and influential nineteenth-century British idealist. Born at Claph, he was the fourth son of an evangelical minister. His younger brother A. C. Bradley was a well-known Shakespearean critic. From 1870 until his death Bradley was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. A kidney ailment, which first occurred in 1871, compelled him to lead a retiring life. This, combined with his forceful literary style, his love of irony, the dedication of three of his books to an unknown woman, and acclaim as the greatest British idealist since Berkeley, has lent an aura of mystery to his personal life. The aim of Bradley’s first important work, Ethical Studies (1876), is not to offer guidance for dealing with practical moral problems (Bradley condemned this as casuistry), but rather to explain what makes morality as embodied in the consciousness of individuals and in social institutions possible. Bradley thought it was the fact that moral agents take morality as an end in itself which involves identifying their wills with an ideal (provided in part by their stations in sociBouwsma, O(ets) K(olk) Bradley, F(rancis) H(erbert) 98 -   98 ety) and then transferring that ideal to reality through action. Bradley called this process “selfrealization.” He thought that moral agents could realize their good selves only by suppressing their bad selves, from which he concluded that morality could never be completely realized, since realizing a good self requires having a bad one. For this reason Bradley believed that the moral consciousness would develop into religious consciousness which, in his secularized version of Christianity, required dying to one’s natural self through faith in the actual existence of the moral ideal. In Ethical Studies Bradley admitted that a full defense of his ethics would require a metaphysical system, something he did not then have. Much of Bradley’s remaining work was an attempt to provide the outline of such a system by solving what he called “the great problem of the relation between thought and reality.” He first confronted this problem in The Principles of Logic(1883), which is his description of thought. He took thought to be embodied in judgments, which are distinguished from other mental activities by being true or false. This is made possible by the fact that their contents, which Bradley called ideas, represent reality. A problem arises because ideas are universals and so represent kinds of things, while the things themselves are all individuals. Bradley solves this problem by distinguishing between the logical and grmatical forms of a judgment and arguing that all judgments have the logical form of conditionals. They assert that universal connections between qualities obtain in reality. The qualities are universals, the connections between them are conditional, while reality is one individual whole that we have contact with in immediate experience. All judgments, in his view, are abstractions from a diverse but non-relational immediate experience. Since judgments are inescapably relational, they fail to represent accurately non-relational reality and so fail to reach truth, which is the goal of thought. From this Bradley concluded that, contrary to what some of his more Hegelian contemporaries were saying, thought is not identical to reality and is never more than partially true. Appearance and Reality (1893) is Bradley’s description of reality: it is experience, all of it, all at once, blended in a harmonious way. Bradley defended this view by means of his criterion for reality. Reality, he proclaimed, does not contradict itself; anything that does is merely appearance. In Part I of Appearance and Reality Bradley relied on an infinite regress argument, now called Bradley’s regress, to contend that relations and all relational phenomena, including thought, are contradictory. They are appearance, not reality. In Part II he claimed that appearances are contradictory because they are abstracted by thought from the immediate experience of which they are a part. Appearances constitute the content of this whole, which in Bradley’s view is experience. In other words, reality is experience in its totality. Bradley called this unified, consistent all-inclusive reality “the Absolute.” Today Bradley is mainly remembered for his argument against the reality of relations, and as the philosopher who provoked Russell’s and Moore’s revolution in philosophy. He would be better remembered as a founder of twentiethcentury philosophy who based metaphysical conclusions on his account of the logical forms of judgments.  BOSANQUET, IDEALISM. J.W.A. Bradwardine, Thomas.

OXFORD CALCULATORS. Brahma.BRAHMAN. Brahman, in Hinduism, the ultimate reality, possessed of being, consciousness, and bliss, dependent on nothing else for existence. Brahman is conceived as a personal deity (Brahma) in Vis’istadvaita and Dvaita Vedanta and as apersonal and qualityless in Advaita Vedanta, in which “being, consciousness, and bliss” are interpreted negatively. While Brahman is conceived as saguna or “with qualities” in Vis’istadvaita and Dvaita, for Advaita Brahman is nirguna or qualityless. For Vis’istadvaita, ‘Brahman’ secondarily refers to the world dependent on Brahman strictly so called, nely all minds and material things that constitute Brahman’s body. For Advaita, each apparently individual mind (or other thing) is identical to Brahman; Dvaita does not construe the world, or anything else, as Brahman’s body. Enlightenment, or moksha, with its consequent escape from the cycle of rebirths, for Advaita involves recognizing one’s identity with nirguna Brahman, and for Dvaita and Vis’istadvaita involves repenting and forsaking one’s sins and trusting a gracious Brahman for salvation.  HINDUISM. K.E.Y. Brahmanism.BRAHMAN. brain in a vat.PUTN, SKEPTICISM. Brandt, Richard B. (1910–97), erican moral philosopher, most closely associated with rule utilitarianism (which term he coined). Brandt Bradwardine, Thomas Brandt, Richard B. 99 -   99 earned degrees from Denison College and Cbridge University, and obtained a Ph.D. from Yale in 1936. He taught at Swarthmore College from 1937 to 1964 and at the University of Michigan from 1964 to 1981. His six books and nearly one hundred articles included work on philosophy of religion, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. His greatest contributions were in moral philosophy. He first defended rule utilitarianism in his textbook Ethical Theory (1959), but greatly refined his view in the 1960s in a series of articles, which were widely discussed and reprinted and eventually collected together in Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights (1992). Further refinements appear in his A Theory of the Good and the Right (1979) and Facts, Values, and Morality (1996). Brandt fously argued for a “reforming definition” of ‘rational person’. He proposed that we use it to designate someone whose desires would survive exposure to all relevant empirical facts and to correct logical reasoning. He also proposed a “reforming definition” of ‘morally right’ that assigns it the descriptive meaning ‘would be permitted by any moral code that all (or nearly all) rational people would publicly favor for the agent’s society if they expected to spend a lifetime in that society’. In his view, rational choice between moral codes is determined not by prior moral commitments but by expected consequences. Brandt admitted that different rational people may favor different codes, since different rational people may have different levels of natural benevolence. But he also contended that most rational people would favor a rule-utilitarian code.  COGNITIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY, ETHICS, UTILITARIANISM. B.W.H. Brentano, Franz (1838–1917), German philosopher, one of the most intellectually influential and personally charismatic of his time. He is known especially for his distinction between psychological and physical phenomena on the basis of intentionality or internal object-directedness of thought, his revival of Aristotelianism and empirical methods in philosophy and psychology, and his value theory and ethics supported by the concept of correct pro- and anti-emotions or love and hate attitudes. Brentano made noted contributions to the theory of metaphysical categories, phenomenology, epistemology, syllogistic logic, and philosophy of religion. His teaching made a profound impact on his students in Würzburg and Vienna, many of whom bece internationally respected thinkers in their fields, including Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski, Christian von Ehrenfels, Anton Marty, and Freud. Brentano began his study of philosophy at the Aschaffenburg Royal Bavarian Gymnasium; in 1856–58 he attended the universities of Munich and Würzburg, and then enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he undertook his first investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics under the supervision of F. A. Trendelenburg. In 1859– 60, he attended the Academy in Münster, reading intensively in the medieval Aristotelians; in 1862 he received the doctorate in philosophy in absentia from the University of Tübingen. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1864, and was later involved in a controversy over the doctrine of papal infallibility, eventually leaving the church in 1873. He taught first as Privatdozent in the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Würzburg (1866–74), and then accepted a professorship at the University of Vienna. In 1880 he decided to marry, temporarily resigning his position to acquire Saxon citizenship, in order to avoid legal difficulties in Austria, where marriages of former priests were not officially recognized. Brentano was promised restoration of his position after his circumvention of these restrictions, but although he was later reinstated as lecturer, his appeals for reappointment as professor were answered only with delay and equivocation. He left Vienna in 1895, retiring to Italy, his fily’s country of origin. At last he moved to Zürich, Switzerland, shortly before Italy entered World War I. Here he remained active both in philosophy and psychology, despite his ensuing blindness, writing and revising numerous books and articles, frequently meeting with former students and colleagues, and maintaining an extensive philosophical-literary correspondence, until his death. In Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (“Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,” 1874), Brentano argued that intentionality is the mark of the mental, that every psychological experience contains an intended object – also called an intentional object – which the thought is about or toward which the thought is directed. Thus, in desire, something is desired. According to the immanent intentionality thesis, this means that the desired object is literally contained within the psychological experience of desire. Brentano claims that this is uniquely true of mental as opposed to physical or non-psychological phenomena, so that the intentionality of the psychological distinguishes mental from physical states. The immanent intentionality thesis proBrentano, Franz Brentano, Franz 100 -   100 vides a frework in which Brentano identifies three categories of psychological phenomena: thoughts (Vorstellungen), judgments, and emotive phenomena. He further maintains that every thought is also self-consciously reflected back onto itself as a secondary intended object in what he called the eigentümliche Verfleckung. From 1905 through 1911, with the publication in that year of Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene, Brentano gradually abandoned the immanent intentionality thesis in favor of his later philosophy of reism, according to which only individuals exist, excluding putative nonexistent irrealia, such as lacks, absences, and mere possibilities. In the meantime, his students Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reacting negatively to the idealism, psychologism, and related philosophical problems apparent in the early immanent intentionality thesis, developed alternative non-immanence approaches to intentionality, leading, in the case of Twardowski and Meinong and his students in the Graz school of phenomenological psychology, to the construction of Gegenstandstheorie, the theory of (transcendent existent and nonexistent intended) objects, and to Husserl’s later transcendental phenomenology. The intentionality of the mental in Brentano’s revival of the medieval Aristotelian doctrine is one of his most important contributions to contemporary non-mechanistic theories of mind, meaning, and expression. Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis was, however, rejected by philosophers who otherwise agreed with his underlying claim that thought is essentially object-directed. Brentano’s value theory (Werttheorie) offers a pluralistic account of value, permitting many different kinds of things to be valuable – although, in keeping with his later reism, he denies the existence of an abstract realm of values. Intrinsic value is objective rather than subjective, in the sense that he believes the pro- and anti-emotions we may have toward an act or situation are objectively correct if they present themselves to emotional preference with the se apodicity or unquestionable sense of rightness as other selfevident matters of non-ethical judgment. ong the controversial consequences of Brentano’s value theory is the conclusion that there can be no such thing as absolute evil. The implication follows from Brentano’s observation, first, that evil requires evil consciousness, and that consciousness of any kind, even the worst imaginable malice or malevolent ill will, is (considered merely as consciousness) intrinsically good. This means that necessarily there is always a mixture of intrinsic good even in the most malicious possible states of mind, by virtue alone of being consciously experienced, so that pure evil never obtains. Brentano’s value theory admits of no defense against those who happen not to share the se “correct” emotional attitudes toward the situations he describes. If it is objected that to another person’s emotional preferences only good consciousness is intrinsically good, while infinitely bad consciousness despite being a state of consciousness appears instead to contain no intrinsic good and is absolutely evil, there is no recourse within Brentano’s ethics except to acknowledge that this contrary emotive attitude toward infinitely bad consciousness may also be correct, even though it contradicts his evaluations. Brentano’s empirical psychology and articulation of the intentionality thesis, his moral philosophy and value theory, his investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics at a time when Aristotelian realism was little appreciated in the prevailing climate of post-Kantian idealism, his epistemic theory of evident judgment, his suggestions for the reform of syllogistic logic, his treatment of the principle of sufficient reason and existence of God, his interpretation of a fourstage cycle of successive trends in the history of philosophy, together with his teaching and personal moral exple, continue to inspire a variety of divergent philosophical traditions.  ARISTOTLE, HUSSERL, INTENTIONALITY, MEINONG, PHENOMENOLOGY, VALUE. D.J. Brentano’s thesis.

INTENTIONALITY. bridge law.REDUCTION. British empiricists.RATIONALISM. Broad, C(harlie) D(unbar) (1887–1971), English epistemologist, metaphysician, moral philosopher, and philosopher of science. He was educated at Trinity College, Cbridge, taught at several universities in Scotland, and then returned to Trinity, first as lecturer in moral science and eventually as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy. His philosophical views are in the broadly realist tradition of Moore and Russell, though with substantial influence also from his teachers at Cbridge, McTaggart and W. E. Johnson. Broad wrote voluminously and incisively on an extremely wide range of philosophical topics, including most prominently the nature of perception, a priori knowledge and concepts, the problem of induction, the mind– Brentano’s thesis Broad, C(harlie) D(unbar) 101 -   101 body problem, the free will problem, various topics in moral philosophy, the nature and philosophical significance of psychical research, the nature of philosophy itself, and various historical figures such as Leibniz, Kant, and McTaggart. Broad’s work in the philosophy of perception centers on the nature of sense-data (or sensa, as he calls them) and their relation to physical objects. He defends a rather cautious, tentative version of the causal theory of perception. With regard to a priori knowledge, Broad rejects the empiricist view that all such knowledge is of analytic propositions, claiming instead that reason can intuit necessary and universal connections between properties or characteristics; his view of concept acquisition is that while most concepts are abstracted from experience, some are a priori, though not necessarily innate. Broad holds that the rationality of inductive inference depends on a further general premise about the world, a more complicated version of the thesis that nature is uniform, which is difficult to state precisely and even more difficult to justify. Broad’s view of the mind–body problem is a version of dualism, though one that places primary emphasis on individual mental events, is much more uncertain about the existence and nature of the mind as a substance, and is quite sympathetic to epiphenomenalism. His main contribution to the free will problem consists in an elaborate analysis of the libertarian conception of freedom, which he holds to be both impossible to realize and at the se time quite possibly an essential precondition of the ordinary conception of obligation. Broad’s work in ethics is diverse and difficult to summarize, but much of it centers on the issue of whether ethical judgments are genuinely cognitive in character. Broad was one of the few philosophers to take psychical research seriously. He served as president of the Society for Psychical Research and was an occasional observer of experiments in this area. His philosophical writings on this subject, while not uncritical, are in the main sympathetic and are largely concerned to defend concepts like precognition against charges of incoherence and also to draw out their implications for more filiar philosophical issues. As regards the nature of philosophy, Broad distinguishes between “critical” and “speculative” philosophy. Critical philosophy is analysis of the basic concepts of ordinary life and of science, roughly in the tradition of Moore and Russell. A very high proportion of Broad’s own work consists of such analyses, often azingly detailed and meticulous in character. But he is also sympathetic to the speculative attempt to arrive at an overall conception of the nature of the universe and the position of human beings therein, while at the se time expressing doubts that anything even remotely approaching demonstration is possible in such endeavors. The foregoing catalog of views reveals something of the range of Broad’s philosophical thought, but it fails to bring out what is most strikingly valuable about it. Broad’s positions on various issues do not form anything like a system (he himself is reported to have said that there is nothing that answers to the description “Broad’s philosophy”). While his views are invariably subtle, thoughtful, and critically penetrating, they rarely have the sort of one-sided novelty that has come to be so highly valued in philosophy. What they do have is exceptional clarity, dialectical insight, and even-handedness. Broad’s skill at uncovering and displaying the precise shape of a philosophical issue, clarifying the relevant arguments and objections, and cataloging in detail the merits and demerits of the opposing positions has rarely been equaled. One who seeks a clear-cut resolution of an issue is likely to be impatient and disappointed with Broad’s careful, measured discussions, in which unusual effort is made to accord all positions and arguments their due. But one who seeks a comprehensive and balanced understanding of the issue in question is unlikely to find a more trustworthy guide.  PARAPSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. L.B Brouwer, Luitzgen Egbertus Jan (1881–1966), Dutch mathematician and philosopher and founder of the intuitionist school in the philosophy of mathematics. Educated at the Municipal University of sterd, where he received his doctorate in 1907, he remained there for his entire professional career, as Privaat-Docent (1909–12) and then professor (1912–55). He was ong the preeminent topologists of his time, proving several important results. Philosophically, he was also unique in his strongly held conviction that philosophical ideas and arguments concerning the nature of mathematics ought to affect and be reflected in its practice. His general orientation in the philosophy of mathematics was Kantian. This was manifested in his radical critique of the role accorded to logical reasoning by classical mathematics; a role that Brouwer, following Kant, believed to be incompatible with the role that intuition must properly play in mathematical reasoning. The bestknown, if not the most fundental, part of his Brouwer, Luitzgen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, Luitzgen Egbertus Jan 102 -   102 critique of the role accorded to logic by classical mathematics was his attack on the principle of the excluded middle and related principles of classical logic. He challenged their reliability, arguing that their unrestricted use leads to results that, intuitionistically speaking, are not true. However, in its fundents, Brouwer’s critique was not so much an attack on particular principles of classical logic as a criticism of the general role that classical mathematics grants to logical reasoning. He believed that logical structure (and hence logical inference) is a product of the linguistic representation of mathematical thought and not a feature of that thought itself. He stated this view in the so-called First Act of Intuitionism, which contains not only the chief critical idea of Brouwer’s position, but also its core positive element. This positive element says, with Kant, that mathematics is an essentially languageless activity of the mind. (Brouwer went on to say something with which Kant would only have partially agreed: that this activity has its origin in the perception of a move of time.) The critical element complements this by saying that mathematics is thus to be kept wholly distinct from mathematical language and the phenomena of language described by logic. The so-called Second Act of Intuitionism then extends the positive part of the First Act by stating that the “self-unfolding” of the primordial intuition of a move of time is the basis not only of the construction of the natural numbers but also of the (intuitionistic) continuum. Together, these two ideas form the basis of Brouwer’s philosophy of mathematics – a philosophy that is radically at odds with most of twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics. 

PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. M.D. Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600), Italian speculative philosopher. He was born in Naples, where he entered the Dominican order in 1565. In 1576 he was suspected of heresy and abandoned his order. He studied and taught in Geneva, but left because of difficulties with the Calvinists. Thereafter he studied and taught in Toulouse, Paris, England, various German universities, and Prague. In 1591 he rashly returned to Venice, and was arrested by the Venetian Inquisition in 1592. In 1593 he was handed over to the Roman Inquisition, which burned him to death as a heretic. Because of his unhappy end, his support for the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis, and his pronounced anti-Aristotelianism, Bruno has been mistakenly seen as the proponent of a scientific worldview against medieval obscurantism. In fact, he should be interpreted in the context of Renaissance hermetism. Indeed, Bruno was so impressed by the hermetic corpus, a body of writings attributed to the mythical Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, that he called for a return to the magical religion of the Egyptians. He was also strongly influenced by Lull, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, and Agrippa von Nettesheim, an early sixteenth-century author of an influential treatise on magic. Several of Bruno’s works were devoted to magic, and it plays an important role in his books on the art of memory. Techniques for improving the memory had long been a subject of discussion, but he linked them with the notion that one could so imprint images of the universe on the mind as to achieve special knowledge of divine realities and the magic powers associated with such knowledge. He emphasized the importance of the imagination as a cognitive power, since it brings us into contact with the divine. Nonetheless, he also held that human ideas are mere shadows of divine ideas, and that God is transcendent and hence incomprehensible. Bruno’s best-known works are the Italian dialogues he wrote while in England, including the following, all published in 1584: The Ash Wednesday Supper; On Cause, Principle and Unity; The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds. He presents a vision of the universe as a living and infinitely extended unity containing innumerable worlds, each of which is like a great animal with a life of its own. He maintained the unity of matter with universal form or the World-Soul, thus suggesting a kind of pantheism attractive to later German idealists, such as Schelling. However, he never identified the World-Soul with God, who remained separate from matter and form. He combined his speculative philosophy of nature with the recommendation of a new naturalistic ethics. Bruno’s support of Copernicus in The Ash Wednesday Supper was related to his belief that a living earth must move, and he specifically rejected any appeal to mere mathematics to prove cosmological hypotheses. In later work he described the monad as a living version of the Democritean atom. Despite some obvious parallels with both Spinoza and Leibniz, he seems not to have had much direct influence on seventeenth-century thinkers. E.J.A. Brunschvicg, Léon (1869–1944), French philosopher, an influential professor at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and a founder of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1893) and the Société Française de Bruno, Giordano Brunschvicg, Léon 103 -   103 Philosophie (1901). In 1940 he was forced by the Nazis to leave Paris and sought refuge in the nonoccupied zone, where he died. A monistic idealist, Brunschvicg unfolded a philosophy of mind (Introduction to the Life of the Mind, 1900). His epistemology highlights judgment. Thinking is judging and judging is acting. He defined philosophy as “the mind’s methodical self-reflection.” Philosophy investigates man’s growing self-understanding. The mind’s recesses, or metaphysical truth, are accessible through analysis of the mind’s timely manifestations. His major works therefore describe the progress of science as progress of consciousness: The Stages of Mathematical Philosophy (1912), Human Experience and Physical Causality (1922), The Progress of Conscience in Western Philosophy (1927), and Ages of Intelligence (1934). An heir of Renouvier, Cournot, and Revaisson, Brunschvicg advocated a moral and spiritual conception of science and attempted to reconcile idealism and positivism. J.-L.S. B-series.TIME. B-theory of time.TIME. Buber, Martin (1878–1965), German Jewish philosopher, theologian, and political leader. Buber’s early influences include Hasidism and neo-Kantianism. Eventually he broke with the latter and bece known as a leading religious existentialist. His chief philosophic works include his most fous book, Ich und du (“I and Thou,” 1923); Moses (1946); Between Man and Man (1947); and Eclipse of God (1952). The crux of Buber’s thought is his conception of two primary relationships: I-Thou and I-It. IThou is characterized by openness, reciprocity, and a deep sense of personal involvement. The I confronts its Thou not as something to be studied, measured, or manipulated, but as a unique presence that responds to the I in its individuality. I-It is characterized by the tendency to treat something as an impersonal object governed by causal, social, or economic forces. Buber rejects the idea that people are isolated, autonomous agents operating according to abstract rules. Instead, reality arises between agents as they encounter and transform each other. In a word, reality is dialogical. Buber describes God as the ultimate Thou, the Thou who can never become an It. Thus God is reached not by inference but by a willingness to respond to the concrete reality of the divine presence.  EXISTENTIALISM, JEWISH PHILOSOPHY. K.See. Buchmanism, also called the Moral Rearment Movement, a non-creedal international movement that sought to bring about universal brotherhood through a commitment to an objectivist moral system derived largely from the Gospels. It was founded by Frank Buchman (1878–1961), an erican Lutheran minister who resigned from his church in 1908 in order to expand his ministry. To promote the movement, Buchman founded the Oxford Group at Oxford University in 1921. L.P.P. Buddha (from Sanskrit, ‘the enlightened one’), a title (but not a ne) of Siddharta Gota (c.563–c.483 B.C.), the historical founder of Buddhism, and of any of his later representations. ‘Buddha’ can also mean anyone who has attained the state of enlightenment (Buddhahood) sought in Buddhism. The Pali Canon mentions twenty-four Buddhas. Siddharta Gota was the son of the ruler of a small state in what is now Nepal. Tradition says that he left home at the age of twenty-nine to seek enlightenment, achieved it at the age of thirty-five, and was a wandering teacher until his death at eighty. He found ready-made in Indian culture the ideas of karma (‘fruits of action’) and ssara (‘wheel of rebirth’) as well as the view that escape from the wheel is the highest good, and offered his own Buddhist way of escape.  BUDDHISM. K.E.Y. Buddhagosa (fourth–fifth century A.D.), Theraveda Buddhist philosopher whose major work was the Visuddhimagga (“Path of Purification”). He accepted the typical Buddhist doctrine that everything that exists (Nirvana aside) is impermanent and momentary. A mind at a moment is only a momentary collection of momentary states; over time it is a series of such collections; similarly for a physical object. He held that, through sensory perception, physical objects are known to exist mind-independently. To the objection that perception of an object cannot occur in a moment since perception requires memory, attention, recognition, exination, and the like, he theorized that there is physical time and there is mental time; a single physical moment passes while distinct mental moments mount to sixteen in number. Hence a complex perceptual process can occur within a series of mental moments while a single material moment passes. Critics (e.g., Buddhist Yogacara philosophers) saw in this a denial of impermanence.  BUDDHISM. K.E.Y. B-series Buddhagosa 104 -   104 Buddhism, a religion of eastern and central Asia founded by Siddharta Gota Buddha. The Buddha found ready-made in Indian culture the ideas of karma (‘fruits of action’) and ssara (‘wheel of rebirth’), as well as the view that escape from the wheel is the highest good. Buddhist doctrine, like that of other Indian religions, offers its distinctive way to achieve that end. It teaches that at the core of the problem is desire or craving – for wealth, pleasure, power, continued existence – which fuels the fle of continued life. It adds that the solution is the snuffing out of craving by following the Eightfold Path (right speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration, views, and intentions). The idea is that intuitive wisdom follows upon moral conduct and mental discipline in accord with Buddhist precepts. This involves accepting these claims: all existence is unsatisfactory (dukkha); all existence is impermanent (anicca); and there is no permanent self (anatta). Along with these claims go the doctrines of momentariness (everything that exists is transitory, lasting only a moment) and codependent origination (everything that exists does so dependently on other things). Since God is typically conceived in monotheistic religions as existing independently and as either eternal or everlasting, there is no room within a Buddhist perspective for monotheism. Save for a heretical school, Buddhist traditions also reject all belief in substances. A substance, in this sense, is something that has properties, is not itself a property or a collection of properties, and endures through time. The obvious contrast to the Buddhist perspective is the notion of a self in Hinduism and Jainism, which is beginningless and endless, an indestructible entity sometimes conceived as inherently self-conscious and sometimes viewed as conscious only when embodied. But even the notion of a substance that endured but had a beginning or end or both, or a substance that existed dependently and endured so long as its sustaining conditions obtained, would run deep against the grain of typical Buddhist teaching. The Buddha is said to have offered no opinion, and to have found no profit in speculation, on certain questions: whether the world is or is not eternal, whether the world is or is not infinite, and whether the soul is different from or identical to the body. The religious reason given for this indifference is that reflection on such matters does not lead to enlightenment. A philosophical reason sometimes given is that if, as Buddhism claims, there is no world of substances, whether minds or bodies, then these questions have no straightforward answer. They are like the question, What does the horn of the hare weigh? Hares have no horns to be heavy or light. Seen in the context of the assumptions common in the culture in which they were asked, the questions would suggest that there are substantival minds and bodies and a world made up of them, and to answer these questions, even negatively, would have involved at least implicitly sanctioning that suggestion. Broadly, Indian Buddhism divides into Theravada (“Doctrine of the Elders,” nely those who heard and followed the Buddha; this school is also called Hinayana, or “Lesser Vehicle”) and Mahayana (“Greater Vehicle”). The Sautrantika and Vaibhasika schools belong to Theravada and the Madhyika and Yogacara schools are Mahayana. The Theravada schools. The Sautrantika school holds that while sensory experience justifies belief in the existence of mind-independent objects, the justification it provides requires us to infer from our sensory experience physical objects that we do not directly experience; it embraces representative realism. Thus, while our seeming to experience mind-independent objects is no illusion, our knowledge that it is not illusory rests as much on inference as on perception. The explanation of the fact that we cannot perceive as we wish – that we see and taste but rice and water though we would prefer meat and wine – is that what we see depends on what there is to be represented and what the conditions are under which we do our perceiving. The Vaibhasika (followers of the Vaibhasha commentary) school defends direct realism, contending that if sensory perception does not justify us in claiming actually to sense objects there is no way in which we can infer their existence. If what we directly experience are alleged representations or copies of objects we never see, from which we must then infer the objects copied, we have no reason to think that the copies are copies of anything. We do not determine the content of our perception because it typically is determined for us by the objects that we see. The very distinctions between dres and waking perceptions, or veridical perceptions and illusions, to which idealists appeal, depend for their appropriateness to the idealist’s purpose on our being able to tell that some perceptual experiences are reliable and some are not; but then the idealist cannot successfully use them. For both Theravada schools, there is no need to correct our belief in physical Buddhism Buddhism 105 -   105 objects, or in minds, beyond our viewing both minds and objects as collections of (different sorts of) momentary states. The Mahayana schools. The Madhyika school holds out for a more radical revision. Our experience of physical objects is reliable only if the beliefs that we properly base on it are true – only if things are as they sensorily seem. These beliefs are true only if we can sensorily distinguish between individual objects. But everything exists dependently, and nothing that exists dependently is an individual. So there are no individuals and we cannot distinguish between individual objects. So our sensory experience is not reliable, but rather is systematically illusory. Madhyika then adds the doctrine of an ineffable ultimate reality hidden behind our ordinary experience and descriptions, which is accessible only in esoteric enlightenment experience. In this respect it is like Advaita Vedanta, which it probably influenced. One result of the overall Madhyika teaching described here is that Nirvana and ssara,the goal and ordinary life, are identified; roughly ssara is how Nirvana seems to the unenlightened (as roughly, for Advaita, the world of dependent things is how qualityless Brahman appears to the unenlightened). The Yogacara (perhaps “Yoga” because it used meditation to remove belief in mind-independent physical objects) school of Mahayana Buddhism contends for a more bitious revision of our beliefs about objects than does Sautrantika or Vaibhasika, but a less radical one than the Madhyika. Against the latter, it contends that if mind itself is empty of essence and if all there is is an ineffable reality, then there is no one to see the truth and no reliable way to discover it. Against the direct physical-object realism of the Vaibhasika and the representational realism of the Sautrantika, the Yogacara philosophers argue that dre experience seems to be of objects that exist mind-independently and in a public space, and yet there are no such objects and there is no such space. What we have experiential evidence for is the existence of (non-substantival) minds and the experiences that those minds have. There are no substances at all and no physical states; there are only mental states that compose minds. Yogacara philosophers too had to explain why our perceptual content is not something we can decide by whim, and its explanation ce in terms of the theory that each collection of momentary states, and hence each series or stre of such collections, contains impressions that represent past experiences. These impressions become potent under certain circumstances and determine the content of one’s explicit or conscious perception. The stre, or substre, of representative impressions is a storehouse of memories and plays a role in Yogacara theory analogous to that of the Atman or Jiva in some of the schools of Hinduism. Critics suspected it of being a thin surrogate for a substantival self. AsaNga, Dignaga, and especially Vasubandhu were leading Yogacara philosophers. Further, critics of the Yogacara idealism argued that while the view contends that there are minds other than one’s own, it provided no way in which that belief could be justified. Our discussion has dealt with Indian Buddhism. Buddhism largely died out in India around the thirteenth century. It thrived in other places, especially China, Tibet, and Japan. Japanese Pure Land Buddhism resembles monotheism more than do any of the traditions that we have discussed. Zen is a form of Mahayana that developed in China in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. and spread to Japan. It involves esoteric teachings outside the sacred writings, following which is believed to lead to realization of Buddhahood. The metaphysical and epistemological issues briefly discussed here demonstrate that the Buddhist tradition found it natural to trace the consequences of views about the nature of objects and persons, and about what experience teaches, beyond the scope of what Buddhism as a religion might strictly require. There are direct realists, representational realists, and idealists, and the question arises as to whether idealism slides into solipsism. There is no way of telling what a particular religious doctrine may or may not be related to. Arguably, certain Buddhist doctrines are incompatible with certain views in contemporary physics (and Buddhist apologists have claimed that contemporary physics provides some sort of confirmation of basic Buddhist categories). There is no a priori way to limit the relationships that may come to light between apparently very diverse, and quite unrelated, issues and doctrines.  CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN PHILOSOPHY, METAPHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. K.E.Y. Buddhism, Hinayana.BUDDHISM. Buddhism, Kyo-hak.KOREAN PHILOSOPHY. Buddhism, Mahayana.BUDDHISM. Buddhism, Son.KOREAN PHILOSOPHY. Buddhism, Hinayana Buddhism, Son 106 -   106 Buddhism, Theravada.BUDDHISM. Buddhism, Zen.BUDDHISM. bundle theory, a view that accepts the idea that concrete objects consist of properties but denies the need for introducing substrata to account for their diversity. By contrast, one traditional view of concrete particular objects is that they are complexes consisting of two more fundental kinds of entities: properties that can be exemplified by many different objects and a substratum that exemplifies those properties belonging to a particular object. Properties account for the qualitative identity of such objects while substrata account for their numerical diversity. The bundle theory is usually glossed as the view that a concrete object is nothing but a bundle of properties. This gloss, however, is inadequate. For if a “bundle” of properties is, e.g., a set of properties, then bundles of properties differ in significant ways from concrete objects. For sets of properties are necessary and eternal while concrete objects are contingent and perishing. A more adequate statement of the theory holds that a concrete object is a complex of properties which all stand in a fundental contingent relation, call it co-instantiation, to one another. On this account, complexes of properties are neither necessary nor eternal. Critics of the theory, however, maintain that such complexes have all their properties essentially and cannot change properties, whereas concrete objects have some of their properties accidentally and undergo change. This objection fails to recognize that there are two distinct problems addressed by the bundle theory: (a) individuation and (b) identity through time. The first problem arises for all objects, both momentary and enduring. The second, however, arises only for enduring objects. The bundle theory typically offers two different solutions to these problems. An enduring concrete object is analyzed as a series of momentary objects which stand in some contingent relation R. Different versions of the theory offer differing accounts of the relation. For exple, Hume holds that the self is a series of co-instantiated impressions and ideas, whose members are related to one another by causation and resemblance (this is his bundle theory of the self). A momentary object, however, is analyzed as a complex of properties all of which stand in the relation of co-instantiation to one another. Consequently, even if one grants that a momentary complex of properties has all of its members essentially, it does not follow that an enduring object, which contains the complex as a temporal part, has those properties essentially unless one endorses the controversial thesis that an enduring object has its temporal parts essentially. Similarly, even if one grants that a momentary complex of properties cannot change in its properties, it does not follow that an enduring object, which consists of such complexes, cannot change its properties. Critics of the bundle theory argue that its analysis of momentary objects is also problematic. For it appears possible that two different momentary objects have all properties in common, yet there cannot be two different complexes with all properties in common. There are two responses available to a proponent of the theory. The first is to distinguish between a strong and a weak version of the theory. On the strong version, the thesis that a momentary object is a complex of co-instantiated properties is a necessary truth, while on the weak version it is a contingent truth. The possibility of two momentary objects with all properties in common impugns only the strong version of the theory. The second is to challenge the basis of the claim that it is possible for two momentary objects to have all their properties in common. Although critics allege that such a state of affairs is conceivable, proponents argue that investigation into the nature of conceivability does not underwrite this claim.  ESSENTIALISM, IDENTITY OF INDISCERNIBLES, METAPHYSICS, PHENOMENALISM, SUBSTANCE, TIME SLICE. A.C. bundle theory of the self.BUNDLE THEORY. Burali-Forte paradox.

SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES, SET THEORY. Buridan, Jean (c.1300–after 1358), French philosopher. He was born in Béthune and educated at the University of Paris. Unlike most philosophers of his time, Buridan spent his academic career as a master in the faculty of arts, without seeking an advanced degree in theology. He was also unusual in being a secular cleric rather than a member of a religious order. Buridan wrote extensively on logic and natural philosophy, although only a few of his works have appeared in modern editions. The most important on logic are the Summulae de dialectica (“Sum of Dialectic”), an introduction to logic conceived as a revision of, and extended commentary on, the Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain, a widely used logic textbook of the period; and the Tractatus de consequentiis, a treatise on modes of inference. Most of Buridan’s other Buddhism, Theravada Buridan, Jean 107 -   107 writings are short literal commentaries (expositiones) and longer critical studies (quaestiones) of Aristotle’s works. Like most medieval nominalists, Buridan argued that universals have no real existence, except as concepts by which the mind “conceives of many things indifferently.” Likewise, he included only particular substances and qualities in his basic ontology. But his nominalist progr is distinctive in its implementation. He differs, e.g., from Ockh in his accounts of motion, time, and quantity (appealing, in the latter case, to quantitative forms to explain the impenetrability of bodies). In natural philosophy, Buridan is best known for introducing to the West the non-Aristotelian concept of impetus, or impressed force, to explain projectile motion. Although asses appear often in his exples, the particular exple that has come (via Spinoza and others) to be known as “Buridan’s ass,” an ass starving to death between two equidistant and equally tempting piles of hay, is unknown in Buridan’s writings. It may, however, have originated as a caricature of Buridan’s theory of action, which attempts to find a middle ground between Aristotelian intellectualism and Franciscan voluntarism by arguing that the will’s freedom to act consists primarily in its ability to defer choice in the absence of a compelling reason to act one way or the other. Buridan’s intellectual legacy was considerable. His works continued to be read and discussed in universities for centuries after his death. Three of his students and disciples, Albert of Saxony, Marsilius of Inghen, and Nicole Oresme, went on to become distinguished philosophers in their own right.  METAPHYSICS, OCKH. J.A.Z. Buridan’s ass.BURIDAN. Burke, Edmund (1729–97), British statesman and one of the eighteenth century’s greatest political writers. Born in Dublin, he moved to London to study law, then undertook a literary and political career. He sat in the House of Commons from 1765 to 1794. In speeches and pphlets during these years he offered an ideological perspective on politics that endures to this day as the fountain of conservative wisdom. The philosophical stance that pervades Burke’s parlientary career and writings is skepticism, a profound distrust of political rationalism, i.e., the achievement in the political realm of abstract and rational structures, ideals, and objectives. Burkean skeptics are profoundly anti-ideological, detesting what they consider the complex, mysterious, and existential givens of political life distorted, criticized, or planned from a perspective of abstract, generalized, and rational categories. The seminal expression of Burke’s skeptical conservatism is found in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The conservatism of the Reflections was earlier displayed, however, in Burke’s response to radical demands in England for democratic reform of Parlient in the early 1780s. The English radicals assumed that legislators could remake governments, when all wise men knew that “a prescriptive government never was made upon any foregone theory.” How ridiculous, then, to put governments on Procrustean beds and make them fit “the theories which learned and speculative men have made.” Such prideful presumption required much more rational capacity than could be found ong ordinary mortals. One victim of Burke’s skepticism is the vaunted liberal idea of the social contract. Commonwealths were neither constructed nor ought they to be renovated according to a priori principles. The concept of an original act of contract is just such a principle. The only contract in politics is the agreement that binds generations past, present, and future, one that “is but a clause in the great primeval contract of an eternal society.” Burke rejects the voluntaristic quality of rationalist liberal contractualism. Individuals are not free to create their own political institutions. Political society and law are not “subject to the will of those who, by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law.” Men and groups “are not morally at liberty, at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement” to rip apart their communities and dissolve them into an “unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos.” Burke saw our stock of reason as small; despite this people still fled their basic limitations in flights of ideological fancy. They recognized no barrier to their powers and sought in politics to make reality match their speculative visions. Burke devoutly wished that people would appreciate their weakness, their “subordinate rank in the creation.” God has “subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us.” And that place is to know the limits of one’s rational and speculative faculties. Instead of relying on their own meager supply of reason, politicians should avail themselves “of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Because people forget this they weave rational schemes of reform far beyond their power to implement. Buridan’s ass Burke, Edmund 108 -   108 Burke stands as the chpion of political skepticism in revolt against Enlightenment rationalism and its “smugness of adulterated metaphysics,” which produced the “revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma.” The sins of the French were produced by the “clumsy subtlety of their political metaphysics.” The “faith in the dogmatism of philosophers” led them to rely on reason and abstract ideas, on speculation and a priori principles of natural right, freedom, and equality as the basis for reforming governments. Englishmen, like Burke, had no such illusions; they understood the complexity and fragility of human nature and human institutions, they were not “the converts of Rousseau . . . the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius [had] made no progress ongst [them].”  POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. I.K. Burley, Walter (c.1275–c.1344), English philosopher who taught philosophy at Oxford and theology at Paris. An orthodox Aristotelian and a realist, he attacked Ockh’s logic and his interpretation of the Aristotelian categories. Burley commented on almost of all of Aristotle’s works in logic, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy. An early Oxford Calculator, Burley began his work as a fellow of Merton College in 1301. By 1310, he was at Paris. A student of Thomas Wilton, he probably incepted before 1322; by 1324 he was a fellow of the Sorbonne. His commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences has been lost. After leaving Paris, Burley was associated with the household of Richard of Bury and the court of Edward III, who sent him as an envoy to the papal curia in 1327. De vita et moribus philosophorum (“On the Life and Manners of Philosophers”), an influential, popular account of the lives of the philosophers, has often been attributed to Burley, but modern scholarship suggests that the attribution is incorrect. Many of Burley’s independent works dealt with problems in natural philosophy, notably De intensione et remissione formarum (“On the Intension and Remission of Forms”), De potentiis animae (“On the Faculties of the Soul”), and De substantia orbis. De primo et ultimo instanti (“On First and Last Instants”) discusses which temporal processes have intrinsic, which extrinsic limits. In his Tractatus de formis Burley attacks Ockh’s theory of quantity. Similarly, Burley’s theory of motion opposed Ockh’s views. Ockh restricts the account of motion to the thing moving, and the quality, quantity, and place acquired by motion. By contrast, Burley emphasizes the process of motion and the quantitative measurement of that process. Burley attacks the view that the forms successively acquired in motion are included in the form finally acquired. He ridicules the view that contrary qualities (hot and cold) could simultaneously inhere in the se subject producing intermediate qualities (warmth). Burley emphasized the formal character of logic in his De puritate artis logicae (“On the Purity of the Art of Logic”), one of the great medieval treatises on logic. Ockh attacked a preliminary version of De puritate in his Summa logicae; Burley called Ockh a beginner in logic. In De puritate artis logicae, Burley makes syllogistics a subdivision of consequences. His treatment of negation is particularly interesting for his views on double negation and the restrictions on the rule that notnot-p implies p. Burley distinguished between analogous words and analogous concepts and natures. His theory of analogy deserves detailed discussion. These views, like the views expressed in most of Burley’s works, have seldom been carefully studied by modern philosophers.  OCKH, PETER LOMBARD. R.W. business ethics.ETHICS. Butler, Joseph (1692–1752), English theologian and Anglican bishop who made important contributions to moral philosophy, to the understanding of moral agency, and to the development of deontological ethics. Better known in his own time for The Analogy of Religion (1736), a defense, along broadly empiricist lines, of orthodox, “revealed” Christian doctrine against deist criticism, Butler’s main philosophical legacy was a series of highly influential arguments and theses contained in a collection of Sermons (1725) and in two “Dissertations” appended to The Analogy – one on virtue and the other on personal identity. The analytical method of these essays (“everything is what it is and not another thing”) provided a model for much of English-speaking moral philosophy to follow. For exple, Butler is often credited with refuting psychological hedonism, the view that all motives can be reduced to the desire for pleasure or happiness. The sources of human motivation are complex and structurally various, he argued. Appetites and passions seek their own peculiar objects, and pleasure must itself be understood as involving an intrinsic positive regard for a particular object. Other philosophers had maintained, like Butler, that we can desire, e.g., the happiness of others intrinsically, and not just as a means to our own Burley, Walter Butler, Joseph 109 -   109 happiness. And others had argued that the person who aims singlemindedly at his own happiness is unlikely to attain it. Butler’s distinctive contribution was to demonstrate that happiness and pleasure themselves require completion by specific objects for which we have an intrinsic positive regard. Self-love, the desire for our own happiness, is a reflective desire for, roughly, the satisfaction of our other desires. But self-love is not our only reflective desire; we also have “a settled reasonable principle of benevolence.” We can consider the goods of others and come on reflection to desire their welfare more or less independently of particular emotional involvement such as compassion. In morals, Butler equally opposed attempts to reduce virtue to benevolence, even of the most universal and impartial sort. Benevolence seeks the good or happiness of others, whereas the regulative principle of virtue is conscience, the faculty of moral approval or disapproval of conduct and character. Moral agency requires, he argued, the capacities to reflect disinterestedly on action, motive, and character, to judge these in distinctively moral terms (and not just in terms of their relation to the non-moral good of happiness), and to guide conduct by such judgments. Butler’s views about the centrality of conscience in the moral life were important in the development of deontological ethics as well as in the working out of an associated account of moral agency. Along the first lines, he argued in the “Dissertation” that what it is right for a person to do depends, not just on the (non-morally) good or bad consequences of an action, but on such other morally relevant features as the relationships the agent bears to affected others (e.g., friend or beneficiary), or whether fraud, injustice, treachery, or violence is involved. Butler thus distinguished analytically between distinctively moral evaluation of action and assessing an act’s relation to such non-moral values as happiness. And he provided succeeding deontological theorists with a litany of exples where the right thing to do is apparently not what would have the best consequences. Butler believed God instills a “principle of reflection” or conscience in us through which we intrinsically disapprove of such actions as fraud and injustice. But he also believed that God, being omniscient and benevolent, fitted us with these moral attitudes because “He foresaw this constitution of our nature would produce more happiness, than forming us with a temper of mere general benevolence.” This points, however, toward a kind of anti-deontological or consequentialist view, sometimes called indirect consequentialism, which readily acknowledges that what it is right to do does not depend on which act will have the best consequences. It is entirely appropriate, according to indirect consequentialism, that conscience approve or disapprove of acts on grounds other than a calculation of consequences precisely because its doing so has the best consequences. Here we have a version of the sort of view later to be found, for exple, in Mill’s defense of utilitarianism against the objection that it conflicts with justice and rights. Morality is a system of social control that demands allegiance to considerations other than utility, e.g., justice and honesty. But it is justifiable only to the extent that the system itself has utility. This sets up something of a tension. From the conscientious perspective an agent must distinguish between the question of which action would have the best consequences and the question of what he should do. And from that perspective, Butler thinks, one will necessarily regard one’s answer to the second question as authoritative for conduct. Conscience necessarily implicitly asserts its own authority, Butler fously claimed. Thus, insofar as agents come to regard their conscience as simply a method of social control with good consequences, they will come to be alienated from the inherent authority their conscience implicitly claims. A similar issue arises concerning the relation between conscience and self-love. Butler says that both self-love and conscience are “superior principles in the nature of man” in that an action will be unsuitable to a person’s nature if it is contrary to either. This makes conscience’s authority conditional on its not conflicting with self-love (and vice versa). Some scholars, moreover, read other passages as implying that no agent could reasonably follow conscience unless doing so was in the agent’s interest. But again, it would seem that an agent who internalized such a view would be alienated from the authority that, if Butler is right, conscience implicitly claims. For Butler, conscience or the principle of reflection is uniquely the faculty of practical judgment. Unlike either self-love or benevolence, even when these are added to the powers of inference and empirical cognition, only conscience makes moral agency possible. Only a creature with conscience can accord with or violate his own judgment of what he ought to do, and thereby be a “law to himself.” This suggests a view that, like Kant’s, seeks to link deontology to a conception of autonomous moral agency. 

EGOISM, ETHICS, HEDONISM, UTILITARIANISM. S.L.D. Butler, Joseph Butler, Joseph 110 -   110 cabala (from Hebrew qabbala, ‘tradition’), a system of Jewish mysticism and theosophy practiced from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century; loosely, all forms of Jewish mysticism. Believed by its adherents to be a tradition communicated to Moses at Sinai, the main body of cabalistic writing, the Zohar, is thought to be the work primarily of Moses de León of Guadalajara, in the thirteenth century, though he attributed it to the second-century rabbi Simon bar Yohai. The Zohar builds on earlier Jewish mysticism, and is replete with gnostic and Neoplatonic themes. It offers the initiated access to the mysteries of God’s being, human destiny, and the meaning of the commandments. The transcendent and strictly unitary God of rabbinic Judaism here encounters ten apparently real divine powers, called sefirot, which together represent God’s being and appearance in the cosmos and include male and female principles. Evil in the world is seen as a reflection of a cosmic rupture in this system, and redemption on earth entails restoration of the divine order. Mankind can assist in this task through knowledge, piety, and observance of the law. Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century developed these themes with graphic descriptions of the dras of creation, cosmic rupture, and restoration, the latter process requiring human assistance more than ever. A.L.I. Caird, Edward (1835–1908), Scottish philosopher, a leading absolute idealist. Influential as both a writer and a teacher, Caird was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow and master of Balliol College, Oxford. His aim in philosophy was to overcome intellectual oppositions. In his main work, The Critical Philosophy of Kant (1889), he argued that Kant had done this by using reason to synthesize rationalism and empiricism while reconciling science and religion. In Caird’s view, Kant unfortunately treated reason as subjective, thereby retaining an opposition between self and world. Loosely following Hegel, Caird claimed that objective reason, or the Absolute, was a larger whole in which both self and world were fragments. In his Evolution of Religion (1893) Caird argued that religion progressively understands God as the Absolute and hence as what reconciles self and world. This allowed him to defend Christianity as the highest evolutionary stage of religion without defending the literal truth of Scripture.  IDEALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. J.W.A. Cajetan, original ne, Tommaso de Vio (c.1469– 1534), Italian prelate and theologian. Born in Gaeta (from which he took his ne), he entered the Dominican order in 1484 and studied philosophy and theology at Naples, Bologna, and Padua. He bece a cardinal in 1517; during the following two years he traveled to Germany, where he engaged in a theological controversy with Luther. His major work is a Commentary on St. Thomas’ Summa of Theology (1508), which promoted a renewal of interest in Scholastic and Thomistic philosophy during the sixteenth century. In agreement with Aquinas, Cajetan places the origin of human knowledge in sense perception. In contrast with Aquinas, he denies that the immortality of the soul and the existence of God as our creator can be proved. Cajetan’s work in logic was based on traditional Aristotelian syllogistic logic but is original in its discussion of the notion of analogy. Cajetan distinguishes three types: analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportion. Whereas he rejected the first two types as improper, he regarded the last as the basic type of analogy and appealed to it in explaining how humans come to know God and how analogical reasoning applied to God and God’s creatures avoids being equivocal.  THOMISM. P.Gar. calculi of relations.RELATIONAL LOGIC. calculus, a central branch of mathematics, originally conceived in connection with the determination of the tangent (or normal) to a curve and of the area between it and some fixed axis; but it also embraced the calculation of volumes and of areas of curved surfaces, the lengths of curved lines, and so on. Mathematical analysis is a still broader branch that subsumed the calculus under its rubric (see below), together with the theories of functions and of infinite series. Still more general and/or abstract versions of analysis have been developed during the twentieth 111 C -   111 century, with applications to other branches of mathematics, such as probability theory. The origins of the calculus go back to Greek mathematics, usually in problems of determining the slope of a tangent to a curve and the area enclosed underneath it by some fixed axes or by a closed curve; sometimes related questions such as the length of an arc of a curve, or the area of a curved surface, were considered. The subject flourished in the seventeenth century when the analytical geometry of Descartes gave algebraic means to extend the procedures. It developed further when the problems of slope and area were seen to require the finding of new functions, and that the pertaining processes were seen to be inverse. Newton and Leibniz had these insights in the late seventeenth century, independently and in different forms. In the Leibnizian differential calculus the differential dx was proposed as an infinitesimal increment on x, and of the se dimension as x; the slope of the tangent to a curve with y as a function of x was the ratio dy/dx. The integral, ex, was infinitely large and of the dimension of x; thus for linear variables x and y the area ey dx was the sum of the areas of rectangles y high and dx wide. All these quantities were variable, and so could admit higher-order differentials and integrals (ddx, eex, and so on). This theory was extended during the eighteenth century, especially by Euler, to functions of several independent variables, and with the creation of the calculus of variations. The chief motivation was to solve differential equations: they were motivated largely by problems in mechanics, which was then the single largest branch of mathematics. Newton’s less successful fluxional calculus used limits in its basic definitions, thereby changing dimensions for the defined terms. The fluxion was the rate of change of a variable quantity relative to “time”; conversely, that variable was the “fluent” of its fluxion. These quantities were also variable; fluxions and fluents of higher orders could be defined from them. A third tradition was developed during the late eighteenth century by J. L. Lagrange. For him the “derived functions” of a function f(x) were definable by purely algebraic means from its Taylorian power-series expansion about any value of x. By these means it was hoped to avoid the use of both infinitesimals and limits, which exhibited conceptual difficulties, the former due to their unclear ontology as values greater than zero but smaller than any orthodox quantity, the latter because of the naive theories of their deployment. In the early nineteenth century the Newtonian tradition died away, and Lagrange’s did not gain general conviction; however, the LeibnizEuler line kept some of its health, for its utility in physical applications. But all these theories gradually bece eclipsed by the mathematical analysis of A. L. Cauchy. As with Newton’s calculus, the theory of limits was central, but they were handled in a much more sophisticated way. He replaced the usual practice of defining the integral as (more or less) automatically the inverse of the differential (or fluxion or whatever) by giving independent definitions of the derivative and the integral; thus for the first time the fundental “theorem” of the calculus, stating their inverse relationship, bece a genuine theorem, requiring sufficient conditions upon the function to ensure its truth. Indeed, Cauchy pioneered the routine specification of necessary and/or sufficient conditions for truth of theorems in analysis. His discipline also incorporated the theory of (dis)continuous functions and the convergence or divergence of infinite series. Again, general definitions were proffered and conditions sought for properties to hold. Cauchy’s discipline was refined and extended in the second half of the nineteenth century by K. Weierstrass and his followers at Berlin. The study of existence theorems (as for irrational numbers), and also technical questions largely concerned with trigonometric series, led to the emergence of set topology. In addition, special attention was given to processes involving several variables changing in value together, and as a result the importance of quantifiers was recognized – for exple, reversing their order from ‘there is a y such that for all x . . .’ to ‘for all x, there is a y . . .’. This developed later into general set theory, and then to mathematical logic: Cantor was the major figure in the first aspect, while G. Peano pioneered much for the second. Under this regime of “rigor,” infinitesimals such as dx bece unacceptable as mathematical objects. However, they always kept an unofficial place because of their utility when applying the calculus, and since World War II theories have been put forward in which the established level of rigor and generality are preserved (and even improved) but in which infinitesimals are reinstated. The best-known of these theories, the non-standard analysis of A. Robinson, makes use of model theory by defining infinitesimals as arithmetical inverses of the transfinite integers generated by a “non-standard model” of Peano’s postulates for the natural numbers. calculus calculus

MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS, SET THEORY. I.G.-G. calculus, fluxional.CALCULUS. calculus, lbda-.COMBINATORY LOGIC, LBDA-CALCULUS. calculus, propositional.FORMAL LOGIC. calculus, sentential.FORMAL LOGIC. calculus, sequential.CUT-ELIMINATION THEOREM. calculus of classes.BOOLEAN ALGEBRA. calculus of individuals.MEREOLOGY. calculus ratiocinator.LEIBNIZ. Calvin, John (1509–64), French theologian and church reformer, a major figure in the Protestant Reformation. He was especially important for the so-called Reformed churches in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Scotland, and England. Calvin was a theologian in the humanist tradition rather than a philosopher. He valued philosophy as “a noble gift of God” and cited philosophers (especially Plato) when it suited his purposes; but he rejected philosophical speculation about “higher things” and despised – though sometimes exploiting its resources – the dominant (Scholastic) philosophy of his time, to which he had been introduced at the University of Paris. His eclectic culture also included a variety of philosophical ideas, of whose source he was often unaware, that inevitably helped to shape his thought. His Christianae religionis institutio (first ed. 1536 but repeatedly enlarged; in English generally cited as Institutes), his theological treatises, his massive biblical commentaries, and his letters, all of which were translated into most European languages, thus helped to transmit various philosophical motifs and attitudes in an unsystematic form both to contemporaries and to posterity. He passed on to his followers impulses derived from both the antiqui and the moderni. From the former he inherited an intellectualist anthropology that conceived of the personality as a hierarchy of faculties properly subordinated to reason, which was at odds with his evangelical theology; and, though he professed to scorn Stoicism, a moralism often more Stoic than evangelical. He also relied occasionally on the Scholastic quaestio, and regularly treated substantives, like the antiqui, as real entities. These elements in his thought also found expression in tendencies to a natural theology based on an innate and universal religious instinct that can discern evidences of the existence and attributes of God everywhere in nature, and a conception of the Diety as immutable and intelligible. This side of Calvinism eventually found expression in Unitarianism and universalism. It was, however, in uneasy tension with other tendencies in his thought that reflect both his biblicism and a nominalist and Scotist sense of the extreme transcendence of God. Like other humanists, therefore, he was also profoundly skeptical about the capacity of the human mind to grasp ultimate truth, an attitude that rested, for him, on both the consequences of original sin and the merely conventional origins of language. Corollaries of this were his sense of the contingency of all human intellectual constructions and a tendency to emphasize the utility rather than the truth even of such major elements in his theology as the doctrine of predestination. It may well be no accident, therefore, that later skepticism and pragmatism have been conspicuous in thinkers nurtured by later Calvinism, such as Bayle, Hume, and Jes.  HUMANISM, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, TRANSCENDENCE. W.J.B. Cbridge change, a non-genuine change. If I turn pale, I  changing, whereas your turning pale is only a Cbridge change in me. When I acquire the property of being such that you are pale, I do not change. In general, an object’s acquiring a new property is not a sufficient condition for that object to change (although some other object may genuinely change). Thus also, my being such that you are pale counts only as a Cbridge property of me, a property such that my gaining or losing it is only a Cbridge change. Cbridge properties are a proper subclass of extrinsic properties: being south of Chicago is considered an extrinsic property of me, but since my moving to Canada would be a genuine change, being south of Chicago cannot, for me, be a Cbridge property. The concept of a Cbridge change reflects a way of thinking entrenched in common sense, but it is difficult to clarify, and its philosophical value is controversial. Neither science nor formal semantics, e.g., supports this viewpoint. Perhaps calculus, fluxional Cbridge change 113 -   113 Cbridge changes and properties are, for better or worse, inseparable from a vague, intuitive metaphysics.  PROPERTY, TIME. S.J.W. Cbridge Platonists, a group of seventeenthcentury philosopher-theologians at the University of Cbridge, principally including Benjin Whichcote (1609–83), often designated the father of the Cbridge Platonists; Henry More; Ralph Cudworth (1617–88); and John Smith (1616–52). Whichcote, Cudworth, and Smith received their university education in or were at some time fellows of Emmanuel College, a stronghold of the Calvinism in which they were nurtured and against which they rebelled under mainly Erasmian, Arminian, and Neoplatonic influences. Other Cbridge men who shared their ideas and attitudes to varying degrees were Nathanael Culverwel (1618?–51), Peter Sterry (1613–72), George Rust (d.1670), John Worthington (1618–71), and Simon Patrick (1625– 1707). As a generic label, ‘Cbridge Platonists’ is a handy umbrella term rather than a dependable signal of doctrinal unity or affiliation. The Cbridge Platonists were not a self-constituted group articled to an explicit manifesto; no two of them shared quite the se set of doctrines or values. Their Platonism was not exclusively the pristine teaching of Plato, but was formed rather from Platonic ideas supposedly prefigured in Hermes Trismegistus, in the Chaldean Oracles, and in Pythagoras, and which they found in Origen and other church fathers, in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus, and in the Florentine Neoplatonism of Ficino. They took contrasting and changing positions on the important belief (originating in Florence with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola) that Pythagoras and Plato derived their wisdom ultimately from Moses and the cabala. They were not equally committed to philosophical pursuits, nor were they equally versed in the new philosophies and scientific advances of the time. The Cbridge Platonists’ concerns were ultimately religious and theological rather than primarily philosophical. They philosophized as theologians, making eclectic use of philosophical doctrines (whether Platonic or not) for apologetic purposes. They wanted to defend “true religion,” nely, their latitudinarian vision of Anglican Christianity, against a variety of enemies: the Calvinist doctrine of predestination; sectarianism; religious enthusiasm; fanaticism; the “hide-bound, strait-laced spirit” of Interregnum Puritanism; the “narrow, persecuting spirit” that followed the Restoration; atheism; and the impieties incipient in certain trends in contemporary science and philosophy. Notable ong the latter were the doctrines of the mechanical philosophers, especially the materialism and mechanical determinism of Hobbes and the mechanistic pretensions of the Cartesians. The existence of God, the existence, immortality, and dignity of the human soul, the existence of spirit activating the natural world, human free will, and the primacy of reason are ong the principal teachings of the Cbridge Platonists. They emphasized the positive role of reason in all aspects of philosophy, religion, and ethics, insisting in particular that it is irrationality that endangers the Christian life. Human reason and understanding was “the Candle of the Lord” (Whichcote’s phrase), perhaps their most cherished image. In Whichcote’s words, “To go against Reason, is to go against God . . . Reason is the Divine Governor of Man’s Life; it is the very Voice of God.” Accordingly, “there is no real clashing at all betwixt any genuine point of Christianity and what true Philosophy and right Reason does determine or allow” (More). Reason directs us to the self-evidence of first principles, which “must be seen in their own light, and are perceived by an inward power of nature.” Yet in keeping with the Plotinian mystical tenor of their thought, they found within the human soul the “Divine Sagacity” (More’s term), which is the prime cause of human reason and therefore superior to it. Denying the Calvinist doctrine that revelation is the only source of spiritual light, they taught that the “natural light” enables us to know God and interpret the Scriptures. Cbridge Platonism was uncompromisingly innatist. Human reason has inherited immutable intellectual, moral, and religious notions, “anticipations of the soul,” which negate the claims of empiricism. The Cbridge Platonists were skeptical with regard to certain kinds of knowledge, and recognized the role of skepticism as a critical instrument in epistemology. But they were dismissive of the idea that Pyrrhonism be taken seriously in the practical affairs of the philosopher at work, and especially of the Christian soul in its quest for divine knowledge and understanding. Truth is not compromised by our inability to devise apodictic demonstrations. Indeed Whichcote passed a moral censure on those who pretend “the doubtfulness and uncertainty of reason.” Innatism and the natural light of reason shaped the Cbridge Platonists’ moral philosoCbridge Platonists Cbridge Platonists 114 -   114 phy. The unchangeable and eternal ideas of good and evil in the divine mind are the exemplars of ethical axioms or noemata that enable the human mind to make moral judgments. More argued for a “boniform faculty,” a faculty higher than reason by which the soul rejoices in reason’s judgment of the good. The most philosophically committed and systematic of the group were More, Cudworth, and Culverwel. Smith, perhaps the most intellectually gifted and certainly the most promising (note his dates), defended Whichcote’s Christian teaching, insisting that theology is more “a Divine Life than a Divine Science.” More exclusively theological in their leanings were Whichcote, who wrote little of solid philosophical interest, Rust, who followed Cudworth’s moral philosophy, and Sterry. Only Patrick, More, and Cudworth (all fellows of the Royal Society) were sufficiently attracted to the new science (especially the work of Descartes) to discuss it in any detail or to turn it to philosophical and theological advantage. Though often described as a Platonist, Culverwel was really a neo-Aristotelian with Platonic embellishments and, like Sterry, a Calvinist. He denied innate ideas and supported the tabula rasa doctrine, commending “the Platonists . . . that they lookt upon the spirit of a man as the Candle of the Lord, though they were deceived in the time when ‘twas lighted.” The Cbridge Platonists were influential as latitudinarians, as advocates of rational theology, as severe critics of unbridled mechanism and materialism, and as the initiators, in England, of the intuitionist ethical tradition. In the England of Locke they are a striking counterinstance of innatism and non-empirical philosophy.  MORE, HENRY; NEOPLATONISM; PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION; PLATO. A.G. Cbridge property.CBRIDGE CHANGE. cera obscura, a darkened enclosure that focuses light from an external object by a pinpoint hole instead of a lens, creating an inverted, reversed image on the opposite wall. The adoption of the cera obscura as a model for the eye revolutionized the study of visual perception by rendering obsolete previous speculative philosophical theories, in particular the emanation theory, which explained perception as due to emanated copy-images of objects entering the eye, and theories that located the image of perception in the lens rather than the retina. By shifting the location of sensation to a projection on the retina, the cera obscura doctrine helped support the distinction of primary and secondary sense qualities, undermining the medieval realist view of perception and moving toward the idea that consciousness is radically split off from the world.  PERCEPTION. T.H.L. Cpanella, Tommaso (1568–1639), Italian theologian, philosopher, and poet. He joined the Dominican order in 1582. Most of the years between 1592 and 1634 he spent in prison for heresy and for conspiring to replace Spanish rule in southern Italy with a utopian republic. He fled to France in 1634 and spent his last years in freedom. Some of his best poetry was written while he was chained in a dungeon; and during less rigorous confinement he managed to write over a hundred books, not all of which survive. His best-known work, The City of the Sun (1602; published 1623), describes a community governed in accordance with astrological principles, with a priest as head of state. In later political writings, Cpanella attacked Machiavelli and called for either a universal Spanish monarchy with the pope as spiritual head or a universal theocracy with the pope as both spiritual and temporal leader. His first publication was Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses (1591), which supported the theories of Telesio and initiated his lifelong attack on Aristotelianism. He hoped to found a new Christian philosophy based on the two books of nature and Scripture, both of which are manifestations of God. While he appealed to sense experience, he was not a straightforward empiricist, for he saw the natural world as alive and sentient, and he thought of magic as a tool for utilizing natural processes. In this he was strongly influenced by Ficino. Despite his own difficulties with Rome, he wrote in support of Galileo.  FICINO, TELESIO. E.J.A. Cpbell, Norman Robert (1880–1949), British physicist and philosopher of science. A successful experimental physicist, Cpbell (with A. Wood) discovered the radioactivity of potassium. His analysis of science depended on a sharp distinction between experimental laws and theories. Experimental laws are generalizations established by observations. A theory has the following structure. First, it requires a (largely arbitrary) hypothesis, which in itself is untestable. To render it testable, the theory requires a “dictionary” of propositions linking the hypothesis to scientific laws, which can be established experimentally. But theories are not merely logical relations between hypotheses and experimental Cbridge property Cpbell, Norman Robert 115 -   115 laws; they also require concrete analogies or models. Indeed, the models suggest the nature of the propositions in the dictionary. The analogies are essential components of the theory, and, for Cpbell, are nearly always mechanical. His theory of science greatly influenced Nagel’s The Structure of Science (1961).  PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, THEORETICAL TERM. R.E.B. Cus, Albert (1913–60), French philosophical novelist and essayist who was also a prose poet and the conscience of his times. He was born and raised in Algeria, and his experiences as a fatherless, tubercular youth, as a young playwright and journalist in Algiers, and later in the anti-German resistance in Paris during World War II informed everything he wrote. His best-known writings are not overtly political; his most fous works, the novel The Stranger (written in 1940, published in 1942) and his book-length essay The Myth of Sisyphus (written in 1941, published in 1943) explore the notion of “the absurd,” which Cus alternatively describes as the human condition and as “a widespread sensitivity of our times.” The absurd, briefly defined, is the confrontation between ourselves – with our demands for rationality and justice – and an “indifferent universe.” Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to the endless, futile task of rolling a rock up a mountain (whence it would roll back down of its own weight), thus becomes an exemplar of the human condition, struggling hopelessly and pointlessly to achieve something. The odd antihero of The Stranger, on the other hand, unconsciously accepts the absurdity of life. He makes no judgments, accepts the most repulsive characters as his friends and neighbors, and remains unmoved by the death of his mother and his own killing of a man. Facing execution for his crime, he “opens his heart to the benign indifference of the universe.” But such stoic acceptance is not the message of Cus’s philosophy. Sisyphus thrives (he is even “happy”) by virtue of his scorn and defiance of the gods, and by virtue of a “rebellion” that refuses to give in to despair. This se theme motivates Cus’s later novel, The Plague(1947), and his long essay The Rebel (1951). In his last work, however, a novel called The Fall published in 1956, the year before he won the Nobel prize for literature, Cus presents an unforgettably perverse character ned Jean-Baptiste Clence, who exemplifies all the bitterness and despair rejected by his previous characters and in his earlier essays. Clence, like the character in The Stranger, refuses to judge people, but whereas Meursault (the “stranger”) is incapable of judgment, Clence (who was once a lawyer) makes it a matter of philosophical principle, “for who ong us is innocent?” It is unclear where Cus’s thinking was heading when he was killed in an automobile accident (with his publisher, Gallimard, who survived).  EXISTENTIALISM, SARTRE. R.C.SO. Canguilhem, Georges (1904–96), French historian and philosopher of science. Canguilhem succeeded Gaston Bachelard as director of the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques at the University of Paris. He developed and sometimes revised Bachelard’s view of science, extending it to issues in the biological and medical sciences, where he focused particularly on the concepts of the normal and the pathological (The Normal and the Pathological, 1966). On his account norms are not objective in the sense of being derived from value-neutral scientific inquiry, but are rooted in the biological reality of the organisms that they regulate. Canguilhem also introduced an important methodological distinction between concepts and theories. Rejecting the common view that scientific concepts are simply functions of the theories in which they are embedded, he argued that the use of concepts to interpret data is quite distinct from the use of theories to explain the data. Consequently, the se concepts may occur in very different theoretical contexts. Canguilhem made particularly effective use of this distinction in tracing the origin of the concept of reflex action.  BACHELARD, PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY. G.G. Cantor, Georg (1845–1918), German mathematician, one of a number of late nineteenthcentury mathematicians and philosophers (including Frege, Dedekind, Peano, Russell, and Hilbert) who transformed both mathematics and the study of its philosophical foundations. The philosophical import of Cantor’s work is threefold. First, it was primarily Cantor who turned arbitrary collections into objects of mathematical study, sets. Second, he created a coherent mathematical theory of the infinite, in particular a theory of transfinite numbers. Third, linking these, he was the first to indicate that it might be possible to present mathematics as nothing but the theory of sets, thus making set theory foundational for mathematics. This contributed to the Cus, Albert Cantor, Georg 116 -   116 view that the foundations of mathematics should itself become an object of mathematical study. Cantor also held to a form of principle of plenitude, the belief that all the infinities given in his theory of transfinite numbers are represented not just in mathematical (or “immanent” reality), but also in the “transient” reality of God’s created world. Cantor’s main, direct achievement is his theory of transfinite numbers and infinity. He characterized (as did Frege) seness of size in terms of one-to-one correspondence, thus accepting the paradoxical results known to Galileo and others, e.g., that the collection of all natural numbers has the se cardinality or size as that of all even numbers. He added to these surprising results by showing (1874) that there is the se number of algebraic (and thus rational) numbers as there are natural numbers, but that there are more points on a continuous line than there are natural (or rational or algebraic) numbers, thus revealing that there are at least two different kinds of infinity present in ordinary mathematics, and consequently demonstrating the need for a mathematical treatment of these infinities. This latter result is often expressed by saying that the continuum is uncountable. Cantor’s theorem of 1892 is a generalization of part of this, for it says that the set of all subsets (the power-set) of a given set must be cardinally greater than that set, thus giving rise to the possibility of indefinitely many different infinities. (The collection of all real numbers has the se size as the power-set of natural numbers.) Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers (1880– 97) was his developed mathematical theory of infinity, with the infinite cardinal numbers (the F-, or aleph-, numbers) based on the infinite ordinal numbers that he introduced in 1880 and 1883. The F-numbers are in effect the cardinalities of infinite well-ordered sets. The theory thus generates two fous questions, whether all sets (in particular the continuum) can be well ordered, and if so which of the F-numbers represents the cardinality of the continuum. The former question was answered positively by Zermelo in 1904, though at the expense of postulating one of the most controversial principles in the history of mathematics, the axiom of choice. The latter question is the celebrated continuum problem. Cantor’s fous continuum hypothesis (CH) is his conjecture that the cardinality of the continuum is represented by F1, the second aleph. CH was shown to be independent of the usual assumptions of set theory by Gödel (1938) and Cohen (1963). Extensions of Cohen’s methods show that it is consistent to assume that the cardinality of the continuum is given by almost any of the vast array of F-numbers. The continuum problem is now widely considered insoluble. Cantor’s conception of set is often taken to admit the whole universe of sets as a set, thus engendering contradiction, in particular in the form of Cantor’s paradox. For Cantor’s theorem would say that the power-set of the universe must be bigger than it, while, since this powerset is a set of sets, it must be contained in the universal set, and thus can be no bigger. However, it follows from Cantor’s early (1883) considerations of what he called the “absolute infinite” that none of the collections discovered later to be at the base of the paradoxes can be proper sets. Moreover, correspondence with Hilbert in 1897 and Dedekind in 1899 (see Cantor, Gesmelte Abhandlungen mathematischen und philosophischen Inhalts, 1932) shows clearly that Cantor was well aware that contradictions will arise if such collections are treated as ordinary sets.  CONTINUUM PROBLEM, SETTHEORETIC PARADOXES, SET THEORY. M.H. Cantor’s paradox.SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES. Cantor’s theorem.CANTOR, CONTINUUM PROBLEM. capacity, diminished.DIMINISHED CAPACITY. capacity responsibility.RESPONSIBILITY. cardinality.SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES. cardinal utility.UTILITARIANISM. cardinal virtues, prudence (practical wisdom), courage, temperance, and justice. Medievals deemed them cardinal (from Latin cardo, ‘hinge’) because of their important or pivotal role in human flourishing. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates explains them through a doctrine of the three parts of the soul, suggesting that a person is prudent when knowledge of how to live (wisdom) informs her reason, courageous when informed reason governs her capacity for wrath, temperate when it also governs her appetites, and just when each part performs its proper task with informed reason in control. Development of thought on the cardinal virtues was closely tied to the doctrine of the unity of the virtues, i.e., that a person possessing one virtue will have them all.  VIRTUE ETHICS. J.L.A.G. Cantor’s paradox cardinal virtues 117 -   117 Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), Scottish-born essayist, historian, and social critic, one of the most popular writers and lecturers in nineteenth-century Britain. His works include literary criticism, history, and cultural criticism. With respect to philosophy, his views on the theory of history are his most significant contributions. According to Carlyle, great personages are the most important causal factor in history. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) asserts, “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.” Carlyle’s doctrine has been challenged from many different directions. Hegelian and Marxist philosophers maintain that the so-called great men of history are not really the engine of history, but merely reflections of deeper forces, such as economic ones, while contemporary historians emphasize the priority of “history from below” – the social history of everyday people – as far more representative of the historical process.  PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. N.C. Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970), German-born erican philosopher, one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle, a movement loosely called logical positivism or logical empiricism. He made fundental contributions to semantics and the philosophy of science, as well as to the foundations of probability and inductive logic. He was a staunch advocate of, and active in, the unity of science movement. Carnap received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1921. His first major work was Die Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928), in which he sought to apply the new logic recently developed by Frege and by Russell and Whitehead to problems in the philosophy of science. Although influential, it was not translated until 1967, when it appeared as The Logical Structure of the World. It was important as one of the first clear and unbiguous statements that the important work of philosophy concerned logical structure: that language and its logic were to be the focus of attention. In 1935 Carnap left his native Germany for the United States, where he taught at the University of Chicago and then at UCLA. Die Logiche Syntax der Sprach (1934) was rapidly translated into English, appearing as The Logical Syntax of Language (1937). This was followed in 1941 by Introduction to Semantics, and in 1942 by The Formalization of Logic. In 1947 Meaning and Necessity appeared; it provided the groundwork for a modal logic that would mirror the meticulous semantic development of first-order logic in the first two volumes. One of the most important concepts introduced in these volumes was that of a state description. A state description is the linguistic counterpart of a possible world: in a given language, the most complete description of the world that can be given. Carnap then turned to one of the most pervasive and important problems to arise in both the philosophy of science and the theory of meaning. To say that the meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions under which it would be verified (as the early positivists did) or that a scientific theory is verified by predictions that turn out to be true, is clearly to speak loosely. Absolute verification does not occur. To carry out the progr of scientific philosophy in a realistic way, we must be able to speak of the support given by inconclusive evidence, either in providing epistemological justification for scientific knowledge, or in characterizing the meanings of many of the terms of our scientific language. This calls for an understanding of probability, or as Carnap preferred to call it, degree of confirmation. We must distinguish between two senses of probability: what he called probability1, corresponding to credibility, and probability2, corresponding to the frequency or empirical conception of probability defended by Reichenbach and von Mises. ‘Degree of confirmation’ was to be the formal concept corresponding to credibility. The first book on this subject, written from the se point of view as the works on semantics, was The Logical Foundations of Probability (1950). The goal was a logical definition of ‘c(h,e)’: the degree of confirmation of a hypothesis h, relative to a body of evidence e, or the degree of rational belief that one whose total evidence was e should commit to h. Of course we must first settle on a formal language in which to express the hypothesis and the evidence; for this Carnap chooses a first-order language based on a finite number of one-place predicates, and a countable number of individual constants. Against this background, we perform the following reductions: ‘c(h,e)’ represents a conditional probability; thus it can be represented as the ratio of the absolute probabilCarlyle, Thomas Carnap, Rudolf 118 -   118 ity of h & e to the absolute probability of e. Absolute probabilities are represented by the value of a measure function m, defined for sentences of the language. The problem is to define m. But every sentence in Carnap’s languages is equivalent to a disjunction of state descriptions; the measure to be assigned to it must, according to the probability calculus, be the sum of the measures assigned to its constituent state descriptions. Now the problem is to define m for state descriptions. (Recall that state descriptions were part of the machinery Carnap developed earlier.) The function c† is a confirmation function based on the assignment of equal measures to each state description. It is inadequate, because if h is not entailed by e, c†(h,e) % m†(h), the a priori measure assigned to h. We cannot “learn from experience.” A measure that does not have that drawback is m*, which is based on the assignment of equal measures to each structure description. A structure description is a set of state descriptions; two state descriptions belong to the se structure description just in case one can be obtained from the other by a permutation of individual constants. Within the structure description, equal values are assigned to each state description. In the next book, The Continuum of Inductive Methods, Carnap takes the rate at which we learn from experience to be a fundental pareter of his assignments of probability. Like measures on state descriptions, the values of the probability of the singular predictive inference determine all other probabilities. The “singular predictive inference” is the inference from the observation that individual 1 has one set of properties, individual 2 has another set of properties, etc., to the conclusion: individual j will have property k. Finally, in the last works (Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability, vols. I [1971] and II [1980], edited with Richard Jeffrey) Carnap offered two long articles constituting his Basic System of Inductive Logic. This system is built around a language having filies of attributes (e.g., color or sound) that can be captured by predicates. The basic structure is still monadic, and the logic still lacks identity, but there are more pareters. There is a pareter l that reflects the “rate of learning from experience”; a pareter h that reflects an inductive relation between values of attributes belonging to filies. With the introduction of arbitrary pareters, Carnap was edging toward a subjective or personalistic view of probability. How far he was willing to go down the subjectivist garden path is open to question; that he discovered more to be relevant to inductive logic than the “language” of science seems clear. Carnap’s work on probability measures on formal languages is destined to live for a long time. So too is his work on formal semantics. He was a staunch advocate of the fruitfulness of formal studies in philosophy, of being clear and explicit, and of offering concrete exples. Beyond the particular philosophical doctrines he advocated, these commitments characterize his contribution to philosophy. 

CONFIRMATION, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, PROBABILITY, VIENNA CIRCLE. H.E.K. Carneades.ACADEMY. Carroll, Lewis, pen ne of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98), English writer and mathematician. The eldest son of a large clerical fily, he was educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his uneventful life, as mathematical lecturer (until 1881) and curator of the senior commonroom. His mathematical writings (under his own ne) are more numerous than important. He was, however, the only Oxonian of his day to contribute to symbolic logic, and is remembered for his syllogistic diagrs, for his methods for constructing and solving elaborate sorites problems, for his early interest in logical paradoxes, and for the many using exples that continue to reappear in modern textbooks. Fe descended upon him almost by accident, as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking Glass (1872), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), and Sylvie and Bruno (1889– 93); saving the last, the only children’s books to bring no blush of embarrassment to an adult reader’s cheek. Dodgson took deacon’s orders in 1861, and though pastorally inactive, was in many ways an archetype of the prim Victorian clergyman. His religious opinions were carefully thought out, but not of great philosophic interest. The Oxford movement passed him by; he worried about sin (though rejecting the doctrine of eternal punishment), abhorred profanity, and fussed over Sunday observance, but was oddly tolerant of theatergoing, a lifelong habit of his own. Apart from the sentimental messages later inserted in them, the Alice books and Snark are blessedly devoid of religious or moral concern. Full of rudeness, aggression, and quarrelsome, if fallacious, argument, they have, on the other hand, a natural attraction for philosophers, who pillage Carneades Carroll, Lewis 119 -   119 them freely for illustrations. Humpty-Dumpty, the various Kings and Queens, the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Unicorn, the Tweedle brothers, the Bellman, the Baker, and the Snark make fleeting appearances in the s of Russell, Moore, Broad, Quine, Nagel, Austin, Ayer, Ryle, Blanshard, and even Wittgenstein (an unlikely admirer of the Mock Turtle). The first such allusion (to the March Hare) is in Venn’s Symbolic Logic (1881). The usual reasons for quotation are to make some point about meaning, stipulative definition, the logic of negation, time reversal, dre consciousness, the reification of fictions and nonentities, or the absurdities that arise from taking “ordinary language” too literally. (For exponents of word processing, the effect of running Jabberwocky through a spell-checker is to extinguish all hope for the future of Artificial Intelligence.) Though himself no philosopher, Carroll’s unique sense of philosophic humor keeps him (and his illustrator, Sir John Tenniel) effortlessly alive in the modern age. Alice has been translated into seventy-five languages; new editions and critical studies appear every year; imitations, parodies, cartoons, quotations, and ephemera proliferate beyond number; and Carroll societies flourish in several countries, notably Britain and the United States. P.He. Cartesian circle.DESCARTES. Cartesian demon.DESCARTES. Cartesian dualism.DUALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. Cartesian interactionism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. Cartesianism.DESCARTES. Cartesian product.SET THEORY. Carvaka, Indian materialism. Its varieties share the view that the mind is simply the body and its capacities, but differ as to whether every mental property is simply a physical property under some psychological description (reductive materialism) or there are emergent irreducibly mental properties that are caused by physical properties and themselves have no causal impact (epiphenomenalism). Some Carvaka epistemologists, at least according to their critics, accept only perception as a reliable source of knowledge, but in its most sophisticated form Carvaka, not unlike logical positivism, allows inference at least to conclusions that concern perceptually accessible states of affairs.  HINDUISM. K.E.Y. Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945), German philosopher and intellectual historian. He was born in the German city of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) and educated at various German universities. He completed his studies in 1899 at Marburg under Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. Cassirer lectured at the University of Berlin from 1906 to 1919, then accepted a professorship at the newly founded University of Hburg. With the rise of Nazism he left Germany in 1933, going first to a visiting appointment at All Souls College, Oxford (1933– 35) and then to a professorship at the University of Göteborg, Sweden (1935–41). In 1941 he went to the United States; he taught first at Yale (1941–44) and then at Columbia (1944–45). Cassirer’s works may be divided into those in the history of philosophy and culture and those that present his own systematic thought. The former include major editions of Leibniz and Kant; his four-volume study The Problem of Knowledge (vols. 1–3, 1906–20; vol. 4, 1950), which traces the subject from Nicholas of Cusa to the twentieth century; and individual works on Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Goethe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and English Platonism. The latter include his multivolume The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), which presents a philosophy of human culture based on types of symbolism found in myth, language, and mathematical science; and individual works concerned with problems in such fields as logic, psychology, aesthetics, linguistics, and concept formation in the humanities. Two of his best-known works are An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (1946). Cassirer did not consider his systematic philosophy and his historical studies as separate endeavors; each grounded the other. Because of his involvement with the Marburg School, his philosophical position is frequently but mistakenly typed as neo-Kantian. Kant is an important influence on him, but so are Hegel, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe, Leibniz, and Vico. Cassirer derives his principal philosophical concept, symbolic form, most directly from Heinrich Hertz’s conception of notation in mechanics and the conception of the symbol in art of the Hegelian aesthetician, Friedrich Theodor Vischer. In a wider sense his conception of symbolic form is a transformation of “idea” and “form” within the whole tradition of philoCartesian circle Cassirer, Ernst 120 -   120 sophical idealism. Cassirer’s conception of symbolic form is not based on a distinction between the symbolic and the literal. In his view all human knowledge depends on the power to form experience through some type of symbolism. The forms of human knowledge are coextensive with forms of human culture. Those he most often analyzes are myth and religion, art, language, history, and science. These forms of symbolism constitute a total system of human knowledge and culture that is the subject matter of philosophy. Cassirer’s influence is most evident in the aesthetics of Susanne Langer (1895–1985), but his conception of the symbol has entered into theoretical anthropology, psychology, structural linguistics, literary criticism, myth theory, aesthetics, and phenomenology. His studies of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment still stand as groundbreaking works in intellectual history.  HEGEL, LEIBNIZ, NEO-KANTIANISM, VICO. D.P.V. Castañeda, Hector-Neri (1924–91), erican analytical philosopher. Heavily influenced by his own critical reaction to Quine, Chisholm, and his teacher Wilfrid Sellars, Castañeda published four books and more than 175 essays. His work combines originality, rigor, and penetration, together with an unusual comprehensiveness – his network of theory and criticism reaches into nearly every area of philosophy, including action theory; deontic logic and practical reason; ethics; history of philosophy; metaphysics and ontology; philosophical methodology; philosophy of language, mind, and perception; and the theory of knowledge. His principal contributions are to metaphysics and ontology, indexical reference, and deontic logic and practical reasoning. In metaphysics and ontology, Castañeda’s chief work is guise theory, first articulated in a 1974 essay, a complex and global account of language, mind, ontology, and predication. By holding that ordinary concrete individuals, properties, and propositions all break down or separate into their various aspects or guises, he theorizes that thinking and reference are directed toward the latter. Each guise is a genuine item in the ontological inventory, having properties internally and externally. In addition, guises are related by standing in various seness relations, only one of which is the filiar relation of strict identity. Since every guise enjoys bona fide ontological standing, whereas only some of these actually exist, Castañeda’s ontology and semantics are Meinongian. With its intricate account of predication, guise theory affords a unified treatment of a wide range of philosophical problems concerning reference to nonexistents, negative existentials, intentional identity, referential opacity, and other matters. Castañeda also played a pivotal role in emphasizing the significance of indexical reference. If, e.g., Paul assertively utters ‘I prefer Chardonnay’, it would obviously be incorrect for Bob to report ‘Paul says that I prefer Chardonnay’, since the last statement expresses (Bob’s) speaker’s reference, not Paul’s. At the se time, Castañeda contends, it is likewise incorrect for Bob to report Paul’s saying as either ‘Paul says that Paul prefers Chardonnay’ or ‘Paul says that Al’s luncheon guest prefers Chardonnay’ (when Paul is Al’s only luncheon guest), since each of these fail to represent the essentially indexical element of Paul’s assertion. Instead, Bob may correctly report ‘Paul says that he himself prefers Chardonnay’, where ‘he himself’ is a quasi-indicator, serving to depict Paul’s reference to himself qua self. For Castañeda (and others), quasi-indicators are a person’s irreducible, essential means for describing the thoughts and experiences of others. A complete account of his view of indexicals, together with a full articulation of guise theory and his unorthodox theories of definite descriptions and proper nes, is contained in Thinking, Language, and Experience (1989). Castañeda’s main views on practical reason and deontic logic turn on his fundental practition–proposition distinction. A number of valuable essays on these views, together with his important replies, are collected in Jes E. Tomberlin, ed., Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World (1983), and Tomberlin, ed., Hector-Neri Castañeda (1986). The latter also includes Castañeda’s revealing intellectual autobiography.  DEONTIC LOGIC, GUISE THEORY, MEINONG, PRACTICAL REASONING, PRACTITION, QUASI-INDICATOR. J.E.T. casuistry, the case-analysis approach to the interpretation of general moral rules. Casuistry starts with paradigm cases of how and when a given general moral rule should be applied, and then reasons by analogy to cases in which the proper application of the rule is less obvious – e.g., a case in which lying is the only way for a priest not to betray a secret revealed in confession. The point of considering the series of cases is to ascertain the morally relevant similarities and differences between cases. Casuistry’s heyday was the first half of the seventeenth century. Reacting against Castañeda, Hector-Neri casuistry 121 -   121 casuistry’s popularity with the Jesuits and against its tendency to qualify general moral rules, Pascal penned a polemic against casuistry from which the term never recovered (see his Provincial Letters, 1656). But the kind of reasoning to which the term refers is flourishing in contemporary practical ethics. B.W.H. categorematic.SYNCATEGOREMATA. categorematica.SYNCATEGOREMATA. categorical grmar.GRMAR. categorical imperative.KANT. categorical-in-power.CATEGORICAL THEORY. categorical proposition.SYLLOGISM. categorical theory, a theory all of whose models are isomorphic. Because of its weak expressive power, in first-order logic with identity only theories with a finite model can be categorical; without identity no theories are categorical. A more interesting property, therefore, is being categorical in power: a theory is categorical in power a when the theory has, up to isomorphism, only one model with a domain of cardinality a. Categoricity in power shows the capacity to characterize a structure completely, only limited by cardinality. For exple, the first-order theory of dense order without endpoints is categorical in power w the cardinality of the natural numbers. The first-order theory of simple discrete orderings with initial element, the ordering of the natural numbers, is not categorical in power w. There are countable discrete orders, not isomorphic to the natural numbers, that are elementary equivalent to it, i.e., have the se elementary, first-order theory. In first-order logic categorical theories are complete. This is not necessarily true for extensions of first-order logic for which no completeness theorem holds. In such a logic a set of axioms may be categorical without providing an informative characterization of the theory of its unique model. The term ‘elementary equivalence’ was introduced around 1936 by Tarski for the property of being indistinguishable by elementary means. According to Oswald Veblen, who first used the term ‘categorical’ in 1904, in a discussion of the foundations of geometry, that term was suggested to him by the erican pragmatist John Dewey.  COMPLETENESS, MODEL THEORY. Z.G.S. categoricity, the semantic property belonging to a set of sentences, a “postulate set,” that implicitly defines (completely describes, or characterizes up to isomorphism) the structure of its intended interpretation or standard model. The best-known categorical set of sentences is the postulate set for number theory attributed to Peano, which completely characterizes the structure of an arithmetic progression. This structure is exemplified by the system of natural numbers with zero as distinguished element and successor (addition of one) as distinguished function. Other exemplifications of this structure are obtained by taking as distinguished element an arbitrary integer, taking as distinguished function the process of adding an arbitrary positive or negative integer and taking as universe of discourse (or domain) the result of repeated application of the distinguished function to the distinguished element. (See, e.g., Russell’s Introduction to the Mathematical Philosophy, 1918.) More precisely, a postulate set is defined to be categorical if every two of its models (satisfying interpretations or realizations) are isomorphic (to each other), where, of course, two interpretations are isomorphic if between their respective universes of discourse there exists a one-to-one correspondence by which the distinguished elements, functions, relations, etc., of the one are mapped exactly onto those of the other. The importance of the analytic geometry of Descartes involves the fact that the system of points of a geometrical line with the “left-of relation” distinguished is isomorphic to the system of real numbers with the “less-than” relation distinguished. Categoricity, the ideal limit of success for the axiomatic method considered as a method for characterizing subject matter rather than for reorganizing a science, is known to be impossible with respect to certain subject matters using certain formal languages. The concept of categoricity can be traced back at least as far as Dedekind; the word is due to Dewey.  AXIOMATIC METHOD, LÖWENHEIMSKOLEM THEOREM, MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS, MODEL THEORY. J.COR. categories, table of.KANT. categories of the understanding.KANT. category, an ultimate class. Categories are the highest genera of entities in the world. They may contain species but are not themselves species of any higher genera. Aristotle, the first philosopher categorematic category 122 -   122 to discuss categories systematically, listed ten, including substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, and time. If a set of categories is complete, then each entity in the world will belong to a category and no entity will belong to more than one category. A prominent exple of a set of categories is Descartes’s dualistic classification of mind and matter. This exple brings out clearly another feature of categories: an attribute that can belong to entities in one category cannot be an attribute of entities in any other category. Thus, entities in the category of matter have extension and color while no entity in the category of mind can have extension or color.  ARISTOTLE, GENUS GENERALISSIMUM, RYLE. J.W.M. category mistake, the placing of an entity in the wrong category. In one of Ryle’s exples, to place the activity of exhibiting te spirit in the se class with the activities of pitching, batting, and catching is to make a category mistake; exhibiting te spirit is not a special function like pitching or batting but instead a way those special functions are performed. A second use of ‘category mistake’ is to refer to the attribution to an entity of a property which that entity cannot have (not merely does not happen to have), as in ‘This memory is violet’ or, to use an exple from Carnap, ‘Caesar is a prime number’. These two kinds of category mistake may seem different, but both involve misunderstandings of the natures of the things being talked about. It is thought that they go beyond simple error or ordinary mistakes, as when one attributes a property to a thing which that thing could have but does not have, since category mistakes involve attributions of properties (e.g., being a special function) to things (e.g., te spirit) that those things cannot have. According to Ryle, the test for category differences depends on whether replacement of one expression for another in the se sentence results in a type of unintelligibility that he calls “absurdity.”  RYLE. J.W.M. category-preserving.LOGICAL FORM. category theory, a mathematical theory that studies the universal properties of structures via their relationships with one another. A category C consists of two collections Obc and Morc , the objects and the morphisms of C, satisfying the following conditions: (i) for each pair (a, b) of objects there is associated a collection Morc (a, b) of morphisms such that each member of Morc belongs to one of these collections; (ii) for each object a of Obc , there is a morphism ida , called the identity on a; (iii) a composition law associating with each morphism f: a P b and each morphism g: b P c a morphism gf:a P c, called the composite of f and g; (iv) for morphisms f: a P b, g: b P c, and h: c P d, the equation h(gf) % (hg)f holds; (v) for any morphism f: a P b, we have idbf % f and fida % f. Sets with specific structures together with a collection of mappings preserving these structures are categories. Exples: (1) sets with functions between them; (2) groups with group homomorphisms; (3) topological spaces with continuous functions; (4) sets with surjections instead of arbitrary maps constitute a different category. But a category need not be composed of sets and set-theoretical maps. Exples: (5) a collection of propositions linked by the relation of logical entailment is a category and so is any preordered set; (6) a monoid taken as the unique object and its elements as the morphisms is a category. The properties of an object of a category are determined by the morphisms that are coming out of and going in this object. Objects with a universal property occupy a key position. Thus, a terminal object a is characterized by the following universal property: for any object b there is a unique morphism from b to a. A singleton set is a terminal object in the category of sets. The Cartesian product of sets, the product of groups, and the conjunction of propositions are all terminal objects in appropriate categories. Thus category theory unifies concepts and sheds a new light on the notion of universality.  PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. J.-P.M. causal chain.CAUSATION. causal closure.DAVIDSON. causal decision theory.DECISION THEORY. causal dependence.DEPENDENCE. causal determinism.DETERMINISM. causal-historical theory of reference.PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. causal immediacy.IMMEDIACY. causal law, a statement describing a regular and invariant connection between types of events or states, where the connections involved are causal in some sense. When one speaks of causal laws as distinguished from laws that are not 123 category mistake causal law -   123 causal, the intended distinction may vary. Sometimes, a law is said to be causal if it relates events or states occurring at successive times, also called a law of succession: e.g., ‘Ingestion of strychnine leads to death.’ A causal law in this sense contrasts with a law of coexistence, which connects events or states occurring at the se time (e.g., the Wiedemann-Franz law relating thermal and electric conductivity in metals). One important kind of causal law is the deterministic law. Causal laws of this kind state exceptionless connections between events, while probabilistic or statistical laws specify probability relationships between events. For any system governed by a set of deterministic laws, given the state of a system at a time, as characterized by a set of state variables, these laws will yield a unique state of the system for any later time (or, perhaps, at any time, earlier or later). Probabilistic laws will yield, for a given antecedent state of a system, only a probability value for the occurrence of a certain state at a later time. The laws of classical mechanics are often thought to be paradigmatic exples of causal laws in this sense, whereas the laws of quantum mechanics are claimed to be essentially probabilistic. Causal laws are sometimes taken to be laws that explicitly specify certain events as causes of certain other events. Simple laws of this kind will have the form ‘Events of kind F cause events of kind G’; e.g., ‘Heating causes metals to expand’. A weaker related concept is this: a causal law is one that states a regularity between events which in fact are related as cause to effect, although the statement of the law itself does not say so (laws of motion expressed by differential equations are perhaps causal laws in this sense). These senses of ‘causal law’ presuppose a prior concept of causation. Finally, causal laws may be contrasted with teleological laws, laws that supposedly describe how certain systems, in particular biological organisms, behave so as to achieve certain “goals” or “end states.” Such laws are sometimes claimed to embody the idea that a future state that does not as yet exist can exert an influence on the present behavior of a system. Just what form such laws take and exactly how they differ from ordinary laws have not been made wholly clear, however.  CAUSATION, DETERMINISM, LAWLIKE GENERALIZATION. J.K. causal overdetermination.CAUSATION. causal relation, singular.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. causal responsibility.RESPONSIBILITY. causal statement, singular.CAUSATION. causal theory of knowledge.EPISTEMOLOGY, NATURALISTIC EPISTEMOLOGY. causal theory of mental content.SKEPTICISM. causal theory of mind.FUNCTIONALISM. causal theory of perception.PERCEPTION. causal theory of proper nes, the view that proper nes designate what they ne by virtue of a kind of causal connection to it. This view is a special case, and in some instances an unwarranted interpretation, of a direct reference view of nes. On this approach, proper nes, e.g., ‘Machiavelli’, are, as J. S. Mill wrote, “purely denotative. . . . they denote the individuals who are called by them; but they do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals” (A System of Logic, 1879). Proper nes may suggest certain properties to many competent speakers, but any such associated information is no part of the definition of the ne. Nes, on this view, have no definitions. What connects a ne to what it nes is not the latter’s satisfying some condition specified in the ne’s definition. Nes, instead, are simply attached to things, applied as labels, as it were. A proper ne, once attached, becomes a socially available device for making the relevant ne bearer a subject of discourse. On the other leading view, the descriptivist view, a proper ne is associated with something like a definition. ‘Aristotle’, on this view, applies by definition to whoever satisfies the relevant properties – e.g., is ‘the teacher of Alexander the Great, who wrote the Nicomachean Ethics’. Russell, e.g., maintained that ordinary proper nes (which he contrasted with logically proper or genuine nes) have definitions, that they are abbreviated definite descriptions. Frege held that nes have sense, a view whose proper interpretation remains in dispute, but is often supposed to be closely related to Russell’s approach. Others, most notably Searle, have defended descendants of the descriptivist view. An important variant, sometimes attributed to Frege, denies that nes have articulable definitions, but nevertheless associates them with senses. And the bearer will still be, by definition (as it were), the unique thing to satisfy the relevant mode of presentation. causal overdetermination causal theory of proper nes 124 -   124 The direct reference approach is sometimes misleadingly called the causal theory of nes. But the key idea need have nothing to do with causation: a proper ne functions as a tag or label for its bearer, not as a surrogate for a descriptive expression. Whence the (allegedly) misleading term ‘causal theory of nes’? Contemporary defenders of Mill’s conception like Keith Donnellan and Kripke felt the need to expand upon Mill’s brief remarks. What connects a present use of a ne with a referent? Here Donnellan and Kripke introduce the notion of a “historical chains of communication.” As Kripke tells the story, a baby is baptized with a proper ne. The ne is used, first by those present at the baptism, subsequently by those who pick up the ne in conversation, reading, and so on. The ne is thus propagated, spread by usage “from link to link as if by a chain” (Ning and Necessity, 1980). There emerges a historical chain of uses of the ne that, according to Donnellan and Kripke, bridges the gap between a present use of the ne and the individual so ned. This “historical chain of communication” is occasionally referred to as a “casual chain of communication.” The idea is that one’s use of the ne can be thought of as a causal factor in one’s listener’s ability to use the ne to refer to the se individual. However, although Kripke in Ning and Necessity does occasionally refer to the chain of communication as causal, he more often simply speaks of the chain of communication, or of the fact that the ne has been passed “by tradition from link to link” (p. 106). The causal aspect is not one that Kripke underscores. In more recent writings on the topic, as well as in lectures, Kripke never mentions causation in this connection, and Donnellan questions whether the chain of communication should be thought of as a causal chain. This is not to suggest that there is no view properly called a “causal theory of nes.” There is such a view, but it is not the view of Kripke and Donnellan. The causal theory of nes is a view propounded by physicalistically minded philosophers who desire to “reduce” the notion of “reference” to something more physicalistically acceptable, such as the notion of a causal chain running from “baptism” to later use. This is a view whose motivation is explicitly rejected by Kripke, and should be sharply distinguished from the more popular anti-Fregean approach sketched above. 

MEANING, THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS. H.W. causal theory of reference.PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. causation, the relation between cause and effect, or the act of bringing about an effect, which may be an event, a state, or an object (say, a statue). The concept of causation has long been recognized as one of fundental philosophical importance. Hume called it “the cement of the universe”: causation is the relation that connects events and objects of this world in significant relationships. The concept of causation seems pervasively present in human discourse. It is expressed by not only ‘cause’ and its cognates but by many other terms, such as ‘produce’, ‘bring about’, ‘issue’, ‘generate’, ‘result’, ‘effect’, ‘determine’, and countless others. Moreover, many common transitive verbs (“causatives”), such as ‘kill’, ‘break’, and ‘move’, tacitly contain causal relations (e.g., killing involves causing to die). The concept of action, or doing, involves the idea that the agent (intentionally) causes a change in some object or other; similarly, the concept of perception involves the idea that the object perceived causes in the perceiver an appropriate perceptual experience. The physical concept of force, too, appears to involve causation as an essential ingredient: force is the causal agent of changes in motion. Further, causation is intimately related to explanation: to ask for an explanation of an event is, often, to ask for its cause. It is sometimes thought that our ability to make predictions, and inductive inference in general, depends on our knowledge of causal connections (or the assumption that such connections are present): the knowledge that water quenches thirst warrants the predictive inference from ‘X is swallowing water’ to ‘X’s thirst will be quenched’. More generally, the identification and systematic description of causal relations that hold in the natural world have been claimed to be the preeminent aim of science. Finally, causal concepts play a crucial role in moral and legal reasoning, e.g., in the assessment of responsibilities and liabilities. Event causation is the causation of one event by another. A sequence of causally connected events is called a causal chain. Agent causation refers to the act of an agent (person, object) in bringing about a change; thus, my opening the window (i.e., my causing the window to open) is an instance of agent causation. There is a controversy as to whether agent causation is reducible to event causation. My opening the window seems reducible to event causation since in reality a certain motion of my arms, an event, causal theory of reference causation 125 -   125 causes the window to open. Some philosophers, however, have claimed that not all cases of agent causation are so reducible. Substantival causation is the creation of a genuinely new substance, or object, rather than causing changes in preexisting substances, or merely rearranging them. The possibility of substantival causation, at least in the natural world, has been disputed by some philosophers. Event causation, however, has been the primary focus of philosophical discussion in the modern and contemporary period. The analysis of event causation has been controversial. The following four approaches have been prominent: the regularity analysis, the counterfactual analysis, the manipulation analysis, and the probabilistic analysis. The heart of the regularity (or nomological) analysis, associated with Hume and J. S. Mill, is the idea that causally connected events must instantiate a general regularity between like kinds of events. More precisely: if c is a cause of e, there must be types or kinds of events, F and G, such that c is of kind F, e is of kind G, and events of kind F are regularly followed by events of kind G. Some take the regularity involved to be merely de facto “constant conjunction” of the two event types involved; a more popular view is that the regularity must hold as a matter of “nomological necessity” – i.e., it must be a “law.” An even stronger view is that the regularity must represent a causal law. A law that does this job of subsuming causally connected events is called a “covering” or “subsumptive” law, and versions of the regularity analysis that call for such laws are often referred to as the “covering-law” or “nomic-subsumptive” model of causality. The regularity analysis appears to give a satisfactory account of some aspects of our causal concepts: for exple, causal claims are often tested by re-creating the event or situation claimed to be a cause and then observing whether a similar effect occurs. In other respects, however, the regularity account does not seem to fare so well: e.g., it has difficulty explaining the apparent fact that we can have knowledge of causal relations without knowledge of general laws. It seems possible to know, for instance, that someone’s contraction of the flu was caused by her exposure to a patient with the disease, although we know of no regularity between such exposures and contraction of the disease (it may well be that only a very small fraction of persons who have been exposed to flu patients contract the disease). Do I need to know general regularities about itchings and scratchings to know that the itchy sensation on my left elbow caused me to scratch it? Further, not all regularities seem to represent causal connections (e.g., Reid’s exple of the succession of day and night; two successive symptoms of a disease). Distinguishing causal from non-causal regularities is one of the main problems confronting the regularity theorist. According to the counterfactual analysis, what makes an event a cause of another is the fact that if the cause event had not occurred the effect event would not have. This accords with the idea that cause is a condition that is sine qua non for the occurrence of the effect. The view that a cause is a necessary condition for the effect is based on a similar idea. The precise form of the counterfactual account depends on how counterfactuals are understood (e.g., if counterfactuals are explained in terms of laws, the counterfactual analysis may turn into a form of the regularity analysis). The counterfactual approach, too, seems to encounter various difficulties. It is true that on the basis of the fact that if Larry had watered my plants, as he had promised, my plants would not have died, I could claim that Larry’s not watering my plants caused them to die. But it is also true that if George Bush had watered my plants, they would not have died; but does that license the claim that Bush’s not watering my plants caused them to die? Also, there appear to be many cases of dependencies expressed by counterfactuals that, however, are not cases of causal dependence: e.g., if Socrates had not died, Xanthippe would not have become a widow; if I had not raised my hand, I would not have signaled. The question, then, is whether these non-causal counterfactuals can be distinguished from causal counterfactuals without the use of causal concepts. There are also questions about how we could verify counterfactuals – in particular, whether our knowledge of causal counterfactuals is ultimately dependent on knowledge of causal laws and regularities. Some have attempted to explain causation in terms of action, and this is the manipulation analysis: the cause is an event or state that we can produce at will, or otherwise manipulate, to produce a certain other event as an effect. Thus, an event is a cause of another provided that by bringing about the first event we can bring about the second. This account exploits the close connection noted earlier between the concepts of action and cause, and highlights the important role that knowledge of causal connections plays in our control of natural events. However, as an analysis of the concept of cause, it may well have things backward: the concept of action seems to causation causation 126 -   126 be a richer and more complex concept that presupposes the concept of cause, and an analysis of cause in terms of action could be accused of circularity. The reason we think that someone’s exposure to a flu patient was the cause of her catching the disease, notwithstanding the absence of an appropriate regularity (even one of high probability), may be this: exposure to flu patients increases the probability of contracting the disease. Thus, an event, X, may be said to be a probabilistic cause of an event, Y, provided that the probability of the occurrence of Y, given that X has occurred, is greater than the antecedent probability of Y. To meet certain obvious difficulties, this rough definition must be further elaborated (e.g., to eliminate the possibility that X and Y are collateral effects of a common cause). There is also the question whether probabilistic causation is to be taken as an analysis of the general concept of causation, or as a special kind of causal relation, or perhaps only as evidence indicating the presence of a causal relationship. Probabilistic causation has of late been receiving increasing attention from philosophers. When an effect is brought about by two independent causes either of which alone would have sufficed, one speaks of causal overdetermination. Thus, a house fire might have been caused by both a short circuit and a simultaneous lightning strike; either event alone would have caused the fire, and the fire, therefore, was causally overdetermined. Whether there are actual instances of overdetermination has been questioned; one could argue that the fire that would have been caused by the short circuit alone would not have been the se fire, and similarly for the fire that would have been caused by the lightning alone. The steady buildup of pressure in a boiler would have caused it to explode but for the fact that a bomb was detonated seconds before, leading to a similar effect. In such a case, one speaks of preemptive, or superseding, cause. We are apt to speak of causes in regard to changes; however, “unchanges,” e.g., this table’s standing here through some period of time, can also have causes: the table continues to stand here because it is supported by a rigid floor. The presence of the floor, therefore, can be called a sustaining cause of the table’s continuing to stand. A cause is usually thought to precede its effect in time; however, some have argued that we must allow for the possibility of a cause that is temporally posterior to its effect – backward causation (sometimes called retrocausation). And there is no universal agreement as to whether a cause can be simultaneous with its effect – concurrent causation. Nor is there a general agreement as to whether cause and effect must, as a matter of conceptual necessity, be “contiguous” in time and space, either directly or through a causal chain of contiguous events – contiguous causation. The attempt to “analyze” causation seems to have reached an impasse; the proposals on hand seem so widely divergent that one wonders whether they are all analyses of one and the se concept. But each of them seems to address some important aspect of the variegated notion that we express by the term ‘cause’, and it may be doubted whether there is a unitary concept of causation that can be captured in an enlightening philosophical analysis. On the other hand, the centrality of the concept, both to ordinary practical discourse and to the scientific description of the world, is difficult to deny. This has encouraged some philosophers to view causation as a primitive, one that cannot be further analyzed. There are others who advocate the extreme view (causal nihilism) that causal concepts play no role whatever in the advanced sciences, such as fundental physical theories of space-time and matter, and that the very notion of cause is an anthropocentric projection deriving from our confused ideas of action and power.  AGENT CAUSATION, EXPLANATION, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. J.K. causation, backward.CAUSATION. causation, counterfactual analysis of.CAUSATION. causation, immanent.AGENT CAUSATION. causation, manipulation analysis of.CAUSATION. causation, probabilistic.CAUSATION. causation, regularity theory of.CAUSATION. causation, substance.AGENT CAUSATION. causation, transeunt.AGENT CAUSATION. causative verb.ACTION VERB. cause, efficient.ARISTOTLE. cause, final.ARISTOTLE. causation, backward cause, final 127 -   127 cause, formal.ARISTOTLE. cause, material.ARISTOTLE. cause, preemptive.CAUSATION. cause, superseding.CAUSATION. cause, sustaining.CAUSATION. causes, the four.ARISTOTLE. causa sui (Latin, ‘cause of itself’), an expression applied to God to mean in part that God owes his existence to nothing other than himself. It does not mean that God somehow brought himself into existence. The idea is that the very nature of God logically requires that he exists. What accounts for the existence of a being that is causa sui is its own nature.  PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. W.L.R. cave, allegory of the.PLATO. Cavell, Stanley Louis (b.1926), erican philosopher whose work has explored skepticism and its consequences. He was Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Value Theory at Harvard from 1963 until 1997. Central to Cavell’s thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by philosophical theory or dismissed as a mere misuse of ordinary language; it is a reflection of the fundental limits of human knowledge of the self, of others, and of the external world, limits that must be accepted – in his term “acknowledged” – because the refusal to do so results in illusion and risks tragedy. Cavell’s work defends J. L. Austin from both positivism and deconstructionism (Must We Mean What We Say?, 1969, and The Pitch of Philosophy, 1994), but not because Cavell is an “ordinary language” philosopher. Rather, his defense of Austin has combined with his response to skepticism to make him a philosopher of the ordinary: he explores the conditions of the possibility and limits of ordinary language, ordinary knowledge, ordinary action, and ordinary human relationships. He uses both the resources of ordinary language and the discourse of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Thoreau, and Emerson, and of the arts. Cavell has explored the ineliminability of skepticism in Must We Mean What We Say?, notably in its essay on King Lear, and has developed his analysis in his 1979 magnum opus, The Claim of Reason. He has exined the benefits of acknowledging the limits of human self-understanding, and the costs of refusing to do so, in a broad range of contexts from film (The World Viewed, 1971; Pursuits of Happiness, 1981; and Contesting Tears, 1996) to erican philosophy (The Senses of Walden, 1972; and the chapters on Emerson in This New Yet Unapproachable erica, 1989, and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 1990). A central argument in The Claim of Reason develops Cavell’s approach by looking at Wittgenstein’s notion of criteria. Criteria are not rules for the use of our words that can guarantee the correctness of the claims we make by them; rather, criteria bring out what we claim by using the words we do. More generally, in making claims to knowledge, undertaking actions, and forming interpersonal relationships, we always risk failure, but it is also precisely in that room for risk that we find the possibility of freedom. This argument is indebted not only to Wittgenstein but also to Kant, especially in the Critique of Judgment. Cavell has used his view as a key to understanding classics of the theater and film. Regarding such tragic figures as Lear, he argues that their tragedies result from their refusal to accept the limits of human knowledge and human love, and their insistence on an illusory absolute and pure love. The World Viewed argues for a realistic approach to film, meaning that we should acknowledge that our cognitive and emotional responses to films are responses to the realities of the human condition portrayed in them. This “ontology of film” prepared the way for Cavell’s treatment of the genre of comedies of remarriage in Pursuits of Happiness. It also grounds his treatment of melodra in Contesting Tears, which argues that human beings must remain tragically unknown to each other if the limits to our knowledge of each other are not acknowledged. In The Claim of Reason and later works Cavell has also contributed to moral philosophy by his defense – against Rawls’s critique of “moral perfectionism” – of “Emersonian perfectionism”: the view that no general principles of conduct, no matter how well established, can ever be employed in practice without the ongoing but never completed perfection of knowledge of oneself and of the others on and with whom one acts. Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionism is thus another application of his Wittgensteinian and Kantian recognition that rules must always be supplemented by the capacity for judgment.  AUSTIN, J. L.; EMERSON; KANT; cause, formal Cavell, Stanley Louis 128 -   128 ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY; WITTGENSTEIN. P.Gu. Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673), English author of some dozen works in a variety of forms. Her central philosophical interest was the developments in natural science of her day. Her earliest works endorsed a kind of atomism, but her settled view, in Philosophical Letters (1664), Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), was a kind of organic materialism. Cavendish argues for a hierarchy of increasingly fine matter, capable of self-motion. Philosophical Letters, ong other matters, raises problems for the notion of inert matter found in Descartes, and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy criticizes microscopists such as Hooke for committing a double error, first of preferring the distortions introduced by instruments to unaided vision and second of preferring sense to reason.  ORGANISM. M.At. cellular automaton.SELF-REPRODUCING AUTOMATON. Celsus(late second century A.D.?), anti-Christian writer known only as the author of a work called The True Doctrine (Alethes Logos), which is quoted extensively by Origen of Alexandria in his response, Against Celsus(written in the late 240s). The True Doctrine is mainly important because it is the first anti-Christian polemic of which we have significant knowledge. Origen considers Celsus to be an Epicurean, but he is uncertain about this. There are no traces of Epicureanism in Origen’s quotations from Celsus, which indicate instead that he is an eclectic Middle Platonist of no great originality, a polytheist whose conception of the “unneable” first deity transcending being and knowable only by “synthesis, analysis, or analogy” is based on Plato’s description of the Good in Republic VI. In accordance with the Timaeus, Celsus believes that God created “immortal things” and turned the creation of “mortal things” over to them. According to him, the universe has a providential organization in which humans hold no special place, and its history is one of eternally repeating sequences of events separated by catastrophes.  MIDDLE PLATONISM, ORIGEN. I.M. central state materialism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. certainty, the property of being certain, which is either a psychological property of persons or an epistemic feature of proposition-like objects (e.g., beliefs, utterances, statements). We can say that a person, S, is psychologically certain that p (where ‘p’ stands for a proposition) provided S has no doubt whatsoever that p is true. Thus, a person can be certain regardless of the degree of epistemic warrant for a proposition. In general, philosophers have not found this an interesting property to explore. The exception is Peter Unger, who argued for skepticism, claiming that (1) psychological certainty is required for knowledge and (2) no person is ever certain of anything or hardly anything. As applied to propositions, ‘certain’ has no univocal use. For exple, some authors (e.g., Chisholm) may hold that a proposition is epistemically certain provided no proposition is more warranted than it. Given that account, it is possible that a proposition is certain, yet there are legitimate reasons for doubting it just as long as there are equally good grounds for doubting every equally warranted proposition. Other philosophers have adopted a Cartesian account of certainty in which a proposition is epistemically certain provided it is warranted and there are no legitimate grounds whatsoever for doubting it. Both Chisholm’s and the Cartesian characterizations of epistemic certainty can be employed to provide a basis for skepticism. If knowledge entails certainty, then it can be argued that very little, if anything, is known. For, the argument continues, only tautologies or propositions like ‘I exist’ or ‘I have beliefs’ are such that either nothing is more warranted or there are absolutely no grounds for doubt. Thus, hardly anything is known. Most philosophers have responded either by denying that ‘certainty’ is an absolute term, i.e., admitting of no degrees, or by denying that knowledge requires certainty (Dewey, Chisholm, Wittgenstein, and Lehrer). Others have agreed that knowledge does entail absolute certainty, but have argued that absolute certainty is possible (e.g., Moore). Sometimes ‘certain’ is modified by other expressions, as in ‘morally certain’ or ‘metaphysically certain’ or ‘logically certain’. Once again, there is no universally accepted account of these terms. Typically, however, they are used to indicate degrees of warrant for a proposition, and often that degree of warrant is taken to be a function of the type of proposition under consideration. For exple, the proposition that smoking causes cancer is morally certain provided its warrant is sufficient to justify acting as though it were true. The evidence for such a proposition may, of necessity, depend upon recognizing particular features of the world. On the other hand, in Cavendish, Margaret certainty 129 -   129 order for a proposition, say that every event has a cause, to be metaphysically certain, the evidence for it must not depend upon recognizing particular features of the world but rather upon recognizing what must be true in order for our world to be the kind of world it is – i.e., one having causal connections. Finally, a proposition, say that every effect has a cause, may be logically certain if it is derivable from “truths of logic” that do not depend in any way upon recognizing anything about our world. Since other taxonomies for these terms are employed by philosophers, it is crucial to exine the use of the terms in their contexts.  EPISTEMOLOGY, JUSTIFICATION, SKEPTICISM. P.D.K. ceteris paribus clause.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. CH.Appendix of Special Symbols. chance.DETERMINISM. change.EVENT, TIME. change, Cbridge.CBRIDGE CHANGE. Chang Hsüeh-ch’eng (1738–1801), Chinese historian and philosopher who devised a dialectical theory of civilization in which beliefs, practices, institutions, and arts developed in response to natural necessities. This process reached its zenith several centuries before Confucius, who is unique in being the sage destined to record this moment. Chang’s teaching, “the Six Classics are all history,” means the classics are not theoretical statements about the tao (Way) but traces of it in operation. In the ideal age, a unity of chih (government) and chiao (teaching) prevailed; there were no private disciplines or schools of learning and all writing was anonymous, being tied to some official function. Later history has meandered around this ideal, dominated by successive ages of philosophy, philology, and literature. P.J.I. Chang Tsai (1020–1077), Chinese philosopher, a major Neo-Confucian figure whose Hsi-ming (“Western Inscription”) provided much of the metaphysical basis for Neo-Confucian ethics. It argues that the cosmos arose from a single source, the t’ai chi (Supreme Ultimate), as undifferentiated ch’i (ether) took shape out of an inchoate, primordial state, t’ai-hsü (the supremely tenuous). Thus the universe is fundentally one. The sage “realizes his oneness with the universe” but, appreciating his particular place and role in the greater scheme, expresses his love for it in a graded fashion. Impure endowments of ch’i prevent most people from seeing the true nature of the world. They act “selfishly” but through ritual practice and learning can overcome this and achieve sagehood. P.J.I. chaos theory.

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. chaotic system.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. character, the comprehensive set of ethical and intellectual dispositions of a person. Intellectual virtues – like carefulness in the evaluation of evidence – promote, for one, the practice of seeking truth. Moral or ethical virtues – including traits like courage and generosity – dispose persons not only to choices and actions but also to attitudes and emotions. Such dispositions are generally considered relatively stable and responsive to reasons. Appraisal of character transcends direct evaluation of particular actions in favor of exination of some set of virtues or the admirable human life as a whole. On some views this admirable life grounds the goodness of particular actions. This suggests seeking guidance from role models, and their practices, rather than relying exclusively on rules. Role models will, at times, simply perceive the salient features of a situation and act accordingly. Being guided by role models requires some recognition of just who should be a role model. One may act out of character, since dispositions do not automatically produce particular actions in specific cases. One may also have a conflicted character if the virtues one’s character comprises contain internal tensions (between, say, tendencies to impartiality and to friendship). The importance of formative education to the building of character introduces some good fortune into the acquisition of character. One can have a good character with a disagreeable personality or have a fine personality with a bad character because personality is not typically a normative notion, whereas character is.  CARDINAL VIRTUES, ETHICS, PERSONAL IDENTITY, EPISTEMOLOGY, VIRTUE ETHICS. M.J.M. character, semantic.INDEXICAL. characteristica universalis.COMPUTER THEORY, LEIBNIZ. ceteris paribus clause characteristica universalis 130 -   130 charity, principle of.MEANING. Charron, Pierre (1541–1603), French Catholic theologian who bece the principal expositor of Montaigne’s ideas, presenting them in didactic form. His first work, The Three Truths (1595), presented a negative argument for Catholicism by offering a skeptical challenge to atheism, nonChristian religions, and Calvinism. He argued that we cannot know or understand God because of His infinitude and the weakness of our faculties. We can have no good reasons for rejecting Christianity or Catholicism. Therefore, we should accept it on faith alone. His second work, On Wisdom (1603), is a systematic presentation of Pyrrhonian skepticism coupled with a fideistic defense of Catholicism. The skepticism of Montaigne and the Greek skeptics is used to show that we cannot know anything unless God reveals it to us. This is followed by offering an ethics to live by, an undogmatic version of Stoicism. This is the first modern presentation of a morality apart from any religious considerations. Charron’s On Wisdom was extremely popular in France and England. It was read and used by many philosophers and theologians during the seventeenth century. Some claimed that his skepticism opened his defense of Catholicism to question, and suggested that he was insincere in his fideism. He was defended by important figures in the French Catholic church.  MONTAIGNE. R.H.P. cheapest-cost avoider, in the economic analysis of law, the party in a dispute that could have prevented the dispute, or minimized the losses arising from it, with the lowest loss to itself. The term encompasses several types of behavior. As the lowest-cost accident avoider, it is the party that could have prevented the accident at the lowest cost. As the lowest-cost insurer, it is the party that could been have insured against the losses arising from the dispute. This could be the party that could have purchased insurance at the lowest cost or self-insured, or the party best able to appraise the expected losses and the probability of the occurrence. As the lowest-cost briber, it is the party least subject to transaction costs. This party is the one best able to correct any legal errors in the assignment of the entitlement by purchasing the entitlement from the other party. As the lowest-cost information gatherer, it is the party best able to make an informed judgment as to the likely benefits and costs of an action.  COASE THEOREM, PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS. M.S.M. Ch’en Hsien-chang (1428–1500), Chinese poetphilosopher. In the early Ming dynasty Chu Hsi’s li-hsüeh (learning of principles) had been firmly established as the orthodoxy and bece somewhat fossilized. Ch’en opposed this trend and emphasized “self-attained learning” by digging deep into the self to find meaning in life. He did not care for book learning and conceptualization, and chose to express his ideas and feelings through poems. Primarily a Confucian, he also drew from Buddhism and Taoism. He was credited with being the first to realize the depth and subtlety of hsin-hsüeh (learning of the mind), later developed into a comprehensive philosophy by Wang Yang-ming.  CHU HSI, NEO-CONFUCIANISM, WANG YANG-MING. S.-h.L. ch’eng, Chinese term meaning ‘sincerity’. It means much more than just a psychological attitude. Mencius barely touched upon the subject; it was in the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean that the idea was greatly elaborated. The ultimate metaphysical principle is characterized by ch’eng, as it is true, real, totally beyond illusion and delusion. According to the classic, sincerity is the Way of Heaven; to think how to be sincere is the Way of man; and only those who can be absolutely sincere can fully develop their nature, after which they can assist in the transforming and nourishing process of Heaven and Earth. 

MENCIUS. S.-H.L. Ch’eng Hao (1032–85), Ch’eng Yi (1033–1107), Chinese philosophers, brothers who established mature Neo-Confucianism. They elevated the notion of li (pattern) to preeminence and systematically linked their metaphysics to central ethical notions, e.g. hsing (nature) and hsin (heart/mind). Ch’eng Hao was more mystical and a stronger intuitionist. He emphasized a universal, creative spirit of life, jen (benevolence), which permeates all things, just as ch’i (ether/vital force) permeates one’s body, and likened an “unfeeling” (i.e., unbenevolent) person to an “unfeeling” (i.e., paralyzed) person. Both fail to realize a unifying “oneness.” Ch’eng Yi presented a more detailed and developed philosophical system in which the li (pattern) in the mind was awakened by perceiving the li in the world, particularly as revealed in the classics, and by t’ui (extending/inferring) their interconnections. If one studies with ching (reverential attentiveness), one can gain both cognitively accurate and affectively appropriate charity, principle of Ch’eng Hao, Ch’eng Yi 131 -   131 “real knowledge,” which Ch’eng Yi illustrates with an allegory about those who “know” (i.e., have heard that) tigers are dangerous and those who “know” because they have been mauled. The two brothers differ most in their views on self-cultivation. For Ch’eng Hao, it is more an inner affair: setting oneself right by bringing into full play one’s moral intuition. For Ch’eng Yi, self-cultivation was more external: chih chih (extending knowledge) through ko wu (investigating things). Here lie the beginnings of the major schools of Neo-Confucianism: the Lu–Wang and Ch’eng–Chu schools.  LI1, NEO-CONFUCIANISM. P.J.I. cheng ming, also called Rectification of Nes, a Confucian progr of language reform advocating a return to traditional language. There is a brief reference to cheng ming in Analects 13:3, but Hsün Tzu presents the most detailed discussion of it. While admitting that new words (ming) will sometimes have to be created, Hsün Tzu fears the proliferation of words, dialects, and idiolects will endanger effective communication. He is also concerned that new ways of speaking may lend themselves to sophistry or fail to serve such purposes as accurately distinguishing the noble from the base.  CONFUCIANISM. B.W.V.N. Cheng-shih hsüan-hsüeh.NEO-TAOISM. ch’i, Chinese term for ether, air, corporeal vital energy, and the “atmosphere” of a season, person, event, or work. Ch’i can be dense/impure or limpid/pure, warm/rising/active or cool/settling/still. The brave brim with ch’i; a coward lacks it. Ch’i rises with excitement or health and sinks with depression or illness. Ch’i bece a concept coordinate with li (pattern), being the medium in which li is embedded and through which it can be experienced. Ch’i serves a role akin to ‘matter’ in Western thought, but being “lively” and “flowing,” it generated a distinct and different set of questions. P.J.I. Chiao Hung (1540?–1620), Chinese historian and philosopher affiliated with the T’ai-chou school, often referred to as the left wing of Wang Yang-ming’s hsin-hsüeh (learning of the mind). However, he did not repudiate book learning; he was very erudite, and bece a forerunner of evidential research. He believed in the unity of the teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. In opposition to Chu Hsi’s orthodoxy he made use of insights of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism to give new interpretations to the classics. Learning for him is primarily and ultimately a process of realization in consciousness of one’s innate moral nature.  BUDDHISM, CHU HSI, NEO-CONFUCIANISM, WANG YANG-MING. S.-h.L. & A.K.L.C. Chia Yi (200–168 B.C.), Chinese scholar who attempted to synthesize Legalist, Confucian, and Taoist ideas. The Ch’in dynasty (221–206 B.C.) used the Legalist practice to unify China, but unlimited use of cruel punishment also caused its quick downfall; hence the Confucian system of li (propriety) had to be established, and the emperor had to delegate his power to able ministers to take care of the welfare of the people. The ultimate Way for Chia Yi is hsü (emptiness), a Taoist idea, but he interpreted it in such a way that it is totally compatible with the practice of li and the development of culture.  CONFUCIANISM, TAOISM. S.-h.L. ch’ien, k’un, in traditional Chinese cosmology, the nes of the two most important trigrs in the system of I-Ching (the Book of Changes). Ch’ien (S) is composed of three undivided lines, the symbol of yang, and k’un (S S) three divided lines, the symbol of yin. Ch’ien means Heaven, the father, creativity; k’un means Earth, the mother, endurance. The two are complementary; they work together to form the whole cosmic order. In the system of I-Ching, there are eight trigrs, the doubling up of two trigrs forms a hexagr, and there are a total of sixtyfour hexagrs. The first two hexagrs are also ned ch’ien (S S) and k’un (S S S S).  T’AICHI. S.-h.L. chien ai.MOHISM. Ch’ien-fu Lun, Chinese title of Comments of a Recluse (second century A.D.), a Confucian political and cosmological work by Wang Fu. Divided into thirty-six essays, it gives a vivid picture of the sociopolitical world of later Han China and prescribes practical measures to overcome corruption and other problems confronting the state. There are discussions on cosmology affirming the belief that the world is constituted by vital energy (ch’i). The pivotal role of human beings in shaping the world is emphasized. A person may be favorably endowed, but education remains crucial. Several essays address the perceived excesses in religious practices. Above all, the author targets for criticism the system of official appointment that privileges fily backcheng ming Ch’ien-fu Lun 132 -   132 ground and reputation at the expense of moral worth and ability. Largely Confucian in outlook, the work reflects strong utilitarian interest reminiscent of Hsün Tzu.  CH’I, CONFUCIANISM. A.K.L.C. Ch’ien Mu (1895–1990), Chinese historian, a leading contemporary New Confucian scholar and cofounder (with T’ang Chün-i) of New Asia College in Hong Kong (1949). Early in his career he was respected for his effort to date the ancient Chinese philosophers and for his study of Confucian thought in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220). During World War II he wrote the Outline of Chinese History, in which he developed a nationalist historical viewpoint stressing the vitality of traditional Chinese culture. Late in his career he published his monumental study of Chu Hsi (1130–1200). He firmly believed the spirit of Confucius and Chu Hsi should be revived today.  CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, CHU HSI, T’ANG CHÜN-I. S.-h.L. chih1, Chinese term roughly corresponding to ‘knowledge’. A concise explanation is found in the Hsün Tzu: “That in man by which he knows is called chih; the chih that accords with actuality is called wisdom (chih).” This definition suggests a distinction between intelligence or the ability to know and its achievement or wisdom, often indicated by its homophone. The later Mohists provide more technical definitions, stressing especially the connection between nes and objects. Confucians for the most part are interested in the ethical significance of chih. Thus chih, in the Analects of Confucius, is often used as a verb in the sense ‘to realize’, conveying understanding and appreciation of ethical learning, in addition to the use of chih in the sense of acquiring information. And one of the basic problems in Confucian ethics pertains to chih-hsing ho-i (the unity of knowledge and action).  CONFUCIANISM, MOHISM. A.S.C. chih2, Chinese term often translated as ‘will’. It refers to general goals in life as well as to more specific aims and intentions. Chih is supposed to pertain to the heart/mind (hsin) and to be something that can be set up and attained. It is sometimes compared in Chinese philosophical texts to aiming in archery, and is explained by some commentators as “directions of the heart/mind.” Confucians emphasize the need to set up the proper chih to guide one’s behavior and way of life generally, while Taoists advocate letting oneself respond spontaneously to situations one is confronted with, free from direction by chih.  CONFUCIANISM. K.-l.S. chih-hsing ho-i, Chinese term for the Confucian doctrine, propounded by Wang Yang-ming, of the unity of knowledge and action. The doctrine is sometimes expressed in terms of the unity of moral learning and action. A recent interpretation focuses on the non-contingent connection between prospective and retrospective moral knowledge or achievement. Noteworthy is the role of desire, intention, will, and motive in the mediation of knowledge and action as informed by practical reasonableness in reflection that responds to changing circumstances. Wang’s doctrine is best construed as an attempt to articulate the concrete significance of jen, the NeoConfucian ideal of the universe as a moral community. A.S.C. Chillington, Richard.KILVINGTON. Chinese Legalism, the collective views of the Chinese “school of laws” theorists, so called in recognition of the importance given to strict application of laws in the work of Shang Yang (390–338 B.C.) and his most prominent successor, Han Fei Tzu (d. 223 B.C.). The Legalists were political realists who believed that success in the context of Warring States China (403–221 B.C.) depended on organizing the state into a military cp, and that failure meant nothing less than political extinction. Although they challenged the viability of the Confucian model of ritually constituted community with their call to law and order, they sidestepped the need to dispute the ritual-versus-law positions by claiming that different periods had different problems, and different problems required new and innovative solutions. Shang Yang believed that the fundental and complementary occupations of the state, agriculture and warfare, could be prosecuted most successfully by insisting on adherence to clearly articulated laws and by enforcing strict punishments for even minor violations. There was an assumed antagonism between the interests of the individual and the interests of the state. By manipulating rewards and punishments and controlling the “handles of life and death,” the ruler could subjugate his people and bring them into compliance with the national purpose. Law would replace morality and function as the exclusive standard of good. Fastidious application of the law, with severe punishments for infractions, was believed to be a policy that Ch’ien Mu Chinese Legalism 133 -   133 would arrest criminality and quickly make punishment unnecessary. Given that the law served the state as an objective and impartial standard, the goal was to minimize any reliance upon subjective interpretation. The Legalists thus conceived of the machinery of state as operating automatically on the basis of self-regulating and self-perpetuating “systems.” They advocated techniques of statecraft (shu) such as “accountability” (hsing-ming), the demand for absolute congruency between stipulated duties and actual performance in office, and “doing nothing” (wu-wei), the ruler residing beyond the laws of the state to reformulate them when necessary, but to resist reinterpreting them to accommodate particular cases. Han Fei Tzu, the last and most influential spokesperson of Legalism, adapted the military precept of strategic advantage (shih) to the rule of government. The ruler, without the prestige and influence of his position, was most often a rather ordinary person. He had a choice: he could rely on his personal attributes and pit his character against the collective strength of his people, or he could tap the collective strength of the empire by using his position and his exclusive power over life and death as a fulcrum to ensure that his will was carried out. What was strategic advantage in warfare bece political purchase in the government of the state. Only the ruler with the astuteness and the resolve to hoard and maximize all of the advantages available to him could guarantee continuation in power. Han Fei believed that the closer one was to the seat of power, the greater threat one posed to the ruler. Hence, all nobler virtues and sentiments – benevolence, trust, honor, mercy – were repudiated as means for conspiring ministers and would-be usurpers to undermine the absolute authority of the throne. Survival was dependent upon total and unflagging distrust.  FA, HAN FEI TZU, SHANG YANG. R.P.P. & R.T.A. Chinese philosophy, philosophy produced in China from the sixth century B.C. to the present. Traditional Chinese philosophy. Its history may be divided into six periods: (1) Pre-Ch’in, before 221 B.C. Spring and Autumn, 722–481 B.C. Warring States, 403–222 B.C. (2) Han, 206 B.C.–A.D. 220 Western (Former) Han, 206 B.C.–A.D. 8 Hsin, A.D. 9–23 Eastern (Later) Han, A.D. 25–220 (3) Wei-Chin, 220–420 Wei, 220–65 Western Chin, 265–317 Eastern Chin, 317–420 (4) Sui-Tang, 581–907 Sui, 581–618 Tang, 618–907 Five Dynasties, 907–60 (5) Sung-(Yüan)-Ming, 960–1644 Northern Sung, 960–1126 Southern Sung, 1127–1279 Yuan (Mongol), 1271–1368 Ming, 1368–1644 (6) Ch’ing (Manchu), 1644–1912 In the late Chou dynasty (1111–249 B.C.), before Ch’in (221–206 B.C.) unified the country, China entered the so-called Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period, and Chou culture was in decline. The so-called hundred schools of thought were contending with one another; ong them six were philosophically significant: (a) Ju-chia (Confucianism), represented by Confucius (551–479 B.C.), Mencius (371– 289 B.C.?), and Hsün Tzu (fl. 298–238 B.C.) (b) Tao-chia (Taoism), represented by Lao Tzu (sixth or fourth century B.C.) and Chuang Tzu (between 399 and 295 B.C.) (c) Mo-chia (Mohism), represented by Mo Tzu (fl. 479–438 B.C.) (d) Ming-chia (Logicians), represented by Hui Shih (380–305 B.C.), Kung-sun Lung (b.380 B.C.?) (e) Yin-yang-chia (Yin–yang school), represented by Tsou Yen (305–240 B.C.?) (f) Fa-chia (Legalism), represented by Han Fei (d. 233 B.C.) Thus, China enjoyed her first golden period of philosophy in the Pre-Ch’in period. As most Chinese philosophies were giving responses to existential problems then, it is no wonder Chinese philosophy had a predominantly practical character. It has never developed the purely theoretical attitude characteristic of Greek philosophy. During the Han dynasty, in 136 B.C., Confucianism was established as the state ideology. But it was blended with ideas of Taoism, Legalism, and the Yin–yang school. An organic view of the universe was developed; creative thinking was replaced by study of the so-called Five Classics: Book of Poetry, Book of History, Book of Changes, Book of Rites, and Spring and Autumn Annals. As the First Emperor of Ch’in burned the Classics except Chinese philosophy Chinese philosophy 134 -   134 for the I-Ching, in the early Han scholars were asked to write down the texts they had memorized in modern script. Later some texts in ancient script were discovered, but were rejected as spurious by modern-script supporters. Hence there were constant disputes between the modern-script school and the ancient-script school. Wei-Chin scholars were fed up with studies of the Classics in trivial detail. They also showed a tendency to step over the bounds of rites. Their interest turned to something more metaphysical; the Lao Tzu, the Chuang Tzu, and the I-Ching were their favorite readings. Especially influential were Hsiang Hsiu’s (fl. A.D. 250) and Kuo Hsiang’s (d. A.D. 312) Commentaries on the Chuang Tzu, and Wang Pi’s (226–49) Commentaries on the Lao Tzu and I-Ching. Although Wang’s perspective was predominantly Taoist, he was the first to brush aside the hsiang-shu (forms and numbers) approach to the study of the I-Ching and concentrate on i-li (meanings and principles) alone. Sung philosophers continued the i-li approach, but they reinterpreted the Classics from a Confucian perspective. Although Buddhism was imported into China in the late Han period, it took several hundred years for the Chinese to absorb Buddhist insights and ways of thinking. First the Chinese had to rely on ko-i (matching the concepts) by using Taoist ideas to transmit Buddhist messages. After the Chinese learned a great deal from Buddhism by translating Buddhist texts into Chinese, they attempted to develop the Chinese versions of Buddhism in the Sui–Tang period. On the whole they favored Mahayana over Hinayana (Theravada) Buddhism, and they developed a much more life-affirming attitude through Hua-yen and T’ien-tai Buddhism, which they believed to represent Buddha’s mature thought. Ch’an went even further, seeking sudden enlightenment instead of scripture studies. Ch’an, exported to Japan, has become Zen, a better-known term in the West. In response to the Buddhist challenge, the Neo-Confucian thinkers gave a totally new interpretation of Confucian philosophy by going back to insights implicit in Confucius’s so-called Four Books: the Analects, the Mencius, The Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean (the latter two were chapters taken from the Book of Rites). They were also fascinated by the I-Ching. They borrowed ideas from Buddhism and Taoism to develop a new Confucian cosmology and moral metaphysics. Sung–Ming Neo-Confucianism brought Chinese philosophy to a new height; some consider the period the Chinese Renaissance. The movement started with Chou Tun-i (1017–73), but the real founders of Neo-Confucianism were the Ch’eng brothers: Ch’eng Hao (1032–85) and Ch’eng Yi (1033–1107). Then ce Chu Hsi (1130–1200), a great synthesizer often compared with Thomas Aquinas or Kant in the West, who further developed Ch’eng Yi’s ideas into a systematic philosophy and originated the so-called Ch’eng–Chu school. But he was opposed by his younger contemporary Lu Hsiang-shan (1139–93). During the Ming dynasty, Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529) reacted against Chu Hsi by reviving the insight of Lu Hsiang-shan, hence the so-called Lu–Wang school. During the Ch’ing dynasty, under the rule of the Manchus, scholars turned to historical scholarship and showed little interest in philosophical speculation. In the late Ch’ing, K’ang Yu-wei (1858–1927) revived the modern-script school, pushed for radical reform, but failed miserably in his attempt. Contemporary Chinese philosophy. Three important trends can be discerned, intertwined with one another: the importation of Western philosophy, the dominance of Marxism on Mainland China, and the development of contemporary New Confucian philosophy. During the early twentieth century China awoke to the fact that traditional Chinese culture could not provide all the means for China to enter into the modern era in competition with the Western powers. Hence the first urgent task was to learn from the West. Almost all philosophical movements had their exponents, but they were soon totally eclipsed by Marxism, which was established as the official ideology in China after the Communist takeover in 1949. Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976) succeeded in the line of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. The Communist regime was intolerant of all opposing views. The Cultural Revolution was launched in 1967, and for a whole decade China closed her doors to the outside world. Almost all the intellectuals inside or outside of the Communist party were purged or suppressed. After the Cultural Revolution was over, universities were reopened in 1978. From 1979 to 1989, intellectuals enjoyed unprecedented freedom. One editorial in People’s Daily News said that Marx’s ideas were the product of the nineteenth century and did not provide all the answers for problems at the present time, and hence it was desirable to develop Marxism further. Such a message was interpreted by scholars in different ways. Although the thoughts set forth by scholChinese philosophy Chinese philosophy 135 -   135 ars lacked depth, the lively atmosphere could be compared to the May Fourth New Culture Movement in 1919. Unfortunately, however, violent suppression of demonstrators in Peking’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 put a stop to all this. Control of ideology bece much stricter for the time being, although the doors to the outside world were not completely closed. As for the Nationalist government, which had fled to Taiwan in 1949, the control of ideology under its jurisdiction was never total on the island; liberalism has been strong ong the intellectuals. Analytic philosophy, existentialism, and hermeneutics all have their followers; today even radicalism has its attraction for certain young scholars. Even though mainstre Chinese thought in the twentieth century has condemned the Chinese tradition altogether, that tradition has never completely died out. In fact the most creative talents were found in the contemporary New Confucian movement, which sought to bring about a synthesis between East and West. ong those who stayed on the mainland, Fung Yu-lan (1895–1990) and Ho Lin (1902–92) changed their earlier views after the Communist takeover, but Liang Sou-ming (1893–1988) and Hsiung Shih-li (1885–1968) kept some of their beliefs. Ch’ien Mu (1895–1990) and Tang Chün-i (1909–78) moved to Hong Kong and Thomé H. Fang (1899–1976), Hsü Fu-kuan (1903–82), and Mou Tsung-san (1909–95) moved to Taiwan, where they exerted profound influence on younger scholars. Today contemporary New Confucianism is still a vital intellectual movement in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas; it is even studied in Mainland China. The New Confucians urge a revival of the traditional spirit of jen (humanity) and sheng (creativity); at the se time they turn to the West, arguing for the incorporation of modern science and democracy into Chinese culture. The New Confucian philosophical movement in the narrower sense derived inspiration from Hsiung Shih-li. ong his disciples the most original thinker is Mou Tsung-san, who has developed his own system of philosophy. He maintains that the three major Chinese traditions – Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist – agree in asserting that humans have the endowment for intellectual intuition, meaning personal participation in tao (the Way). But the so-called third generation has a much broader scope; it includes scholars with varied backgrounds such as Yu Ying-shih (b. 1930), Liu Shu-hsien (b. 1934), and Tu Wei-ming (b.1940), whose ideas have impact on intellectuals at large and whose selected writings have recently been allowed to be published on the mainland. The future of Chinese philosophy will still depend on the interactions of imported Western thought, Chinese Marxism, and New Confucianism.  BUDDHISM, CHU HSI, CONFUCIANISM, HSIUNG SHIH-LI, NEO-CONFUCIANISM, TAOISM, WANG YANG-MING. S.-h.L. Chinese room argument.SEARLE. ching, Chinese term meaning ‘reverence’, ‘seriousness’, ‘attentiveness’, ‘composure’. In early texts, ching is the appropriate attitude toward spirits, one’s parents, and the ruler; it was originally interchangeable with another term, kung (respect). ong Neo-Confucians, these terms are distinguished: ching reserved for the inner state of mind and kung for its outer manifestations. This distinction was part of the Neo-Confucian response to the quietistic goal of meditative calm advocated by many Taoists and Buddhists. Neo-Confucians sought to maintain an imperturbable state of “reverential attentiveness” not only in meditation but throughout all activity. This sense of ching is best understood as a Neo-Confucian appropriation of the Ch’an (Zen) ideal of yi-hsing san-mei (universal sadhi), prominent in texts such as the Platform Sutra. P.J.I. ch’ing, Chinese term meaning (1) ‘essence’, ‘essential’; (2) ‘emotion’, ‘passions’. Originally, the ch’ing of x was the properties without which x would cease to be the kind of thing that it is. In this sense it contrasts with the nature (hsing) of x: the properties x has if it is a flourishing instance of its kind. By the time of Hsün Tzu, though, ch’ing comes to refer to human emotions or passions. A list of “the six emotions” (liu ch’ing) soon bece fairly standard: fondness (hao), dislike (wu), delight (hsi), anger (nu), sadness (ai), and joy (le). B.W.V.N. Chisholm, Roderick Milton (1916–99), influential erican philosopher whose publications spanned the field, including ethics and the history of philosophy. He is mainly known as an epistemologist, metaphysician, and philosopher of mind. In early opposition to powerful forms of reductionism, such as phenomenalism, extensionalism, and physicalism, Chisholm developed an original philosophy of his own. Educated at Brown and Harvard (Ph.D., 1942), he spent nearly his entire career at Brown. Chinese room argument Chisholm, Roderick Milton 136 -   136 He is known chiefly for the following contributions. (a) Together with his teacher and later his colleague at Brown, C. J. Ducasse, he developed and long defended an adverbial account of sensory experience, set against the sense-datum act-object account then dominant. (b) Based on deeply probing analysis of the free will problematic, he defended a libertarian position, again in opposition to the compatibilism long orthodox in analytic circles. His libertarianism had, moreover, an unusual account of agency, based on distinguishing transeunt (event) causation from immanent (agent) causation. (c) In opposition to the celebrated linguistic turn of linguistic philosophy, he defended the primacy of intentionality, a defense made fous not only through important papers, but also through his extensive and eventually published correspondence with Wilfrid Sellars. (d) Quick to recognize the importance and distinctiveness of the de se, he welcomed it as a basis for much de re thought. (e) His realist ontology is developed through an intentional concept of “entailment,” used to define key concepts of his system, and to provide criteria of identity for occupants of fundental categories. (f) In epistemology, he fously defended forms of foundationalism and internalism, and offered a delicately argued (dis)solution of the ancient problem of the criterion. The principles of Chisholm’s epistemology and metaphysics are not laid down antecedently as hard-and-fast axioms. Lacking any inviolable antecedent privilege, they must pass muster in the light of their consequences and by comparison with whatever else we may find plausible. In this regard he sharply contrasts with such epistemologists as Popper, with the skepticism of justification attendant on his deductivism, and Quine, whose stranded naturalism drives so much of his radical epistemology and metaphysics. By contrast, Chisholm has no antecedently set epistemic or metaphysical principles. His philosophical views develop rather dialectically, with sensitivity to whatever considerations, exples, or counterexples reflection may reveal as relevant. This makes for a demanding complexity of elaboration, relieved, however, by a powerful drive for ontological and conceptual economy.  EPISTEMOLOGY, FOUNDATIONALISM, FREE WILL PROBLEM, KNOWLEDGE DE SE, PROBLEM OF THE CRITERION, SKEPTICISM. E.S. chit.SAT/CHIT/ANANDA. choice, axiom of.LÖWENHEIM-SKOLEM THEOREM, SET THEORY. choice sequence, a variety of infinite sequence introduced by L. E. J. Brouwer to express the non-classical properties of the continuum (the set of real numbers) within intuitionism. A choice sequence is determined by a finite initial segment together with a “rule” for continuing the sequence. The rule, however, may allow some freedom in choosing each subsequent element. Thus the sequence might start with the rational numbers 0 and then ½, and the rule might require the n ! 1st element to be some rational number within (½)n of the nth choice, without any further restriction. The sequence of rationals thus generated must converge to a real number, r. But r’s definition leaves open its exact location in the continuum. Speaking intuitionistically, r violates the classical law of trichotomy: given any pair of real numbers (e.g., r and ½), the first is either less than, equal to, or greater than the second. From the 1940s Brouwer got this non-classical effect without appealing to the apparently nonmathematical notion of free choice. Instead he used sequences generated by the activity of an idealized mathematician (the creating subject), together with propositions that he took to be undecided. Given such a proposition, P – e.g. Fermat’s last theorem (that for n ( 2 there is no general method of finding triplets of numbers with the property that the sum of each of the first two raised to the nth power is equal to the result of raising the third to the nth power) or Goldbach’s conjecture (that every even number is the sum of two prime numbers) – we can modify the definition of r: The n ! 1st element is ½ if at the nth stage of research P remains undecided. That element and all its successors are ½ ! (½)n if by that stage P is proved; they are ½ † (½)n if P is refuted. Since he held that there is an endless supply of such propositions, Brouwer believed that we can always use this method to refute classical laws. In the early 1960s Stephen Kleene and Richard Vesley reproduced some main parts of Brouwer’s theory of the continuum in a formal system based on Kleene’s earlier recursion-theoretic interpretation of intuitionism and of choice sequences. At about the se time – but in a different and occasionally incompatible vein – Saul Kripke formally captured the power of Brouwer’s counterexples without recourse to recursive functions and without invoking either the creating subject or the notion of free choice. chit choice sequence 137 -   137 Subsequently Georg Kreisel, A. N. Troelstra, Dirk Van Dalen, and others produced formal systems that analyze Brouwer’s basic assumptions about open-futured objects like choice sequences.  MATHEMATICAL INTUITIONISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. C.J.P. Chomsky, No (b.1928), preeminent erican linguist, philosopher, and political activist who has spent his professional career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky’s best-known scientific achievement is the establishment of a rigorous and philosophically compelling foundation for the scientific study of the grmar of natural language. With the use of tools from the study of formal languages, he gave a far more precise and explanatory account of natural language grmar than had previously been given (Syntactic Structures, 1957). He has since developed a number of highly influential freworks for the study of natural language grmar (e.g., Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965; Lectures on Government and Binding, 1981; The Minimalist Progr, 1995). Though there are significant differences in detail, there are also common themes that underlie these approaches. Perhaps the most central is that there is an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans, and the purpose of linguistic inquiry is to describe the initial state of the language learner, and account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms. On Chomsky’s conception of linguistics, languages are structures in the brains of individual speakers, described at a certain level of abstraction within the theory. These structures occur within the language faculty, a hypothesized module of the human brain. Universal Grmar is the set of principles hard-wired into the language faculty that determine the class of possible human languages. This conception of linguistics involves several influential and controversial theses. First, the hypothesis of a Universal Grmar entails the existence of innate linguistic principles. Secondly, the hypothesis of a language faculty entails that our linguistic abilities, at least so far as grmar is concerned, are not a product of general reasoning processes. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, since having one of these structures is an intrinsic property of a speaker, properties of languages so conceived are determined solely by states of the speaker. On this individualistic conception of language, there is no room in scientific linguistics for the social entities determined by linguistic communities that are languages according to previous anthropological conceptions of the discipline. Many of Chomsky’s most significant contributions to philosophy, such as his influential rejection of behaviorism (“Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language, 1959), stem from his elaborations and defenses of the above consequences (cf. also Cartesian Linguistics, 1966; Reflections on Language, 1975; Rules and Representations, 1980; Knowledge of Language, 1986). Chomsky’s philosophical writings are characterized by an adherence to methodological naturalism, the view that the mind should be studied like any other natural phenomenon. In recent years, he has also argued that reference, in the sense in which it is used in the philosophy of language, plays no role in a scientific theory of language (“Language and Nature,” Mind, 1995). 

FORMAL LEARNABILITY THEORY, GRMAR, MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, PSYCHOLINGUISTICS. J.Sta. Chomsky hierarchy of languages.PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. chora.KRISTEVA. Chou Tun-yi (1017–73), Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher. His most important work, the T’aichi t’u-shuo (“Explanations of the Diagr of the Supreme Ultimate”), consists of a chart, depicting the constituents, structure, and evolutionary process of the cosmos, along with an explanatory commentary. This work, together with his T’ungshu (“Penetrating the I-Ching“), introduced many of the fundental ideas of Neo-Confucian metaphysics. Consequently, heated debates arose concerning Chou’s diagr, some claiming it described the universe as arising out of wu (non-being) and thus was inspired by and supported Taoism. Chou’s primary interest was always cosmological; he never systematically related his metaphysics to ethical concerns.  T’AI-CHI. P.J.I. Chrysippus.STOICISM. Chrysorrhoas.JOHN OF DASCUS. ch’üan, Chinese term for a key Confucian concept that may be rendered as meaning ‘weighing of circumstances’, ‘exigency’, or ‘moral discretion’. A metaphorical extension of the basic sense of a steelyard for measuring weight, ch’üan essentially pertains to assessment of the imporChomsky, No ch’üan 138 -   138 tance of moral considerations to a current matter of concern. Alternatively, the exercise of ch’üan consists in a judgment of the comparative importance of competing options answering to a current problematic situation. The judgment must accord with li (principle, reason), i.e., be a principled or reasoned judgment. In the sense of exigency, ch’üan is a hard case, i.e., one falling outside the normal scope of the operation of standards of conduct. In the sense of ‘moral discretion’, ch’üan must conform to the requirement of i (rightness).  CONFUCIANISM. A.S.C. Chuang Tzu, also called Chuang Chou (4th century B.C.), Chinese Taoist philosopher. According to many scholars, ideas in the inner chapters (chapters 1 to 7) of the text Chuang Tzu may be ascribed to the person Chuang Tzu, while the other chapters contain ideas related to his thought and later developments of his ideas. The inner chapters contain dialogues, stories, verses, sayings, and brief essays geared toward inducing an altered perspective on life. A realization that there is no neutral ground for adjudicating between opposing judgments made from different perspectives is supposed to lead to a relaxation of the importance one attaches to such judgments and to such distinctions as those between right and wrong, life and death, and self and others. The way of life advocated is subject to different interpretations. Parts of the text seem to advocate a way of life not radically different from the conventional one, though with a lessened emotional involvement. Other parts seem to advocate a more radical change; one is supposed to react spontaneously to situations one is confronted with, with no preconceived goals or preconceptions of what is right or proper, and to view all occurrences, including changes in oneself, as part of the transformation process of the natural order.  TAOISM. K.-l.S. Chu Hsi (1130–1200), Neo-Confucian scholar of the Sung dynasty (960–1279), commonly regarded as the greatest Chinese philosopher after Confucius and Mencius. His mentor was Ch’eng Yi (1033–1107), hence the so-called Ch’eng–Chu School. Chu Hsi developed Ch’eng Yi’s ideas into a comprehensive metaphysics of li (principle) and ch’i (material force). Li is incorporeal, one, eternal, and unchanging, always good; ch’i is physical, many, transitory, and changeable, involving both good and evil. They are not to be mixed or separated. Things are composed of both li and ch’i. Chu identifies hsing (human nature) as li, ch’ing (feelings and emotions) as ch’i, and hsin (mind/heart) as ch’i of the subtlest kind, comprising principles. He interprets ko-wu in the Great Learning to mean the investigation of principles inherent in things, and chih-chih to mean the extension of knowledge. He was opposed by Lu Hsiang-shan (1139– 93) and Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), who argued that mind is principle. Mou Tsung-san thinks that Lu’s and Wang’s position was closer to Mencius’s philosophy, which was honored as orthodoxy. But Ch’eng and Chu’s commentaries on the Four Books were used as the basis for civil service exinations from 1313 until the system was abolished in 1905.  CH’IEN MU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, CONFUCIUS, FUNG YULAN, MENCIUS, WANG YANG-MING. S.-h.L. chung, shu, Chinese philosophical terms important in Confucianism, meaning ‘loyalty’ or ‘commitment’, and ‘consideration’ or ‘reciprocity’, respectively. In the Analects, Confucius observes that there is one thread running through his way of life, and a disciple describes the one thread as constituted by chung and shu. Shu is explained in the text as not doing to another what one would not have wished done to oneself, but chung is not explicitly explained. Scholars interpret chung variously as a commitment to having one’s behavior guided by shu, as a commitment to observing the norms of li (rites) (to be supplemented by shu, which humanizes and adds a flexibility to the observance of such norms), or as a strictness in observing one’s duties toward superiors or equals (to be supplemented by shu, which involves considerateness toward inferiors or equals, thereby humanizing and adding a flexibility to the application of rules governing one’s treatment of them). The pair of terms continued to be used by later Confucians to refer to supplementary aspects of the ethical ideal or self-cultivation process; e.g., some used chung to refer to a full manifestation of one’s originally good heart/mind (hsin), and shu to refer to the extension of that heart/mind to others.  CONFUCIANISM. K.-l.S. Chung-yung, a portion of the Chinese Confucian classic Book of Rites. The standard English title of the Chung-yung (composed in the third or second century B.C.) is The Doctrine of the Mean, but Centrality and Commonality is more accurate. Although frequently treated as an independent classic from quite early in its history, it did not Chuang Tzu Chung-yung 139 -   139 receive canonical status until Chu Hsi made it one of the Four Books. The text is a collection of aphorisms and short essays unified by common themes. Portions of the text outline a virtue ethic, stressing flexible response to changing contexts, and identifying human flourishing with complete development of the capacities present in one’s nature (hsing), which is given by Heaven (t’ien). As is typical of Confucianism, virtue in the fily parallels political virtue.  CH’ENG, TA-HSÜEH. B.W.V.N. chün-tzu, Chinese term meaning ‘gentleman’, ‘superior man’, ‘noble person’, or ‘exemplary individual’. Chün-tzu is Confucius’s practically attainable ideal of ethical excellence. A chün-tzu, unlike a sheng (sage), is one who exemplifies in his life and conduct a concern for jen (humanity), li (propriety), and i (rightness/righteousness). Jen pertains to affectionate regard to the well-being of one’s fellows in the community; li to ritual propriety conformable to traditional rules of proper behavior; and i to one’s sense of rightness, especially in dealing with changing circumstances. A chün-tzu is marked by a catholic and neutral attitude toward preconceived moral opinions and established moral practices, a concern with harmony of words and deeds. These salient features enable the chün-tzu to cope with novel and exigent circumstances, while at the se time heeding the importance of moral tradition as a guide to conduct. A.S.C. Church, Alonzo (1903–95), erican logician, mathematician, and philosopher, known in pure logic for his discovery and application of the Church lbda operator, one of the central ideas of the Church lbda calculus, and for his rigorous formalizations of the theory of types, a higher-order underlying logic originally formulated in a flawed form by Whitehead and Russell. The lbda operator enables direct, unbiguous, symbolic representation of a range of philosophically and mathematically important expressions previously representable only biguously or after elaborate paraphrasing. In philosophy, Church advocated rigorous analytic methods based on symbolic logic. His philosophy was characterized by his own version of logicism, the view that mathematics is reducible to logic, and by his unhesitating acceptance of higherorder logics. Higher-order logics, including second-order, are ontologically rich systems that involve quantification of higher-order variables, variables that range over properties, relations, and so on. Higher-order logics were routinely used in foundational work by Frege, Peano, Hilbert, Gödel, Tarski, and others until around World War II, when they suddenly lost favor. In regard to both his logicism and his acceptance of higher-order logics, Church countered trends, increasingly dominant in the third quarter of the twentieth century, against reduction of mathematics to logic and against the so-called “ontological excesses” of higher-order logic. In the 1970s, although admired for his high standards of rigor and for his achievements, Church was regarded as conservative or perhaps even reactionary. Opinions have softened in recent years. On the computational and epistemological sides of logic Church made two major contributions. He was the first to articulate the now widely accepted principle known as Church’s thesis, that every effectively calculable arithmetic function is recursive. At first highly controversial, this principle connects intuitive, epistemic, extrinsic, and operational aspects of arithmetic with its formal, ontic, intrinsic, and abstract aspects. Church’s thesis sets a purely arithmetic outer limit on what is computationally achievable. Church’s further work on Hilbert’s “decision problem” led to the discovery and proof of Church’s theorem – basically that there is no computational procedure for determining, of a finite-premised first-order argument, whether it is valid or invalid. This result contrasts sharply with the previously known result that the computational truth-table method suffices to determine the validity of a finite-premised truthfunctional argument. Church’s thesis at once highlights the vast difference between propositional logic and first-order logic and sets an outer limit on what is achievable by “automated reasoning.” Church’s mathematical and philosophical writings are influenced by Frege, especially by Frege’s semantic distinction between sense and reference, his emphasis on purely syntactical treatment of proof, and his doctrine that sentences denote (are nes of) their truth-values. 

CHURCH’S THESIS, COMPUTABILITY, FORMALIZATION, HILBERT, HILBERT’S PROGR, LOGICISM, RECURSIVE FUNCTION THEORY, SECOND-ORDER LOGIC, TRUTH TABLE, TYPE THEORY. J.Cor. church fathers.PATRISTIC AUTHORS. Churchland, Patricia Smith (b.1943), Canadianborn erican philosopher and advocate of neurophilosophy. She received her B.Phil. from Oxford in 1969 and held positions at the Unichün-tzu Churchland, Patricia Smith 140 -   140 versity of Manitoba and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, settling at the UniversityofCalifornia,SanDiego, with appointments in philosophy and the Institute for Neural Computation. Skeptical of philosophy’s a priori specification of mental categories and dissatisfied with computational psychology’s purely top-down approach to their function, Churchland began studying the brain at the University of Manitoba medical school. The result was a unique merger of science and philosophy, a “neurophilosophy” that challenged the prevailing methodology of mind. Thus, in a series of articles that includes “Fodor on Language Learning” (1978) and “A Perspective on Mind-Brain Research” (1980), she outlines a new neurobiologically based paradigm. It subsumes simple non-linguistic structures and organisms, since the brain is an evolved organ; but it preserves functionalism, since a cognitive system’s mental states are explained via high-level neurofunctional theories. It is a strategy of cooperation between psychology and neuroscience, a “co-evolutionary” process eloquently described in Neurophilosophy (1986) with the prediction that genuine cognitive phenomena will be reduced, some as conceptualized within the commonsense frework, others as transformed through the sciences. The se intellectual confluence is displayed through Churchland’s various collaborations: with psychologist and computational neurobiologist Terrence Sejnowski in The Computational Brain (1992); with neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas in The Mind-Brain Continuum (1996); and with philosopher and husband Paul Churchland in On the Contrary (1998) (she and Paul Churchland are jointly appraised in R. McCauley, The Churchlands and Their Critics, 1996). From the viewpoint of neurophilosophy, interdisciplinary cooperation is essential for advancing knowledge, for the truth lies in the intertheoretic details.  PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. R.P.E. Churchland, Paul M. (b.1942), Canadian-born erican philosopher, leading proponent of eliminative materialism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969 and held positions at the Universities of Toronto, Manitoba, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He is professor of philosophy and member of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California, San Diego. Churchland’s literary corpus constitutes a lucidly written, scientifically informed narrative where his neurocomputational philosophy unfolds. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979) maintains that, though science is best construed realistically, perception is conceptually driven, with no observational given, while language is holistic, with meaning fixed by networks of associated usage. Moreover, regarding the structure of science, higher-level theories should be reduced by, incorporated into, or eliminated in favor of more basic theories from natural science, and, in the specific case, commonsense psychology is a largely false empirical theory, to be replaced by a non-sentential, neuroscientific frework. This skepticism regarding “sentential” approaches is a common thread, present in earlier papers, and taken up again in “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes” (1981). When fully developed, the non-sentential, neuroscientific frework takes the form of connectionist network or parallel distributed processing models. Thus, with essays in A Neurocomputational Perspective (1989), Churchland adds that genuine psychological processes are sequences of activation patterns over neuronal networks. Scientific theories, likewise, are learned vectors in the space of possible activation patterns, with scientific explanation being prototypical activation of a preferred vector. Classical epistemology, too, should be neurocomputationally naturalized. Indeed, Churchland suggests a semantic view whereby synonymy, or the sharing of concepts, is a similarity between patterns in neuronal state-space. Even moral knowledge is analyzed as stored prototypes of social reality that are elicited when an individual navigates through other neurocomputational systems. The entire picture is expressed in The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (1996) and, with his wife Patricia Churchland, by the essays in On the Contrary (1998). What has emerged is a neurocomputational embodiment of the naturalist progr, a panphilosophy that promises to capture science, epistemology, language, and morals in one broad sweep of its connectionist net.  CONNECTIONISM, MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. R.P.E. Church’s theorem.CHURCH’S THESIS. Church’s thesis, the thesis, proposed by Alonzo Church at a meeting of the erican Mathematical Society in April 1935, “that the notion of an effectively calculable function of positive inteChurchland, Paul M. Church’s thesis 141 -   141 gers should be identified with that of a recursive function. . . .” This proposal has been called Church’s thesis ever since Kleene used that ne in his Introduction to Metathematics (1952). The informal notion of an effectively calculable function (effective procedure, or algorithm) had been used in mathematics and logic to indicate that a class of problems is solvable in a “mechanical fashion” by following fixed elementary rules. Underlying epistemological concerns ce to the fore when modern logic moved in the late nineteenth century from axiomatic to formal presentations of theories. Hilbert suggested in 1904 that such formally presented theories be taken as objects of mathematical study, and metathematics has been pursued vigorously and systematically since the 1920s. In its pursuit, concrete issues arose that required for their resolution a delimitation of the class of effective procedures. Hilbert’s important Entscheidungsproblem, the decision problem for predicate logic, was one such issue. It was solved negatively by Church and Turing – relative to the precise notion of recursiveness; the result was obtained independently by Church and Turing, but is usually called Church’s theorem. A second significant issue was the general formulation of the incompleteness theorems as applying to all formal theories (satisfying the usual representability and derivability conditions), not just to specific formal systems like that of Principia Mathematica. According to Kleene, Church proposed in 1933 the identification of effective calculability with l-definability. That proposal was not published at the time, but in 1934 Church mentioned it in conversation to Gödel, who judged it to be “thoroughly unsatisfactory.” In his Princeton Lectures of 1934, Gödel defined the concept of a recursive function, but he was not convinced that all effectively calculable functions would fall under it. The proof of the equivalence between l-definability and recursiveness (by Church and Kleene) led to Church’s first published formulation of the thesis as quoted above. The thesis was reiterated in Church’s “An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory” (1936). Turing introduced, in “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (1936), a notion of computability by machines and maintained that it captures effective calculability exactly. Post’s paper “Finite Combinatory Processes, Formulation 1” (1936) contains a model of computation that is strikingly similar to Turing’s. However, Post did not provide any analysis; he suggested considering the identification of effective calculability with his concept as a working hypothesis that should be verified by investigating ever wider formulations and reducing them to his basic formulation. (The classic papers of Gödel, Church, Turing, Post, and Kleene are all reprinted in Davis, ed., The Undecidable, 1965.) In his 1936 paper Church gave one central reason for the proposed identification, nely that other plausible explications of the informal notion lead to mathematical concepts weaker than or equivalent to recursiveness. Two paradigmatic explications, calculability of a function via algorithms or in a logic, were considered by Church. In either case, the steps taken in determining function values have to be effective; and if the effectiveness of steps is, as Church put it, interpreted to mean recursiveness, then the function is recursive. The fundental interpretative difficulty in Church’s “step-by-step argument” (which was turned into one of the “recursiveness conditions” Hilbert and Bernays used in their 1939 characterization of functions that can be evaluated according to rules) was bypassed by Turing. Analyzing human mechanical computations, Turing was led to finiteness conditions that are motivated by the human computer’s sensory limitations, but are ultimately based on memory limitations. Then he showed that any function calculable by a human computer satisfying these conditions is also computable by one of his machines. Both Church and Gödel found Turing’s analysis convincing; indeed, Church wrote in a 1937 review of Turing’s paper that Turing’s notion makes “the identification with effectiveness in the ordinary (not explicitly defined) sense evident immediately.” This reflective work of partly philosophical and partly mathematical character provides one of the fundental notions in mathematical logic. Indeed, its proper understanding is crucial for (judging) the philosophical significance of central metathematical results – like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems or Church’s theorem. The work is also crucial for computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology, providing in these fields a basic theoretical notion. For exple, Church’s thesis is the cornerstone for Newell and Simon’s delimitation of the class of physical symbol systems, i.e. universal machines with a particular architecture; see Newell’s Physical Symbol Systems (1980). Newell views the delimitation “as the most fundental contribution of artificial intelligence and computer science to the joint enterprise of cognitive science.” In a turn that had been taken by Turing in “Intelligent Machinery” (1948) and “ComputChurch’s thesis Church’s thesis 142 -   142 ing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), Newell points out the basic role physical symbol systems take on in the study of the human mind: “the hypothesis is that humans are instances of physical symbol systems, and, by virtue of this, mind enters into the physical universe. . . . this hypothesis sets the terms on which we search for a scientific theory of mind.” 

COMPUTER THEORY, GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREMS, PROOF THEORY, RECURSIVE FUNCTION THEORY. W.S. Church-Turing thesis.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 B.C.), Roman statesman, orator, essayist, and letter writer. He was important not so much for formulating individual philosophical arguments as for expositions of the doctrines of the major schools of Hellenistic philosophy, and for, as he put it, “teaching philosophy to speak Latin.” The significance of the latter can hardly be overestimated. Cicero’s coinages helped shape the philosophical vocabulary of the Latin-speaking West well into the early modern period. The most characteristic feature of Cicero’s thought is his attempt to unify philosophy and rhetoric. His first major trilogy, On the Orator, On the Republic, and On the Laws, presents a vision of wise statesmen-philosophers whose greatest achievement is guiding political affairs through rhetorical persuasion rather than violence. Philosophy, Cicero argues, needs rhetoric to effect its most important practical goals, while rhetoric is useless without the psychological, moral, and logical justification provided by philosophy. This combination of eloquence and philosophy constitutes what he calls humanitas – a coinage whose enduring influence is attested in later revivals of humanism – and it alone provides the foundation for constitutional governments; it is acquired, moreover, only through broad training in those subjects worthy of free citizens (artes liberales). In philosophy of education, this Ciceronian conception of a humane education encompassing poetry, rhetoric, history, morals, and politics endured as an ideal, especially for those convinced that instruction in the liberal disciplines is essential for citizens if their rational autonomy is to be expressed in ways that are culturally and politically beneficial. A major aim of Cicero’s earlier works is to appropriate for Roman high culture one of Greece’s most distinctive products, philosophical theory, and to demonstrate Roman superiority. He thus insists that Rome’s laws and political institutions successfully embody the best in Greek political theory, whereas the Greeks themselves were inadequate to the crucial task of putting their theories into practice. Taking over the Stoic conception of the universe as a rational whole, governed by divine reason, he argues that human societies must be grounded in natural law. For Cicero, nature’s law possesses the characteristics of a legal code; in particular, it is formulable in a comparatively extended set of rules against which existing societal institutions can be measured. Indeed, since they so closely mirror the requirements of nature, Roman laws and institutions furnish a nearly perfect paradigm for human societies. Cicero’s overall theory, if not its particular details, established a lasting frework for anti-positivist theories of law and morality, including those of Aquinas, Grotius, Suárez, and Locke. The final two years of his life saw the creation of a series of dialogue-treatises that provide an encyclopedic survey of Hellenistic philosophy. Cicero himself follows the moderate fallibilism of Philo of Larissa and the New Academy. Holding that philosophy is a method and not a set of dogmas, he endorses an attitude of systematic doubt. However, unlike Cartesian doubt, Cicero’s does not extend to the real world behind phenomena, since he does not envision the possibility of strict phenomenalism. Nor does he believe that systematic doubt leads to radical skepticism about knowledge. Although no infallible criterion for distinguishing true from false impressions is available, some impressions, he argues, are more “persuasive” (probabile) and can be relied on to guide action. In Academics he offers detailed accounts of Hellenistic epistemological debates, steering a middle course between dogmatism and radical skepticism. A similar strategy governs the rest of his later writings. Cicero presents the views of the major schools, submits them to criticism, and tentatively supports any positions he finds “persuasive.” Three connected works, On Divination, On Fate, and On the Nature of the Gods, survey Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic arguments about theology and natural philosophy. Much of the treatment of religious thought and practice is cool, witty, and skeptically detached – much in the manner of eighteenth-century philosophes who, along with Hume, found much in Cicero to emulate. However, he concedes that Stoic arguments for providence are “persuasive.” So too in ethics, he criticizes Epicurean, Stoic, and Peripatetic doctrines in On Ends (45) and their views on death, pain, irrational emotions, and happiChurch-Turing thesis Cicero, Marcus Tullius 143 -   143 ness in Tusculan Disputations (45). Yet, a final work, On Duties, offers a practical ethical system based on Stoic principles. Although sometimes dismissed as the eclecticism of an ateur, Cicero’s method of selectively choosing from what had become authoritative professional systems often displays considerable reflectiveness and originality.  HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY, NATURAL LAW, NEW ACADEMY, STOICISM. P.Mi. circularity.CIRCULAR REASONING, DEFINITION, DIALLELON. circular reasoning, reasoning that, when traced backward from its conclusion, returns to that starting point, as one returns to a starting point when tracing a circle. The discussion of this topic by Richard Whatley (1787–1863) in his Logic (1826) sets a high standard of clarity and penetration. Logic textbooks often quote the following exple from Whatley: To allow every man an unbounded freedom of speech must always be, on the whole, advantageous to the State; for it is highly conducive to the interests of the Community, that each individual should enjoy a liberty perfectly unlimited, of expressing his sentiments. This passage illustrates how circular reasoning is less obvious in a language, such as English, that, in Whatley’s words, is “abounding in synonymous expressions, which have no resemblance in sound, and no connection in etymology.” The premise and conclusion do not consist of just the se words in the se order, nor can logical or grmatical principles transform one into the other. Rather, they have the se propositional content: they say the se thing in different words. That is why appealing to one of them to provide reason for believing the other ounts to giving something as a reason for itself. Circular reasoning is often said to beg the question. ‘Begging the question’ and petitio principii are translations of a phrase in Aristotle connected with a ge of formal disputation played in antiquity but not in recent times. The meanings of ‘question’ and ‘begging’ do not in any clear way determine the meaning of ‘question begging’. There is no simple argument form that all and only circular arguments have. It is not logic, in Whatley’s exple above, that determines the identity of content between the premise and the conclusion. Some theorists propose rather more complicated formal or syntactic accounts of circularity. Others believe that any account of circular reasoning must refer to the beliefs of those who reason. Whether or not the following argument about articles in this dictionary is circular depends on why the first premise should be accepted: (1) The article on inference contains no split infinitives. (2) The other articles contain no split infinitives. Therefore, (3) No article contains split infinitives. Consider two cases. Case I: Although (2) supports (1) inductively, both (1) and (2) have solid outside support independent of any prior acceptance of (3). This reasoning is not circular. Case II: Someone who advances the argument accepts (1) or (2) or both, only because he believes (3). Such reasoning is circular, even though neither premise expresses just the se proposition as the conclusion. The question remains controversial whether, in explaining circularity, we should refer to the beliefs of individual reasoners or only to the surrounding circumstances. One purpose of reasoning is to increase the degree of reasonable confidence that one has in the truth of a conclusion. Presuming the truth of a conclusion in support of a premise thwarts this purpose, because the initial degree of reasonable confidence in the premise cannot then exceed the initial degree of reasonable confidence in the conclusion.  INFORMAL FALLACY, JUSTIFICATION. D.H.S. citta-matra, the Yogacara Buddhist doctrine that there are no extrental entities, given classical expression by Vasubandhu in the fourth or fifth century A.D. The classical form of this doctrine is a variety of idealism that claims (1) that a coherent explanation of the facts of experience can be provided without appeal to anything extrental; (2) that no coherent account of what extrental entities are like is possible; and (3) that therefore the doctrine that there is nothing but mind is to be preferred to its realistic competitors. The claim and the argument were and are controversial ong Buddhist metaphysicians.  VIJÑAPTI. P.J.G. civic humanism.CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM. civil disobedience, a deliberate violation of the law, committed in order to draw attention to or circularity civil disobedience 144 -   144 rectify perceived injustices in the law or policies of a state. Illustrative questions raised by the topic include: how are such acts justified, how should the legal system respond to such acts when justified, and must such acts be done publicly, nonviolently, and/or with a willingness to accept attendant legal sanctions?  NONVIOLENCE, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. P.S. civil rights.RIGHTS. claim right.HOHFELD, RIGHTS. clairvoyance.PARAPSYCHOLOGY. Clarke, Suel (1675–1729), English philosopher, preacher, and theologian. Born in Norwich, he was educated at Cbridge, where he ce under the influence of Newton. Upon graduation Clarke entered the established church, serving for a time as chaplain to Queen Anne. He spent the last twenty years of his life as rector of St. Jes, Westminster. Clarke wrote extensively on controversial theological and philosophical issues – the nature of space and time, proofs of the existence of God, the doctrine of the Trinity, the incorporeality and natural immortality of the soul, freedom of the will, the nature of morality, etc. His most philosophical works are his Boyle lectures of 1704 and 1705, in which he developed a forceful version of the cosmological argument for the existence and nature of God and attacked the views of Hobbes, Spinoza, and some proponents of deism; his correspondence with Leibniz (1715–16), in which he defended Newton’s views of space and time and charged Leibniz with holding views inconsistent with free will; and his writings against Anthony Collins, in which he defended a libertarian view of the agent as the undetermined cause of free actions and attacked Collins’s arguments for a materialistic view of the mind. In these works Clarke maintains a position of extreme rationalism, contending that the existence and nature of God can be conclusively demonstrated, that the basic principles of morality are necessarily true and immediately knowable, and that the existence of a future state of rewards and punishments is assured by our knowledge that God will reward the morally just and punish the morally wicked.  HOBBES, LEIBNIZ, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, SPINOZA. W.L.R. class, term sometimes used as a synonym for ‘set’. When the two are distinguished, a class is understood as a collection in the logical sense, i.e., as the extension of a concept (e.g. the class of red objects). By contrast, sets, i.e., collections in the mathematical sense, are understood as occurring in stages, where each stage consists of the sets that can be formed from the non-sets and the sets already formed at previous stages. When a set is formed at a given stage, only the non-sets and the previously formed sets are even candidates for membership, but absolutely anything can gain membership in a class simply by falling under the appropriate concept. Thus, it is classes, not sets, that figure in the inconsistent principle of unlimited comprehension. In set theory, proper classes are collections of sets that are never formed at any stage, e.g., the class of all sets (since new sets are formed at each stage, there is no stage at which all sets are available to be collected into a set).  SET THEORY. P.Mad. class, equivalence.PARTITION, RELATION. class, proper.CLASS. class, reference.PROBABILITY. classical conditioning.CONDITIONING. classical liberalism.LIBERALISM. classical republicanism, also known as civic humanism, a political outlook developed by Machiavelli in Renaissance Italy and by Jes Harrington (1611–77) in seventeenth-century England, modified by eighteenth-century British and Continental writers and important for the thought of the erican founding fathers. Drawing on Roman historians, Machiavelli argued that a state could hope for security from the blows of fortune only if its (male) citizens were devoted to its well-being. They should take turns ruling and being ruled, be always prepared to fight for the republic, and limit their private possessions. Such men would possess a wholly secular virtù appropriate to political beings. Corruption, in the form of excessive attachment to private interest, would then be the most serious threat to the republic. Harrington’s utopian Oceana (1656) portrayed England governed under such a system. Opposing the authoritarian views of Hobbes, it described a system in which the well-to-do male citizens would elect some of their number to govern for limited terms. Those governing would propose state policies; the others would vote on the acceptability of the proposals. Agriculture was the basis of economics, civil rights classical republicanism 145 -   145 but the size of estates was to be strictly controlled. Harringtonianism helped form the views of the political party opposing the dominance of the king and court. Montesquieu in France drew on classical sources in discussing the importance of civic virtue and devotion to the republic. All these views were well known to Jefferson, Ads, and other erican colonial and revolutionary thinkers; and some contemporary communitarian critics of erican culture return to classical republican ideas.  MACHIAVELLI, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. J.B.S. class paradox.UNEXPECTED EXINATION PARADOX. Cleanthes.STOICISM. clear and distinct idea.DESCARTES. Clement of Alexandria (A.D. c.150–c.215), formative teacher in the early Christian church who, as a “Christian gnostic,” combined enthusiasm for Greek philosophy with a defense of the church’s faith. He espoused spiritual and intellectual ascent toward that complete but hidden knowledge or gnosis reserved for the truly enlightened. Clement’s school did not practice strict fidelity to the authorities, and possibly the teachings, of the institutional church, drawing upon the Hellenistic traditions of Alexandria, including Philo and Middle Platonism. As with the law ong the Jews, so, for Clement, philosophy ong the pagans was a pedagogical preparation for Christ, in whom logos, reason, had become enfleshed. Philosophers now should rise above their inferior understanding to the perfect knowledge revealed in Christ. Though hostile to gnosticism and its speculations, Clement was thoroughly Hellenized in outlook and sometimes guilty of Docetism, not least in his reluctance to concede the utter humanness of Jesus.  GNOSTICISM. A.E.L. Clifford, W(illi) K(ingdon) (1845–79), British mathematician and philosopher. Educated at King’s College, London, and Trinity College, Cbridge, he began giving public lectures in 1868, when he was appointed a fellow of Trinity, and in 1870 bece professor of applied mathematics at University College, London. His academic career ended prematurely when he died of tuberculosis. Clifford is best known for his rigorous view on the relation between belief and evidence, which, in “The Ethics of Belief,” he summarized thus: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” He gives this exple. Imagine a shipowner who sends to sea an emigrant ship, although the evidence raises strong suspicions as to the vessel’s seaworthiness. Ignoring this evidence, he convinces himself that the ship’s condition is good enough and, after it sinks and all the passengers die, collects his insurance money without a trace of guilt. Clifford maintains that the owner had no right to believe in the soundness of the ship. “He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.” The right Clifford is alluding to is moral, for what one believes is not a private but a public affair and may have grave consequences for others. He regards us as morally obliged to investigate the evidence thoroughly on any occasion, and to withhold belief if evidential support is lacking. This obligation must be fulfilled however trivial and insignificant a belief may seem, for a violation of it may “leave its stp upon our character forever.” Clifford thus rejected Catholicism, to which he had subscribed originally, and bece an agnostic. Jes’s fous essay “The Will to Believe” criticizes Clifford’s view. According to Jes, insufficient evidence need not stand in the way of religious belief, for we have a right to hold beliefs that go beyond the evidence provided they serve the pursuit of a legitimate goal.  EPISTEMOLOGY, EVIDENTIALISM. M.St. closed formula.WELL-FORMED FORMULA. closed loop.

CYBERNETICS. closed sentence.OPEN FORMULA. closure. A set of objects, O, is said to exhibit closure or to be closed under a given operation, R, provided that for every object, x, if x is a member of O and x is R-related to any object, y, then y is a member of O. For exple, the set of propositions is closed under deduction, for if p is a proposition and p entails q, i.e., q is deducible from p, then q is a proposition (simply because only propositions can be entailed by propositions). In addition, many subsets of the set of propositions are also closed under deduction. For exple, the set of true propositions is closed under deduction or entailment. Others are not. Under most accounts of belief, we may fail to believe what is entailed by what we do, in fact, believe. Thus, if knowledge is some form of class paradox closure 146 -   146 true, justified belief, knowledge is not closed under deduction, for we may fail to believe a proposition entailed by a known proposition. Nevertheless, there is a related issue that has been the subject of much debate, nely: Is the set of justified propositions closed under deduction? Aside from the obvious importance of the answer to that question in developing an account of justification, there are two important issues in epistemology that also depend on the answer. Subtleties aside, the so-called Gettier problem depends in large part upon an affirmative answer to that question. For, assuming that a proposition can be justified and false, it is possible to construct cases in which a proposition, say p, is justified, false, but believed. Now, consider a true proposition, q, which is believed and entailed by p. If justification is closed under deduction, then q is justified, true, and believed. But if the only basis for believing q is p, it is clear that q is not known. Thus, true, justified belief is not sufficient for knowledge. What response is appropriate to this problem has been a central issue in epistemology since E. Gettier’s publication of “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” (Analysis, 1963). Whether justification is closed under deduction is also crucial when evaluating a common, traditional argument for skepticism. Consider any person, S, and let p be any proposition ordinarily thought to be knowable, e.g., that there is a table before S. The argument for skepticism goes like this: (1) If p is justified for S, then, since p entails q, where q is ‘there is no evil genius making S falsely believe that p’, q is justified for S. (2) S is not justified in believing q. Therefore, S is not justified in believing p. The first premise depends upon justification being closed under deduction.  EPISTEMIC LOGIC,

 EPISTEMOLOGY, JUSTIFICATION, SKEPTICISM. P.D.K. closure, causal.DAVIDSON. Coase theorem, a non-formal insight by Ronald Coase (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1991): assuming that there are no (transaction) costs involved in exchanging rights for money, then no matter how rights are initially distributed, rational agents will buy and sell them so as to maximize individual returns. In jurisprudence this proposition has been the basis for a claim about how rights should be distributed even when (as is usual) transaction costs are high: the law should confer rights on those who would purchase them were they for sale on markets without transaction costs; e.g., the right to an indivisible, unsharable resource should be conferred on the agent willing to pay the highest price for it.  PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS. A.R. Cockburn, Catherine (Trotter) (1679–1749), English philosopher and playwright who made a significant contribution to the debates on ethical rationalism sparked by Clarke’s Boyle lectures (1704–05). The major theme of her writings is the nature of moral obligation. Cockburn displays a consistent, non-doctrinaire philosophical position, arguing that moral duty is to be rationally deduced from the “nature and fitness of things” (Remarks, 1747) and is not founded primarily in externally imposed sanctions. Her writings, published anonymously, take the form of philosophical debates with others, including Suel Rutherforth, Willi Warburton, Isaac Watts, Francis Hutcheson, and Lord Shaftesbury. Her best-known intervention in contemporary philosophical debate was her able defense of Locke’s Essay in 1702. S.H. coercion.FREE WILL PROBLEM. cogito argument.DESCARTES. Cogito ergo sum (Latin, ‘I think, therefore I ’), the starting point of Descartes’s system of knowledge. In his Discourse on the Method (1637), he observes that the proposition ‘I  thinking, therefore I exist’ (je pense, donc je suis) is “so firm and sure that the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it.” The celebrated phrase, in its better-known Latin version, also occurs in the Principles of Philosophy (1644), but is not to be found in the Meditations (1641), though the latter contains the fullest statement of the reasoning behind Descartes’s certainty of his own existence.  DESCARTES. J.C.O. cognitive architecture.COGNITIVE SCIENCE. cognitive dissonance, mental discomfort arising from conflicting beliefs or attitudes held simultaneously. Leon Festinger, who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance in a book of that title (1957), suggested that cognitive dissonance has motivational characteristics. Suppose a person is contemplating moving to a new city. She Coase theorem cognitive dissonance 147 -   147 is considering both Birmingh and Boston. She cannot move to both, so she must choose. Dissonance is experienced by the person if in choosing, say, Birmingh, she acquires knowledge of bad or unwelcome features of Birmingh and of good or welcome aspects of Boston. The ount of dissonance depends on the relative intensities of dissonant elements. Hence, if the only dissonant factor is her learning that Boston is cooler than Birmingh, and she does not regard climate as important, she will experience little dissonance. Dissonance may occur in several sorts of psychological states or processes, although the bulk of research in cognitive dissonance theory has been on dissonance in choice and on the justification and psychological aftereffects of choice. Cognitive dissonance may be involved in two phenomena of interest to philosophers, nely, self-deception and weakness of will. Why do self-deceivers try to get themselves to believe something that, in some sense, they know to be false? One may resort to self-deception when knowledge causes dissonance. Why do the weak-willed perform actions they know to be wrong? One may become weak-willed when dissonance arises from the expected consequences of doing the right thing. G.A.G. cognitive meaning.MEANING. cognitive psychology.COGNITIVE SCIENCE. cognitive psychotherapy, an expression introduced by Brandt in A Theory of the Good and the Right (1979) to refer to a process of assessing and adjusting one’s desires, aversions, or pleasures (henceforth, “attitudes”). This process is central to Brandt’s analysis of rationality, and ultimately, to his view on the justification of morality. Cognitive psychotherapy consists of the agent’s criticizing his attitudes by repeatedly representing to himself, in an ideally vivid way and at appropriate times, all relevant available information. Brandt characterizes the key definiens as follows: (1) available information is “propositions accepted by the science of the agent’s day, plus factual propositions justified by publicly accessible evidence (including testimony of others about themselves) and the principles of logic”; (2) information is relevant provided, if the agent were to reflect repeatedly on it, “it would make a difference,” i.e., would affect the attitude in question, and the effect would be a function of its content, not an accidental byproduct; (3) relevant information is represented in an ideally vivid way when the agent focuses on it with maximal clarity and detail and with no hesitation or doubt about its truth; and (4) repeatedly and at appropriate times refer, respectively, to the frequency and occasions that would result in the information’s having the maximal attitudinal impact. Suppose Mary’s desire to smoke were extinguished by her bringing to the focus of her attention, whenever she was about to inhale smoke, some justified beliefs, say that smoking is hazardous to one’s health and may cause lung cancer; Mary’s desire would have been removed by cognitive psychotherapy. According to Brandt, an attitude is rational for a person provided it is one that would survive, or be produced by, cognitive psychotherapy; otherwise it is irrational. Rational attitudes, in this sense, provide a basis for moral norms. Roughly, the correct moral norms are those of a moral code that persons would opt for if (i) they were motivated by attitudes that survive the process of cognitive psychotherapy; and (ii) at the time of opting for a moral code, they were fully aware of, and vividly attentive to, all available information relevant to choosing a moral code (for a society in which they are to live for the rest of their lives). In this way, Brandt seeks a value-free justification for moral norms – one that avoids the problems of other theories such as those that make an appeal to intuitions. 

 Y.Y. cognitive science, an interdisciplinary research cluster that seeks to account for intelligent activity, whether exhibited by living organisms (especially adult humans) or machines. Hence, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence constitute its core. A number of other disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, as well as other fields of psychology (e.g., developmental psychology), are more peripheral contributors. The quintessential cognitive scientist is someone who employs computer modeling techniques (developing computer progrs for the purpose of simulating particular human cognitive activities), but the broad range of disciplines that are at least peripherally constitutive of cognitive science have lent a variety of research strategies to the enterprise. While there are a few common institutions that seek to unify cognitive science (e.g., departments, journals, and societies), the problems investigated and the methods of investigation often are limited to a single contributing discicognitive meaning cognitive science 148 -   148 pline. Thus, it is more appropriate to view cognitive science as a cross-disciplinary enterprise than as itself a new discipline. While interest in cognitive phenomena has historically played a central role in the various disciplines contributing to cognitive science, the term properly applies to cross-disciplinary activities that emerged in the 1970s. During the preceding two decades each of the disciplines that bece part of cogntive science gradually broke free of positivistic and behavioristic proscriptions that barred systematic inquiry into the operation of the mind. One of the primary factors that catalyzed new investigations of cognitive activities was Chomsky’s generative grmar, which he advanced not only as an abstract theory of the structure of language, but also as an account of language users’ mental knowledge of language (their linguistic competence). A more fundental factor was the development of approaches for theorizing about information in an abstract manner, and the introduction of machines (computers) that could manipulate information. This gave rise to the idea that one might progr a computer to process information so as to exhibit behavior that would, if performed by a human, require intelligence. If one tried to formulate a unifying question guiding cognitive science research, it would probably be: How does the cognitive system work? But even this common question is interpreted quite differently in different disciplines. We can appreciate these differences by looking just at language. While psycholinguists (generally psychologists) seek to identify the processing activities in the mind that underlie language use, most linguists focus on the products of this internal processing, seeking to articulate the abstract structure of language. A frequent goal of computer scientists, in contrast, has been to develop computer progrs to parse natural language input and produce appropriate syntactic and semantic representations. These differences in objectives ong the cognitive science disciplines correlate with different methodologies. The following represent some of the major methodological approaches of the contributing disciplines and some of the problems each encounters. Artificial intelligence. If the human cognition system is viewed as computational, a natural goal is to simulate its performance. This typically requires formats for representing information as well as procedures for searching and manipulating it. Some of the earliest AIprogrs drew heavily on the resources of first-order predicate calculus, representing information in propositional formats and manipulating it according to logical principles. For many modeling endeavors, however, it proved important to represent information in larger-scale structures, such as fres (Marvin Minsky), schemata (David Rumelhart), or scripts (Roger Schank), in which different pieces of information associated with an object or activity would be stored together. Such structures generally employed default values for specific slots (specifying, e.g., that deer live in forests) that would be part of the representation unless overridden by new information (e.g., that a particular deer lives in the San Diego Zoo). A very influential alternative approach, developed by Allen Newell, replaces declarative representations of information with procedural representations, known as productions. These productions take the form of conditionals that specify actions to be performed (e.g., copying an expression into working memory) if certain conditions are satisfied (e.g., the expression matches another expression). Psychology. While some psychologists develop computer simulations, a more characteristic activity is to acquire detailed data from human subjects that can reveal the cognitive system’s actual operation. This is a challenging endeavor. While cognitive activities transpire within us, they frequently do so in such a smooth and rapid fashion that we are unaware of them. For exple, we have little awareness of what occurs when we recognize an object as a chair or remember the ne of a client. Some cognitive functions, though, seem to be transparent to consciousness. For exple, we might approach a logic problem systematically, enumerating possible solutions and evaluating them serially. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon have refined methods for exploiting verbal protocols obtained from subjects as they solve such problems. These methods have been quite fruitful, but their limitations must be respected. In many cases in which we think we know how we performed a cognitive task, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson have argued that we are misled, relying on folk theories to describe how our minds work rather than reporting directly on their operation. In most cases cognitive psychologists cannot rely on conscious awareness of cognitive processes, but must proceed as do physiologists trying to understand metabolism: they must devise experiments that reveal the underlying processes operative in cognition. One approach is to seek clues in the errors to which the cognitive system cognitive science cognitive science 149 -   149 is prone. Such errors might be more easily accounted for by one kind of underlying process than by another. Speech errors, such as substituting ‘bat cad’ for ‘bad cat’, may be diagnostic of the mechanisms used to construct speech. This approach is often combined with strategies that seek to overload or disrupt the system’s normal operation. A common technique is to have a subject perform two tasks at once – e.g., read a passage while watching for a colored spot. Cognitive psychologists may also rely on the ability to dissociate two phenomena (e.g., obliterate one while maintaining the other) to establish their independence. Other types of data widely used to make inferences about the cognitive system include patterns of reaction times, error rates, and priming effects (in which activation of one item facilitates access to related items). Finally, developmental psychologists have brought a variety of kinds of data to bear on cognitive science issues. For exple, patterns of acquisition times have been used in a manner similar to reaction time patterns, and accounts of the origin and development of systems constrain and elucidate mature systems. Linguistics. Since linguists focus on a product of cognition rather than the processes that produce the product, they tend to test their analyses directly against our shared knowledge of that product. Generative linguists in the tradition of Chomsky, for instance, develop grmars that they test by probing whether they generate the sentences of the language and no others. While grmars are certainly germane to developing processing models, they do not directly determine the structure of processing models. Hence, the central task of linguistics is not central to cognitive science. However, Chomsky has augmented his work on grmatical description with a number of controversial claims that are psycholinguistic in nature (e.g., his nativism and his notion of linguistic competence). Further, an alternative approach to incorporating psycholinguistic concerns, the cognitive linguistics of Lakoff and Langacker, has achieved prominence as a contributor to cognitive science. Neuroscience. Cognitive scientists have generally assumed that the processes they study are carried out, in humans, by the brain. Until recently, however, neuroscience has been relatively peripheral to cognitive science. In part this is because neuroscientists have been chiefly concerned with the implementation of processes, rather than the processes themselves, and in part because the techniques available to neuroscientists (such as single-cell recording) have been most suitable for studying the neural implementation of lower-order processes such as sensation. A prominent exception was the classical studies of brain lesions initiated by Broca and Wernicke, which seemed to show that the location of lesions correlated with deficits in production versus comprehension of speech. (More recent data suggest that lesions in Broca’s area impair certain kinds of syntactic processing.) However, other developments in neuroscience promise to make its data more relevant to cognitive modeling in the future. These include studies of simple nervous systems, such as that of the aplysia (a genus of marine mollusk) by Eric Kandel, and the development of a variety of techniques for determining the brain activities involved in the performance of cognitive tasks (e.g., recording of evoked response potentials over larger brain structures, and imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography). While in the future neuroscience is likely to offer much richer information that will guide the development and constrain the character of cognitive models, neuroscience will probably not become central to cognitive science. It is itself a rich, multidisciplinary research cluster whose contributing disciplines employ a host of complicated research tools. Moreover, the focus of cognitive science can be expected to remain on cognition, not on its implementation. So far cognitive science has been characterized in terms of its modes of inquiry. One can also focus on the domains of cognitive phenomena that have been explored. Language represents one such domain. Syntax was one of the first domains to attract wide attention in cognitive science. For exple, shortly after Chomsky introduced his transformational grmar, psychologists such as George Miller sought evidence that transformations figured directly in human language processing. From this beginning, a more complex but enduring relationship ong linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists has formed a leading edge for much cognitive science research. Psycholinguistics has matured; sophisticated computer models of natural language processing have been developed; and cognitive linguists have offered a particular synthesis that emphasizes semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive foundations of language. Thinking and reasoning. These constitute an important domain of cognitive science that is closely linked to philosophical interests. Problem cognitive science cognitive science 150 -   150 solving, such as that which figures in solving puzzles, playing ges, or serving as an expert in a domain, has provided a prototype for thinking. Newell and Simon’s influential work construed problem solving as a search through a problem space and introduced the idea of heuristics – generally reliable but fallible simplifying devices to facilitate the search. One arena for problem solving, scientific reasoning and discovery, has particularly interested philosophers. Artificial intelligence researchers such as Simon and Patrick Langley, as well as philosophers such as Paul Thagard and Lindley Darden, have developed computer progrs that can utilize the se data as that available to historical scientists to develop and evaluate theories and plan future experiments. Cognitive scientists have also sought to study the cognitive processes underlying the sorts of logical reasoning (both deductive and inductive) whose normative dimensions have been a concern of philosophers. Philip JohnsonLaird, for exple, has sought to account for human performance in dealing with syllogistic reasoning by describing a processing of constructing and manipulating mental models. Finally, the process of constructing and using analogies is another aspect of reasoning that has been extensively studied by traditional philosophers as well as cognitive scientists. Memory, attention, and learning. Cognitive scientists have differentiated a variety of types of memory. The distinction between long- and short-term memory was very influential in the information-processing models of the 1970s. Short-term memory was characterized by limited capacity, such as that exhibited by the ability to retain a seven-digit telephone number for a short period. In much cognitive science work, the notion of working memory has superseded short-term memory, but many theorists are reluctant to construe this as a separate memory system (as opposed to a part of long-term memory that is activated at a given time). Endel Tulving introduced a distinction between semantic memory (general knowledge that is not specific to a time or place) and episodic memory (memory for particular episodes or occurrences). More recently, Daniel Schacter proposed a related distinction that emphasizes consciousness: implicit memory (access without awareness) versus explicit memory (which does involve awareness and is similar to episodic memory). One of the interesting results of cognitive research is the dissociation between different kinds of memory: a person might have severely impaired memory of recent events while having largely unimpaired implicit memory. More generally, memory research has shown that human memory does not simply store away information as in a file cabinet. Rather, information is organized according to preexisting structures such as scripts, and can be influenced by events subsequent to the initial storage. Exactly what gets stored and retrieved is partly determined by attention, and psychologists in the information-processing tradition have sought to construct general cognitive models that emphasize memory and attention. Finally, the topic of learning has once again become prominent. Extensively studied by the behaviorists of the precognitive era, learning was superseded by memory and attention as a research focus in the 1970s. In the 1980s, artificial intelligence researchers developed a growing interest in designing systems that can learn; machine learning is now a major problem area in AI. During the se period, connectionism arose to offer an alternative kind of learning model. Perception and motor control. Perceptual and motor systems provide the inputs and outputs to cognitive systems. An important aspect of perception is the recognition of something as a particular kind of object or event; this requires accessing knowledge of objects and events. One of the central issues concerning perception questions the extent to which perceptual processes are influenced by higher-level cognitive information (top-down processing) versus how much they are driven purely by incoming sensory information (bottom-up processing). A related issue concerns the claim that visual imagery is a distinct cognitive process and is closely related to visual perception, perhaps relying on the se brain processes. A number of cognitive science inquiries (e.g., by Roger Shepard and Stephen Kosslyn) have focused on how people use images in problem solving and have sought evidence that people solve problems by rotating images or scanning them. This research has been extremely controversial, as other investigators have argued against the use of images and have tried to account for the performance data that have been generated in terms of the use of propositionally represented information. Finally, a distinction recently has been proposed between the What and Where systems. All of the foregoing issues concern the What system (which recognizes and represents objects as exemplars of categories). The Where system, in contrast, concerns objects in their environment, and is particcognitive science cognitive science 151 -   151 ularly adapted to the dynics of movement. Gibson’s ecological psychology is a long-standing inquiry into this aspect of perception, and work on the neural substrates is now attracting the interest of cognitive scientists as well. Recent developments. The breadth of cognitive science has been expanding in recent years. In the 1970s, cognitive science inquiries tended to focus on processing activities of adult humans or on computer models of intelligent performance; the best work often combined these approaches. Subsequently, investigators exined in much greater detail how cognitive systems develop, and developmental psychologists have increasingly contributed to cognitive science. One of the surprising findings has been that, contrary to the claims of Willi Jes, infants do not seem to confront the world as a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” but rather recognize objects and events quite early in life. Cognitive science has also expanded along a different dimension. Until recently many cognitive studies focused on what humans could accomplish in laboratory settings in which they performed tasks isolated from reallife contexts. The motivation for this was the assumption that cognitive processes were generic and not limited to specific contexts. However, a variety of influences, including Gibsonian ecological psychology (especially as interpreted and developed by Ulric Neisser) and Soviet activity theory, have advanced the view that cognition is much more dynic and situated in real-world tasks and environmental contexts; hence, it is necessary to study cognitive activities in an ecologically valid manner. Another form of expansion has resulted from a challenge to what has been the dominant architecture for modeling cognition. An architecture defines the basic processing capacities of the cognitive system. The dominant cognitive architecture has assumed that the mind possesses a capacity for storing and manipulating symbols. These symbols can be composed into larger structures according to syntactic rules that can then be operated upon by formal rules that recognize that structure. Jerry Fodor has referred to this view of the cognitive system as the “language of thought hypothesis” and clearly construes it as a modern heir of rationalism. One of the basic arguments for it, due to Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, is that thoughts, like language, exhibit productivity (the unlimited capacity to generate new thoughts) and systematicity (exhibited by the inherent relation between thoughts such as ‘Joan loves the florist’ and ‘The florist loves Joan’). They argue that only if the architecture of cognition has languagelike compositional structure would productivity and systematicity be generic properties and hence not require special case-by-case accounts. The challenge to this architecture has arisen with the development of an alternative architecture, known as connectionism, parallel distributed processing, or neural network modeling, which proposes that the cognitive system consists of vast numbers of neuronlike units that excite or inhibit each other. Knowledge is stored in these systems by the adjustment of connection strengths between processing units; consequently, connectionism is a modern descendant of associationism. Connectionist networks provide a natural account of certain cognitive phenomena that have proven challenging for the symbolic architecture, including pattern recognition, reasoning with soft constraints, and learning. Whether they also can account for productivity and systematicity has been the subject of debate. Philosophical theorizing about the mind has often provided a starting point for the modeling and empirical investigations of modern cognitive science. The ascent of cognitive science has not meant that philosophers have ceased to play a role in exining cognition. Indeed, a number of philosophers have pursued their inquiries as contributors to cognitive science, focusing on such issues as the possible reduction of cognitive theories to those of neuroscience, the status of folk psychology relative to emerging scientific theories of mind, the merits of rationalism versus empiricism, and strategies for accounting for the intentionality of mental states. The interaction between philosophers and other cognitive scientists, however, is bidirectional, and a number of developments in cognitive science promise to challenge or modify traditional philosophical views of cognition. For exple, studies by cognitive and social psychologists have challenged the assumption that human thinking tends to accord with the norms of logic and decision theory. On a variety of tasks humans seem to follow procedures (heuristics) that violate normative canons, raising questions about how philosophers should characterize rationality. Another area of empirical study that has challenged philosophical assumptions has been the study of concepts and categorization. Philosophers since Plato have widely assumed that concepts of ordinary language, such as red, bird, and justice, should be definable by necessary and sufficient conditions. But celebrated studies by cognitive science cognitive science 152 -   152 Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues indicated that many ordinary-language concepts had a prototype structure instead. On this view, the categories employed in human thinking are characterized by prototypes (the clearest exemplars) and a metric that grades exemplars according to their degree of typicality. Recent investigations have also pointed to significant instability in conceptual structure and to the role of theoretical beliefs in organizing categories. This alternative conception of concepts has profound implications for philosophical methodologies that portray philosophy’s task to be the analysis of concepts. 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, INTENTIONALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. W.B. cognitive value.FREGE. Cohen, Hermann (1842–1918), German Jewish philosopher who originated and led, with Paul Natorp (1854–1924), the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. He taught at Marburg from 1876 to 1912. Cohen wrote commentaries on Kant’s Critiques prior to publishing System der Philosophie (1902–12), which consisted of parts on logic, ethics, and aesthetics. He developed a Kantian idealism of the natural sciences, arguing that a transcendental analysis of these sciences shows that “pure thought” (his system of Kantian a priori principles) “constructs” their “reality.” He also developed Kant’s ethics as a democratic socialist ethics. He ended his career at a rabbinical seminary in Berlin, writing his influential Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (“Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism,” 1919), which explicated Judaism on the basis of his own Kantian ethical idealism. Cohen’s ethical-political views were adopted by Kurt Eisner (1867–1919), leader of the Munich revolution of 1918, and also had an impact on the revisionism (of orthodox Marxism) of the German Social Democratic Party, while his philosophical writings greatly influenced Cassirer.  .

coherence theory of truth, the view that either the nature of truth or the sole criterion for determining truth is constituted by a relation of coherence between the belief (or judgment) being assessed and other beliefs (or judgments). As a view of the nature of truth, the coherence theory represents an alternative to the correspondence theory of truth. Whereas the correspondence theory holds that a belief is true provided it corresponds to independent reality, the coherence theory holds that it is true provided it stands in a suitably strong relation of coherence to other beliefs, so that the believer’s total system of beliefs forms a highly or perhaps perfectly coherent system. Since, on such a characterization, truth depends entirely on the internal relations within the system of beliefs, such a conception of truth seems to lead at once to idealism as regards the nature of reality, and its main advocates have been proponents of absolute idealism (mainly Bradley, Bosanquet, and Brand Blanshard). A less explicitly metaphysical version of the coherence theory was also held by certain members of the school of logical positivism (mainly Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel). The nature of the intended relation of coherence, often characterized metaphorically in terms of the beliefs in question fitting together or dovetailing with each other, has been and continues to be a matter of uncertainty and controversy. Despite occasional misconceptions to the contrary, it is clear that coherence is intended to be a substantially more demanding relation than mere consistency, involving such things as inferential and explanatory relations within the system of beliefs. Perfect or ideal coherence is sometimes described as requiring that every belief in the system of beliefs entails all the others (though it must be remembered that those offering such a characterization do not restrict entailments to those that are formal or analytic in character). Since actual human systems of belief seem inevitably to fall short of perfect coherence, however that is understood, their truth is usually held to be only approximate at best, thus leading to the absolute idealist view that truth admits of degrees. As a view of the criterion of truth, the coherence theory of truth holds that the sole criterion or standard for determining whether a belief is true is its coherence with other beliefs or judgments, with the degree of justification varying with the degree of coherence. Such a view ounts to a coherence theory of epistemic justification. It was held by most of the proponents of the coherence theory of the nature of truth, though usually without distinguishing the two views very clearly. For philosophers who hold both of these cognitive value coherence theory of truth 153 -   153 views, the thesis that coherence is the sole criterion of truth is usually logically prior, and the coherence theory of the nature of truth is adopted as a consequence, the clearest argument being that only the view that perfect or ideal coherence is the nature of truth can make sense of the appeal to degrees of coherence as a criterion of truth.  COHERENTISM, IDEALISM, TRUTH. L.B.

coherentism, in epistemology, a theory of the structure of knowledge or justified beliefs according to which all beliefs representing knowledge are known or justified in virtue of their relations to other beliefs, specifically, in virtue of belonging to a coherent system of beliefs. Assuming that the orthodox account of knowledge is correct at least in maintaining that justified true belief is necessary for knowledge, we can identify two kinds of coherence theories of knowledge: those that are coherentist merely in virtue of incorporating a coherence theory of justification, and those that are doubly coherentist because they account for both justification and truth in terms of coherence. What follows will focus on coherence theories of justification. Historically, coherentism is the most significant alternative to foundationalism. The latter holds that some beliefs, basic or foundational beliefs, are justified apart from their relations to other beliefs, while all other beliefs derive their justification from that of foundational beliefs. Foundationalism portrays justification as having a structure like that of a building, with certain beliefs serving as the foundations and all other beliefs supported by them. Coherentism rejects this image and pictures justification as having the structure of a raft. Justified beliefs, like the planks that make up a raft, mutually support one another. This picture of the coherence theory is due to the positivist Otto Neurath. ong the positivists, Hempel shared Neurath’s sympathy for coherentism. Other defenders of coherentism from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were idealists, e.g., Bradley, Bosanquet, and Brand Blanshard. (Idealists often held the sort of double coherence theory mentioned above.) The contrast between foundationalism and coherentism is commonly developed in terms of the regress argument. If we are asked what justifies one of our beliefs, we characteristically answer by citing some other belief that supports it, e.g., logically or probabilistically. If we are asked about this second belief, we are likely to cite a third belief, and so on. There are three shapes such an evidential chain might have: it could go on forever, if could eventually end in some belief, or it could loop back upon itself, i.e., eventually contain again a belief that had occurred “higher up” on the chain. Assuming that infinite chains are not really possible, we are left with a choice between chains that end and circular chains. According to foundationalists, evidential chains must eventually end with a foundational belief that is justified, if the belief at the beginning of the chain is to be justified. Coherentists are then portrayed as holding that circular chains can yield justified beliefs. This portrayal is, in a way, correct. But it is also misleading since it suggests that the disagreement between coherentism and foundationalism is best understood as concerning only the structure of evidential chains. Talk of evidential chains in which beliefs that are further down on the chain are responsible for beliefs that are higher up naturally suggests the idea that just as real chains transfer forces, evidential chains transfer justification. Foundationalism then sounds like a real possibility. Foundational beliefs already have justification, and evidential chains serve to pass the justification along to other beliefs. But coherentism seems to be a nonstarter, for if no belief in the chain is justified to begin with, there is nothing to pass along. Altering the metaphor, we might say that coherentism seems about as likely to succeed as a bucket brigade that does not end at a well, but simply moves around in a circle. The coherentist seeks to dispel this appearance by pointing out that the primary function of evidential chains is not to transfer epistemic status, such as justification, from belief to belief. Indeed, beliefs are not the primary locus of justification. Rather, it is whole systems of belief that are justified or not in the primary sense; individual beliefs are justified in virtue of their membership in an appropriately structured system of beliefs. Accordingly, what the coherentist claims is that the appropriate sorts of evidential chains, which will be circular – indeed, will likely contain numerous circles – constitute justified systems of belief. The individual beliefs within such a system are themselves justified in virtue of their place in the entire system and not because this status is passed on to them from beliefs further down some evidential chain in which they figure. One can, therefore, view coherentism with considerable accuracy as a version of foundationalism that holds all beliefs to be foundational. From this perspective, the difference between coherentism and traditional foundationalism has to do with coherentism coherentism 154 -   154 what accounts for the epistemic status of foundational beliefs, with traditional foundationalism holding that such beliefs can be justified in various ways, e.g., by perception or reason, while coherentism insists that the only way such beliefs can be justified is by being a member of an appropriately structured system of beliefs. One outstanding problem the coherentist faces is to specify exactly what constitutes a coherent system of beliefs. Coherence clearly must involve much more than mere absence of mutually contradictory beliefs. One way in which beliefs can be logically consistent is by concerning completely unrelated matters, but such a consistent system of beliefs would not embody the sort of mutual support that constitutes the core idea of coherentism. Moreover, one might question whether logical consistency is even necessary for coherence, e.g., on the basis of the preface paradox. Similar points can be made regarding efforts to begin an account of coherence with the idea that beliefs and degrees of belief must correspond to the probability calculus. So although it is difficult to avoid thinking that such formal features as logical and probabilistic consistency are significantly involved in coherence, it is not clear exactly how they are involved. An account of coherence can be drawn more directly from the following intuitive idea: a coherent system of belief is one in which each belief is epistemically supported by the others, where various types of epistemic support are recognized, e.g., deductive or inductive arguments, or inferences to the best explanation. There are, however, at least two problems this suggestion does not address. First, since very small sets of beliefs can be mutually supporting, the coherentist needs to say something about the scope a system of beliefs must have to exhibit the sort of coherence required for justification. Second, given the possibility of small sets of mutually supportive beliefs, it is apparently possible to build a system of very broad scope out of such small sets of mutually supportive beliefs by mere conjunction, i.e., without forging any significant support relations ong them. Yet, since the interrelatedness of all truths does not seem discoverable by analyzing the concept of justification, the coherentist cannot rule out epistemically isolated subsystems of belief entirely. So the coherentist must say what sorts of isolated subsystems of belief are compatible with coherence. The difficulties involved in specifying a more precise concept of coherence should not be pressed too vigorously against the coherentist. For one thing, most foundationalists have been forced to grant coherence a significant role within their accounts of justification, so no dialectical advantage can be gained by pressing them. Moreover, only a little reflection is needed to see that nearly all the difficulties involved in specifying coherence are manifestations within a specific context of quite general philosophical problems concerning such matters as induction, explanation, theory choice, the nature of epistemic support, etc. They are, then, problems that are faced by logicians, philosophers of science, and epistemologists quite generally, regardless of whether they are sympathetic to coherentism. Coherentism faces a number of serious objections. Since according to coherentism justification is determined solely by the relations ong beliefs, it does not seem to be capable of taking us outside the circle of our beliefs. This fact gives rise to complaints that coherentism cannot allow for any input from external reality, e.g., via perception, and that it can neither guarantee nor even claim that it is likely that coherent systems of belief will make contact with such reality or contain true beliefs. And while it is widely granted that justified false beliefs are possible, it is just as widely accepted that there is an important connection between justification and truth, a connection that rules out accounts according to which justification is not truth-conducive. These abstractly formulated complaints can be made more vivid, in the case of the former, by imagining a person with a coherent system of beliefs that becomes frozen, and fails to change in the face of ongoing sensory experience; and in the case of the latter, by pointing out that, barring an unexpected account of coherence, it seems that a wide variety of coherent systems of belief are possible, systems that are largely disjoint or even incompatible.  COHERENCE THEORY OF TRUTH, EPISTEMOLOGY, FOUNDATIONALISM, JUSTIFICATION. M.R.D. Coimbra commentaries.FONSECA. collective unconscious.JUNG. collectivity.DISTRIBUTION. Collier, Arthur (1680–1732), English philosopher, a Wiltshire parish priest whose Clavis Universalis (1713) defends a version of immaterialism closely akin to Berkeley’s. Matter, Collier contends, “exists in, or in dependence on mind.” He emphatically affirms the existence of bodies, and, like Berkeley, defends immaterialCoimbra commentaries Collier, Arthur 155 -   155 ism as the only alternative to skepticism. Collier grants that bodies seem to be external, but their “quasi-externeity” is only the effect of God’s will. In Part I of the Clavis Collier argues (as Berkeley had in his New Theory of Vision, 1709) that the visible world is not external. In Part II he argues (as Berkeley had in the Principles, 1710, and Three Dialogues, 1713) that the external world “is a being utterly impossible.” Two of Collier’s arguments for the “intrinsic repugnancy” of the external world resemble Kant’s first and second antinomies. Collier argues, e.g., that the material world is both finite and infinite; the contradiction can be avoided, he suggests, only by denying its external existence. Some scholars suspect that Collier deliberately concealed his debt to Berkeley; most accept his report that he arrived at his views ten years before he published them. Collier first refers to Berkeley in letters written in 1714–15. In A Specimen of True Philosophy (1730), where he offers an immaterialist interpretation of the opening verse of Genesis, Collier writes that “except a single passage or two” in Berkeley’s Dialogues, there is no other book “which I ever heard of” on the se subject as the Clavis. This is a puzzling remark on several counts, one being that in the Preface to the Dialogues, Berkeley describes his earlier books. Collier’s biographer reports seeing ong his papers (now lost) an outline, dated 1708, on “the question of the visible world being without us or not,” but he says no more about it. The biographer concludes that Collier’s independence cannot reasonably be doubted; perhaps the outline would, if unearthed, establish this.  BERKELEY. K.P.W. colligation.WHEWELL.

Collingwood, R(obin) G(eorge) (1889–1943), English philosopher and historian. His father, W. G. Collingwood, John Ruskin’s friend, secretary, and biographer, at first educated him at home in Coniston and later sent him to Rugby School and then Oxford. Immediately upon graduating in 1912, he was elected to a fellowship at Pembroke College; except for service with admiralty intelligence during World War I, he remained at Oxford until 1941, when illness compelled him to retire. Although his Autobiography expresses strong disapproval of the lines on which, during his lifetime, philosophy at Oxford developed, he was a university “insider.” In 1934 he was elected to the Waynflete Professorship, the first to become vacant after he had done enough work to be a serious candidate. He was also a leading archaeologist of Roman Britain. Although as a student Collingwood was deeply influenced by the “realist” teaching of John Cook Wilson, he studied not only the British idealists, but also Hegel and the contemporary Italian post-Hegelians. At twenty-three, he published a translation of Croce’s book on Vico’s philosophy. Religion and Philosophy (1916), the first of his attempts to present orthodox Christianity as philosophically acceptable, has both idealist and Cook Wilsonian elements. Thereafter the Cook Wilsonian element steadily diminished. In Speculum Mentis(1924), he investigated the nature and ultimate unity of the four special ‘forms of experience’ – art, religion, natural science, and history – and their relation to a fifth comprehensive form – philosophy. While all four, he contended, are necessary to a full human life now, each is a form of error that is corrected by its less erroneous successor. Philosophy is error-free but has no content of its own: “The truth is not some perfect system of philosophy: it is simply the way in which all systems, however perfect, collapse into nothingness on the discovery that they are only systems.” Some critics dismissed this enterprise as idealist (a description Collingwood accepted when he wrote), but even those who favored it were disturbed by the apparent skepticism of its result. A year later, he plified his views about art in Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. Since much of what Collingwood went on to write about philosophy has never been published, and some of it has been negligently destroyed, his thought after Speculum Mentis is hard to trace. It will not be definitively established until the more than 3,000 s of his surviving unpublished manuscripts (deposited in the Bodleian Library in 1978) have been thoroughly studied. They were not available to the scholars who published studies of his philosophy as a whole up to 1990. Three trends in how his philosophy developed, however, are discernible. The first is that as he continued to investigate the four special forms of experience, he ce to consider each valid in its own right, and not a form of error. As early as 1928, he abandoned the conception of the historical past in Speculum Mentis as simply a spectacle, alien to the historian’s mind; he now proposed a theory of it as thoughts explaining past actions that, although occurring in the past, can be rethought in the present. Not only can the identical thought “enacted” at a definite time in the past be “reenacted” any number of times after, but it can be known to be so reenacted if colligation Collingwood, R(obin) G(eorge) 156 -   156 physical evidence survives that can be shown to be incompatible with other proposed reenactments. In 1933–34 he wrote a series of lectures (posthumously published as The Idea of Nature) in which he renounced his skepticism about whether the quantitative material world can be known, and inquired why the three constructive periods he recognized in European scientific thought, the Greek, the Renaissance, and the modern, could each advance our knowledge of it as they did. Finally, in 1937, returning to the philosophy of art and taking full account of Croce’s later work, he showed that imagination expresses emotion and becomes false when it counterfeits emotion that is not felt; thus he transformed his earlier theory of art as purely imaginative. His later theories of art and of history remain alive; and his theory of nature, although corrected by research since his death, was an advance when published. The second trend was that his conception of philosophy changed as his treatment of the special forms of experience bece less skeptical. In his beautifully written Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), he argued that philosophy has an object – the ens realissimum as the one, the true, and the good – of which the objects of the special forms of experience are appearances; but that implies what he had ceased to believe, that the special forms of experience are forms of error. In his Principles of Art (1938) and New Leviathan (1942) he denounced the idealist principle of Speculum Mentis that to abstract is to falsify. Then, in his Essay on Metaphysics (1940), he denied that metaphysics is the science of being qua being, and identified it with the investigation of the “absolute presuppositions” of the special forms of experience at definite historical periods. A third trend, which ce to dominate his thought as World War II approached, was to see serious philosophy as practical, and so as having political implications. He had been, like Ruskin, a radical Tory, opposed less to liberal or even some socialist measures than to the bourgeois ethos from which they sprang. Recognizing European fascism as the barbarism it was, and detesting anti-Semitism, he advocated an antifascist foreign policy and intervention in the Spanish civil war in support of the republic. His last major publication, The New Leviathan, impressively defends what he called civilization against what he called barbarism; and although it was neglected by political theorists after the war was won, the collapse of Communism and the rise of Islic states are winning it new readers. 

combinatory logic, a branch of formal logic that deals with formal systems designed for the study of certain basic operations for constructing and manipulating functions as rules, i.e. as rules of calculation expressed by definitions. The notion of a function was fundental in the development of modern formal (or mathematical) logic that was initiated by Frege, Peano, Russell, Hilbert, and others. Frege was the first to introduce a generalization of the mathematical notion of a function to include propositional functions, and he used the general notion for formally representing logical notions such as those of a concept, object, relation, generality, and judgment. Frege’s proposal to replace the traditional logical notions of subject and predicate by argument and function, and thus to conceive predication as functional application, marks a turning point in the history of formal logic. In most modern logical systems, the notation used to express functions, including propositional functions, is essentially that used in ordinary mathematics. As in ordinary mathematics, certain basic notions are taken for granted, such as the use of variables to indicate processes of substitution. Like the original systems for modern formal logic, the systems of combinatory logic were designed to give a foundation for mathematics. But combinatory logic arose as an effort to carry the foundational aims further and deeper. It undertook an analysis of notions taken for granted in the original systems, in particular of the notions of substitution and of the use of variables. In this respect combinatory logic was conceived by one of its founders, H. B. Curry, to be concerned with the ultimate foundations and with notions that constitute a “prelogic.” It was hoped that an analysis of this prelogic would disclose the true source of the difficulties connected with the logical paradoxes. The operation of applying a function to one of its arguments, called application, is a primitive operation in all systems of combinatory logic. If f is a function and x a possible argument, then the result of the application operation is denoted (fx). In mathematics this is usually written f(x), but the notation (fx) is more convenient in combinatory logic. The German logician M. Schönfinkel, who started combinatory logic in 1924, observed that it is not necessary to introduce color realism combinatory logic 157 -   157 functions of more than one variable, provided that the idea of a function is enlarged so that functions can be arguments as well as values of other functions. A function F(x,y) is represented with the function f, which when applied to the argument x has, as a value, the function (fx), which, when applied to y, yields F(x,y), i.e. ((fx)y) % F(x,y). It is therefore convenient to omit parentheses with association to the left so that fx1 . . . xn is used for (( . . . (fx1 . . .) xn). Schönfinkel’s main result was to show how to make the class of functions studied closed under explicit definition by introducing two specific primitive functions, the combinators S and K, with the rules Kxy % x, and Sxyz % xz(yz). (To illustrate the effect of S in ordinary mathematical notation, let f and g be functions of two and one arguments, respectively; then Sfg is the function such that Sfgx % f(x,g(x)).) Generally, if a(x1, . . . ,xn) is an expression built up from constants and the variables shown by means of the application operation, then there is a function F constructed out of constants (including the combinators S and K), such that Fx1 . . . xn % a(x1, . . . , xn). This is essentially the meaning of the combinatory completeness of the theory of combinators in the terminology of H. B. Curry and R. Feys, Combinatory Logic (1958); and H. B. Curry, J. R. Hindley, and J. P. Seldin, Combinatory Logic, vol. II (1972). The system of combinatory logic with S and K as the only primitive functions is the simplest equation calculus that is essentially undecidable. It is a type-free theory that allows the formation of the term ff, i.e. self-application, which has given rise to problems of interpretation. There are also type theories based on combinatory logic. The systems obtained by extending the theory of combinators with functions representing more filiar logical notions such as negation, implication, and generality, or by adding a device for expressing inclusion in logical categories, are studied in illative combinatory logic. The theory of combinators exists in another, equivalent form, nely as the type-free l-calculus created by Church in 1932. Like the theory of combinators, it was designed as a formalism for representing functions as rules of calculation, and it was originally part of a more general system of functions intended as a foundation for mathematics. The l-calculus has application as a primitive operation, but instead of building up new functions from some primitive ones by application, new functions are here obtained by functional abstraction. If a(x) is an expression built up by means of application from constants and the variable x, then a(x) is considered to define a function denoted lx.a (x), whose value for the argument b is a(b), i.e. (lx.a (x))b % a(b). The function lx.a(x) is obtained from a(x) by functional abstraction. The property of combinatory completeness or closure under explicit definition is postulated in the form of functional abstraction. The combinators can be defined using functional abstraction (i.e., K % lx.ly.x and S % lx.ly.lz.xz(yz)), and conversely, in the theory of combinators, functional abstraction can be defined. A detailed presentation of the l-calculus is found in H. Barendregt, The Lbda Calculus, Its Syntax and Semantics (1981). It is possible to represent the series of natural numbers by a sequence of closed terms in the lcalculus. Certain expressions in the l-calculus will then represent functions on the natural numbers, and these l-definable functions are exactly the general recursive functions or the Turing computable functions. The equivalence of l-definability and general recursiveness was one of the arguments used by Church for what is known as Church’s thesis, i.e., the identification of the effectively computable functions and the recursive functions. The first problem about recursive undecidability was expressed by Church as a problem about expressions in the l calculus. The l-calculus thus played a historically important role in the original development of recursion theory. Due to the emphasis in combinatory logic on the computational aspect of functions, it is natural that its method has been found useful in proof theory and in the development of systems of constructive mathematics. For the se reason it has found several applications in computer science in the construction and analysis of progrming languages. The techniques of combinatory logic have also been applied in theoretical linguistics, e.g. in so-called Montague grmar. In recent decades combinatory logic, like other domains of mathematical logic, has developed into a specialized branch of mathematics, in which the original philosophical and foundational aims and motives are of little and often no importance. One reason for this is the discovery of the new technical applications, which were not intended originally, and which have turned the interest toward several new mathematical problems. Thus, the original motives are often felt to be less urgent and only of historical significance. Another reason for the decline of the original philosophical and foundational aims may be a growing awareness in the philosophy of mathematics of the limitations of formal and mathematical methods as tools for conceptual combinatory logic combinatory logic 158 -   158 clarification, as tools for reaching “ultimate foundations.” 

CHURCH’S THESIS, COMPUTABILITY, PROOF THEORY, RECURSIVE FUNCTION THEORY. S.St. command theory of law.PHILOSOPHY OF LAW.

commentaries on Aristotle, the term commonly used for the Greek commentaries on Aristotle that take up about 15,000 s in the Berlin Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (1882–1909), still the basic edition of them. Only in the 1980s did a project begin, under the editorship of Richard Sorabji, of King’s College, London, to translate at least the most significant portions of them into English. They had remained the largest corpus of Greek philosophy not translated into any modern language. Most of these works, especially the later, Neoplatonic ones, are much more than simple commentaries on Aristotle. They are also a mode of doing philosophy, the favored one at this stage of intellectual history. They are therefore important not only for the understanding of Aristotle, but also for both the study of the pre-Socratics and the Hellenistic philosophers, particularly the Stoics, of whom they preserve many fragments, and lastly for the study of Neoplatonism itself – and, in the case of John Philoponus, for studying the innovations he introduces in the process of trying to reconcile Platonism with Christianity. The commentaries may be divided into three main groups. (1) The first group of commentaries are those by Peripatetic scholars of the second to fourth centuries A.D., most notably Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c.200), but also the paraphraser Themistius (fl. c.360). We must not omit, however, to note Alexander’s predecessor Aspasius, author of the earliest surviving commentary, one on the Nicomachean Ethics – a work not commented on again until the late Byzantine period. Commentaries by Alexander survive on the Prior Analytics, Topics, Metaphysics I–V, On the Senses, and Meteorologics, and his now lost ones on the Categories, On the Soul, and Physics had enormous influence in later times, particularly on Simplicius. (2) By far the largest group is that of the Neoplatonists up to the sixth century A.D. Most important of the earlier commentators is Porphyry (232–c.309), of whom only a short commentary on the Categories survives, together with an introduction (Isagoge) to Aristotle’s logical works, which provoked many commentaries itself, and proved most influential in both the East and (through Boethius) in the Latin West. The reconciling of Plato and Aristotle is largely his work. His big commentary on the Categories was of great importance in later times, and many fragments are preserved in that of Simplicius. His follower Iblichus was also influential, but his commentaries are likewise lost. The Athenian School of Syrianus (c.375–437) and Proclus (410–85) also commented on Aristotle, but all that survives is a commentary of Syrianus on Books III, IV, XIII, and XIV of the Metaphysics. It is the early sixth century, however, that produces the bulk of our surviving commentaries, originating from the Alexandrian school of monius, son of Hermeias (c.435–520), but composed both in Alexandria, by the Christian John Philoponus (c.490–575), and in (or at least from) Athens by Simplicius (writing after 532). Main commentaries of Philoponus are on Categories, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, On Generation and Corruption, On the Soul I–II, and Physics; of Simplicius on Categories, Physics, On the Heavens, and (perhaps) On the Soul. The tradition is carried on in Alexandria by Olympiodorus (c.495–565) and the Christians Elias (fl. c.540) and David (an Armenian, nickned the Invincible, fl. c.575), and finally by Stephanus, who was brought by the emperor to take the chair of philosophy in Constantinople in about 610. These scholars comment chiefly on the Categories and other introductory material, but Olympiodorus produced a commentary on the Meteorologics. Characteristic of the Neoplatonists is a desire to reconcile Aristotle with Platonism (arguing, e.g., that Aristotle was not dismissing the Platonic theory of Forms), and to systematize his thought, thus reconciling him with himself. They are responding to a long tradition of criticism, during which difficulties were raised about incoherences and contradictions in Aristotle’s thought, and they are concerned to solve these, drawing on their comprehensive knowledge of his writings. Only Philoponus, as a Christian, dares to criticize him, in particular on the eternity of the world, but also on the concept of infinity (on which he produces an ingenious argument, picked up, via the Arabs, by Bonaventure in the thirteenth century). The Categories proves a particularly fruitful battleground, and much of the later debate between realism and nominalism stems from arguments about the proper subject matter of that work. The format of these commentaries is mostly that adopted by scholars ever since, that of taking command theory of law commentaries on Aristotle 159 -   159 one passage, or lemma, after another of the source work and discussing it from every angle, but there are variations. Sometimes the general subject matter is discussed first, and then details of the text are exined; alternatively, the lemma is taken in subdivisions without any such distinction. The commentary can also proceed explicitly by answering problems, or aporiai, which have been raised by previous authorities. Some commentaries, such as the short one of Porphyry on the Categories, and that of Iblichus’s pupil Dexippus on the se work, have a “catechetical” form, proceeding by question and answer. In some cases (as with Wittgenstein in modern times) the commentaries are simply transcriptions by pupils of the lectures of a teacher. This is the case, for exple, with the surviving “commentaries” of monius. One may also indulge in simple paraphrase, as does Themistius on Posterior Analysis, Physics, On the Soul, and On the Heavens, but even here a good deal of interpretation is involved, and his works remain interesting. An important offshoot of all this activity in the Latin West is the figure of Boethius (c.480–524). It is he who first transmitted a knowledge of Aristotelian logic to the West, to become an integral part of medieval Scholasticism. He translated Porphyry’s Isagoge, and the whole of Aristotle’s logical works. He wrote a double commentary on the Isagoge, and commentaries on the Categories and On Interpretation. He is dependent ultimately on Porphyry, but more immediately, it would seem, on a source in the school of Proclus. (3) The third major group of commentaries dates from the late Byzantine period, and seems mainly to emanate from a circle of scholars grouped around the princess Anna Comnena in the twelfth century. The most important figures here are Eustratius (c.1050–1120) and Michael of Ephesus (originally dated c.1040, but now fixed at c.1130). Michael in particular seems concerned to comment on areas of Aristotle’s works that had hitherto escaped commentary. He therefore comments widely, for exple, on the biological works, but also on the Sophistical Refutations. He and Eustratius, and perhaps others, seem to have cooperated also on a composite commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, neglected since Aspasius. There is also evidence of lost commentaries on the Politics and the Rhetoric. The composite commentary on the Ethics was translated into Latin in the next century, in England, by Robert Grosseteste, but earlier than this translations of the various logical commentaries had been made by Jes of Venice (fl. c.1130), who may have even made the acquaintance of Michael of Ephesus in Constantinople. Later in that century other commentaries were being translated from Arabic versions by Gerard of Cremona (d.1187). The influence of the Greek commentary tradition in the West thus resumed after the long break since Boethius in the sixth century, but only now, it seems fair to say, is the full significance of this enormous body of work becoming properly appreciated. 

commentaries on Plato, a term designating the works in the tradition of commentary (hypomnema) on Plato that may go back to the Old Academy (Crantor is attested by Proclus to have been the first to have “commented” on the Timaeus). More probably, the tradition arises in the first century B.C. in Alexandria, where we find Eudorus commenting, again, on the Timaeus, but possibly also (if the scholars who attribute to him the Anonymous Theaetetus Commentary are correct) on the Theaetetus. It seems also as if the Stoic Posidonius composed a commentary of some sort on the Timaeus. The commentary form (such as we can observe in the biblical commentaries of Philo of Alexandria) owes much to the Stoic tradition of commentary on Homer, as practiced by the second-century B.C. School of Pergum. It was normal to select (usually consecutive) portions of text (lemmata) for general, and then detailed, comment, raising and answering “problems” (aporiai), refuting one’s predecessors, and dealing with points of both doctrine and philology. By the second century A.D. the tradition of Platonic commentary was firmly established. We have evidence of commentaries by the Middle Platonists Gaius, Albinus, Atticus, Numenius, and Cronius, mainly on the Timaeus, but also on at least parts of the Republic, as well as a work by Atticus’s pupil Herpocration of Argos, in twentyfour books, on Plato’s work as a whole. These works are all lost, but in the surviving works of Plutarch we find exegesis of parts of Plato’s works, such as the creation of the soul in the Timaeus (35a–36d). The Latin commentary of Calcidius (fourth century A.D.) is also basically Middle Platonic. In the Neoplatonic period (after Plotinus, who did not indulge in formal commentary, though many of his essays are in fact informal commentaries), we have evidence of much more comprehensive exegetic activity. Porphyry initiated the tradition with commentaries on the Phaedo, commentaries on Plato commentaries on Plato 160 -   160 Cratylus, Sophist, Philebus, Parmenides (of which the surviving anonymous fragment of commentary is probably a part), and the Timaeus. He also commented on the myth of Er in the Republic. It seems to have been Porphyry who is responsible for introducing the allegorical interpretation of the introductory portions of the dialogues, though it was only his follower Iblichus (who also commented on all the above dialogues, as well as the Alcibiades and the Phaedrus) who introduced the principle that each dialogue should have only one central theme, or skopos. The tradition was carried on in the Athenian School by Syrianus and his pupils Hermeias (on the Phaedrus – surviving) and Proclus (Alcibiades, Cratylus, Timaeus, Parmenides – all surviving, at least in part), and continued in later times by Dascius (Phaedo, Philebus, Parmenides) and Olympiodorus (Alcibiades, Phaedo, Gorgias – also surviving, though sometimes only in the form of pupils’ notes). These commentaries are not now to be valued primarily as expositions of Plato’s thought (though they do contain useful insights, and much valuable information); they are best regarded as original philosophical treatises presented in the mode of commentary, as is so much of later Greek philosophy, where it is not originality but rather faithfulness to an inspired master and a great tradition that is being striven for. 

MIDDLE PLATONISM, NEOPLATONISM, PLATO. J.M.D. commission.ACTION THEORY. commissive.SPEECH ACT THEORY.

common-consent arguments for the existence of God.MARTINEAU. common effects.CAUSATION. common good, a normative standard in Thomistic and Neo-Thomistic ethics for evaluating the justice of social, legal, and political arrangements, referring to those arrangements that promote the full flourishing of everyone in the community. Every good can be regarded as both a goal to be sought and, when achieved, a source of human fulfillment. A common good is any good sought by and/or enjoyed by two or more persons (as friendship is a good common to the friends); the common good is the good of a “perfect” (i.e., complete and politically organized) human community – a good that is the common goal of all who promote the justice of that community, as well as the common source of fulfillment of all who share in those just arrangements. ‘Common’ is an analogical term referring to kinds and degrees of sharing ranging from mere similarity to a deep ontological communion. Thus, any good that is a genuine perfection of our common human nature is a common good, as opposed to merely idiosyncratic or illusory goods. But goods are common in a deeper sense when the degree of sharing is more than merely coincidental: two children engaged in parallel play enjoy a good in common, but they realize a common good more fully by engaging each other in one ge; similarly, if each in a group watches the se good movie alone at home, they have enjoyed a good in common but they realize this good at a deeper level when they watch the movie together in a theater and discuss it afterward. In short, common good includes aggregates of private, individual goods but transcends these aggregates by the unique fulfillment afforded by mutuality, shared activity, and communion of persons. As to the sources in Thomistic ethics for this emphasis on what is deeply shared over what merely coincides, the first is Aristotle’s understanding of us as social and political animals: many aspects of human perfection, on this view, can be achieved only through shared activities in communities, especially the political community. The second is Christian Trinitarian theology, in which the single Godhead involves the mysterious communion of three divine “persons,” the very exemplar of a common good; human personhood, by analogy, is similarly perfected only in a relationship of social communion. The achievement of such intimately shared goods requires very complex and delicate arrangements of coordination to prevent the exploitation and injustice that plague shared endeavors. The establishment and maintenance of these social, legal, and political arrangements is “the” common good of a political society, because the enjoyment of all goods is so dependent upon the quality and the justice of those arrangements. The common good of the political community includes, but is not limited to, public goods: goods characterized by non-rivalry and non-excludability and which, therefore, must generally be provided by public institutions. By the principle of subsidiarity, the common good is best promoted by, in addition to the state, many lower-level non-public societies, associations, and individuals. Thus, religiously affiliated schools educating non-religious minority chilcommission common good 161 -   161 dren might promote the common good without being public goods. 

compactness theorem, a theorem for first-order logic: if every finite subset of a given infinite theory T is consistent, then the whole theory is consistent. The result is an immediate consequence of the completeness theorem, for if the theory were not consistent, a contradiction, say ‘P and not-P’, would be provable from it. But the proof, being a finitary object, would use only finitely many axioms from T, so this finite subset of T would be inconsistent. This proof of the compactness theorem is very general, showing that any language that has a sound and complete system of inference, where each rule allows only finitely many premises, satisfies the theorem. This is important because the theorem immediately implies that many filiar mathematical notions are not expressible in the language in question, notions like those of a finite set or a well-ordering relation. The compactness theorem is important for other reasons as well. It is the most frequently applied result in the study of first-order model theory and has inspired interesting developments within set theory and its foundations by generating a search for infinitary languages that obey some analog of the theorem.  INFINITARY LOGIC. J.Ba. compatibilism.

FREE WILL PROBLEM. competence, linguistic.PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. complement.RELATION. complementarity.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, QUANTUM MECHANICS. complementary class, the class of all things not in a given class. For exple, if C is the class of all red things, then its complementary class is the class containing everything that is not red. This latter class includes even non-colored things, like numbers and the class C itself. Often, the context will determine a less inclusive complementary class. If B 0 A, then the complement of B with respect to A is A – B. For exple, if A is the class of physical objects, and B is the class of red physical objects, then the complement of B with respect to A is the class of non-red physical objects.  SET THEORY. P.Mad. complementary term.CONTRAPOSITION. complementation.NEGATION. complete negation.NECESSITY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. completeness, a property that something – typically, a set of axioms, a logic, a theory, a set of well-formed formulas, a language, or a set of connectives – has when it is strong enough in some desirable respect. (1) A set of axioms is complete for the logic L if every theorem of L is provable using those axioms. (2) A logic L has weak semantical completeness if every valid sentence of the language of L is a theorem of L. L has strong semantical completeness (or is deductively complete) if for every set G of sentences, every logical consequence of G is deducible from G using L. A propositional logic L is Halldén-complete if whenever A 7 B is a theorem of L, where A and B share no variables, either A or B is a theorem of L. And L is Post-complete if L is consistent but no stronger logic for the se language is consistent. Reference to the “completeness” of a logic, without further qualification, is almost invariably to either weak or strong semantical completeness. One curious exception: second-order logic is often said to be “incomplete,” where what is meant is that it is not axiomatizable. (3) A theory T is negation-complete (often simply complete) if for every sentence A of the lancommon notions completeness 162 -   162 guage of T, either A or its negation is provable in T. And T is omega-complete if whenever it is provable in T that a property f / holds of each natural number 0, 1, . . . , it is also provable that every number has f. (Generalizing on this, any set G of well-formed formulas might be called omega complete if (v)A[v] is deducible from G whenever A[t] is deducible from G for all terms t, where A[t] is the result of replacing all free occurrences of v in A[v] by t.) (4) A language L is expressively complete if each of a given class of items is expressible in L. Usually, the class in question is the class of (twovalued) truth-functions. The propositional language whose sole connectives are - and 7 is thus said to be expressively (or functionally) complete, while that built up using 7 alone is not, since classical negation is not expressible therein. Here one might also say that the set {-,7} is expressively (or functionally) complete, while {7} is not.

 GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREMS, SECOND-ORDER LOGIC, SHEFFER STROKE. G.F.S. completeness, combinatory.COMBINATORY LOGIC. completeness theorem.SATISFIABLE. complete symbol.SYNCATEGOREMATA. complexe significabile (plural: complexe significabilia), also called complexum significabile, in medieval philosophy, what is signified only by a complexum (a statement or declarative sentence), by a that-clause, or by a dictum (an accusative ! infinitive construction, as in: ‘I want him to go’). It is analogous to the modern proposition. The doctrine seems to have originated with Ad de Wodeh in the early fourteenth century, but is usually associated with Gregory of Rimini slightly later. Complexe significabilia do not fall under any of the Aristotelian categories, and so do not “exist” in the ordinary way. Still, they are somehow real. For before creation nothing existed except God, but even then God knew that the world was going to exist. The object of this knowledge cannot have been God himself (since God is necessary, but the world’s existence is contingent), and yet did not “exist” before creation. Nevertheless, it was real enough to be an object of knowledge. Some authors who maintained such a view held that these entities were not only signifiable in a complex way by a statement, but were themselves complex in their inner structure; the term ‘complexum significabile’ is unique to their theories. The theory of complexe significabilia was vehemently criticized by late medieval nominalists. 

ABSTRACT ENTITY, PROPOSITION. P.V.S. complexum significabile.COMPLEXE SIGNIFICABILE. composition, fallacy of.INFORMAL FALLACY. compositional intention.LEWIS, DAVID. compositionality.COGNITIVE SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. compossible, capable of existing or occurring together. E.g., two individuals are compossible provided the existence of one of them is compatible with the existence of the other. In terms of possible worlds, things are compossible provided there is some possible world to which all of them belong; otherwise they are incompossible. Not all possibilities are compossible. E.g., the extinction of life on earth by the year 3000 is possible; so is its continuation until the year 10,000; but since it is impossible that both of these things should happen, they are not compossible. Leibniz held that any non-actualized possibility must be incompossible with what is actual.  PRINCIPLE OF PLENITUDE. P.Mac. comprehension, as applied to a term, the set of attributes implied by a term. The comprehension of ‘square’, e.g., includes being four-sided, having equal sides, and being a plane figure, ong other attributes. The comprehension of a term is contrasted with its extension, which is the set of individuals to which the term applies. The distinction between the extension and the comprehension of a term was introduced in the Port-Royal Logic by Arnauld and Pierre Nicole in 1662. Current practice is to use the expression ‘intension’ rather than ‘comprehension’. Both expressions, however, are inherently somewhat vague.  AXIOM OF COMPREHENSION. V.K. comprehension, axiom of.AXIOM OF COMPREHENSION. comprehension, principle of.SET THEORY. comprehension schema.SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES. completeness, combinatory comprehension schema 163 -   163 compresence, an unanalyzable relation in terms of which Russell, in his later writings (especially in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948), took concrete particular objects to be analyzable. Concrete particular objects are analyzable in terms of complexes of qualities all of whose members are compresent. Although this relation can be defined only ostensively, Russell states that it appears in psychology as “simultaneity in one experience” and in physics as “overlapping in space-time.” Complete complexes of compresence are complexes of qualities having the following two properties: (1) all members of the complex are compresent; (2) given anything not a member of the complex, there is at least one member of the complex with which it is not compresent. He argues that there is strong empirical evidence that no two complete complexes have all their qualities in common. Finally, space-time pointinstants are analyzed as complete complexes of compresence. Concrete particulars, on the other hand, are analyzed as series of incomplete complexes of compresence related by certain causal laws. 

BUNDLE THEORY, RUSSELL. A.C. computability, roughly, the possibility of computation on a Turing machine. The first convincing general definition, A. N. Turing’s (1936), has been proved equivalent to the known plausible alternatives, so that the concept of computability is generally recognized as an absolute one. Turing’s definition referred to computations by imaginary tape-processing machines that we now know to be capable of computing the se functions (whether simple sums and products or highly complex, esoteric functions) that modern digital computing machines could compute if provided with sufficient storage capacity. In the form ‘Any function that is computable at all is computable on a Turing machine’, this absoluteness claim is called Turing’s thesis. A comparable claim for Alonzo Church’s (1935) concept of lcomputability is called Church’s thesis. Similar theses are enunciated for Markov algorithms, for S. C. Kleene’s notion of general recursiveness, etc. It has been proved that the se functions are computable in all of these ways. There is no hope of proving any of those theses, for such a proof would require a definition of ‘computable’ – a definition that would simply be a further item in the list, the subject of a further thesis. But since computations of new kinds might be recognizable as genuine in particular cases, Turing’s thesis and its equivalents, if false, might be decisively refuted by discovery of a particular function, a way of computing it, and a proof that no Turing machine can compute it. The halting problem for (say) Turing machines is the problem of devising a Turing machine that computes the function h(m, n) % 1 or 0 depending on whether or not Turing machine number m ever halts, once started with the number n on its tape. This problem is unsolvable, for a machine that computed h could be modified to compute a function g(n), which is undefined (the machine goes into an endless loop) when h(n, n) % 1, and otherwise agrees with h(n, n). But this modified machine – Turing machine number k, say – would have contradictory properties: started with k on its tape, it would eventually halt if and only if it does not. Turing proved unsolvability of the decision problem for logic (the problem of devising a Turing machine that, applied to argument number n in logical notation, correctly classifies it as valid or invalid) by reducing the halting problem to the decision problem, i.e., showing how any solution to the latter could be used to solve the former problem, which we know to be unsolvable. 

CHURCH’S THESIS, COMPUTER THEORY, TURING MACHINE. R.J. computability, algorithmic.ALGORITHM. computable.EFFECTIVE PROCEDURE. computational.COMPUTER THEORY. computational theories of mind.COGNITIVE SCIENCE. computer modeling.COMPUTER THEORY. computer progr.COMPUTER THEORY. computer theory, the theory of the design, uses, powers, and limits of modern electronic digital computers. It has important bearings on philosophy, as may be seen from the many philosophical references herein. Modern computers are a radically new kind of machine, for they are active physical realizations of formal languages of logic and arithmetic. Computers employ sophisticated languages, and they have reasoning powers many orders of magnitude greater than those of any prior machines. Because they are far superior to humans in many important tasks, they have produced a revolution in society that is as profound as the industrial revolution and is advancing compresence computer theory 164 -   164 much more rapidly. Furthermore, computers themselves are evolving rapidly. When a computer is augmented with devices for sensing and acting, it becomes a powerful control system, or a robot. To understand the implications of computers for philosophy, one should imagine a robot that has basic goals and volitions built into it, including conflicting goals and competing desires. This concept first appeared in Karel C v apek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920), where the word ‘robot’ originated. A computer has two aspects, hardware and progrming languages. The theory of each is relevant to philosophy. The software and hardware aspects of a computer are somewhat analogous to the human mind and body. This analogy is especially strong if we follow Peirce and consider all information processing in nature and in human organisms, not just the conscious use of language. Evolution has produced a succession of levels of sign usage and information processing: self-copying chemicals, self-reproducing cells, genetic progrs directing the production of organic forms, chemical and neuronal signals in organisms, unconscious human information processing, ordinary languages, and technical languages. But each level evolved gradually from its predecessors, so that the line between body and mind is vague. The hardware of a computer is typically organized into three general blocks: memory, processor (arithmetic unit and control), and various inputoutput devices for communication between machine and environment. The memory stores the data to be processed as well as the progr that directs the processing. The processor has an arithmetic-logic unit for transforming data, and a control for executing the progr. Memory, processor, and input-output communicate to each other through a fast switching system. The memory and processor are constructed from registers, adders, switches, cables, and various other building blocks. These in turn are composed of electronic components: transistors, resistors, and wires. The input and output devices employ mechanical and electromechanical technologies as well as electronics. Some input-output devices also serve as auxiliary memories; floppy disks and magnetic tapes are exples. For theoretical purposes it is useful to imagine that the computer has an indefinitely expandable storage tape. So imagined, a computer is a physical realization of a Turing machine. The idea of an indefinitely expandable memory is similar to the logician’s concept of an axiomatic formal language that has an unlimited number of proofs and theorems. The software of a modern electronic computer is written in a hierarchy of progrming languages. The higher-level languages are designed for use by human progrmers, operators, and maintenance personnel. The “machine language” is the basic hardware language, interpreted and executed by the control. Its words are sequences of binary digits or bits. Progrs written in intermediate-level languages are used by the computer to translate the languages employed by human users into the machine language for execution. A progrming language has instructional means for carrying out three kinds of operations: data operations and transfers, transfers of control from one part of the progr to the other, and progr self-modification. Von Neumann designed the first modern progrming language. A progrming language is general purpose, and an electronic computer that executes it can in principle carry out any algorithm or effective procedure, including the simulation of any other computer. Thus the modern electronic computer is a practical realization of the abstract concept of a universal Turing machine. What can actually be computed in practice depends, of course, on the state of computer technology and its resources. It is common for computers at many different spatial locations to be interconnected into complex networks by telephone, radio, and satellite communication systems. Insofar as users in one part of the network can control other parts, either legitimately or illegitimately (e.g., by means of a “computer virus”), a global network of computers is really a global computer. Such vast computers greatly increase societal interdependence, a fact of importance for social philosophy. The theory of computers has two branches, corresponding to the hardware and software aspects of computers. The fundental concept of hardware theory is that of a finite automaton, which may be expressed either as an idealized logical network of simple computer primitives, or as the corresponding temporal system of input, output, and internal states. A finite automaton may be specified as a logical net of truth-functional switches and simple memory elements, connected to one another by computer theory computer theory 165 -   165 idealized wires. These elements function synchronously, each wire being in a binary state (0 or 1) at each moment of time t % 0, 1, 2, . . . . Each switching element (or “gate”) executes a simple truth-functional operation (not, or, and, nor, not-and, etc.) and is imagined to operate instantaneously (compare the notions of sentential connective and truth table). A memory element (flip-flop, binary counter, unit delay line) preserves its input bit for one or more time-steps. A well-formed net of switches and memory elements may not have cycles through switches only, but it typically has feedback cycles through memory elements. The wires of a logical net are of three kinds: input, internal, and output. Correspondingly, at each moment of time a logical net has an input state, an internal state, and an output state. A logical net or automaton need not have any input wires, in which case it is a closed system. The complete history of a logical net is described by a deterministic law: at each moment of time t, the input and internal states of the net determine its output state and its next internal state. This leads to the second definition of ‘finite automaton’: it is a deterministic finite-state system characterized by two tables. The transition table gives the next internal state produced by each pair of input and internal states. The output table gives the output state produced by each input state and internal state. The state analysis approach to computer hardware is of practical value only for systems with a few elements (e.g., a binary-coded decimal counter), because the number of states increases as a power of the number of elements. Such a rapid rate of increase of complexity with size is called the combinatorial explosion, and it applies to many discrete systems. However, the state approach to finite automata does yield abstract models of law-governed systems that are of interest to logic and philosophy. A correctly operating digital computer is a finite automaton. Alan Turing defined the finite part of what we now call a Turing machine in terms of states. It seems doubtful that a human organism has more computing power than a finite automaton. A closed finite automaton illustrates Nietzsche’s law of eternal return. Since a finite automaton has a finite number of internal states, at least one of its internal states must occur infinitely many times in any infinite state history. And since a closed finite automaton is deterministic and has no inputs, a repeated state must be followed by the se sequence of states each time it occurs. Hence the history of a closed finite automaton is periodic, as in the law of eternal return. Idealized neurons are sometimes used as the primitive elements of logical nets, and it is plausible that for any brain and central nervous system there is a logical network that behaves the se and performs the se functions. This shows the close relation of finite automata to the brain and central nervous system. The switches and memory elements of a finite automaton may be made probabilistic, yielding a probabilistic automaton. These automata are models of indeterministic systems. Von Neumann showed how to extend deterministic logical nets to systems that contain selfreproducing automata. This is a very basic logical design relevant to the nature of life. The part of computer progrming theory most relevant to philosophy contains the answer to Leibniz’s conjecture concerning his characteristica universalis and calculus ratiocinator. He held that “all our reasoning is nothing but the joining and substitution of characters, whether these characters be words or symbols or pictures.” He thought therefore that one could construct a universal, arithmetic language with two properties of great philosophical importance. First, every atomic concept would be represented by a prime number. Second, the truth-value of any logically true-or-false statement expressed in the characteristica universalis could be calculated arithmetically, and so any rational dispute could be resolved by calculation. Leibniz expected to do the computation by hand with the help of a calculating machine; today we would do it on an electronic computer. However, we know now that Leibniz’s proposed language cannot exist, for no computer (or computer progr) can calculate the truth-value of every logically true-orfalse statement given to it. This fact follows from a logical theorem about the limits of what computer progrs can do. Let E be a modern electronic computer with an indefinitely expandable memory, so that E has the power of a universal Turing machine. And let L be any formal language in which every arithmetic statement can be expressed, and which is consistent. Leibniz’s proposed characteristica universalis would be such a language. Now a computer that is operating correctly is an active formal language, carrying out the instructions of its progr deductively. Accordingly, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for formal arithmetic apply to computer E. It follows from these theorems that no progr can enable computer E to decide of an arbitrary statecomputer theory computer theory 166 -   166 ment of L whether or not that statement is true. More strongly, there cannot even be a progr that will enable E to enumerate the truths of language L one after another. Therefore Leibniz’s characteristica universalis cannot exist. Electronic computers are the first active or “live” mathematical systems. They are the latest addition to a long historical series of mathematical tools for inquiry: geometry, algebra, calculus and differential equations, probability and statistics, and modern mathematics. The most effective use of computer progrs is to instruct computers in tasks for which they are superior to humans. Computers are being designed and progrmed to cooperate with humans so that the calculation, storage, and judgment capabilities of the two are synthesized. The powers of such human–computer combines will increase at an exponential rate as computers continue to become faster, more powerful, and easier to use, while at the se time becoming smaller and cheaper. The social implications of this are very important. The modern electronic computer is a new tool for the logic of discovery (Peirce’s abduction). An inquirer (or inquirers) operating a computer interactively can use it as a universal simulator, dynically modeling systems that are too complex to study by traditional mathematical methods, including non-linear systems. Simulation is used to explain known empirical results, and also to develop new hypotheses to be tested by observation. Computer models and simulations are unique in several ways: complexity, dynism, controllability, and visual presentability. These properties make them important new tools for modeling and thereby relevant to some important philosophical problems. A human–computer combine is especially suited for the study of complex holistic and hierarchical systems with feedback (cf. cybernetics), including adaptive goal-directed systems. A hierarchical-feedback system is a dynic structure organized into several levels, with the compounds of one level being the atoms or building blocks of the next higher level, and with cyclic paths of influence operating both on and between levels. For exple, a complex human institution has several levels, and the people in it are themselves hierarchical organizations of selfcopying chemicals, cells, organs, and such systems as the pulmonary and the central nervous system. The behaviors of these systems are in general much more complex than, e.g., the behaviors of traditional systems of mechanics. Contrast an organism, society, or ecology with our planetary system as characterized by Kepler and Newton. Simple formulas (ellipses) describe the orbits of the planets. More basically, the planetary system is stable in the sense that a small perturbation of it produces a relatively small variation in its subsequent history. In contrast, a small change in the state of a holistic hierarchical feedback system often plifies into a very large difference in behavior, a concern of chaos theory. For this reason it is helpful to model such systems on a computer and run sple histories. The operator searches for representative cases, interesting phenomena, and general principles of operation. The human–computer method of inquiry should be a useful tool for the study of biological evolution, the actual historical development of complex adaptive goal-directed systems. Evolution is a logical and communication process as well as a physical and chemical process. But evolution is statistical rather than deterministic, because a single temporal state of the system results in a probabilistic distribution of histories, rather than in a single history. The genetic operators of mutation and crossover, e.g., are probabilistic operators. But though it is stochastic, evolution cannot be understood in terms of limiting relative frequencies, for the important developments are the repeated emergence of new phenomena, and there may be no evolutionary convergence toward a final state or limit. Rather, to understand evolution the investigator must simulate the statistical spectra of histories covering critical stages of the process. Many important evolutionary phenomena should be studied by using simulation along with observation and experiment. Evolution has produced a succession of levels of organization: selfcopying chemicals, self-reproducing cells, communities of cells, simple organisms, haploid sexual reproduction, diploid sexuality with genetic dominance and recessiveness, organisms composed of organs, societies of organisms, humans, and societies of humans. Most of these systems are complex hierarchical feedback systems, and it is of interest to understand how they emerged from earlier systems. Also, the interaction of competition and cooperation at all stages of evolution is an important subject, of relevance to social philosophy and ethics. Some basic epistemological and metaphysical concepts enter into computer modeling. A model is a well-developed concept of its object, representing characteristics like structure and funccomputer theory computer theory 167 -   167 tion. A model is similar to its object in important respects, but simpler; in mathematical terminology, a model is homomorphic to its object but not isomorphic to it. However, it is often useful to think of a model as isomorphic to an embedded subsystem of the system it models. For exple, a gas is a complicated system of microstates of particles, but these microstates can be grouped into macrostates, each with a pressure, volume, and temperature satisfying the gas law PV % kT. The derivation of this law from the detailed mechanics of the gas is a reduction of the embedded subsystem to the underlying system. In many cases it is adequate to work with the simpler embedded subsystem, but in other cases one must work with the more complex but complete underlying system. The law of an embedded subsystem may be different in kind from the law of the underlying system. Consider, e.g., a machine tossing a coin randomly. The sequence of tosses obeys a simple probability law, while the complex underlying mechanical system is deterministic. The random sequence of tosses is a probabilistic system embedded in a deterministic system, and a mathematical account of this embedding relation constitutes a reduction of the probabilistic system to a deterministic system. Compare the compatibilist’s claim that free choice can be embedded in a deterministic system. Compare also a pseudorandom sequence, which is a deterministic sequence with adequate randomness for a given (finite) simulation. Note finally that the probabilistic system of quantum mechanics underlies the deterministic system of mechanics. The ways in which models are used by goaldirected systems to solve problems and adapt to their environments are currently being modeled by human–computer combines. Since computer software can be converted into hardware, successful simulations of adaptive uses of models could be incorporated into the design of a robot. Human intentionality involves the use of a model of oneself in relation to others and the environment. A problem-solving robot using such a model would constitute an important step toward a robot with full human powers. These considerations lead to the central thesis of the philosophy of logical mechanism: a finite deterministic automaton can perform all human functions. This seems plausible in principle (and is treated in detail in Merrilee Salmon, ed., The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism: Essays in Honor of Arthur W. Burks,1990). A digital computer has reasoning and memory powers. Robots have sensory inputs for collecting information from the environment, and they have moving and acting devices. To obtain a robot with human powers, one would need to put these abilities under the direction of a system of desires, purposes, and goals. Logical mechanism is a form of mechanism or materialism, but differs from traditional forms of these doctrines in its reliance on the logical powers of computers and the logical nature of evolution and its products. The modern computer is a kind of complex hierarchical physical system, a system with memory, processor, and control that employs a hierarchy of progrming languages. Humans are complex hierarchical systems designed by evolution – with structural levels of chemicals, cells, organs, and systems (e.g., circulatory, neural, immune) and linguistic levels of genes, enzymes, neural signals, and immune recognition. Traditional materialists did not have this model of a computer nor the contemporary understanding of evolution, and never gave an adequate account of logic and reasoning and such phenomena as goaldirectedness and self-modeling.  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE,

Comte, Auguste (1798–1857), French philosopher and sociologist, the founder of positivism. He was educated in Paris at l’École Polytechnique, where he briefly taught mathematics. He suffered from a mental illness that occasionally interrupted his work. In conformity with empiricism, Comte held that knowledge of the world arises from observation. He went beyond many empiricists, however, in denying the possibility of knowledge of unobservable physical objects. He conceived of positivism as a method of study based on observation and restricted to the observable. He applied positivism chiefly to science. He claimed that the goal of science is prediction, to be accomplished using laws of succession. Explanation insofar as attainable has the se structure as prediction. It subsumes events under laws of succession; it is not causal. Influenced by Kant, he held that the causes of phenomena and the nature of things-in-themselves are not knowable. He criticized metaphysics for ungrounded speculation about such matters; he accused it of not keeping imagination subordinate to observation. He advanced positivism for all the sciences but held that each science has additional special methods, and has laws not derivable by human intelligence from laws of other sciences. He corresponded extensively with J. S. Mill, who Comte, Auguste Comte, Auguste 168 -   168 encouraged his work and discussed it in Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865). Twentieth-century logical positivism was inspired by Comte’s ideas. Comte was a founder of sociology, which he also called social physics. He divided the science into two branches – statics and dynics dealing respectively with social organization and social development. He advocated a historical method of study for both branches. As a law of social development, he proposed that all societies pass through three intellectual stages, first interpreting phenomena theologically, then metaphysically, and finally positivistically. The general idea that societies develop according to laws of nature was adopted by Marx. Comte’s most important work is his six-volume Cours de philosophie positive (Course in Positive Philosophy, 1830–42). It is an encyclopedic treatment of the sciences that expounds positivism and culminates in the introduction of sociology.  EMPIRICISM, LOGICAL POSITIVISM. P.We. conative.VOLITION. conceivability, capability of being conceived or imagined. Thus, golden mountains are conceivable; round squares, inconceivable. As Descartes pointed out, the sort of imaginability required is not the ability to form mental images. Chiliagons, Cartesian minds, and God are all conceivable, though none of these can be pictured “in the mind’s eye.” Historical references include Anselm’s definition of God as “a being than which none greater can be conceived” and Descartes’s argument for dualism from the conceivability of disembodied existence. Several of Hume’s arguments rest upon the maxim that whatever is conceivable is possible. He argued, e.g., that an event can occur without a cause, since this is conceivable, and his critique of induction relies on the inference from the conceivability of a change in the course of nature to its possibility. In response, Reid maintained that to conceive is merely to understand the meaning of a proposition. Reid argued that impossibilities are conceivable, since we must be able to understand falsehoods. Many simply equate conceivability with possibility, so that to say something is conceivable (or inconceivable) just is to say that it is possible (or impossible). Such usage is controversial, since conceivability is broadly an epistemological notion concerning what can be thought, whereas possibility is a metaphysical notion concerning how things can be. The se controversy can arise regarding the compossible, or co-possible, where two states of affairs are compossible provided it is possible that they both obtain, and two propositions are compossible provided their conjunction is possible. Alternatively, two things are compossible if and only if there is a possible world containing both. Leibniz held that two things are compossible provided they can be ascribed to the se possible world without contradiction. “There are many possible universes, each collection of compossibles making one of them.” Others have argued that non-contradiction is sufficient for neither possibility nor compossibility. The claim that something is inconceivable is usually meant to suggest more than merely an inability to conceive. It is to say that trying to conceive results in a phenomenally distinctive mental repugnance, e.g. when one attempts to conceive of an object that is red and green all over at once. On this usage the inconceivable might be equated with what one can “just see” to be impossible. There are two related usages of ‘conceivable’: (1) not inconceivable in the sense just described; and (2) such that one can “just see” that the thing in question is possible. Goldbach’s conjecture would seem a clear exple of something conceivable in the first sense, but not the second. 

LEIBNIZ, NECESSITY, POSSIBLE WORLDS. P.Ti. concept.CONCEPTUALISM. concept, denoting.RUSSELL. concept, theoretical.THEORETICAL TERM. conceptual analysis.ANALYSIS. conceptual immediacy.IMMEDIACY. conceptualism, the view that there are no universals and that the supposed classificatory function of universals is actually served by particular concepts in the mind. A universal is a property that can be instantiated by more than one individual thing (or particular) at the se time; e.g., the shape of this , if identical with the shape of the next , will be one property instantiated by two distinct individual things at the se time. If viewed as located where the s are, then it would be immanent. If viewed as not having spatiotemporal location itself, but only bearing a connection, usually called instantiation or exemplification, to things that have such location, then the shape of this  would be transcendent conative conceptualism 169 -   169 and presumably would exist even if exemplified by nothing, as Plato seems to have held. The conceptualist rejects both views by holding that universals are merely concepts. Most generally, a concept may be understood as a principle of classification, something that can guide us in determining whether an entity belongs in a given class or does not. Of course, properties understood as universals satisfy, trivially, this definition and thus may be called concepts, as indeed they were by Frege. But the conceptualistic substantive views of concepts are that concepts are (1) mental representations, often called ideas, serving their classificatory function presumably by resembling the entities to be classified; or (2) brain states that serve the se function but presumably not by resemblance; or (3) general words (adjectives, common nouns, verbs) or uses of such words, an entity’s belonging to a certain class being determined by the applicability to the entity of the appropriate word; or (4) abilities to classify correctly, whether or not with the aid of an item belonging under (1), (2), or (3). The traditional conceptualist holds (1). Defenders of (3) would be more properly called nominalists. In whichever way concepts are understood, and regardless of whether conceptualism is true, they are obviously essential to our understanding and knowledge of anything, even at the most basic level of cognition, nely, recognition. The classic work on the topic is Thinking and Experience (1954) by H. H. Price, who held (4).  METAPHYSICS, PLATO, PROPERTY. P.Bu. conceptual polarity.POLARITY. conceptual priority.DEPENDENCE. conceptual role semantics.MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. conceptual role theory of meaning.MEANING. conceptual truth.ANALYTIC–SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION. conciliarism.GERSON. concilience.WHEWELL. conclusive evidence.EVIDENCE. conclusive justification.JUSTIFICATION. concomitant variation, method of.MILL’S METHODS. concrescence.WHITEHEAD. concrete universal.HEGEL. concretion, principle of.WHITEHEAD. concretism.REISM. concurrent cause.CAUSATION. concursus dei, God’s concurrence. The notion derives from a theory from medieval philosophical theology, according to which any case of causation involving created substances requires both the exercise of genuine causal powers inherent in creatures and the exercise of God’s causal activity. In particular, a person’s actions are the result of the person’s causal powers, often including the powers of deliberation and choice, and God’s causal endorsement. Divine concurrence maintains that the nature of God’s activity is more determinate than simply conserving the created world in existence. Although divine concurrence agrees with occasionalism in holding God’s power to be necessary for any event to occur, it diverges from occasionalism insofar as it regards creatures as causally active.  OCCASIONALISM. W.E.M. Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de (1714–80), French philosopher, an empiricist who was considered the great analytical mind of his generation. Close to Rousseau and Diderot, he stayed within the church. He is closely (perhaps excessively) identified with the image of the statue that, in the Traité des sensations (Treatise on Sense Perception, 1754), he endows with the five senses to explain how perceptions are assimilated and produce understanding (cf. also his Treatise on the Origins of Human Knowledge, 1746). He maintains a critical distance from precursors: he adopts Locke’s tabula rasa but from his first work to Logique (Logic, 1780) insists on the creative role of the mind as it analyzes and compares sense impressions. His Traité des animaux (Treatise on Animals, 1755), which includes a proof of the existence of God, considers sensate creatures rather than Descartes’s animaux machines and sees God only as a final cause. He reshapes Leibniz’s monads in the Monadologie (Monadology, 1748, rediscovered in 1980). In the Langue des calculs (Language of Numbers, 1798) he proposes mathematics as a model of clear analysis. The origin of language and creation of symbols eventually bece his major concern. His break with metaphysics in the Traité des systèmes (Treaconceptual polarity Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 170 -   170 tise on Systems, 1749) has been overemphasized, but Condillac does replace rational constructs with sense experience and reflection. His empiricism has been mistaken for materialism, his clear analysis for simplicity. The “ideologues,” Destutt de Tracy and Laromiguière, found Locke in his writings. Jefferson admired him. Maine de Biran, while critical, was indebted to him for concepts of perception and the self; Cousin disliked him; Saussure saw him as a forerunner in the study of the origins of language.  LEIBNIZ, LOCKE, SENSATIONALISM. O.A.H. condition, a state of affairs or “way things are,” most commonly referred to in relation to something that implies or is implied by it. Let p, q, and r be schematic letters for declarative sentences; and let P, Q, and R be corresponding nominalizations; e.g., if p is ‘snow is white’, then P would be ‘snow’s being white’. P can be a necessary or sufficient condition of Q in any of several senses. In the weakest sense P is a sufficient condition of Q iff (if and only if): if p then q (or if P is actual then Q is actual) – where the conditional is to be read as “material,” as ounting merely to not-(p & not-q). At the se time Q is a necessary condition of P iff: if not-q then not-p. It follows that P is a sufficient condition of Q iff Q is a necessary condition of P. Stronger senses of sufficiency and of necessity are definable, in terms of this basic sense, as follows: P is nomologically sufficient (necessary) for Q iff it follows from the laws of nature, but not without them, that if p then q (that if q then p). P is alethically or metaphysically sufficient (necessary) for Q iff it is alethically or metaphysically necessary that if p then q (that if q then p). However, it is perhaps most common of all to interpret conditions in terms of subjunctive conditionals, in such a way that P is a sufficient condition of Q iff P would not occur unless Q occurred, or: if P should occur, Q would; and P is a necessary condition of Q iff Q would not occur unless P occurred, or: if Q should occur, P would.  CAUSATION, PROPERTY, STATE OF AFFAIRS. E.S. conditional, a compound sentence, such as ‘if Abe calls, then Ben answers,’ in which one sentence, the antecedent, is connected to a second, the consequent, by the connective ‘if . . . then’. Propositions (statements, etc.) expressed by conditionals are called conditional propositions (statements, etc.) and, by ellipsis, simply conditionals. The biguity of the expression ‘if . . . then’ gives rise to a semantic classification of conditionals into material conditionals, causal conditionals, counterfactual conditionals, and so on. In traditional logic, conditionals are called hypotheticals, and in some areas of mathematical logic conditionals are called implications. Faithful analysis of the meanings of conditionals continues to be investigated and intensely disputed.  CORRESPONDING CONDITIONAL, COUNTERFACTUALS, IMPLICATION, PROPOSITION, TRUTH TABLE. J.Cor. conditional, material.COUNTERFACTUALS, IMPLICATION. conditional, strict.COUNTERFACTUALS, IMPLICATION. conditional probability.PROBABILITY. conditional proof. (1) The argument form ‘B follows from A; therefore, if A then B’ and arguments of this form. (2) The rule of inference that permits one to infer a conditional given a derivation of its consequent from its antecedent. This is also known as the rule of conditional proof or /- introduction. G.F.S. conditional proposition.

CONDITIONAL, CONVERSE, COUNTERFACTUALS. conditioning, a form of associative learning that occurs when changes in thought or behavior are produced by temporal relations ong events. It is common to distinguish between two types of conditioning; one, classical or Pavlovian, in which behavior change results from events that occur before behavior; the other, operant or instrumental, in which behavior change occurs because of events after behavior. Roughly, classically and operantly conditioned behavior correspond to the everyday, folk-psychological distinction between involuntary and voluntary or goaldirected behavior. In classical conditioning, stimuli or events elicit a response (e.g., salivation); neutral stimuli (e.g., a dinner bell) gain control over behavior when paired with stimuli that already elicit behavior (e.g., the appearance of dinner). The behavior is involuntary. In operant conditioning, stimuli or events reinforce behavior after behavior occurs; neutral stimuli gain power to reinforce by being paired with actual reinforcers. Here, occasions in which behavior is reinforced serve as discriminative stimuli-evoking behavior. Operant behavior is goal-directed, if not consciously or deliberately, then through the bond between behavior and reinforcement. condition conditioning 171 -   171 Thus, the arrangement of condiments at dinner may serve as the discriminative stimulus evoking the request “Please pass the salt,” whereas saying “Thank you” may reinforce the behavior of passing the salt. It is not easy to integrate conditioning phenomena into a unified theory of conditioning. Some theorists contend that operant conditioning is really classical conditioning veiled by subtle temporal relations ong events. Other theorists contend that operant conditioning requires mental representations of reinforcers and discriminative stimuli. B. F. Skinner (1904– 90) argued in Walden Two (1948) that astute, benevolent behavioral engineers can and should use conditioning to create a social utopia.  REDINTEGRATION. G.A.G. conditio sine qua non (Latin, ‘a condition without which not’), a necessary condition; something without which something else could not be or could not occur. For exple, being a plane figure is a conditio sine qua non for being a triangle. Sometimes the phrase is used emphatically as a synonym for an unconditioned presupposition, be it for an action to start or an argument to get going. I.Bo. Condorcet, Marquis de, title of Marie-JeanAntoine-Nicolas de Caritat (1743–94), French philosopher and political theorist who contributed to the Encyclopedia and pioneered the mathematical analysis of social institutions. Although prominent in the Revolutionary government, he was denounced for his political views and died in prison. Condorcet discovered the voting paradox, which shows that majoritarian voting can produce cyclical group preferences. Suppose, for instance, that voters A, B, and C rank proposals x, y, and z as follows: A: xyz, B: yzx, and C: zxy. Then in majoritarian voting x beats y and y beats z, but z in turn beats x. So the resulting group preferences are cyclical. The discovery of this problem helped initiate social choice theory, which evaluates voting systems. Condorcet argued that any satisfactory voting system must guarantee selection of a proposal that beats all rivals in majoritarian competition. Such a proposal is called a Condorcet winner. His jury theorem says that if voters register their opinions about some matter, such as whether a defendant is guilty, and the probabilities that individual voters are right are greater than ½, equal, and independent, then the majority vote is more likely to be correct than any individual’s or minority’s vote. Condorcet’s main works are Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Decisions Reached by a Majority of Votes, 1785); and a posthumous treatise on social issues, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795).  PROBABILITY, SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY, VOTING PARADOX. P.We. Condorcet winner.

CONDORCET. confirmation, an evidential relation between evidence and any statement (especially a scientific hypothesis) that this evidence supports. It is essential to distinguish two distinct, and fundentally different, meanings of the term: (1) the incremental sense, in which a piece of evidence contributes at least some degree of support to the hypothesis in question – e.g., finding a fingerprint of the suspect at the scene of the crime lends some weight to the hypothesis that the suspect is guilty; and (2) the absolute sense, in which a body of evidence provides strong support for the hypothesis in question – e.g., a case presented by a prosecutor making it practically certain that the suspect is guilty. If one thinks of confirmation in terms of probability, then evidence that increases the probability of a hypothesis confirms it incrementally, whereas evidence that renders a hypothesis highly probable confirms it absolutely. In each of the two foregoing senses one can distinguish three types of confirmation: (i) qualitative, (ii) quantitative, and (iii) comparative. (i) Both exples in the preceding paragraph illustrate qualitative confirmation, for no numerical values of the degree of confirmation were mentioned. (ii) If a gbler, upon learning that an opponent holds a certain card, asserts that her chance of winning has increased from 2 /3 to ¾, the claim is an instance of quantitative incremental confirmation. If a physician states that, on the basis of an X-ray, the probability that the patient has tuberculosis is .95, that claim exemplifies quantitative absolute confirmation. In the incremental sense, any case of quantitative confirmation involves a difference between two probability values; in the absolute sense, any case of quantitative confirmation involves only one probability value. (iii) Comparative confirmation in the incremental sense would be illustrated if an investigator said that possession of the murder weapon weighs more heavily against the suspect conditiio sine qua non confirmation 172 -   172 than does the fingerprint found at the scene of the crime. Comparative confirmation in the absolute sense would occur if a prosecutor claimed to have strong cases against two suspects thought to be involved in a crime, but that the case against one is stronger than that against the other. Even given recognition of the foregoing six varieties of confirmation, there is still considerable controversy regarding its analysis. Some authors claim that quantitative confirmation does not exist; only qualitative and/or comparative confirmation are possible. Some authors maintain that confirmation has nothing to do with probability, whereas others – known as Bayesians – analyze confirmation explicitly in terms of Bayes’s theorem in the mathematical calculus of probability. ong those who offer probabilistic analyses there are differences as to which interpretation of probability is suitable in this context. Popper advocates a concept of corroboration that differs fundentally from confirmation. Many (real or apparent) paradoxes of confirmation have been posed; the most fous is the paradox of the ravens. It is plausible to suppose that ‘All ravens are black’ can be incrementally confirmed by the observation of one of its instances, nely, a black crow. However, ‘All ravens are black’ is logically equivalent to ‘All non-black things are non-ravens.’ By parity of reasoning, an instance of this statement, nely, any nonblack non-raven (e.g., a white shoe), should incrementally confirm it. Moreover, the equivalence condition – whatever confirms a hypothesis must equally confirm any statement logically equivalent to it – seems eminently reasonable. The result appears to facilitate indoor ornithology, for the observation of a white shoe would seem to confirm incrementally the hypothesis that all ravens are black. Many attempted resolutions of this paradox can be found in the literature.  TESTABILITY, VERIFICATIONISM. W.C.S. confirmation, degree of.CARNAP. confirmation, paradoxes of.CONFIRMATION. confirmational holism.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. Confucianism, a Chinese school of thought and set of moral, ethical, and political teachings usually considered to be founded by Confucius. Before the time of Confucius (sixth–fifth century B.C.), a social group, the Ju (literally, ‘weaklings’ or ‘foundlings’), existed whose members were ritualists and sometimes also teachers by profession. Confucius belonged to this group; but although he retained the interest in rituals, he was also concerned with the then chaotic social and political situation and with the search for remedies, which he believed to lie in the restoration and maintenance of certain traditional values and norms. Later thinkers who professed to be followers of Confucius shared such concern and belief and, although they interpreted and developed Confucius’s teachings in different ways, they are often regarded as belonging to the se school of thought, traditionally referred to by Chinese scholars as Ju-chia, or the school of the Ju. The term ‘Confucianism’ is used to refer to some or all of the range of phenomena including the way of life of the Ju as a group of ritualists, the school of thought referred to as Ju-chia, the ethical, social, and political ideals advocated by this school of thought (which include but go well beyond the practice of rituals), and the influence of such ideals on the actual social and political order and the life of the Chinese. As a school of thought, Confucianism is characterized by a common ethical ideal which includes an affective concern for all living things, varying in degree and nature depending on how such things relate to oneself; a reverential attitude toward others manifested in the observance of formal rules of conduct such as the way to receive guests; an ability to determine the proper course of conduct, whether this calls for observance of traditional norms or departure from such norms; and a firm commitment to proper conduct so that one is not swayed by adverse circumstances such as poverty or death. Everyone is supposed to have the ability to attain this ideal, and people are urged to exercise constant vigilance over their character so that they can transform themselves to embody this ideal fully. In the political realm, a ruler who embodies the ideal will care about and provide for the people, who will be attracted to him; the moral exple he sets will have a transforming effect on the people. Different Confucian thinkers have different conceptions of the way the ethical ideal may be justified and attained. Mencius (fourth century B.C.) regarded the ideal as a full realization of certain incipient moral inclinations shared by human beings, and emphasized the need to reflect on and fully develop such inclinations. Hsün Tzu (third century B.C.) regarded it as a way of optimizing the satisfaction of presocial confirmation, degree of Confucianism 173 -   173 human desires, and emphasized the need to learn the norms governing social distinctions and let them transform and regulate the pursuit of satisfaction of such desires. Different kinds of Confucian thought continued to evolve, yielding such major thinkers as Tung Chung-shu (second century B.C.) and Han Yü (A.D. 768–824). Han Yü regarded Mencius as the true transmitter of Confucius’s teachings, and this view bece generally accepted, largely through the efforts of Chu Hsi (1130–1200). The Mencian form of Confucian thought continued to be developed in different ways by such major thinkers as Chu Hsi, Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), and Tai Chen (1723–77), who differed concerning the way to attain the Confucian ideal and the metaphysics undergirding it. Despite these divergent developments, Confucius continued to be revered within this tradition of thought as its first and most important thinker, and the Confucian school of thought continued to exert great influence on Chinese life and on the social and political order down to the present century.  CHU HSI, MENCIUS, WANG YANGMING. K.-l.S. Confucius, also known as K’ung Ch’iu, K’ung Tzu, Kung Fu-tzu (sixth–fifth century B.C.), Chinese thinker usually regarded as founder of the Confucian school of thought. His teachings are recorded in the Lun Yü or Analects, a collection of sayings by him and by disciples, and of conversations between him and his disciples. His highest ethical ideal is jen (humanity, goodness), which includes an affective concern for the wellbeing of others, desirable attributes (e.g. filial piety) within filial, social, and political institutions, and other desirable attributes such as yung (courage, bravery). An important part of the ideal is the general observance of li (rites), the traditional norms governing conduct between people related by their different social positions, along with a critical reflection on such norms and a preparedness to adapt them to present circumstances. Human conduct should not be dictated by fixed rules, but should be sensitive to relevant considerations and should accord with yi (rightness, duty). Other important concepts include shu (consideration, reciprocity), which involves not doing to another what one would not have wished done to oneself, and chung (loyalty, commitment), interpreted variously as a commitment to the exercise of shu, to the norms of li, or to one’s duties toward superiors and equals. The ideal of jen is within the reach of all, and one should constantly reflect on one’s character and correct one’s deficiencies. Jen has transformative powers that should ideally be the basis of government; a ruler with jen will care about and provide for the people, who will be attracted to him, and the moral exple he sets will inspire people to reform themselves. 

CONFUCIANISM, JEN, LI2. K.-l.S. congruence.LEWIS, C. I. conjecture.POPPER. conjunction, the logical operation on a pair of propositions that is typically indicated by the coordinating conjunction ‘and’. The truth table for conjunction is Besides ‘and’, other coordinating conjunctions, including ‘but’, ‘however’, ‘moreover’, and ‘although’, can indicate logical conjunction, as can the semicolon ‘;’ and the comma ‘,’.  TRUTH TABLE. R.W.B. conjunction elimination. (1) The argument form ‘A and B; therefore, A (or B)’ and arguments of this form. (2) The rule of inference that permits one to infer either conjunct from a conjunction. This is also known as the rule of simplification or 8-elimination.  CONJUNCTION. G.F.S. conjunction introduction. (1) The argument form ‘A, B; therefore, A and B’ and arguments of this form. (2) The rule of inference that permits one to infer a conjunction from its two conjuncts. This is also known as the rule of conjunction introduction, 8-introduction, or adjunction.  CONJUNCTION. G.F.S. conjunctive normal form.NORMAL FORM. connected,said of a relation R where, for any two distinct elements x and y of the domain, either xRy or yRx. R is said to be strongly connected if, for any two elements x and y, either xRy or yRx, even if x and y are identical. Given the domain of positive integers, for instance, the relation ‹ is connected, since for any two distinct numbers a and b, either a ‹ b or b ‹ a. ‹ is not strongly connected, however, since if a % b we do not have either a ‹ b or b ‹ a. The relation o, however, is Confucius connected 174 -   174 strongly connected, since either a o b or b o a for any two numbers, including the case where a % b. An exple of a relation that is not connected is the subset relation 0, since it is not true that for any two sets A and B, either A 0 B or B 0 A.  RELATION. V.K. connectionism, an approach to modeling cognitive systems which utilizes networks of simple processing units that are inspired by the basic structure of the nervous system. Other nes for this approach are neural network modeling and parallel distributed processing. Connectionism was pioneered in the period 1940–65 by researchers such as Frank Rosenblatt and Oliver Selfridge. Interest in using such networks diminished during the 1970s because of limitations encountered by existing networks and the growing attractiveness of the computer model of the mind (according to which the mind stores symbols in memory and registers and performs computations upon them). Connectionist models enjoyed a renaissance in the 1980s, partly as the result of the discovery of means of overcoming earlier limitations (e.g., development of the back-propagation learning algorithm by David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Willis, and of the Boltzmann-machine learning algorithm by David Ackley, Geoffrey Hinton, and Terrence Sejnowski), and partly as limitations encountered with the computer model rekindled interest in alternatives. Researchers employing connectionist-type nets are found in a variety of disciplines including psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and physics. There are often major differences in the endeavors of these researchers: psychologists and artificial intelligence researchers are interested in using these nets to model cognitive behavior, whereas neuroscientists often use them to model processing in particular neural systems. A connectionist system consists of a set of processing units that can take on activation values. These units are connected so that particular units can excite or inhibit others. The activation of any particular unit will be determined by one or more of the following: inputs from outside the system, the excitations or inhibitions supplied by other units, and the previous activation of the unit. There are a variety of different architectures invoked in connectionist systems. In feedforward nets units are clustered into layers and connections pass activations in a unidirectional manner from a layer of input units to a layer of output units, possibly passing through one or more layers of hidden units along the way. In these systems processing requires one pass of processing through the network. Interactive nets exhibit no directionality of processing: a given unit may excite or inhibit another unit, and it, or another unit influenced by it, might excite or inhibit the first unit. A number of processing cycles will ensue after an input has been given to some or all of the units until eventually the network settles into one state, or cycles through a small set of such states. One of the most attractive features of connectionist networks is their ability to learn. This is accomplished by adjusting the weights connecting the various units of the system, thereby altering the manner in which the network responds to inputs. To illustrate the basic process of connectionist learning, consider a feedforward network with just two layers of units and one layer of connections. One learning procedure (commonly referred to as the delta rule) first requires the network to respond, using current weights, to an input. The activations on the units of the second layer are then compared to a set of target activations, and detected differences are used to adjust the weights coming from active input units. Such a procedure gradually reduces the difference between the actual response and the target response. In order to construe such networks as cognitive models it is necessary to interpret the input and output units. Localist interpretations treat individual input and output units as representing concepts such as those found in natural language. Distributed interpretations correlate only patterns of activation of a number of units with ordinary language concepts. Sometimes (but not always) distributed models will interpret individual units as corresponding to microfeatures. In one interesting variation on distributed representation, known as coarse coding, each symbol will be assigned to a different subset of the units of the system, and the symbol will be viewed as active only if a predefined number of the assigned units are active. A number of features of connectionist nets make them particularly attractive for modeling cognitive phenomena in addition to their ability to learn from experience. They are extremely efficient at pattern-recognition tasks and often generalize very well from training inputs to similar test inputs. They can often recover complete patterns from partial inputs, making them good models for content-addressable memory. Interactive networks are particularly useful in modeling cognitive tasks in which multiple constraints must be satisfied simultaneously, or in which the connectionism connectionism 175 -   175 goal is to satisfy competing constraints as well as possible. In a natural manner they can override some constraints on a problem when it is not possible to satisfy all, thus treating the constraints as soft. While the cognitive connectionist models are not intended to model actual neural processing, they suggest how cognitive processes can be realized in neural hardware. They also exhibit a feature demonstrated by the brain but difficult to achieve in symbolic systems: their performance degrades gracefully as units or connections are disabled or the capacity of the network is exceeded, rather than crashing. Serious challenges have been raised to the usefulness of connectionism as a tool for modeling cognition. Many of these challenges have come from theorists who have focused on the complexities of language, especially the systematicity exhibited in language. Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, for exple, have emphasized the manner in which the meaning of complex sentences is built up compositionally from the meaning of components, and argue both that compositionality applies to thought generally and that it requires a symbolic system. Therefore, they maintain, while cognitive systems might be implemented in connectionist nets, these nets do not characterize the architecture of the cognitive system itself, which must have capacities for symbol storage and manipulation. Connectionists have developed a variety of responses to these objections, including emphasizing the importance of cognitive functions such as pattern recognition, which have not been as successfully modeled by symbolic systems; challenging the need for symbol processing in accounting for linguistic behavior; and designing more complex connectionist architectures, such as recurrent networks, capable of responding to or producing systematic structures.  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. W.B. connective, propositional.SENTENTIAL CONNECTIVE. connective, sentential.SENTENTIAL CONNECTIVE. connotation. (1) The ideas and associations brought to mind by an expression (used in contrast with ‘denotation’ and ‘meaning’). (2) In a technical use, the properties jointly necessary and sufficient for the correct application of the expression in question.  DENOTATION, MEANING. T.M. conscience.BUTLER, SYNDERESIS. consciousness.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. consent, informed.INFORMED CONSENT. consent, tacit.SOCIAL CONTRACT. consequence.FORMAL SEMANTICS. consequence, logical.LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE. consequence, semantic.MODAL LOGIC. consequence argument.FREE WILL PROBLEM. consequence relation.FORMAL SEMANTICS, LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE. consequent.COUNTERFACTUALS. consequentialism, the doctrine that the moral rightness of an act is determined solely by the goodness of the act’s consequences. Prominent consequentialists include J. S. Mill, Moore, and Sidgwick. Maximizing versions of consequentialism – the most common sort – hold that an act is morally right if and only if it produces the best consequences of those acts available to the agent. Satisficing consequentialism holds that an act is morally right if and only if it produces enough good consequences on balance. Consequentialist theories are often contrasted with deontological ones, such as Kant’s, which hold that the rightness of an act is determined at least in part by something other than the goodness of the act’s consequences. A few versions of consequentialism are agentrelative: that is, they give each agent different aims, so that different agents’ aims may conflict. For instance, egoistic consequentialism holds that the moral rightness of an act for an agent depends solely on the goodness of its consequences for him or her. However, the vast majority of consequentialist theories have been agent-neutral (and consequentialism is often defined in a more restrictive way so that agentrelative versions do not count as consequentialist). A doctrine is agent-neutral when it gives to each agent the se ultimate aims, so that different agents’ aims cannot conflict. For instance, utilitarianism holds that an act is morally right if and only if it produces more happiness for the sentient beings it affects than any other act available to the agent. This gives each agent the se ultimate aim, and so is agent-neutral. connective, propositional consequentialism 176 -   176 Consequentialist theories differ over what features of acts they hold to determine their goodness. Utilitarian versions hold that the only consequences of an act relevant to its goodness are its effects on the happiness of sentient beings. But some consequentialists hold that the promotion of other things matters too – achievement, autonomy, knowledge, or fairness, for instance. Thus utilitarianism, as a maximizing, agent-neutral, happiness-based view is only one of a broad range of consequentialist theories.  ETHICS; MILL, J. S.; MOORE; SIDGWICK; UTILITARIANISM. B.Ga. consequentialism, indirect.BUTLER. consequential property.SUPERVENIENCE. consequentia mirabilis, the logical principle that if a statement follows from its own negation it must be true. Strict consequentia mirabilis is the principle that if a statement follows logically from its own negation it is logically true. The principle is often connected with the paradoxes of strict implication, according to which any statement follows from a contradiction. Since the negation of a tautology is a contradiction, every tautology follows from its own negation. However, if every expression of the form ‘if p then q’ implies ‘not-p or q’ (they need not be equivalent), then from ‘if not-p then p’ we can derive ‘not-not-p or p’ and (by the principles of double negation and repetition) derive p. Since all of these rules are unexceptionable the principle of consequentia mirabilis is also unexceptionable. It is, however, somewhat counterintuitive, hence the ne (‘the astonishing implication’), which goes back to its medieval discoverers (or rediscoverers).  IMPLICATION. R.P. conservation.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. conservation principle.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. consilience.

WHEWELL. consistency, in traditional Aristotelian logic, a semantic notion: two or more statements are called consistent if they are simultaneously true under some interpretation (cf., e.g., W. S. Jevons, Elementary Lessons in Logic, 1870). In modern logic there is a syntactic definition that also fits complex (e.g., mathematical) theories developed since Frege’s Begriffsschrift (1879): a set of statements is called consistent with respect to a certain logical calculus, if no formula ‘P & –P’ is derivable from those statements by the rules of the calculus; i.e., the theory is free from contradictions. If these definitions are equivalent for a logic, we have a significant fact, as the equivalence ounts to the completeness of its system of rules. The first such completeness theorem was obtained for sentential or propositional logic by Paul Bernays in 1918 (in his Habilitationsschrift that was partially published as Axiomatische Untersuchung des Aussagen-Kalküls der “Principia Mathematica,” 1926) and, independently, by Emil Post (in Introduction to a General Theory of Elementary Propositions, 1921); the completeness of predicate logic was proved by Gödel (in Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls, 1930). The crucial step in such proofs shows that syntactic consistency implies semantic consistency. Cantor applied the notion of consistency to sets. In a well-known letter to Dedekind (1899) he distinguished between an inconsistent and a consistent multiplicity; the former is such “that the assumption that all of its elements ‘are together’ leads to a contradiction,” whereas the elements of the latter “can be thought of without contradiction as ‘being together.’ “ Cantor had conveyed these distinctions and their motivation by letter to Hilbert in 1897 (see W. Purkert and H. J. Ilgauds, Georg Cantor, 1987). Hilbert pointed out explicitly in 1904 that Cantor had not given a rigorous criterion for distinguishing between consistent and inconsistent multiplicities. Already in his Über den Zahlbegriff (1899) Hilbert had suggested a remedy by giving consistency proofs for suitable axiomatic systems; e.g., to give the proof of the “existence of the totality of real numbers or – in the terminology of G. Cantor – the proof of the fact that the system of real numbers is a consistent (complete) set” by establishing the consistency of an axiomatic characterization of the reals – in modern terminology, of the theory of complete, ordered fields. And he claimed, somewhat indeterminately, that this could be done “by a suitable modification of filiar methods.” After 1904, Hilbert pursued a new way of giving consistency proofs. This novel way of proceeding, still aiming for the se goal, was to make use of the formalization of the theory at hand. However, in the formulation of Hilbert’s Progr during the 1920s the point of consistency proofs was no longer to guarantee the existence of suitable sets, but rather to establish the instrumental usefulness of strong mathematical consequentialism, indirect consistency 177 -   177 theories T, like axiomatic set theory, relative to finitist mathematics. That focus rested on the observation that the statement formulating the syntactic consistency of T is equivalent to the reflection principle Pr(a, ‘s’) P s; here Pr is the finitist proof predicate for T, s is a finitistically meaningful statement, and ‘s’ its translation into the language of T. If one could establish finitistically the consistency of T, one could be sure – on finitist grounds – that T is a reliable instrument for the proof of finitist statements. There are many exples of significant relative consistency proofs: (i) non-Euclidean geometry relative to Euclidean, Euclidean geometry relative to analysis; (ii) set theory with the axiom of choice relative to set theory (without the axiom of choice), set theory with the negation of the axiom of choice relative to set theory; (iii) classical arithmetic relative to intuitionistic arithmetic, subsystems of classical analysis relative to intuitionistic theories of constructive ordinals. The mathematical significance of relative consistency proofs is often brought out by sharpening them to establish conservative extension results; the latter may then ensure, e.g., that the theories have the se class of provably total functions. The initial motivation for such arguments is, however, frequently philosophical: one wants to guarantee the coherence of the original theory on an epistemologically distinguished basis.  CANTOR, COMPLETENESS, GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREMS, HILBERT’S PROGR, PROOF THEORY. W.S. consistency, axiom of.

AXIOM OF CONSISTENCY. consistency, semantic.CONSISTENCY. consistency, syntactic.CONSISTENCY. Constant, Benjin, in full, Henri-Benjin Constant de Rebecque (1767–1830), Swiss-born defender of liberalism and passionate analyst of French and European politics. He welcomed the French Revolution but not the Reign of Terror, the violence of which he avoided by accepting a lowly diplomatic post in Braunschweig (1787– 94). In 1795 he returned to Paris with Made de Staël and intervened in parlientary debates. His pphlets opposed both extremes, the Jacobin and the Bonapartist. Impressed by Rousseau’s Social Contract, he ce to fear that like Napoleon’s dictatorship, the “general will” could threaten civil rights. He had first welcomed Napoleon, but turned against his autocracy. He favored parlientary democracy, separation of church and state, and a bill of rights. The high point of his political career ce with membership in the Tribunat (1800–02), a consultative chber appointed by the Senate. His centrist position is evident in the Principes de politique (1806–10). Had not republican terror been as destructive as the Empire? In chapters 16–17, Constant opposes the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns. He assumes that the Greek world was given to war, and therefore strengthened “political liberty” that favors the state over the individual (the liberty of the ancients). Fundentally optimistic, he believed that war was a thing of the past, and that the modern world needs to protect “civil liberty,” i.e. the liberty of the individual (the liberty of the moderns). The great merit of Constant’s comparison is the analysis of historical forces, the theory that governments must support current needs and do not depend on deterministic factors such as the size of the state, its form of government, geography, climate, and race. Here he contradicts Montesquieu. The opposition between ancient and modern liberty expresses a radical liberalism that did not seem to fit French politics. However, it was the beginning of the liberal tradition, contrasting political liberty in the service of the state with the civil liberty of the citizen (cf. Mill’s On Liberty, 1859, and Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958). Principes remained in manuscript until 1861; the scholarly editions of Étienne Hofmann (1980) are far more recent. Hofmann calls Principes the essential text between Montesquieu and Tocqueville. It was translated into English as Constant, Political Writings (ed. Biancaria Fontana, 1988 and 1997). Forced into retirement by Napoleon, Constant wrote his literary masterpieces, Adolphe and the diaries. He completed the Principes, then turned to De la religion (6 vols.), which he considered his supreme achievement.  MONTESQUIEU, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FREEDOM. O.A.H. constant, logical.LOGICAL CONSTANT. constant conjunction.CAUSATION, HUME. constant sum ge.GE THEORY. constative.SPEECH ACT THEORY. constitution, a relation between concrete particuconsistency, axiom of constitution 178 -   178 lars (including objects and events) and their parts, according to which at some time t, a concrete particular is said to be constituted by the sum of its parts without necessarily being identical with that sum. For instance, at some specific time t, Mt. Everest is constituted by the various chunks of rock and other matter that form Everest at t, though at t Everest would still have been Everest even if, contrary to fact, some particular rock that is part of the sum had been absent. Hence, although Mt. Everest is not identical to the sum of its material parts at t, it is constituted by them. The relation of constitution figures importantly in recent attempts to articulate and defend metaphysical physicalism (naturalism). To capture the idea that all that exists is ultimately physical, we may say that at the lowest level of reality, there are only microphysical phenomena, governed by the laws of microphysics, and that all other objects and events are ultimately constituted by objects and events at the microphysical level.  IDENTITY, MORAL REALISM, NATURALISM, PHYSICALISM, REDUCTION. M.C.T. constitutive principle.KANT. construct.

LOGICAL CONSTRUCTION, OPERATIONALISM. construct, hypothetical.OPERATIONALISM. constructionism, social.SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM. constructive dilemma.DILEMMA. constructive empiricism.SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM. constructivism, ethical.ETHICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM. constructivism, mathematical.PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. constructivism, social.SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM. consubstantiation.TRANSUBSTANTIATION. containment.KANT. content.INDEXICAL, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. content, factual.ANALYTIC–SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION. content, latent.FREUD. content, manifest.FREUD. content, narrow.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. content, propositional.CIRCULAR REASONING. content, wide.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. content externalism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. context principle.FREGE. contextual definition.DEFINITION. contextualism, the view that inferential justification always takes place against a background of beliefs that are themselves in no way evidentially supported. The view has not often been defended by ne, but Dewey, Popper, Austin, and Wittgenstein are arguably ong its notable exponents. As this list perhaps suggests, contextualism is closely related to the “relevant alternatives” conception of justification, according to which claims to knowledge are justified not by ruling out any and every logically possible way in which what is asserted might be false or inadequately grounded, but by excluding certain especially relevant alternatives or epistemic shortcomings, these varying from one context of inquiry to another. Formally, contextualism resembles foundationalism. But it differs from traditional, or substantive, foundationalism in two crucial respects. First, foundationalism insists that basic beliefs be self-justifying or intrinsically credible. True, for contemporary foundationalists, this intrinsic credibility need not ount to incorrigibility, as earlier theorists tended to suppose: but some degree of intrinsic credibility is indispensable for basic beliefs. Second, substantive foundational theories confine intrinsic credibility, hence the status of being epistemologically basic, to beliefs of some fairly narrowly specified kind(s). By contrast, contextualists reject all forms of the doctrine of intrinsic credibility, and in consequence place no restrictions on the kinds of beliefs that can, in appropriate circumstances, function as contextually basic. They regard this as a strength of their position, since explaining and defending attributions of intrinsic credibility has always been the foundationalist’s main problem. Contextualism is also distinct from the coherence theory of justification, foundationalism’s constitutive principle contextualism 179 -   179 traditional rival. Coherence theorists are as suspicious as contextualists of the foundationalist’s specified kinds of basic beliefs. But coherentists react by proposing a radically holistic model of inferential justification, according to which a belief becomes justified through incorporation into a suitably coherent overall system of beliefs or “total view.” There are many well-known problems with this approach: the criteria of coherence have never been very clearly articulated; it is not clear what satisfying such criteria has to do with making our beliefs likely to be true; and since it is doubtful whether anyone has a very clear picture of his system of beliefs as a whole, to insist that justification involves comparing the merits of competing total views seems to subject ordinary justificatory practices to severe idealization. Contextualism, in virtue of its formal affinity with foundationalism, claims to avoid all such problems. Foundationalists and coherentists are apt to respond that contextualism reaps these benefits by failing to show how genuinely epistemic justification is possible. Contextualism, they charge, is finally indistinguishable from the skeptical view that “justification” depends on unwarranted assumptions. Even if, in context, these are pragmatically acceptable, epistemically speaking they are still just assumptions. This objection raises the question whether contextualists mean to answer the se questions as more traditional theorists, or answer them in the se way. Traditional theories of justification are fred so as to respond to highly general skeptical questions – e.g., are we justified in any of our beliefs about the external world? It may be that contextualist theories are (or should be) advanced, not as direct answers to skepticism, but in conjunction with attempts to diagnose or dissolve traditional skeptical problems. Contextualists need to show how and why traditional demands for “global” justification misfire, if they do. If traditional skeptical problems are taken at face value, it is doubtful whether contextualism can answer them.  COHERENTISM, EPISTEMOLOGY, FOUNDATIONALISM, JUSTIFICATION. M.W. contiguity.ASSOCIATIONISM. continence.AKRASIA. Continental philosophy, the gradually changing spectrum of philosophical views that in the twentieth century developed in Continental Europe and that are notably different from the various forms of analytic philosophy that during the se period flourished in the Anglo-erican world. Immediately after World War II the expression was more or less synonymous with ‘phenomenology’. The latter term, already used earlier in German idealism, received a completely new meaning in the work of Husserl. Later on the term was also applied, often with substantial changes in meaning, to the thought of a great number of other Continental philosophers such as Scheler, Alexander Pfander, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Nicolai Hartmann, and most philosophers mentioned below. For Husserl the aim of philosophy is to prepare humankind for a genuinely philosophical form of life, in and through which each human being gives him- or herself a rule through reason. Since the Renaissance, many philosophers have tried in vain to materialize this aim. In Husserl’s view, the reason was that philosophers failed to use the proper philosophical method. Husserl’s phenomenology was meant to provide philosophy with the method needed. ong those deeply influenced by Husserl’s ideas the so-called existentialists must be mentioned first. If ‘existentialism’ is construed strictly, it refers mainly to the philosophy of Sartre and Beauvoir. In a very broad sense it refers to the ideas of an entire group of thinkers influenced methodologically by Husserl and in content by Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, or Merleau-Ponty. In this case one often speaks of existential phenomenology. When Heidegger’s philosophy bece better known in the Anglo-erican world, ‘Continental philosophy’ received again a new meaning. From Heidegger’s first publication, Being and Time (1927), it was clear that his conception of phenomenology differs from that of Husserl in several important respects. That is why he qualified the term and spoke of hermeneutic phenomenology and clarified the expression by exining the “original” meaning of the Greek words from which the term was formed. In his view phenomenology must try “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” Heidegger applied the method first to the mode of being of man with the aim of approaching the question concerning the meaning of being itself through this phenomenological interpretation. Of those who took their point of departure from Heidegger, but also tried to go beyond him, Gader and Ricoeur must be mentioned. The structuralist movement in France added another connotation to ‘Continental philosocontiguity Continental philosophy 180 -   180 phy’. The term structuralism above all refers to an activity, a way of knowing, speaking, and acting that extends over a number of distinguished domains of human activity: linguistics, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, mathematics, philosophy of science, and philosophy itself. Structuralism, which bece a fashion in Paris and later in Western Europe generally, reached its high point on the Continent between 1950 and 1970. It was inspired by ideas first formulated by Russian formalism (1916–26) and Czech structuralism (1926–40), but also by ideas derived from the works of Marx and Freud. In France Foucault, Barthes, Althusser, and Derrida were the leading figures. Structuralism is not a new philosophical movement; it must be characterized by structuralist activity, which is meant to evoke ever new objects. This can be done in a constructive and a reconstructive manner, but these two ways of evoking objects can never be separated. One finds the constructive aspect primarily in structuralist aesthetics and linguistics, whereas the reconstructive aspect is more apparent in philosophical reflections upon the structuralist activity. Influenced by Nietzschean ideas, structuralism later developed in a number of directions, including poststructuralism; in this context the works of Gilles Deleuze, Lyotard, Irigaray, and Kristeva must be mentioned. After 1970 ‘Continental philosophy’ received again a new connotation: deconstruction. At first deconstruction presented itself as a reaction against philosophical hermeneutics, even though both deconstruction and hermeneutics claim their origin in Heidegger’s reinterpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology. The leading philosopher of the movement is Derrida, who at first tried to think along phenomenological and structuralist lines. Derrida formulated his “final” view in a linguistic form that is both complex and suggestive. It is not easy in a few sentences to state what deconstruction is. Generally speaking one can say that what is being deconstructed is texts; they are deconstructed to show that there are conflicting conceptions of meaning and implication in every text so that it is never possible definitively to show what a text really means. Derrida’s own deconstructive work is concerned mainly with philosophical texts, whereas others apply the “method” predominantly to literary texts. What according to Derrida distinguished philosophy is its reluctance to face the fact that it, too, is a product of linguistic and rhetorical figures. Deconstruction is here that process of close reading that focuses on those elements where philosophers in their work try to erase all knowledge of its own linguistic and rhetorical dimensions. It has been said that if construction typifies modern thinking, then deconstruction is the mode of thinking that radically tries to overcome modernity. Yet this view is simplistic, since one also deconstructs Plato and many other thinkers and philosophers of the premodern age. People concerned with social and political philosophy who have sought affiliation with Continental philosophy often appeal to the so-called critical theory of the Frankfurt School in general, and to Habermas’s theory of communicative action in particular. Habermas’s view, like the position of the Frankfurt School in general, is philosophically eclectic. It tries to bring into harmony ideas derived from Kant, German idealism, and Marx, as well as ideas from the sociology of knowledge and the social sciences. Habermas believes that his theory makes it possible to develop a communication community without alienation that is guided by reason in such a way that the community can stand freely in regard to the objectively given reality. Critics have pointed out that in order to make this theory work Habermas must substantiate a number of assumptions that until now he has not been able to justify.  ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY, DECONSTRUCTION, EXISTENTIALISM, PHENOMENOLOGY, SARTRE, STRUCTURALISM. J.J.K. Continental rationalism.RATIONALISM. contingent, neither impossible nor necessary; i.e., both possible and non-necessary. The modal property of being contingent is attributable to a proposition, state of affairs, event, or – more debatably – an object. Muddles about the relationship between this and other modal properties have abounded ever since Aristotle, who initially conflated contingency with possibility but later realized that something that is possible may also be necessary, whereas something that is contingent cannot be necessary. Even today many philosophers are not clear about the “opposition” between contingency and necessity, mistakenly supposing them to be contradictory notions (probably because within the domain of true propositions the contingent and the necessary are indeed both exclusive and exhaustive of one another). But the contradictory of ‘necessary’ is ‘non-necessary’; that of ‘contingent’ is ‘non-contingent’, as the following extended modal square of opposition shows: Continental rationalism contingent 181 -   181 These logicosyntactical relationships are preserved through various semantical interpretations, such as those involving: (a) the logical modalities (proposition P is logically contingent just when P is neither a logical truth nor a logical falsehood); (b) the causal or physical modalities (state of affairs or event E is physically contingent just when E is neither physically necessary nor physically impossible); and (c) the deontic modalities (act A is morally indeterminate just when A is neither morally obligatory nor morally forbidden). In none of these cases does ‘contingent’ mean ‘dependent,’ as in the phrase ‘is contingent upon’. Yet just such a notion of contingency seems to feature prominently in certain formulations of the cosmological argument, all created objects being said to be contingent beings and God alone to be a necessary or non-contingent being. Conceptual clarity is not furthered by assimilating this sense of ‘contingent’ to the others.  MODAL LOGIC, NECESSITY. R.D.B. contingent being.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. contingent liar.SEMANTIC PARADOXES. contingents, future.FUTURE CONTINGENTS. continuant.TIME SLICE. continuity, bodily.PERSONAL IDENTITY. continuity, psychological.PERSONAL IDENTITY. continuity, spatiotemporal.SPATIOTEMPORAL CONTINUITY. continuum hypothesis.CANTOR, CONTINUUM PROBLEM. continuum problem, an open question that arose in Cantor’s theory of infinite cardinal numbers. By definition, two sets have the se cardinal number if there is a one-to-one correspondence between them. For exple, the function that sends 0 to 0, 1 to 2, 2 to 4, etc., shows that the set of even natural numbers has the se cardinal number as the set of all natural numbers, nely F0. That F0 is not the only infinite cardinal follows from Cantor’s theorem: the power set of any set (i.e., the set of all its subsets) has a greater cardinality than the set itself. So, e.g., the power set of the natural numbers, i.e., the set of all sets of natural numbers, has a cardinal number greater than F0. The first infinite number greater than F0 is F1; the next after that is F2, and so on. When arithmetical operations are extended into the infinite, the cardinal number of the power set of the natural numbers turns out to be 2F0. By Cantor’s theorem, 2F0 must be greater than F0; the conjecture that it is equal to F1 is Cantor’s continuum hypothesis (in symbols, CH or 2F0 % F1). Since 2F0 is also the cardinality of the set of points on a continuous line, CH can also be stated in this form: any infinite set of points on a line can be brought into one-to-one correspondence either with the set of natural numbers or with the set of all points on the line. Cantor and others attempted to prove CH, without success. It later bece clear, due to the work of Gödel and Cohen, that their failure was inevitable: the continuum hypothesis can neither be proved nor disproved from the axioms of set theory (ZFC). The question of its truth or falsehood – the continuum problem – remains open. 

CANTOR, INFINITY, SET THEORY. P.Mad. contractarianism, a fily of moral and political theories that make use of the idea of a social contract. Traditionally philosophers (such as Hobbes and Locke) used the social contract idea to justify certain conceptions of the state. In the twentieth century philosophers such as John Rawls have used the social contract notion to define and defend moral conceptions (both conceptions of political justice and individual morality), often (but not always) doing so in addition to developing social contract theories of the state. The term ‘contractarian’ most often applies to this second type of theory. There are two kinds of moral argument that the contract image has spawned, the first rooted in Hobbes and the second rooted in Kant. Hobbesians start by insisting that what is valuable is what a person desires or prefers, not what he ought to desire or prefer (for no such prescriptively powerful object exists); and rational action is action that achieves or maximizes the satisfaccontingent being contractarianism 182 -   182 tion of desires or preferences. They go on to insist that moral action is rational for a person to perform if and only if such action advances the satisfaction of his desires or preferences. And they argue that because moral action leads to peaceful and harmonious living conducive to the satisfaction of almost everyone’s desires or preferences, moral actions are rational for almost everyone and thus “mutually agreeable.” But Hobbesians believe that, to ensure that no cooperative person becomes the prey of immoral aggressors, moral actions must be the conventional norms in a community, so that each person can expect that if she behaves cooperatively, others will do so too. These conventions constitute the institution of morality in a society. So the Hobbesian moral theory is committed to the idea that morality is a human-made institution, which is justified only to the extent that it effectively furthers human interests. Hobbesians explain the existence of morality in society by appealing to the convention-creating activities of human beings, while arguing that the justification of morality in any human society depends upon how well its moral conventions serve individuals’ desires or preferences. By considering “what we could agree to” if we reappraised and redid the cooperative conventions in our society, we can determine the extent to which our present conventions are “mutually agreeable” and so rational for us to accept and act on. Thus, Hobbesians invoke both actual agreements (or rather, conventions) and hypothetical agreements (which involve considering what conventions would be “mutually agreeable”) at different points in their theory; the former are what they believe our moral life consists in; the latter are what they believe our moral life should consist in – i.e., what our actual moral life should model. So the notion of the contract does not do justificational work by itself in the Hobbesian moral theory: this term is used only metaphorically. What we “could agree to” has moral force for the Hobbesians not because make-believe promises in hypothetical worlds have any binding force but because this sort of agreement is a device that (merely) reveals how the agreed-upon outcome is rational for all of us. In particular, thinking about “what we could all agree to” allows us to construct a deduction of practical reason to determine what policies are mutually advantageous. The second kind of contractarian theory is derived from the moral theorizing of Kant. In his later writings Kant proposed that the “idea” of the “Original Contract” could be used to determine what policies for a society would be just. When Kant asks “What could people agree to?,” he is not trying to justify actions or policies by invoking, in any literal sense, the consent of the people. Only the consent of real people can be legitimating, and Kant talks about hypothetical agreements made by hypothetical people. But he does believe these make-believe agreements have moral force for us because the process by which these people reach agreement is morally revealing. Kant’s contracting process has been further developed by subsequent philosophers, such as Rawls, who concentrates on defining the hypothetical people who are supposed to make this agreement so that their reasoning will not be tarnished by immorality, injustice, or prejudice, thus ensuring that the outcome of their joint deliberations will be morally sound. Those contractarians who disagree with Rawls define the contracting parties in different ways, thereby getting different results. The Kantians’ social contract is therefore a device used in their theorizing to reveal what is just or what is moral. So like Hobbesians, their contract talk is really just a way of reasoning that allows us to work out conceptual answers to moral problems. But whereas the Hobbesians’ use of contract language expresses the fact that, on their view, morality is a human invention which (if it is well invented) ought to be mutually advantageous, the Kantians’ use of the contract language is meant to show that moral principles and conceptions are provable theorems derived from a morally revealing and authoritative reasoning process or “moral proof procedure” that makes use of the social contract idea. Both kinds of contractarian theory are individualistic, in the sense that they assume that moral and political policies must be justified with respect to, and answer the needs of, individuals. Accordingly, these theories have been criticized by communitarian philosophers, who argue that moral and political policies can and should be decided on the basis of what is best for a community. They are also attacked by utilitarian theorists, whose criterion of morality is the maximization of the utility of the community, and not the mutual satisfaction of the needs or preferences of individuals. Contractarians respond that whereas utilitarianism fails to take seriously the distinction between persons, contractarian theories make moral and political policies answerable to the legitimate interests and needs of individuals, which, contra the communitarians, they take to be the starting point of moral theorizing. contractarianism contractarianism 183 -   183  KANT, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CONTRACT, SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. J.H. contradiction.TRUTH TABLE. contradiction, pragmatic.PRAGMATIC CONTRADICTION. contradiction, principle of.PRINCIPLE OF CONTRADICTION. contradictories.SQUARE OF OPPOSITION. contraposition, the immediate logical operation on any categorical proposition that is accomplished by first forming the complements of both the subject term and the predicate term of that proposition and then interchanging these complemented terms. Thus, contraposition applied to the categorical proposition ‘All cats are felines’ yields ‘All non-felines are non-cats’, where ‘nonfeline’ and ‘non-cat’ are, respectively, the complements (or complementary terms) of ‘feline’ and ‘cat’. The result of applying contraposition to a categorical proposition is said to be the contrapositive of that proposition.  SQUARE OF OPPOSITION, SYLLOGISM. R.W.B. contrapositive.CONTRAPOSITION. contraries, any pair of propositions that cannot both be true but can both be false; derivatively, any pair of properties that cannot both apply to a thing but that can both fail to apply to a thing. Thus the propositions ‘This object is red all over’ and ‘This object is green all over’ are contraries, as are the properties of being red all over and being green all over. Traditionally, it was considered that the categorical A-proposition ‘All S’s are P’s’ and the categorical E-proposition ‘No S’s are P’s’ were contraries; but according to De Morgan and most subsequent logicians, these two propositions are both true when there are no S’s at all, so that modern logicians do not usually regard the categorical A- and E-propositions as being true contraries.  EXISTENTIAL IMPORT, SQUARE OF OPPOSITION, SYLLOGISM. R.W.B. contrary-to-duty imperative.DEONTIC PARADOXES. contrary-to-fact conditional.COUNTERFACTUALS. contravalid, designating a proposition P in a logical system such that every proposition in the system is a consequence of P. In most of the typical and filiar logical systems, contravalidity coincides with self-contradictoriness.  IMPLICATION. R.W.B. contributive value.VALUE. contributory value.VALUE. control, an apparently causal phenomenon closely akin to power and important for such topics as intentional action, freedom, and moral responsibility. Depending upon the control you had over the event, your finding a friend’s stolen car may or may not be an intentional action, a free action, or an action for which you deserve moral credit. Control seems to be a causal phenomenon. Try to imagine controlling a car, say, without causing anything. If you cause nothing, you have no effect on the car, and one does not control a thing on which one has no effect. But control need not be causally deterministic. Even if a genuine randomizer in your car’s steering mechanism gives you only a 99 percent chance of making turns you try to make, you still have considerable control in that sphere. Some philosophers claim that we have no control over anything if causal determinism is true. That claim is false. When you drive your car, you normally are in control of its speed and direction, even if our world happens to be deterministic. 

DETERMINISM, FREE WILL PROBLEM, POWER. A.R.M. convention.LEWIS, DAVID. conventional implicature.IMPLICATURE. conventionalism, the philosophical doctrine that logical truth and mathematical truth are created by our choices, not dictated or imposed on us by the world. The doctrine is a more specific version of the linguistic theory of logical and mathematical truth, according to which the statements of logic and mathematics are true because of the way people use language. Of course, any statement owes its truth to some extent to facts about linguistic usage. For exple, ‘Snow is white’ is true (in English) because of the facts that (1) ‘snow’ denotes snow, (2) ‘is white’ is true of white things, and (3) snow is white. What the linguistic theory asserts is that statements of logic and mathematics owe their truth entirely to the way people use language. Extralinguistic facts such as (3) are not relevant to the truth of such statements. Which aspects of linguistic usage produce logical truth contradiction conventionalism 184 -   184 and mathematical truth? The conventionalist answer is: certain linguistic conventions. These conventions are said to include rules of inference, axioms, and definitions. The idea that geometrical truth is truth we create by adopting certain conventions received support by the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries. Prior to this discovery, Euclidean geometry had been seen as a paradigm of a priori knowledge. The further discovery that these alternative systems are consistent made Euclidean geometry seem rejectable without violating rationality. Whether we adopt the Euclidean system or a non-Euclidean system seems to be a matter of our choice based on such pragmatic considerations as simplicity and convenience. Moving to number theory, conventionalism received a prima facie setback by the discovery that arithmetic is incomplete if consistent. For let S be an undecidable sentence, i.e., a sentence for which there is neither proof nor disproof. Suppose S is true. In what conventions does its truth consist? Not axioms, rules of inference, and definitions. For if its truth consisted in these items it would be provable. Suppose S is not true. Then its negation must be true. In what conventions does its truth consist? Again, no answer. It appears that if S is true or its negation is true and if neither S nor its negation is provable, then not all arithmetic truth is truth by convention. A response the conventionalist could give is that neither S nor its negation is true if S is undecidable. That is, the conventionalist could claim that arithmetic has truth-value gaps. As to logic, all truths of classical logic are provable and, unlike the case of number theory and geometry, axioms are dispensable. Rules of inference suffice. As with geometry, there are alternatives to classical logic. The intuitionist, e.g., does not accept the rule ‘From not-not-A infer A’. Even detachment – ’From A, if A then B, infer B’ – is rejected in some multivalued systems of logic. These facts support the conventionalist doctrine that adopting any set of rules of inference is a matter of our choice based on pragmatic considerations. But (the anti-conventionalist might respond) consider a simple logical truth such as ‘If Tom is tall, then Tom is tall’. Granted that this is provable by rules of inference from the empty set of premises, why does it follow that its truth is not imposed on us by extralinguistic facts about Tom? If Tom is tall the sentence is true because its consequent is true. If Tom is not tall the sentence is true because its antecedent is false. In either case the sentence owes its truth to facts about Tom.  MANY-VALUED LOGIC, PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS, POINCARÉ. C.S. conventionalism, ethical.RELATIVISM. conventionalism, geometric.POINCARÉ. conventional sign.THEORY OF SIGNS. convention T, a criterion of material adequacy (of proposed truth definitions) discovered, formally articulated, adopted, and so ned by Tarski in connection with his 1929 definition of the concept of truth in a formalized language. Convention T is one of the most important of several independent proposals Tarski made concerning philosophically sound and logically precise treatment of the concept of truth. Various of these proposals have been criticized, but convention T has remained virtually unchallenged and is regarded almost as an axiom of analytic philosophy. To say that a proposed definition of an established concept is materially adequate is to say that it is “neither too broad nor too narrow,” i.e., that the concept it characterizes is coextensive with the established concept. Since, as Tarski emphasized, for many formalized languages there are no criteria of truth, it would seem that there can be no general criterion of material adequacy of truth definitions. But Tarski brilliantly finessed this obstacle by discovering a specification that is fulfilled by the established correspondence concept of truth and that has the further property that any two concepts fulfilling it are necessarily coextensive. Basically, convention T requires that to be materially adequate a proposed truth definition must imply all of the infinitely many relevant Tarskian biconditionals; e.g., the sentence ‘Some perfect number is odd’ is true if and only if some perfect number is odd. Loosely speaking, a Tarskian biconditional for English is a sentence obtained from the form ‘The sentence ——— is true if and only if ——’ by filling the right blank with a sentence and filling the left blank with a ne of the sentence. Tarski called these biconditionals “equivalences of the form T” and referred to the form as a “scheme.” Later writers also refer to the form as “schema T.” 

FORMAL SEMANTICS, GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREMS, MATERIAL ADEQUACY, SATISFACTION, TARSKI, TRUTH. J.Cor. convergence.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. conversational implicature.IMPLICATURE. conventionalism, ethical conversational implicature 185 -   185 converse. (1) Narrowly, the result of the immediate logical operation called conversion on any categorical proposition, accomplished by interchanging the subject term and the predicate term of that proposition. Thus, the converse of the categorical proposition ‘All cats are felines’ is ‘All felines are cats’. (2) More broadly, the proposition obtained from a given ‘if . . . then . . .’ (conditional) proposition by interchanging the antecedent and the consequent clauses, i.e., the propositions following the ‘if’ and the ‘then’, respectively; also, the argument obtained from an argument of the form ‘P; therefore Q’ by interchanging the premise and the conclusion.  RELATION. R.W.B. converse, outer and inner, respectively, the result of “converting” the two “terms” or the relation verb of a relational sentence. The outer converse of ‘Abe helps Ben’ is ‘Ben helps Abe’ and the inner converse is ‘Abe is helped by Ben’. In simple, or atomic, sentences the outer and inner converses express logically equivalent propositions, and thus in these cases no informational biguity arises from the adjunction of ‘and conversely’ or ‘but not conversely’, despite the fact that such adjunction does not indicate which, if either, of the two converses intended is meant. However, in complex, or quantified, relational sentences such as ‘Every integer precedes some integer’ genuine informational biguity is produced. Under normal interpretations of the respective sentences, the outer converse expresses the false proposition that some integer precedes every integer, the inner converse expresses the true proposition that every integer is preceded by some integer. More complicated considerations apply in cases of quantified doubly relational sentences such as ‘Every integer precedes every integer exceeding it’. The concept of scope explains such structural biguity: in the sentence ‘Every integer precedes some integer and conversely’, ‘conversely’ taken in the outer sense has wide scope, whereas taken in the inner sense it has narrow scope.  BIGUITY, CONVERSE, RELATION, SCOPE. J. Cor. converse domain.RELATION. converse relation.RELATION. conversion.CONVERSE. Conway, Anne (c.1630–79), English philosopher whose Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690; English translation, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 1692) proposes a monistic ontology in which all created things are modes of one spiritual substance emanating from God. This substance is made up of an infinite number of hierarchically arranged spirits, which she calls monads. Matter is congealed spirit. Motion is conceived not dynically but vitally. Lady Conway’s scheme entails a moral explanation of pain and the possibility of universal salvation. She repudiates the dualism of both Descartes and her teacher, Henry More, as well as the materialism of Hobbes and Spinoza. The work shows the influence of cabalism and affinities with the thought of the mentor of her last years, Francis Mercurius van Helmont, through whom her philosophy bece known to Leibniz. S.H. Cook Wilson, John.WILSON. coordination problem.SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY. coordinative definition.DEFINITION. Copernican revolution.KANT. copula, in logic, a form of the verb ‘to be’ that joins subject and predicate in singular and categorical propositions. In ‘George is wealthy’ and ‘Swans are beautiful’, e.g., ‘is’ and ‘are’, respectively, are copulas. Not all occurrences of forms of ‘be’ count as copulas. In sentences such as ‘There are 51 states’, ‘are’ is not a copula, since it does not join a subject and a predicate, but occurs simply as a part of the quantifier term ‘there are’.  DEFINITION, INTENSION, MEANING. V.K. copulatio.PROPRIETATES TERMINORUM. Cordemoy, Géraud de (1626–84), French philosopher and member of the Cartesian school. His most important work is his Le discernement du corps et de l’âme en six discours, published in 1666 and reprinted (under slightly different titles) a number of times thereafter. Also important are the Discours physique de la parole (1668), a Cartesian theory of language and communication; and Une lettre écrite à un sçavant religieux (1668), a defense of Descartes’s orthodoxy on certain questions in natural philosophy. Cordemoy also wrote a history of France, left incomplete at his death. Like Descartes, Cordemoy advocated a mechanistic physics explaining physical phenomena in terms of size, shape, and local motion, and converse Cordemoy, Géraud de 186 -   186 held that minds are incorporeal thinking substances. Like most Cartesians, Cordemoy also advocated a version of occasionalism. But unlike other Cartesians, he argued for atomism and admitted the void. These innovations were not welcomed by other members of the Cartesian school. But Cordemoy is often cited by later thinkers, such as Leibniz, as an important seventeenth-century advocate of atomism.  OCCASIONALISM. D.Garb. corner quotes.CORNERS. corners, also called corner quotes, quasi-quotes, a notational device (] ^) introduced by Quine (Mathematical Logic, 1940) to provide a conveniently brief way of speaking generally about unspecified expressions of such and such kind. For exple, a logician might want a conveniently brief way of saying in the metalanguage that the result of writing a wedge ‘7’ (the dyadic logical connective for a truth-functional use of ‘or’) between any two well-formed formulas (wffs) in the object language is itself a wff. Supposing the Greek letters ‘f’ and ‘y’ available in the metalanguage as variables ranging over wffs in the object language, it is tempting to think that the formation rule stated above can be succinctly expressed simply by saying that if f and y are wffs, then ‘f 7 y’ is a wff. But this will not do, for ‘f 7 y’ is not a wff. Rather, it is a hybrid expression of two variables of the metalanguage and a dyadic logical connective of the object language. The problem is that putting quotation marks around the Greek letters merely results in designating those letters themselves, not, as desired, in designating the context of the unspecified wffs. Quine’s device of corners allows one to transcend this limitation of straight quotation since quasi-quotation, e.g., ]f 7 y^, ounts to quoting the constant contextual background, ‘# 7 #’, and imagining the unspecified expressions f and y written in the blanks.  USE– MENTION DISTINCTION. R.F.G. corrective justice.JUSTICE. correlativity.POLARITY, RIGHTS. correspondence theory of truth.TRUTH. corresponding conditional(of a given argument), any conditional whose antecedent is a (logical) conjunction of all of the premises of the argument and whose consequent is the conclusion. The two conditionals, ‘if Abe is Ben and Ben is wise, then Abe is wise’ and ‘if Ben is wise and Abe is Ben, then Abe is wise’, are the two corresponding conditionals of the argument whose premises are ‘Abe is Ben’ and ‘Ben is wise’ and whose conclusion is ‘Abe is wise’. For a one-premise argument, the corresponding conditional is the conditional whose antecedent is the premise and whose consequent is the conclusion. The limiting cases of the empty and infinite premise sets are treated in different ways by different logicians; one simple treatment considers such arguments as lacking corresponding conditionals. The principle of corresponding conditionals is that in order for an argument to be valid it is necessary and sufficient for all its corresponding conditionals to be tautological. The commonly used expression ‘the corresponding conditional of an argument’ is also used when two further stipulations are in force: first, that an argument is construed as having an (ordered) sequence of premises rather than an (unordered) set of premises; second, that conjunction is construed as a polyadic operation that produces in a unique way a single premise from a sequence of premises rather than as a dyadic operation that combines premises two by two. Under these stipulations the principle of the corresponding conditional is that in order for an argument to be valid it is necessary and sufficient for its corresponding conditional to be valid. These principles are closely related to modus ponens, to conditional proof, and to the so-called deduction theorem. 

ARGUMENT, CONDITIONAL, CONDITIONAL PROOF, LIMITING CASE, MODUS PONENS, PROPOSITION, TAUTOLOGY. J.Cor. corrigibility.PRIVILEGED ACCESS. cosmological argument.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. cosmology.METAPHYSICS. cost–benefit analysis.DECISION THEORY. countable.SET THEORY. counterdomain.RELATION. counterexple.COUNTERINSTANCE. counterfactual analysis of causation.CAUSATION. counterfactuals, also called contrary-to-fact conditionals, subjunctive conditionals that presupcorner quotes counterfactuals 187 -   187 pose the falsity of their antecedents, such as ‘If Hitler had invaded England, Germany would have won’ and ‘If I were you, I’d run’. Conditionals (or hypothetical statements) are compound statements of the form ‘If p, (then) q’, or equivalently ‘q if p’. Component p is described as the antecedent (protasis) and q as the consequent (apodosis). A conditional like ‘If Oswald did not kill Kennedy, then someone else did’ is called indicative, because both the antecedent and consequent are in the indicative mood. One like ‘If Oswald had not killed Kennedy, then someone else would have’ is subjunctive. Many subjunctive and all indicative conditionals are open, presupposing nothing about the antecedent. Unlike ‘If Bob had won, he’d be rich’, neither ‘If Bob should have won, he would be rich’ nor ‘If Bob won, he is rich’ implies that Bob did not win. Counterfactuals presuppose, rather than assert, the falsity of their antecedents. ‘If Reagan had been president, he would have been fous’ seems inappropriate and out of place, but not false, given that Reagan was president. The difference between counterfactual and open subjunctives is less important logically than that between subjunctives and indicatives. Whereas the indicative conditional about Kennedy is true, the subjunctive is probably false. Replace ‘someone’ with ‘no one’ and the truth-values reverse. The most interesting logical feature of counterfactuals is that they are not truth-functional. A truth-functional compound is one whose truth-value is completely determined in every possible case by the truth-values of its components. For exple, the falsity of ‘The President is a grandmother’ and ‘The President is childless’ logically entails the falsity of ‘The President is a grandmother and childless’: all conjunctions with false conjuncts are false. But whereas ‘If the President were a grandmother, the President would be childless’ is false, other counterfactuals with equally false components are true, such as ‘If the President were a grandmother, the President would be a mother’. The truth-value of a counterfactual is determined in part by the specific content of its components. This property is shared by indicative and subjunctive conditionals generally, as can be seen by varying the wording of the exple. In marked contrast, the material conditional, p / q, of modern logic, defined as meaning that either p is false or q is true, is completely truth-functional. ‘The President is a grandmother / The President is childless’ is just as true as ‘The President is a grandmother / The President is a mother’. While stronger than the material conditional, the counterfactual is weaker than the strict conditional, p U q, of modern modal logic, which says that p / q is necessarily true. ‘If the switch had been flipped, the light would be on’ may in fact be true even though it is possible for the switch to have been flipped without the light’s being on because the bulb could have burned out. The fact that counterfactuals are neither strict nor material conditionals generated the problem of counterfactual conditionals (raised by Chisholm and Goodman): What are the truth conditions of a counterfactual, and how are they determined by its components? According to the “metalinguistic” approach, which resembles the deductive-nomological model of explanation, a counterfactual is true when its antecedent conjoined with laws of nature and statements of background conditions logically entails its consequent. On this account, ‘If the switch had been flipped the light would be on’ is true because the statement that the switch was flipped, plus the laws of electricity and statements describing the condition and arrangement of the circuitry, entail that the light is on. The main problem is to specify which facts are “fixed” for any given counterfactual and context. The background conditions cannot include the denials of the antecedent or the consequent, even though they are true, nor anything else that would not be true if the antecedent were. Counteridenticals, whose antecedents assert identities, highlight the difficulty: the background for ‘If I were you, I’d run’ must include facts about my character and your situation, but not vice versa. Counterlegals like ‘Newton’s laws would fail if planets had rectangular orbits’, whose antecedents deny laws of nature, show that even the set of laws cannot be all-inclusive. Another leading approach (pioneered by Robert C. Stalnaker and David K. Lewis) extends the possible worlds semantics developed for modal logic, saying that a counterfactual is true when its consequent is true in the nearest possible world in which the antecedent is true. The counterfactual about the switch is true on this account provided a world in which the switch was flipped and the light is on is closer to the actual world than one in which the switch was flipped but the light is not on. The main problem is to specify which world is nearest for any given counterfactual and context. The difference between indicative and subjunctive conditionals can be accounted for in terms of either a different set of background conditions or a different measure of nearness. counterfactuals counterfactuals 188 -   188 Counterfactuals turn up in a variety of philosophical contexts. To distinguish laws like ‘All copper conducts’ from equally true generalizations like ‘Everything in my pocket conducts’, some have observed that while anything would conduct if it were copper, not everything would conduct if it were in my pocket. And to have a disposition like solubility, it does not suffice to be either dissolving or not in water: it must in addition be true that the object would dissolve if it were in water. It has similarly been suggested that one event is the cause of another only if the latter would not have occurred if the former had not; that an action is free only if the agent could or would have done otherwise if he had wanted to; that a person is in a particular mental state only if he would behave in certain ways given certain stimuli; and that an action is right only if a completely rational and fully informed agent would choose it.  CAUSATION, POSSIBLE WORLDS. W.A.D. counteridenticals.COUNTERFACTUALS. counterinstance, also called counterexple. (1) A particular instance of an argument form that has all true premises but a false conclusion, thereby showing that the form is not universally valid. The argument form ‘p 7 q, - p / , ~q’, for exple, is shown to be invalid by the counterinstance ‘Grass is either red or green; Grass is not red; Therefore, grass is not green’. (2) A particular false instance of a statement form, which demonstrates that the form is not a logical truth. A counterinstance to the form ‘(p 7 q) / p’, for exple, would be the statement ‘If grass is either red or green, then grass is red’. (3) A particular exple that demonstrates that a universal generalization is false. The universal statement ‘All large cities in the United States are east of the Mississippi’ is shown to be false by the counterinstance of San Francisco, which is a large city in the United States that is not east of the Mississippi. V.K. counterpart theory, a theory that analyzes statements about what is possible and impossible for individuals (statements of de re modality) in terms of what holds of counterparts of those individuals in other possible worlds, a thing’s counterparts being individuals that resemble it without being identical with it. (The ne ‘counterpart theory’ was coined by David Lewis, the theory’s principal exponent.) Whereas some theories analyze ‘Mrs. Simpson might have been queen of England’ as ‘In some possible world, Mrs. Simpson is queen of England’, counterpart theory analyzes it as ‘In some possible world, a counterpart of Mrs. Simpson is queen of (a counterpart of) England’. The chief motivation for counterpart theory is a combination of two views: (a) de re modality should be given a possible worlds analysis, and (b) each actual individual exists only in the actual world, and hence cannot exist with different properties in other possible worlds. Counterpart theory provides an analysis that allows ‘Mrs. Simpson might have been queen’ to be true compatibly with (a) and (b). For Mrs. Simpson’s counterparts in other possible worlds, in those worlds where she herself does not exist, may have regal properties that the actual Mrs. Simpson lacks. Counterpart theory is perhaps prefigured in Leibniz’s theory of possibility.  COUNTERFACTUALS, POSSIBLE WORLDS. P.Mac. count noun, a noun that can occur syntactically (a) with quantifiers ‘each’, ‘every’, ‘many’, ‘few’, ‘several’, and numerals; (b) with the indefinite article, ‘a(n)’; and (c) in the plural form. The following are exples of count nouns (CNs), paired with semantically similar mass nouns (MNs): ‘each dollar / silver’, ‘one composition / music’, ‘a bed / furniture’, ‘instructions / advice’. MNs but not CNs can occur with the quantifiers ‘much’ and ‘little’: ‘much poetry / poem(s)’, ‘little bread / loaf’. Both CNs and MNs may occur with ‘all’, ‘most’, and ‘some’. Semantically, CNs but not MNs refer distributively, providing a counting criterion. It makes sense to ask how many CNs?: ‘How many coins / gold?’ MNs but not CNs refer collectively. It makes sense to ask how much MN?: ‘How much gold / coins?’ One problem is that these syntactic and semantic criteria yield different classifications; another problem is to provide logical forms and truth conditions for sentences containing mass nouns.  DISTRIBUTION, MEANING, SORTAL PREDICATE. W.K.W. courage.CARDINAL VIRTUES. Cournot, Antoine-Augustin (1801–77), French mathematician and economist. A critical realist in scientific and philosophical matters, he was a conservative in religion and politics. His Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth (1838), though a fiasco at the time, pioneered mathematical economics. Cournot upheld a position midway between science and metaphysics. His philosophy rests on three basic counteridenticals Cournot, Antoine-Augustin 189 -   189 concepts: order, chance, and probability. The Exposition of the Theory of Chances and Probabilities (1843) focuses on the calculus of probability, unfolds a theory of chance occurrences, and distinguishes ong objective, subjective, and philosophical probability. The Essay on the Foundations of Knowledge (1861) defines science as logically organized knowledge. Cournot developed a probabilist epistemology, showed the relevance of probabilism to the scientific study of human acts, and further assumed the existence of a providential and complex order undergirding the universe. Materialism, Vitalism, Rationalism (1875) acknowledges transrationalism and makes room for finality, purpose, and God. J.L.S. Cousin, Victor (1792–1867), French philosopher who set out to merge the French psychological tradition with the pragmatism of Locke and Condillac and the inspiration of the Scottish (Reid, Stewart) and German idealists (Kant, Hegel). His early courses at the Sorbonne (1815– 18), on “absolute” values that might overcome materialism and skepticism, aroused immense enthusiasm. The course of 1818, Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien (Of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good), is preserved in the Adolphe Garnier edition of student notes (1836); other early texts appeared in the Fragments philosophiques (Philosophical Fragments, 1826). Dismissed from his teaching post as a liberal (1820), arrested in Germany at the request of the French police and detained in Berlin, he was released after Hegel intervened (1824); he was not reinstated until 1828. Under Louis-Philippe, he rose to highest honors, bece minister of education, and introduced philosophy into the curriculum. His eclecticism, transformed into a spiritualism and cult of the “juste milieu,” bece the official philosophy. Cousin rewrote his work accordingly and even succeeded in having Du Vrai (third edition, 1853) removed from the papal index. In 1848 he was forced to retire. He is noted for his educational reforms, as a historian of philosophy, and for his translations (Proclus, Plato), editions (Descartes), and portraits of ladies of seventeenth-century society. O.A.H. Couturat, Louis (1868–1914), French philosopher and logician who wrote on the history of philosophy, logic, philosophy of mathematics, and the possibility of a universal language. Couturat refuted Renouvier’s finitism and advocated an actual infinite in The Mathematical Infinite (1896). He argued that the assumption of infinite numbers was indispensable to maintain the continuity of magnitudes. He saw a precursor of modern logistic in Leibniz, basing his interpretation of Leibniz on the Discourse on Metaphysics and Leibniz’s correspondence with Arnauld. His epoch-making Leibniz’s Logic (1901) describes Leibniz’s metaphysics as panlogism. Couturat published a study on Kant’s mathematical philosophy (Revue de Métaphysique, 1904), and defended Peano’s logic, Whitehead’s algebra, and Russell’s logistic in The Algebra of Logic (1905). He also contributed to André Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (1926). J.-L.S. covering law model, the view of scientific explanation as a deductive argument which contains non-vacuously at least one universal law ong its premises. The nes of this view include ‘Hempel’s model’, ‘Hempel-Oppenheim (HO) model’, ‘Popper-Hempel model’, ‘deductivenomological (D-N) model’, and the ‘subsumption theory’ of explanation. The term ‘covering law model of explanation’ was proposed by Willi Dray. The theory of scientific explanation was first developed by Aristotle. He suggested that science proceeds from mere knowing that to deeper knowing why by giving understanding of different things by the four types of causes. Answers to why-questions are given by scientific syllogisms, i.e., by deductive arguments with premises that are necessarily true and causes of their consequences. Typical exples are the “subsumptive” arguments that can be expressed by the Barbara syllogism: All ravens are black. Jack is a raven. Therefore, Jack is black. Plants containing chlorophyll are green. Grass contains chlorophyll. Therefore, grass is green. In modern logical notation, An explanatory argument was later called in Greek synthesis, in Latin compositio or demonstratio propter quid. After the seventeenth century, the Cousin, Victor covering law model 190 -   190 terms ‘explication’ and ‘explanation’ bece commonly used. The nineteenth-century empiricists accepted Hume’s criticism of Aristotelian essences and necessities: a law of nature is an extensional statement that expresses a uniformity, i.e., a constant conjunction between properties (‘All swans are white’) or types of events (‘Lightning is always followed by thunder’). Still, they accepted the subsumption theory of explanation: “An individual fact is said to be explained by pointing out its cause, that is, by stating the law or laws of causation, of which its production is an instance,” and “a law or uniformity in nature is said to be explained when another law or laws are pointed out, of which that law itself is but a case, and from which it could be deduced” (J. S. Mill). A general model of probabilistic explanation, with deductive explanation as a specific case, was given by Peirce in 1883. A modern formulation of the subsumption theory was given by Hempel and Paul Oppenheim in 1948 by the following schema of D-N explanation: Explanandum E is here a sentence that describes a known particular event or fact (singular explanation) or uniformity (explanation of laws). Explanation is an argument that answers an explanation-seeking why-question ‘Why E?’ by showing that E is nomically expectable on the basis of general laws (r M 1) and antecedent conditions. The relation between the explanans and the explanandum is logical deduction. Explanation is distinguished from other kinds of scientific systematization (prediction, postdiction) that share its logical characteristics – a view often called the symmetry thesis regarding explanation and prediction – by the presupposition that the phenomenon E is already known. This also separates explanations from reason-seeking arguments that answer questions of the form ‘What reasons are there for believing that E?’ Hempel and Oppenheim required that the explanans have empirical content, i.e., be testable by experiment or observation, and it must be true. If the strong condition of truth is dropped, we speak of potential explanation. Dispositional explanations, for non-probabilistic dispositions, can be formulated in the D-N model. For exple, let Hx % ‘x is hit by hmer’, Bx % ‘x breaks’, and Dx % ‘x is fragile’. Then the explanation why a piece of glass was broken may refer to its fragility and its being hit: It is easy to find exples of HO explanations that are not satisfactory: self-explanations (‘Grass is green, because grass is green’), explanations with too weak premises (‘John died, because he had a heart attack or his plane crashed’), and explanations with irrelevant information (‘This stuff dissolves in water, because it is sugar produced in Finland’). Attempts at finding necessary and sufficient conditions in syntactic and semantic terms for acceptable explanations have not led to any agreement. The HO model also needs the additional Aristotelian condition that causal explanation is directed from causes to effects. This is shown by Sylvain Bromberger’s flagpole exple: the length of a flagpole explains the length of its shadow, but not vice versa. Michael Scriven has argued against Hempel that explanations of particular events should be given by singular causal statements ‘E because C’. However, a regularity theory (Humean or stronger than Humean) of causality implies that the truth of such a singular causal statement presupposes a universal law of the form ‘Events of type C are universally followed by events of type E’. The HO version of the covering law model can be generalized in several directions. The explanans may contain probabilistic or statistical laws. The explanans-explanandum relation may be inductive (in this case the explanation itself is inductive). This gives us four types of explanations: deductive-universal (i.e., D-N), deductiveprobabilistic, inductive-universal, and inductiveprobabilistic (I-P). Hempel’s 1962 model for I-P explanation contains a probabilistic covering law P(G/F) % r, where r is the statistical probability of G given F, and r in brackets is the inductive probability of the explanandum given the explanans: The explanation-seeking question may be weakened from ‘Why necessarily E?’ to ‘How possibly E?’. In a corrective explanation, the explanatory answer points out that the explanandum sencovering law model covering law model 191 -   191 tence E is not strictly true. This is the case in approximate explanation (e.g., Newton’s theory entails a corrected form of Galileo’s and Kepler’s laws). 

CAUSATION, EXPLANATION, GRUE PARADOX, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. I.N. Craig reduct.CRAIG’S INTERPOLATION THEOREM. Craig’s interpolation theorem, a theorem for firstorder logic: if a sentence y of first-order logic entails a sentence q there is an “interpolant,” a sentence F in the vocabulary common to q and y that entails q and is entailed by y. Originally, Willi Craig proved his theorem in 1957 as a lemma, to give a simpler proof of Beth’s definability theorem, but the result now stands on its own. In abstract model theory, logics for which an interpolation theorem holds are said to have the Craig interpolation property. Craig’s interpolation theorem shows that first-order logic is closed under implicit definability, so that the concepts embodied in first-order logic are all given explicitly. In the philosophy of science literature ‘Craig’s theorem’ usually refers to another result of Craig’s: that any recursively enumerable set of sentences of first-order logic can be axiomatized. This has been used to argue that theoretical terms are in principle eliminable from empirical theories. Assuming that an empirical theory can be axiomatized in first-order logic, i.e., that there is a recursive set of first-order sentences from which all theorems of the theory can be proven, it follows that the set of consequences of the axioms in an “observational” sublanguage is a recursively enumerable set. Thus, by Craig’s theorem, there is a set of axioms for this subtheory, the Craig-reduct, that contains only observation terms. Interestingly, the Craig-reduct theory may be semantically weaker, in the sense that it may have models that cannot be extended to a model of the full theory. The existence of such a model would prove that the theoretical terms cannot all be defined on the basis of the observational vocabulary only, a result related to Beth’s definability theorem.  BETH’S DEFINABILITY THEOREM, PROOF THEORY. Z.G.S. Craig’s theorem.CRAIG’S INTERPOLATION THEOREM. Crates of Thebes.CYNICS. Crates the Cynic.CYNICS. Cratylus of Athens.HERACLITUS. Cratylus Zeyl.PRE-SOCRATICS. creation ex nihilo, the act of bringing something into existence from nothing. According to traditional Christian theology, God created the world ex nihilo. To say that the world was created from nothing does not mean that there was a prior non-existent substance out of which it was fashioned, but rather that there was not anything out of which God brought it into being. However, some of the patristics influenced by Plotinus, such as Gregory of Nyssa, apparently understood creation ex nihilo to be an emanation from God according to which what is created comes, not from nothing, but from God himself. Not everything that God makes need be created ex nihilo; or if, as in Genesis 2: 7, 19, God made a human being and animals from the ground, a previously existing material, God did not create them from nothing. Regardless of how bodies are made, orthodox theology holds that human souls are created ex nihilo; the opposing view, traducianism, holds that souls are propagated along with bodies. 

GREGORY OF NYSSA, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, PLOTINUS. E.R.W. creationism, acceptance of the early chapters of Genesis taken literally. Genesis claims that the universe and all of its living creatures including humans were created by God in the space of six days. The need to find some way of reconciling this story with the claims of science intensified in the nineteenth century, with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). In the Southern states of the United States, the indigenous form of evangelical Protestant Christianity declared total opposition to evolutionism, refusing any attempt at reconciliation, and affirming total commitment to a literal “creationist” reading of the Bible. Because of this, certain states passed laws banning the teaching of evolutionism. More recently, literalists have argued that the Bible can be given full scientific backing, and they have therefore argued that “Creation science” may properly be taught in state-supported schools in the United States without violation of the constitutional separation of church and state. This claim was challenged in the state of Arkansas in 1981, and ultimately rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. The creationism dispute has raised some issues of philosophical interest and importance. Most obviously, there is the question of what constitutes a genuine science. Is there an adequate criCraig reduct creationism 192 -   192 terion of demarcation between science and nonscience, and will it put evolutionism on the one side and creationism on the other? Some philosophers, arguing in the spirit of Karl Popper, think that such a criterion can be found. Others are not so sure; and yet others think that some such criterion can be found, but shows creationism to be genuine science, albeit already proven false. Philosophers of education have also taken an interest in creationism and what it represents. If one grants that even the most orthodox science may contain a value component, reflecting and influencing its practitioners’ culture, then teaching a subject like biology almost certainly is not a normatively neutral enterprise. In that case, without necessarily conceding to the creationist anything about the true nature of science or values, perhaps one must agree that science with its teaching is not something that can and should be set apart from the rest of society, as an entirely distinct phenomenon.  DARWINISM, PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION,

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, TESTABILITY. M.Ru. creationism, theological.PREEXISTENCE. credibility.CARNAP. Crescas, Hasdai (d.1412), Spanish Jewish philosopher, theologian, and statesman. He was a well-known representative of the Jewish community in both Barcelona and Saragossa. Following the death of his son in the anti-Jewish riots of 1391, he wrote a chronicle of the massacres (published as an appendix to Ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, ed. M. Wiener, 1855). Crescas’s devotion to protecting Spanish Jewry in a time when conversion was encouraged is documented in one extant work, the Refutation of Christian Dogmas (1397–98), found in the 1451 Hebrew translation of Joseph ibn Shem Tov (Bittul ’Iqqarey ha-Nofrim). His major philosophical work, Or Adonai (The Light of the Lord), was intended as the first of a two-part project that was to include his own more extensive systematization of halakha (Jewish law) as well as a critique of Maimonides’ work. But this second part, “Lp of the Divine Commandment,” was never written. Or Adonai is a philosophico-dogmatic response to and attack on the Aristotelian doctrines that Crescas saw as a threat to the Jewish faith, doctrines concerning the nature of God, space, time, place, free will, and infinity. For theological reasons he attempts to refute basic tenets in Aristotelian physics. He offers, e.g., a critique of Aristotle’s arguments against the existence of a vacuum. The Aristotelian view of time is rejected as well. Time, like space, is thought by Crescas to be infinite. Furthermore, it is not an accident of motion, but rather exists only in the soul. In defending the fundental doctrines of the Torah, Crescas must address the question discussed by his predecessors Maimonides and Gersonides, nely that of reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom. Unlike these two thinkers, Crescas adopts a form of determinism, arguing that God knows both the possible and what will necessarily take place. An act is contingent with respect to itself, and necessary with respect to its causes and God’s knowledge. To be willed freely, then, is not for an act to be absolutely contingent, but rather for it to be “willed internally” as opposed to “willed externally.” Reactions to Crescas’s doctrines were mixed. Isaac Abrabanel, despite his respect for Crescas’s piety, rejected his views as either “unintelligible” or “simple-minded.” On the other hand, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola appeals to Crescas’s critique of Aristotelian physics; Judah Abrabanel’s Dialogues of Love may be seen as accommodating Crescas’s metaphysical views; and Spinoza’s notions of necessity, freedom, and extension may well be influenced by the doctrines of Or Adonai. 

GERSONIDES, MAIMONIDES. T.M.R. criteriological connection.CRITERION. criteriology.MERCIER. criterion, broadly, a sufficient condition for the presence of a certain property or for the truth of a certain proposition. Generally, a criterion need be sufficient merely in normal circumstances rather than absolutely sufficient. Typically, a criterion is salient in some way, often by virtue of being a necessary condition as well as a sufficient one. The plural form, ‘criteria’, is commonly used for a set of singly necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. A set of truth conditions is said to be criterial for the truth of propositions of a certain form. A conceptual analysis of a philosophically important concept may take the form of a proposed set of truth conditions for paradigmatic propositions containing the concept in question. Philosophers have proposed criteria for such notions as meaningfulness, intentionality, creationism, theological criterion 193 -   193 knowledge, justification, justice, rightness, and identity (including personal identity and event identity), ong many others. There is a special use of the term in connection with Wittgenstein’s well-known remark that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria,” e.g., moans and groans for aches and pains. The suggestion is that a criteriological connection is needed to forge a conceptual link between items of a sort that are intelligible and knowable to items of a sort that, but for the connection, would not be intelligible or knowable. A mere symptom cannot provide such a connection, for establishing a correlation between a symptom and that for which it is a symptom presupposes that the latter is intelligible and knowable. One objection to a criteriological view, whether about aches or quarks, is that it clashes with realism about entities of the sort in question and lapses into, as the case may be, behaviorism or instrumentalism. For it seems that to posit a criteriological connection is to suppose that the nature and existence of entities of a given sort can depend on the conditions for their intelligibility or knowability, and that is to put the epistemological cart before the ontological horse.  PROBLEM OF THE CRITERION. K.B. criterion, problem of the.PROBLEM OF THE CRITERION. Critical idealism.KANT. critical legal studies, a loose assemblage of legal writings and thinkers in the United States and Great Britain since the mid-1970s that aspire to a jurisprudence and a political ideology. Like the erican legal realists of the 1920s and 1930s, the jurisprudential progr is largely negative, consisting in the discovery of supposed contradictions within both the law as a whole and areas of law such as contracts and criminal law. The jurisprudential implication derived from such supposed contradictions within the law is that any decision in any case can be defended as following logically from some authoritative propositions of law, making the law completely without guidance in particular cases. Also like the erican legal realists, the political ideology of critical legal studies is vaguely leftist, embracing the communitarian critique of liberalism. Communitarians fault liberalism for its alleged overemphasis on individual rights and individual welfare at the expense of the intrinsic value of certain collective goods. Given the cognitive relativism of many of its practitioners, critical legal studies tends not to aspire to have anything that could be called a theory of either law or of politics. 

JURISPRUDENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF LAW, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. M.S.M. critical philosophy.BROAD, KANT. Critical Realism, a philosophy that at the highest level of generality purports to integrate the positive insights of both New Realism and idealism. New Realism was the first wave of realistic reaction to the dominant idealism of the nineteenth century. It was a version of immediate and direct realism. In its attempt to avoid any representationalism that would lead to idealism, this tradition identified the immediate data of consciousness with objects in the physical world. There is no intermediary between the knower and the known. This heroic tour de force foundered on the phenomena of error, illusion, and perceptual variation, and gave rise to a successor realism – Critical Realism – that acknowledged the mediation of “the mental” in our cognitive grasp of the physical world. ’Critical Realism’ was the title of a work in epistemology by Roy Wood Sellars (1916), but its more general use to designate the broader movement derives from the 1920 cooperative volume, Essays in Critical Realism: A Cooperative Study of the Problem of Knowledge, containing position papers by Durant Drake, A. O. Lovejoy, J. B. Pratt, A. K. Rogers, C. A. Strong, George Santayana, and Roy Wood Sellars. With New Realism, Critical Realism maintains that the primary object of knowledge is the independent physical world, and that what is immediately present to consciousness is not the physical object as such, but some corresponding mental state broadly construed. Whereas both New Realism and idealism grew out of the conviction that any such mediated account of knowledge is untenable, the Critical Realists felt that only if knowledge of the external world is explained in terms of a process of mental mediation, can error, illusion, and perceptual variation be accommodated. One could fashion an account of mental mediation that did not involve the pitfalls of Lockean representationalism by carefully distinguishing between the object known and the mental state through which it is known. The Critical Realists differed ong themselves both epistemologically and metaphysically. The mediating elements in cognition were variously construed as essences, ideas, or sensedata, and the precise role of these items in cognicriterion, problem of the Critical Realism 194 -   194 tion was again variously construed. Metaphysically, some were dualists who saw knowledge as unexplainable in terms of physical processes, whereas others (principally Santayana and Sellars) were materialists who saw cognition as simply a function of conscious biological systems. The position of most lasting influence was probably that of Sellars because that torch was taken up by his son, Wilfrid, whose very sophisticated development of it was quite influential.  IDEALISM; METAPHYSICAL REALISM; NEW REALISM; PERCEPTION; SELLARS, WILFRID. C.F.D. critical theory, any social theory that is at the se time explanatory, normative, practical, and self-reflexive. The term was first developed by Horkheimer as a self-description of the Frankfurt School and its revision of Marxism. It now has a wider significance to include any critical, theoretical approach, including feminism and liberation philosophy. When they make claims to be scientific, such approaches attempt to give rigorous explanations of the causes of oppression, such as ideological beliefs or economic dependence; these explanations must in turn be verified by empirical evidence and employ the best available social and economic theories. Such explanations are also normative and critical, since they imply negative evaluations of current social practices. The explanations are also practical, in that they provide a better self-understanding for agents who may want to improve the social conditions that the theory negatively evaluates. Such change generally aims at “emancipation,” and theoretical insight empowers agents to remove limits to human freedom and the causes of human suffering. Finally, these theories must also be self-reflexive: they must account for their own conditions of possibility and for their potentially transformative effects. These requirements contradict the standard account of scientific theories and explanations, particularly positivism and its separation of fact and value. For this reason, the methodological writings of critical theorists often attack positivism and empiricism and attempt to construct alternative epistemologies. Critical theorists also reject relativism, since the cultural relativity of norms would undermine the basis of critical evaluation of social practices and emancipatory change. The difference between critical and non-critical theories can be illustrated by contrasting the Marxian and Mannheimian theories of ideology. Whereas Mannheim’s theory merely describes relations between ideas of social conditions, Marx’s theory tries to show how certain social practices require false beliefs about them by their participants. Marx’s theory not only explains why this is so, it also negatively evaluates those practices; it is practical in that by disillusioning participants, it makes them capable of transformative action. It is also self-reflexive, since it shows why some practices require illusions and others do not, and also why social crises and conflicts will lead agents to change their circumstances. It is scientific, in that it appeals to historical evidence and can be revised in light of better theories of social action, language, and rationality. Marx also claimed that his theory was superior for its special “dialectical method,” but this is now disputed by most critical theorists, who incorporate many different theories and methods. This broader definition of critical theory, however, leaves a gap between theory and practice and places an extra burden on critics to justify their critical theories without appeal to such notions as inevitable historical progress. This problem has made critical theories more philosophical and concerned with questions of justification.  FRANKFURT SCHOOL, LOGICAL POSITIVISM, MANNHEIM, RELATIVISM. J.Bo. Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952), Italian philosopher. He was born at Pescasseroli, in the Abruzzi, and after 1886 lived in Naples. He briefly attended the University of Rome and was led to study Herbart’s philosophy. In 1904 he founded the influential journal La critica. In 1910 he was made life member of the Italian senate. Early in his career he befriended Giovanni Gentile, but this friendship was breached by Gentile’s Fascism. During the Fascist period and World War II Croce lived in isolation as the chief anti-fascist thinker in Italy. He later bece a leader of the Liberal party and at the age of eighty founded the Institute for Historical Studies. Croce was a literary and historical scholar who joined his great interest in these fields to philosophy. His best-known work in the Englishspeaking world is Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1902). This was the first part of his “Philosophy of Spirit”; the second was his Logic (1905), the third his theory of the Practical (1909), and the fourth his Historiography (1917). Croce was influenced by Hegel and the Hegelian aesthetician Francesco De Sanctis (1817–83) and by Vico’s conceptions of knowledge, history, and society. He wrote The Philosophy of Gibattista Vico (1911) and a fous commentary on Hegel, What Is Living and What Is critical theory Croce, Benedetto 195 -   195 Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel (1907), in which he advanced his conception of the “dialectic of distincts” as more fundental than the Hegelian dialectic of opposites. Croce held that philosophy always springs from the occasion, a view perhaps rooted in his concrete studies of history. He accepted the general Hegelian identification of philosophy with the history of philosophy. His philosophy originates from his conception of aesthetics. Central to his aesthetics is his view of intuition, which evolved through various stages during his career. He regards aesthetic experience as a primitive type of cognition. Intuition involves an awareness of a particular image, which constitutes a non-conceptual form of knowledge. Art is the expression of emotion but not simply for its own sake. The expression of emotion can produce cognitive awareness in the sense that the particular intuited as an image can have a cosmic aspect, so that in it the universal human spirit is perceived. Such perception is present especially in the masterpieces of world literature. Croce’s conception of aesthetic has connections with Kant’s “intuition” (Anschauung) and to an extent with Vico’s conception of a primordial form of thought based in imagination (fantasia). Croce’s philosophical idealism includes fully developed conceptions of logic, science, law, history, politics, and ethics. His influence to date has been largely in the field of aesthetics and in historicist conceptions of knowledge and culture. His revival of Vico has inspired a whole school of Vico scholarship. Croce’s conception of a “Philosophy of Spirit” showed it was possible to develop a post-Hegelian philosophy that, with Hegel, takes “the true to be the whole” but which does not simply imitate Hegel.  AESTHETICS, HEGEL, KANT, VICO. D.P.V. crucial experiment, a means of deciding between rival theories that, providing parallel explanations of large classes of phenomena, come to be placed at issue by a single fact. For exple, the Newtonian emission theory predicts that light travels faster in water than in air; according to the wave theory, light travels slower in water than in air. Dominique François Arago proposed a crucial experiment comparing the respective velocities. Léon Foucault then devised an apparatus to measure the speed of light in various media and found a lower velocity in water than in air. Arago and Foucault concluded for the wave theory, believing that the experiment refuted the emission theory. Other exples include Galileo’s discovery of the phases of Venus (Ptolemaic versus Copernican astronomy), Pascal’s Puy-de-Dôme experiment with the barometer (vacuists versus plenists), Fresnel’s prediction of a spot of light in circular shadows (particle versus wave optics), and Eddington’s measurement of the gravitational bending of light rays during a solar eclipse (Newtonian versus Einsteinian gravitation). At issue in crucial experiments is usually a novel prediction. The notion seems to derive from Francis Bacon, whose New Organon (1620) discusses the “Instance of the Fingerpost (Instantia – later experimentum – crucis),” a term borrowed from the post set up at crossroads to indicate several directions. Crucial experiments were emphasized in early nineteenth-century scientific methodology – e.g., in John F. Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830). Duhem argued that crucial experiments resemble false dilemmas: hypotheses in physics do not come in pairs, so that crucial experiments cannot transform one of the two into a demonstrated truth. Discussing Foucault’s experiment, Duhem asks whether we dare assert that no other hypothesis is imaginable and suggests that instead of light being either a simple particle or wave, light might be something else, perhaps a disturbance propagated within a dielectric medium, as theorized by Maxwell. In the twentieth century, crucial experiments and novel predictions figured prominently in the work of Imre Lakatos (1922–74). Agreeing that crucial experiments are unable to overthrow theories, Lakatos accepted them as retroactive indications of the fertility or progress of research progrs.  BACON, FRANCIS; CONFIRMATION; DUHEM; PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. R.Ar. Crusius, Christian August (1715–75), German philosopher, theologian, and a devout Lutheran pastor who believed that religion was endangered by the rationalist views especially of Wolff. He devoted his considerable philosophical powers to working out acute and often deep criticisms of Wolff and developing a comprehensive alternative to the Wolffian system. His main philosophical works were published in the 1740s. In his understanding of epistemology and logic Crusius broke with many of the assumptions that allowed Wolff to argue from how we think of things to how things are. For instance, Crusius tried to show that the necessity in causal connection is not the se as logical necessity. He rejected the Leibnizian view that this world is probably the best possible world, and he criticrucial experiment Crusius, Christian August 196 -   196 cized the Wolffian view of freedom of the will as merely a concealed spiritual mechanism. His ethics stressed our dependence on God and his commands, as did the natural law theory of Pufendorf, but he developed the view in some strikingly original ways. Rejecting voluntarism, Crusius held that God’s commands take the form of innate principles of the will (not the understanding). Everyone alike can know what they are, so (contra Wolff) there is no need for moral experts. And they carry their own motivational force with them, so there is no need for external sanctions. We have obligations of prudence to do what will forward our own ends; but true obligation, the obligation of virtue, arises only when we act simply to comply with God’s law, regardless of any ends of our own. In this distinction between two kinds of obligation, as in many of his other views, Crusius plainly anticipated much that Kant ce to think. Kant when young read and admired his work, and it is mainly for this reason that Crusius is now remembered.  KANT, NATURAL LAW, PUFENDORF. J.B.S. Cudworth, Daris, Lady Mash (1659– 1708), English philosopher and author of two treatises on religion, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1690) and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Virtuous Christian Life (1705). The first argues against the views of the English Malebranchian, John Norris; the second, ostensibly about the importance of education for women, argues for the need to establish natural religion on rational principles and explores the place of revealed religion within a rational frework. Cudworth’s reputation is founded on her long friendship with John Locke. Her correspondence with him is almost entirely personal; she also entered into a brief but philosophically interesting exchange of letters with Leibniz.  LOCKE, MALEBRANCHE. M.At. Cudworth, Ralph.

CBRIDGE PLATONISTS, HYLOZOISM. cultural relativism.RELATIVISM. Culverwel, Nathaniel.CBRIDGE PLATONISTS. Cumberland, Richard (1631–1718), English philosopher and bishop. He wrote a Latin Treatise of the Laws of Nature (1672), translated twice into English and once into French. Admiring Grotius, Cumberland hoped to refute Hobbes in the interests of defending Christian morality and religion. He refused to appeal to innate ideas and a priori arguments because he thought Hobbes must be attacked on his own ground. Hence he offered a reductive and naturalistic account of natural law. The one basic moral law of nature is that the pursuit of the good of all rational beings is the best path to the agent’s own good. This is true because God made nature so that actions aiding others are followed by beneficial consequences to the agent, while those harmful to others harm the agent. Since the natural consequences of actions provide sanctions that, once we know them, will make us act for the good of others, we can conclude that there is a divine law by which we are obligated to act for the common good. And all the other laws of nature follow from the basic law. Cumberland refused to discuss free will, thereby suggesting a view of human action as fully determined by natural causes. If on his theory it is a blessing that God made nature (including humans) to work as it does, the religious reader must wonder if there is any role left for God concerning morality. Cumberland is generally viewed as a major forerunner of utilitarianism.  GROTIUS, HOBBES, NATURAL LAW. J.B.S. cum hoc ergo propter hoc.

INFORMAL FALLACY. Cursus Coninbricensis.FONSECA. curve-fitting problem, the problem of making predictions from past observations by fitting curves to the data. Curve fitting has two steps: first, select a fily of curves; then, find the bestfitting curve by some statistical criterion such as the method of least squares (e.g., choose the curve that has the least sum of squared deviations between the curve and data). The method was first proposed by Adrian Marie Legendre (1752–1833) and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777– 1855) in the early nineteenth century as a way of inferring planetary trajectories from noisy data. More generally, curve fitting may be used to construct low-level empirical generalizations. For exple, suppose that the ideal gas law, P % nkT, is chosen as the form of the law governing the dependence of the pressure P on the equilibrium temperature T of a fixed volume of gas, where n is the molecular number per unit volume and k is Boltzmann’s constant (a universal constant equal to 1.3804 $ 10†16 erg°C†1. When the pareter nk is adjustable, the law specifies a fily of curves – one for each numerCudworth, Daris curve-fitting problem 197 -   197 ical value of the pareter. Curve fitting may be used to determine the best-fitting member of the fily, thereby effecting a measurement of the theoretical pareter, nk. The philosophically vexing problem is how to justify the initial choice of the form of the law. On the one hand, one might choose a very large, complex fily of curves, which would ensure excellent fit with any data set. The problem with this option is that the best-fitting curve may overfit the data. If too much attention is paid to the random elements of the data, then the predictively useful trends and regularities will be missed. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. On the other hand, simpler filies run a greater risk of making grossly false assumptions about the true form of the law. Intuitively, the solution is to choose a simplefily of curves that maintains a reasonable degree of fit. The simplicity of a fily of curves is measured by the paucity of pareters. The problem is to say how and why such a trade-off between simplicity and goodness of fit should be made. When a theory can accommodate recalcitrant data only by the ad hoc – i.e., improperly motivated – addition of new terms and pareters, students of science have long felt that the subsequent increase in the degree of fit should not count in the theory’s favor, and such additions are sometimes called ad hoc hypotheses. The best-known exple of this sort of ad hoc hypothesizing is the addition of epicycles upon epicycles in the planetary astronomies of Ptolemy and Copernicus. This is an exple in which a gain in fit need not compensate for the loss of simplicity. Contemporary philosophers sometimes formulate the curve-fitting problem differently. They often assume that there is no noise in the data, and speak of the problem of choosing ong different curves that fit the data exactly. Then the problem is to choose the simplest curve from ong all those curves that pass through every data point. The problem is that there is no universally accepted way of defining the simplicity of single curves. No matter how the problem is formulated, it is widely agreed that simplicity should play some role in theory choice. Rationalists have chpioned the curve-fitting problem as exemplifying the underdetermination of theory from data and the need to make a priori assumptions about the simplicity of nature. Those philosophers who think that we have no such a priori knowledge still need to account for the relevance of simplicity to science. Whewell described curve fitting as the colligation of facts in the quantitative sciences, and the agreement in the measured pareters (coefficients) obtained by different colligations of facts as the consilience of inductions. Different colligations of facts (say on the se gas at different volume or for other gases) may yield good agreement ong independently measured values of pareters (like the molecular density of the gas and Boltzmann’s constant). By identifying different pareters found to agree, we constrain the form of the law without appealing to a priori knowledge (good news for empiricism). But the accompanying increase in unification also worsens the overall degree of fit. Thus, there is also the problem of how and why we should trade off unification with total degree of fit. Statisticians often refer to a fily of hypotheses as a model. A rapidly growing literature in statistics on model selection has not yet produced any universally accepted formula for trading off simplicity with degree of fit. However, there is wide agreement ong statisticians that the paucity of pareters is the appropriate way of measuring simplicity.  EXPLANATION, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, WHEWELL. M.R.F. Cusa.NICHOLAS OF CUSA. Cusanus.NICHOLAS OF CUSA. cut, Dedekind.DEDEKIND. cut-elimination theorem, a theorem stating that a certain type of inference rule (including a rule that corresponds to modus ponens) is not needed in classical logic. The idea was anticipated by J. Herbrand; the theorem was proved by G. Gentzen and generalized by S. Kleene. Gentzen formulated a sequent calculus – i.e., a deductive system with rules for statements about derivability. It includes a rule that we here express as ‘From (C Y D,M) and (M,C Y D), infer (C Y D)’ or ‘Given that C yields D or M, and that C plus M yields D, we may infer that C yields D’. Cusa cut-elimination theorem 198 -   198 This is called the cut rule because it cuts out the middle formula M. Gentzen showed that his sequent calculus is an adequate formalization of the predicate logic, and that the cut rule can be eliminated; anything provable with it can be proved without it. One important consequence of this is that, if a formula F is provable, then there is a proof of F that consists solely of subformulas of F. This fact simplifies the study of provability. Gentzen’s methodology applies directly to classical logic but can be adapted to many nonclassical logics, including some intuitionistic logics. It has led to some important theorems about consistency, and has illuminated the role of auxiliary assumptions in the derivation of consequences from a theory.

 CONSISTENCY, PROOF THEORY. D.H. cybernetics (coined by Norbert Wiener in 1947 from Greek kubernetes, ‘helmsman’), the study of the communication and manipulation of information in service of the control and guidance of biological, physical, or chemical energy systems. Historically, cybernetics has been intertwined with mathematical theories of information (communication) and computation. To describe the cybernetic properties of systems or processes requires ways to describe and measure information (reduce uncertainty) about events within the system and its environment. Feedback and feedforward, the basic ingredients of cybernetic processes, involve information – as what is fed forward or backward – and are basic to processes such as homeostasis in biological systems, automation in industry, and guidance systems. Of course, their most comprehensive application is to the purposive behavior (thought) of cognitively goal-directed systems such as ourselves. Feedback occurs in closed-loop, as opposed to open-loop, systems. Actually, ‘open-loop’ is a misnomer (involving no loop), but it has become entrenched. The standard exple of an openloop system is that of placing a heater with constant output in a closed room and leaving it switched on. Room temperature may accidentally reach, but may also dratically exceed, the temperature desired by the occupants. Such a heating system has no means of controlling itself to adapt to required conditions. In contrast, the standard closed-loop system incorporates a feedback component. At the heart of cybernetics is the concept of control. A controlled process is one in which an end state that is reached depends essentially on the behavior of the controlling system and not merely on its external environment. That is, control involves partial independence for the system. A control system may be pictured as having both an inner and outer environment. The inner environment consists of the internal events that make up the system; the outer environment consists of events that causally impinge on the system, threatening disruption and loss of system integrity and stability. For a system to maintain its independence and identity in the face of fluctuations in its external environment, it must be able to detect information about those changes in the external environment. Information must pass through the interface between inner and outer environments, and the system must be able to compensate for fluctuations of the outer environment by adjusting its own inner environmental variables. Otherwise, disturbances in the outer environment will overcome the system – bringing its inner states into equilibrium with the outer states, thereby losing its identity as a distinct, independent system. This is nowhere more certain than with the homeostatic systems of the body (for temperature or blood sugar levels). Control in the attainment of goals is accomplished by minimizing error. Negative feedback, or information about error, is the difference between activity a system actually performs (output) and that activity which is its goal to perform (input). The standard exple of control incorporating negative feedback is the thermostatically controlled heating system. The actual room temperature (system output) carries information to the thermostat that can be compared (via goal-state comparator) to the desired temperature for the room (input) as embodied in the set-point on the thermostat; a correction can then be made to minimize the difference (error) – the furnace turns on or off. Positive feedback tends to plify the value of the output of a system (or of a system disturbance) by adding the value of the output to the system input quantity. Thus, the system accentuates disturbances and, if unchecked, will eventually pass the brink of instability. Suppose that as room temperature rises it causes the thermostatic set-point to rise in direct proportion to the rise in temperature. This would cause the furnace to continue to output heat (possibly with disastrous consequences). Many biological maladies have just this characteristic. For exple, severe loss of blood causes inability of the heart to pump effectively, which causes loss of arterial pressure, which, in turn, causes reduced flow of blood to the heart, reducing pumping efficiency. cybernetics cybernetics 199 -   199 Cognitively goal-directed systems are also cybernetic systems. Purposive attainment of a goal by a goal-directed system must have (at least): (1) an internal representation of the goal state of the system (a detector for whether the desired state is actual); (2) a feedback loop by which information about the present state of the system can be compared with the goal state as internally represented and by means of which an error correction can be made to minimize any difference; and (3) a causal dependency of system output upon the error-correction process of condition (2) (to distinguish goal success from fortuitous goal satisfaction). 

Cynics, a classical Greek philosophical school characterized by asceticism and emphasis on the sufficiency of virtue for happiness (eudaimonia), boldness in speech, and shelessness in action. The Cynics were strongly influenced by Socrates and were themselves an important influence on Stoic ethics. An ancient tradition links the Cynics to Antisthenes (c.445–c.360 B.C.), an Athenian. He fought bravely in the battle of Tanagra and claimed that he would not have been so courageous if he had been born of two Athenians instead of an Athenian and a Thracian slave. He studied with Gorgias, but later bece a close companion of Socrates and was present at Socrates’ death. Antisthenes was proudest of his wealth, although he had no money, because he was satisfied with what he had and he could live in whatever circumstances he found himself. Here he follows Socrates in three respects. First, Socrates himself lived with a disregard for pleasure and pain – e.g., walking barefoot in snow. Second, Socrates thinks that in every circumstance a virtuous person is better off than a nonvirtuous one; Antisthenes anticipates the Stoic development of this to the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness, because the virtuous person uses properly whatever is present. Third, both Socrates and Antisthenes stress that the soul is more important than the body, and neglect the body for the soul. Unlike the later Cynics, however, both Socrates and Antisthenes do accept pleasure when it is available. Antisthenes also does not focus exclusively on ethics; he wrote on other topics, including logic. (He supposedly told Plato that he could see a horse but not horseness, to which Plato replied that he had not acquired the means to see horseness.) Diogenes of Sinope (c.400–c.325 B.C.) continued the emphasis on self-sufficiency and on the soul, but took the disregard for pleasure to asceticism. (According to one story, Plato called Diogenes “Socrates gone mad.”) He ce to Athens after being exiled from Sinope, perhaps because the coinage was defaced, either by himself or by others, under his father’s direction. He took ‘deface the coinage!’ as a motto, meaning that the current standards were corrupt and should be marked as corrupt by being defaced; his refusal to live by them was his defacing them. For exple, he lived in a wine cask, ate whatever scraps he ce across, and wrote approvingly of cannibalism and incest. One story reports that he carried a lighted lp in broad daylight looking for an honest human, probably intending to suggest that the people he did see were so corrupted that they were no longer really people. He apparently wanted to replace the debased standards of custom with the genuine standards of nature – but nature in the sense of what was minimally required for human life, which an individual human could achieve, without society. Because of this, he was called a Cynic, from the Greek word kuon (dog), because he was as sheless as a dog. Diogenes’ most fous successor was Crates (fl. c.328–325 B.C.). He was a Boeotian, from Thebes, and renounced his wealth to become a Cynic. He seems to have been more pleasant than Diogenes; according to some reports, every Athenian house was open to him, and he was even regarded by them as a household god. Perhaps the most fous incident involving Crates is his marriage to Hipparchia, who took up the Cynic way of life despite her fily’s opposition and insisted that educating herself was preferable to working a loom. Like Diogenes, Crates emphasized that happiness is self-sufficiency, and claimed that asceticism is required for self-sufficiency; e.g., he advises us not to prefer oysters to lentils. He argues that no one is happy if happiness is measured by the balance of pleasure and pain, since in each period of our lives there is more pain than pleasure. Cynicism continued to be active through the third century B.C., and returned to prominence in the second century A.D. after an apparent decline. 

Cyrenaics, a classical Greek philosophical school that began shortly after Socrates and lasted for several centuries, noted especially for hedonism. Ancient writers trace the Cyrenaics back to ArisCynics Cyrenaics 200 -   200 tippus of Cyrene (fifth-fourth century B.C.), an associate of Socrates. Aristippus ce to Athens because of Socrates’ fe and later greatly enjoyed the luxury of court life in Sicily. (Some people ascribe the founding of the school to his grandchild Aristippus, because of an ancient report that the elder Aristippus said nothing clear about the human end.) The Cyrenaics include Aristippus’s child Arete, her child Aristippus (taught by Arete), Hegesius, Anniceris, and Theodorus. The school seems to have been superseded by the Epicureans. No Cyrenaic writings survive, and the reports we do have are sketchy. The Cyrenaics avoid mathematics and natural philosophy, preferring ethics because of its utility. (According to them, not only will studying nature not make us virtuous, it also won’t make us stronger or richer.) Some reports claim that they also avoid logic and epistemology. But this is not true of all the Cyrenaics: according to other reports, they think logic and epistemology are useful, consider arguments (and also causes) as topics to be covered in ethics, and have an epistemology. Their epistemology is skeptical. We can know only how we are affected; we can know, e.g., that we are whitening, but not that whatever is causing this sensation is itself white. This differs from Protagoras’s theory; unlike Protagoras the Cyrenaics draw no inferences about the things that affect us, claiming only that external things have a nature that we cannot know. But, like Protagoras, the Cyrenaics base their theory on the problem of conflicting appearances. Given their epistemology, if humans ought to aim at something that is not a way of being affected (i.e., something that is immediately perceived according to them), we can never know anything about it. Unsurprisingly, then, they claim that the end is a way of being affected; in particular, they are hedonists. The end of good actions is particular pleasures (smooth changes), and the end of bad actions is particular pains (rough changes). There is also an intermediate class, which aims at neither pleasure nor pain. Mere absence of pain is in this intermediate class, since the absence of pain may be merely a static state. Pleasure for Aristippus seems to be the sensation of pleasure, not including related psychic states. We should aim at pleasure (although not everyone does), as is clear from our naturally seeking it as children, before we consciously choose to. Happiness, which is the sum of the particular pleasures someone experiences, is choiceworthy only for the particular pleasures that constitute it, while particular pleasures are choiceworthy for themselves. Cyrenaics, then, are not concerned with maximizing total pleasure over a lifetime, but only with particular pleasures, and so they should not choose to give up particular pleasures on the chance of increasing the total. Later Cyrenaics diverge in important respects from the original Cyrenaic hedonism, perhaps in response to the development of Epicurus’s views. Hegesias claims that happiness is impossible because of the pains associated with the body, and so thinks of happiness as total pleasure minus total pain. He emphasizes that wise people act for themselves, and denies that people actually act for someone else. Anniceris, on the other hand, claims that wise people are happy even if they have few pleasures, and so seems to think of happiness as the sum of pleasures, and not as the excess of pleasures over pains. Anniceris also begins considering psychic pleasures: he insists that friends should be valued not only for their utility, but also for our feelings toward them. We should even accept losing pleasure because of a friend, even though pleasure is the end. Theodorus goes a step beyond Anniceris. He claims that the end of good actions is joy and that of bad actions is grief. (Surprisingly, he denies that friendship is reasonable, since fools have friends only for utility and wise people need no friends.) He even regards pleasure as intermediate between practical wisdom and its opposite. This seems to involve regarding happiness as the end, not particular pleasures, and may involve losing particular pleasures for long-term happiness.

Czolbe, Heinrich (1819–73), German philosopher. He was born in Danzig and trained in theology and medicine. His main works are Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus (“New Exposition of Sensualism,” 1855), Entstehung des Selbstbewusstseins (“Origin of Self-Consciousness,” 1856), Die Grenzen und der Ursprung der menschlichen Erkenntnis (“The Limits and Origin of Human Knowledge,” 1865), and a posthumously published study, Grundzüge der extensionalen Erkenntnistheorie (1875). Czolbe proposed a sensualistic theory of knowledge: knowledge is a copy of the actual, and spatial extension is ascribed even to ideas. Space is the support of all attributes. His later work defended a non-reductive materialism. Czolbe made the rejection of the supersensuous a central principle and defended a radical “senCzolbe, Heinrich Czolbe, Heinrich 201 -   201 sationalism.” Despite this, he did not present a dogmatic materialism, but cast his philosophy in hypothetical form. In his study of the origin of self-consciousness Czolbe held that dissatisfaction with the actual world generates supersensuous ideas and branded this attitude as “immoral.” He excluded supernatural phenomena on the basis not of physiological or scientific studies but of a “moral feeling of duty towards the natural world-order and contentment with it.” The se valuation led him to postulate the eternality of terrestrial life. Nietzsche was filiar with Czolbe’s works and incorporated some of his themes into his philosophy.

d’Ailly, Pierre (1350–1420), French Ockhist philosopher, prelate, and writer. Educated at the Collège de Navarre, he was promoted to doctor in the Sorbonne in 1380, appointed chancellor of Paris University in 1389, consecrated bishop in 1395, and made a cardinal in 1411. He was influenced by John of Mirecourt’s nominalism. He taught Gerson. At the Council of Constance (1414–18), which condemned Huss’s teachings, d’Ailly upheld the superiority of the council over the pope (conciliarism). The relation of astrology to history and theology figures ong his primary interests. His 1414 Tractatus de Concordia astronomicae predicted the 1789 French Revolution. He composed a De anima, a commentary on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and another on Peter Lombard’s Sentences. His early logical work, Concepts and Insolubles (c.1472), was particularly influential. In epistemology, d’Ailly contradistinguished “natural light” (indubitable knowledge) from reason (relative knowledge), and emphasized thereafter the uncertainty of experimental knowledge and the mere probability of the classical “proofs” of God’s existence. His doctrine of God differentiates God’s absolute power (potentia absoluta) from God’s ordained power on earth (potentia ordinata). His theology anticipated fideism (Deum esse sola fide tenetur), his ethics the spirit of Protestantism, and his sacrentology Lutheranism. J.-L.S. d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond (1717–83), French mathematician, philosopher, and Encyclopedist. According to Grimm, d’Alembert was the prime luminary of the philosophic party. An abandoned, illegitimate child, he nonetheless received an outstanding education at the Jansenist Collège des Quatre-Nations in Paris. He read law for a while, tried medicine, and settled on mathematics. In 1743, he published an acclaimed Treatise of Dynics. Subsequently, he joined the Paris Academy of Sciences and contributed decisive works on mathematics and physics. In 1754, he was elected to the French Academy, of which he later bece permanent secretary. In association with Diderot, he launched the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote the epoch-making Discours préliminaire (1751) and numerous entries on science. Unwilling to compromise with the censorship, he resigned as coeditor in 1758. In the Discours préliminaire, d’Alembert specified the divisions of the philosophical discourse on man: pneumatology, logic, and ethics. Contrary to Christian philosophies, he limited pneumatology to the investigation of the human soul. Prefiguring positivism, his Essay on the Elements of Philosophy (1759) defines philosophy as a comparative exination of physical phenomena. Influenced by Bacon, Locke, and Newton, d’Alembert’s epistemology associates Cartesian psychology with the sensory origin of ideas. Though assuming the universe to be rationally ordered, he discarded metaphysical questions as inconclusive. The substance, or the essence, of soul and matter, is unknowable. Agnosticism ineluctably arises from his empirically based naturalism. D’Alembert is prominently featured in D’Alembert’s Dre (1769), Diderot’s dialogical apology for materialism.

 ENCYCLOPEDIA. J.-L.S. Dascene, John.JOHN OF DASCUS. Dascius (c.462–c.550), Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, last head of the Athenian Academy before its closure by Justinian in A.D. 529. Born probably in Dascus, he studied first in Alexandria, and then moved to Athens shortly before Proclus’s death in 485. He returned to Alexandria, where he attended the lectures of monius, but ce back again to Athens in around 515, to assume the headship of the Academy. After the closure, he retired briefly with some other philosophers, including Simplicius, to Persia, but left after about a year, probably for Syria, where he died. He composed many works, including a life of his master Isidorus, which survives in truncated form; commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories, On the Heavens, and Meteorologics I (all lost); commentaries on Plato’s Alcibiades, Phaedo, Philebus, and Parmenides, which survive; and a surviving treatise On First Principles. His philosophical system is a further elaboration of the scholastic Neoplatonism of Proclus, exhibiting a great proliferation of metaphysical entities. 

NEOPLATONISM. J.M.D. 203 D -   203 Danto, Arthur Coleman (b.1924), erican philosopher of art and art history who has also contributed to the philosophies of history, action, knowledge, science, and metaphilosophy. ong his influential studies in the history of philosophy are books on Nietzsche, Sartre, and Indian thought. Danto arrives at his philosophy of art through his “method of indiscernibles,” which has greatly influenced contemporary philosophical aesthetics. According to his metaphilosophy, genuine philosophical questions arise when there is a theoretical need to differentiate two things that are perceptually indiscernible – such as prudential actions versus moral actions (Kant), causal chains versus constant conjunctions (Hume), and perfect dres versus reality (Descartes). Applying the method to the philosophy of art, Danto asks what distinguishes an artwork, such as Warhol’s Brillo Box, from its perceptually indiscernible, real-world counterparts, such as Brillo boxes by Proctor and Gble. His answer – his partial definition of art – is that x is a work of art only if (1) x is about something and (2) x embodies its meaning (i.e., discovers a mode of presentation intended to be appropriate to whatever subject x is about). These two necessary conditions, Danto claims, enable us to distinguish between artworks and real things – between Warhol’s Brillo Box and Proctor and Gble’s. However, critics have pointed out that these conditions fail, since real Brillo boxes are about something (Brillo) about which they embody or convey meanings through their mode of presentation (viz., that Brillo is clean, fresh, and dynic). Moreover, this is not an isolated exple. Danto’s theory of art confronts systematic difficulties in differentiating real cultural artifacts, such as industrial packages, from artworks proper. In addition to his philosophy of art, Danto proposes a philosophy of art history. Like Hegel, Danto maintains that art history – as a developmental, progressive process – has ended. Danto believes that modern art has been primarily reflexive (i.e., about itself); it has attempted to use its own forms and strategies to disclose the essential nature of art. Cubism and abstract expressionism, for exple, exhibit saliently the two-dimensional nature of painting. With each experiment, modern art has gotten closer to disclosing its own essence. But, Danto argues, with works such as Warhol’s Brillo Box, artists have taken the philosophical project of self-definition as far as they can, since once an artist like Warhol has shown that artworks can be perceptually indiscernible from “real things” and, therefore, can look like anything, there is nothing further that the artist qua artist can show through the medium of appearances about the nature of art. The task of defining art must be reassigned to philosophers to be treated discursively, and art history – as the developmental, progressive narrative of self-definition – ends. Since that turn of events was putatively precipitated by Warhol in the 1960s, Danto calls the present period of art making “post-historical.” As an art critic for The Nation, he has been chronicling its vicissitudes for a decade and a half. Some dissenters, nevertheless, have been unhappy with Danto’s claim that art history has ended because, they maintain, he has failed to demonstrate that the only prospects for a developmental, progressive history of art reside in the project of the self-definition of art.  

Darwinism, the view that biological species evolve primarily by means of chance variation and natural selection. Although several important scientists prior to Charles Darwin (1809–82) had suggested that species evolve and had provided mechanisms for that evolution, Darwin was the first to set out his mechanism in sufficient detail and provide adequate empirical grounding. Even though Darwin preferred to talk about descent with modification, the term that rapidly ce to characterize his theory was evolution. According to Darwin, organisms vary with respect to their characteristics. In a litter of puppies, some will be bigger, some will have longer hair, some will be more resistant to disease, etc. Darwin termed these variations chance, not because he thought that they were in any sense “uncaused,” but to reject any general correlation between the variations that an organism might need and those it gets, as Larck had proposed. Instead, successive generations of organisms become adapted to their environments in a more roundabout way. Variations occur in all directions. The organisms that happen to possess the characteristics necessary to survive and reproduce proliferate. Those that do not either die or leave fewer offspring. Before Darwin, an adaptation was any trait that fits an organism to its environment. After Darwin, the term ce to be limited to just those useful traits that arose through natural selection. For exple, the sutures in the skulls of mmals make parturition easier, but they are not adaptations in an evolutionary sense because Danto, Arthur Coleman Darwinism 204 -   204 they arose in ancestors that did not give birth to live young, as is indicated by these se sutures appearing in the skulls of egg-laying birds. Because organisms are integrated systems, Darwin thought that adaptations had to arise through the accumulation of numerous, small variations. As a result, evolution is gradual. Darwin himself was unsure about how progressive biological evolution is. Organisms certainly become better adapted to their environments through successive generations, but as fast as organisms adapt to their environments, their environments are likely to change. Thus, Darwinian evolution may be goal-directed, but different species pursue different goals, and these goals keep changing. Because heredity was so important to his theory of evolution, Darwin supplemented it with a theory of heredity – pangenesis. According to this theory, the cells throughout the body of an organism produce numerous tiny gemmules that find their way to the reproductive organs of the organism to be transmitted in reproduction. An offspring receives variable numbers of gemmules from each of its parents for each of its characteristics. For instance, the male parent might contribute 214 gemmules for length of hair to one offspring, 121 to another, etc., while the female parent might contribute 54 gemmules for length of hair to the first offspring and 89 to the second. As a result, characters tend to blend. Darwin even thought that gemmules themselves might merge, but he did not think that the merging of gemmules was an important factor in the blending of characters. Numerous objections were raised to Darwin’s theory in his day, and one of the most telling stemmed from his adopting a blending theory of inheritance. As fast as natural selection biases evolution in a particular direction, blending inheritance neutralizes its effects. Darwin’s opponents argued that each species had its own range of variation. Natural selection might bias the organisms belonging to a species in a particular direction, but as a species approached its limits of variation, additional change would become more difficult. Some special mechanism was needed to leap over the deep, though possibly narrow, chasms that separate species. Because a belief in biological evolution bece widespread within a decade or so after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, the tendency is to think that it was Darwin’s view of evolution that bece popular. Nothing could be further from the truth. Darwin’s contemporaries found his theory too materialistic and haphazard because no supernatural or teleological force influenced evolutionary development. Darwin’s contemporaries were willing to accept evolution, but not the sort advocated by Darwin. Although Darwin viewed the evolution of species on the model of individual development, he did not think that it was directed by some internal force or induced in a Larckian fashion by the environment. Most Darwinians adopted just such a position. They also argued that species arise in the space of a single generation so that the boundaries between species remained as discrete as the creationists had maintained. Ideal morphologists even eliminated any genuine temporal dimension to evolution. Instead they viewed the evolution of species in the se atemporal way that mathematicians view the transformation of an ellipse into a circle. The revolution that Darwin instigated was in most respects non-Darwinian. By the turn of the century, Darwinism had gone into a decided eclipse. Darwin himself remained fairly open with respect to the mechanisms of evolution. For exple, he was willing to accept a minor role for Larckian forms of inheritance, and he acknowledged that on occasion a new species might arise quite rapidly on the model of the Ancon sheep. Several of his followers were less flexible, rejecting all forms of Larckian inheritance and insisting that evolutionary change is always gradual. Eventually Darwinism bece identified with the views of these neo-Darwinians. Thus, when Mendelian genetics burst on the scene at the turn of the century, opponents of Darwinism interpreted this new particulate theory of inheritance as being incompatible with Darwin’s blending theory. The difference between Darwin’s theory of pangenesis and Mendelian genetics, however, did not concern the existence of hereditary particles. Gemmules were as particulate as genes. The difference lay in numbers. According to early Mendelians, each character is controlled by a single pair of genes. Instead of receiving a variable number of gemmules from each parent for each character, each offspring gets a single gene from each parent, and these genes do not in any sense blend with each other. Blue eyes remain as blue as ever from generation to generation, even when the gene for blue eyes resides opposite the gene for brown eyes. As the nature of heredity was gradually worked out, biologists began to realize that a Darwinian view of evolution could be combined with Mendelian genetics. Initially, the founders of this later stage in the development of neoDarwinism exhibited considerable variation in Darwinism Darwinism 205 -   205 their beliefs about the evolutionary process, but as they strove to produce a single, synthetic theory, they tended to become more Darwinian than Darwin had been. Although they acknowledged that other factors, such as the effects of small numbers, might influence evolution, they emphasized that natural selection is the sole directive force in evolution. It alone could explain the complex adaptations exhibited by organisms. New species might arise through the isolation of a few founder organisms, but from a populational perspective, evolution was still gradual. New species do not arise in the space of a single generation by means of “hopeful monsters” or any other developmental means. Nor was evolution in any sense directional or progressive. Certain lineages might become more complex for a while, but at this se time, others would become simpler. Because biological evolution is so opportunistic, the tree of life is highly irregular. But the united front presented by the neo-Darwinians was in part an illusion. Differences of opinion persisted, for instance over how heterogeneous species should be. No sooner did neo-Darwinism become the dominant view ong evolutionary biologists than voices of dissent were raised. Currently, almost every aspect of the neo-Darwinian paradigm is being challenged. No one proposes to reject naturalism, but those who view themselves as opponents of neo-Darwinism urge more important roles for factors treated as only minor by the neo-Darwinians. For exple, neoDarwinians view selection as being extremely sharp-sighted. Any inferior organism, no matter how slightly inferior, is sure to be eliminated. Nearly all variations are deleterious. Currently evolutionists, even those who consider themselves Darwinians, acknowledge that a high percentage of changes at the molecular level may be neutral with respect to survival or reproduction. On current estimates, over 95 percent of an organism’s genes may have no function at all. Disagreement also exists about the level of organization at which selection can operate. Some evolutionary biologists insist that selection occurs primarily at the level of single genes, while others think that it can have effects at higher levels of organization, certainly at the organismic level, possibly at the level of entire species. Some biologists emphasize the effects of developmental constraints on the evolutionary process, while others have discovered unexpected mechanisms such as molecular drive. How much of this conceptual variation will become incorporated into Darwinism remains to be seen. 

Davidson, Donald (b.1917), erican metaphysician and philosopher of mind and language. His views on the relationship between our conceptions of ourselves as persons and as complex physical objects have had an enormous impact on contemporary philosophy. Davidson regards the mind–body problem as the problem of the relation between mental and physical events; his discussions of explanation assume that the entities explained are events; causation is a relation between events; and action is a species of events, so that events are the very subject matter of action theory. His central claim concerning events is that they are concrete particulars – unrepeatable entities located in space and time. He does not take for granted that events exist, but argues for their existence and for specific claims as to their nature. In “The Individuation of Events” (in Essays on Actions and Events, 1980), Davidson argues that a satisfactory theory of action must recognize that we talk of the se action under different descriptions. We must therefore assume the existence of actions. His strongest argument for the existence of events derives from his most original contribution to metaphysics, the semantic method of truth (Essays on Actions and Events, pp. 105–80; Essays on Truth and Interpretation, 1984, pp. 199–214). The argument is based on a distinctive trait of the English language (one not obviously shared by signal systems in lower animals), nely, its productivity of combinations. We learn modes of composition as well as words and are thus prepared to produce and respond to complex expressions never before encountered. Davidson argues, from such considerations, that our very understanding of English requires assuming the existence of events. To understand Davidson’s rather complicated views about the relationships between mind and body, consider the following claims: (1) The mental and the physical are distinct. (2) The mental and the physical causally interact. (3) The physical is causally closed. Darwinism, social Davidson, Donald 206 -   206 (1) says that no mental event is a physical event; (2), that some mental events cause physical events and vice versa; and (3), that all the causes of physical events are physical events. If mental events are distinct from physical events and sometimes cause them, then the physical is not causally closed. The dilemma posed by the plausibility of each of these claims and by their apparent incompatibility just is the traditional mind– body problem. Davidson’s resolution consists of three theses: (4) There are no strict psychological or psychophysical laws; in fact, all strict laws are expressible in purely physical vocabulary. (5) Mental events causally interact with physical events. (6) Event c causes event e only if some strict causal law subsumes c and e. It is commonly held that a property expressed by M is reducible to a property expressed by P (where M and P are not logically connected) only if some exceptionless law links them. So, given (4), mental and physical properties are distinct. (6) says that c causes e only if there are singular descriptions, D of c and DH of e, and a “strict” causal law, L, such that L and ‘D occurred’ entail ‘D caused D'’. (6) and the second part of (4) entail that physical events have only physical causes and that all event causation is physically grounded. Given the parallel between (1)–(3) and (4)– (6), it may seem that the latter, too, are incompatible. But Davidson shows that they all can be true if (and only if) mental events are identical to physical events. Let us say that an event e is a physical event if and only if e satisfies a basic physical predicate (that is, a physical predicate appearing in a “strict” law). Since only physical predicates (or predicates expressing properties reducible to basic physical properties) appear in “strict” laws, every event that enters into causal relations satisfies a basic physical predicate. So, those mental events which enter into causal relations are also physical events. Still, the anomalous monist is committed only to a partial endorsement of (1). The mental and physical are distinct insofar as they are not linked by strict law – but they are not distinct insofar as mental events are in fact physical events.  ACTION THEORY, CAUSAL LAW, EVENT, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, SUPERVENIENCE TRUTH. E.L. de Beauvoir, Simone.EXISTENTIALISM. decidability, as a property of sets, the existence of an effective procedure (a “decision procedure”) which, when applied to any object, determines whether or not the object belongs to the set. A theory or logic is decidable if and only if the set of its theorems is. Decidability is proved by describing a decision procedure and showing that it works. The truth table method, for exple, establishes that classical propositional logic is decidable. To prove that something is not decidable requires a more precise characterization of the notion of effective procedure. Using one such characterization (for which there is ple evidence), Church proved that classical predicate logic is not decidable. 

decision theory, the theory of rational decision, often called “rational choice theory” in political science and other social sciences. The basic idea (probably Pascal’s) was published at the end of Arnaud’s Port-Royal Logic (1662): “To judge what one must do to obtain a good or avoid an evil one must consider not only the good and the evil in itself but also the probability of its happening or not happening, and view geometrically the proportion that all these things have together.” Where goods and evils are monetary, Daniel Bernoulli (1738) spelled the idea out in terms of expected utilities as figures of merit for actions, holding that “in the absence of the unusual, the utility resulting from a fixed small increase in wealth will be inversely proportional to the quantity of goods previously possessed.” This was meant to solve the St. Petersburg paradox: Peter tosses a coin . . . until it should land “heads” [on toss n]. . . . He agrees to give Paul one ducat if he gets “heads” on the very first throw [and] with each additional throw the number of ducats he must pay is doubled. . . . Although the standard calculation shows that the value of Paul’s expectation [of gain] is infinitely great [i.e., the sum of all possible gains $ probabilities, 2n/2 $ ½n], it has . . . to be admitted that any fairly reasonable man would sell his chance, with great pleasure, for twenty ducats. In this case Paul’s expectation of utility is indeed finite on Bernoulli’s assumption of inverse proportionality; but as Karl Menger observed (1934), Bernoulli’s solution fails if payoffs are so large that utilities are inversely proporde Beauvoir, Simone decision theory 207 -   207 tional to probabilities; then only boundedness of utility scales resolves the paradox. Bernoulli’s idea of diminishing marginal utility of wealth survived in the neoclassical texts of W. S. Jevons (1871), Alfred Marshall (1890), and A. C. Pigou (1920), where personal utility judgment was understood to cause preference. But in the 1930s, operationalistic arguments of John Hicks and R. G. D. Allen persuaded economists that on the contrary, (1) utility is no cause but a description, in which (2) the numbers indicate preference order but not intensity. In their Theory of Ges and Economic Behavior (1946), John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern undid (2) by pushing (1) further: ordinal preferences ong risky prospects were now seen to be describable on “interval” scales of subjective utility (like the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales for temperature), so that once utilities, e.g., 0 and 1, are assigned to any prospect and any preferred one, utilities of all prospects are determined by overall preferences ong gbles, i.e., probability distributions over prospects. Thus, the utility midpoint between two prospects is marked by the distribution assigning probability ½ to each. In fact, Rsey had done that and more in a little-noticed essay (“Truth and Probability,” 1931) teasing subjective probabilities as well as utilities out of ordinal preferences ong gbles. In a form independently invented by L. J. Savage (Foundations of Statistics, 1954), this approach is now widely accepted as a basis for rational decision analysis. The 1968 book of that title by Howard Raiffa bece a theoretical centerpiece of M.B.A. curricula, whose graduates diffused it through industry, government, and the military in a simplified format for defensible decision making, nely, “cost–benefit analyses,” substituting expected numbers of dollars, deaths, etc., for preference-based expected utilities. Social choice and group decision form the native ground of interpersonal comparison of personal utilities. Thus, John C. Harsanyi (1955) proved that if (1) individual and social preferences all satisfy the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms, and (2) society is indifferent between two prospects whenever all individuals are, and (3) society prefers one prospect to another whenever someone does and nobody has the opposite preference, then social utilities are expressible as sums of individual utilities on interval scales obtained by stretching or compressing the individual scales by ounts determined by the social preferences. Arguably, the theorem shows how to derive interpersonal comparisons of individual preference intensities from social preference orderings that are thought to treat individual preferences on a par. Somewhat earlier, Kenneth Arrow had written that “interpersonal comparison of utilities has no meaning and, in fact, there is no meaning relevant to welfare economics in the measurability of individual utility” (Social Choice and Individual Values, 1951) – a position later abandoned (P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, 1967). Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” is illustrated by cyclic preferences (observed by Condorcet in 1785) ong candidates A, B, C of voters 1, 2, 3, who rank them ABC, BCA, CAB, respectively, in decreasing order of preference, so that majority rule yields intransitive preferences for the group of three, of whom two (1, 3) prefer A to B and two (1, 2) prefer B to C but two (2, 3) prefer C to A. In general, the theorem denies existence of technically democratic schemes for forming social preferences from citizens’ preferences. A clause tendentiously called “independence of irrelevant alternatives” in the definition of ‘democratic’ rules out appeal to preferences ong non-candidates as a way to form social preferences ong candidates, thus ruling out the preferences ong gbles used in Harsanyi’s theorem. (See John Broome, Weighing Goods, 1991, for further information and references.) Savage derived the agent’s probabilities for states as well as utilities for consequences from preferences ong abstract acts, represented by deterministic assignments of consequences to states. An act’s place in the preference ordering is then reflected by its expected utility, a probability-weighted average of the utilities of its consequences in the various states. Savage’s states and consequences formed distinct sets, with every assignment of consequences to states constituting an act. While Rsey had also taken acts to be functions from states to consequences, he took consequences to be propositions (sets of states), and assigned utilities to states, not consequences. A further step in that direction represents acts, too, by propositions (see Ethan Bolker, Functions Resembling Quotients of Measures, University Microfilms, 1965; and Richard Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision, 1965, 1990). Bolker’s representation theorem states conditions under which preferences between truth of propositions determine probabilities and utilities nearly enough to make the position of a proposition in one’s preference ranking reflect its “desirability,” i.e., one’s expectation of utility conditionally on it. decision theory decision theory 208 -   208 Alongside such basic properties as transitivity and connexity, a workhorse ong Savage’s assumptions was the “sure-thing principle”: Preferences ong acts having the se consequences in certain states are unaffected by arbitrary changes in those consequences. This implies that agents see states as probabilistically independent of acts, and therefore implies that an act cannot be preferred to one that dominates it in the sense that the dominant act’s consequences in each state have utilities at least as great as the other’s. Unlike the sure thing principle, the principle ‘Choose so as to maximize CEU (conditional expectation of utility)’ rationalizes action aiming to enhance probabilities of preferred states of nature, as in quitting cigarettes to increase life expectancy. But as Nozick pointed out in 1969, there are problems in which choiceworthiness goes by dominance rather than CEU, as when the smoker (like R. A. Fisher in 1959) believes that the statistical association between smoking and lung cancer is due to a genetic allele, possessors of which are more likely than others to smoke and to contract lung cancer, although ong them smokers are not especially likely to contract lung cancer. In such (“Newcomb”) problems choices are ineffectual signs of conditions that agents would promote or prevent if they could. Causal decision theories modify the CEU formula to obtain figures of merit distinguishing causal efficacy from evidentiary significance – e.g., replacing conditional probabilities by probabilities of counterfactual conditionals; or forming a weighted average of CEU’s under all hypotheses about causes, with agents’ unconditional probabilities of hypotheses as weights; etc. Mathematical statisticians leery of subjective probability have cultivated Abrah Wald’s Theory of Statistical Decision Functions (1950), treating statistical estimation, experimental design, and hypothesis testing as zero-sum “ges against nature.” For an account of the opposite assimilation, of ge theory to probabilistic decision theory, see Skyrms, Dynics of Rational Deliberation (1990). The “preference logics” of Sören Halldén, The Logic of ‘Better’ (1957), and G. H. von Wright, The Logic of Preference (1963), sidestep probability. Thus, Halldén holds that when truth of p is preferred to truth of q, falsity of q must be preferred to falsity of p, and von Wright (with Aristotle) holds that “this is more choiceworthy than that if this is choiceworthy without that, but that is not choiceworthy without this” (Topics III, 118a). Both principles fail in the absence of special probabilistic assumptions, e.g., equiprobability of p with q. Received wisdom counts decision theory clearly false as a description of human behavior, seeing its proper status as normative. But some, notably Davidson, see the theory as constitutive of the very concept of preference, so that, e.g., preferences can no more be intransitive than propositions can be at once true and false. 

EMPIRICAL DECISION THEORY, GE THEORY, RATIONALITY, SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY. R.J. decision tree.DECISION THEORY. declining marginal utility.UTILITARIANISM. decomposability.MODULARITY. deconstruction, a demonstration of the incompleteness or incoherence of a philosophical position using concepts and principles of argument whose meaning and use is legitimated only by that philosophical position. A deconstruction is thus a kind of internal conceptual critique in which the critic implicitly and provisionally adheres to the position criticized. The early work of Derrida is the source of the term and provides paradigm cases of its referent. That deconstruction remains within the position being discussed follows from a fundental deconstructive argument about the nature of language and thought. Derrida’s earliest deconstructions argue against the possibility of an interior “language” of thought and intention such that the senses and referents of terms are determined by their very nature. Such terms are “meanings” or logoi. Derrida calls accounts that presuppose such magical thought-terms “logocentric.” He claims, following Heidegger, that the conception of such logoi is basic to the concepts of Western metaphysics, and that Western metaphysics is fundental to our cultural practices and languages. Thus there is no “ordinary language” uncontinated by philosophy. Logoi ground all our accounts of intention, meaning, truth, and logical connection. Versions of logoi in the history of philosophy range from Plato’s Forms through the self-interpreting ideas of the empiricists to Husserl’s intentional entities. Thus Derrida’s fullest deconstructions are of texts that give explicit accounts of logoi, especially his discussion of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. There, Derrida argues that meanings that are fully present to consciousness are in decision tree deconstruction 209 -   209 principle impossible. The idea of a meaning is the idea of a repeatable ideality. But “repeatability” is not a feature that can be present. So meanings, as such, cannot be fully before the mind. Selfinterpreting logoi are an incoherent supposition. Without logoi, thought and intention are merely wordlike and have no intrinsic connection to a sense or a referent. Thus “meaning” rests on connections of all kinds ong pieces of language and ong our linguistic interactions with the world. Without logoi, no special class of connections is specifically “logical.” Roughly speaking, Derrida agrees with Quine both on the nature of meaning and on the related view that “our theory” cannot be abandoned all at once. Thus a philosopher must by and large think about a logocentric philosophical theory that has shaped our language in the very logocentric terms that that theory has shaped. Thus deconstruction is not an excision of criticized doctrines, but a much more complicated, self-referential relationship. Deconstructive arguments work out the consequences of there being nothing helpfully better than words, i.e., of thoroughgoing nominalism. According to Derrida, without logoi fundental philosophical contrasts lose their principled foundations, since such contrasts implicitly posit one term as a logos relative to which the other side is defective. Without logos, many contrasts cannot be made to function as principles of the sort of theory philosophy has sought. Thus the contrasts between metaphorical and literal, rhetoric and logic, and other central notions of philosophy are shown not to have the foundation that their use presupposes.  HEIDEGGER, HUSSERL, MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. S.C.W. Dedekind, Richard (1831–1916), German mathematician, one of the most important figures in the mathematical analysis of foundational questions that took place in the late nineteenth century. Philosophically, three things are interesting about Dedekind’s work: (1) the insistence that the fundental numerical systems of mathematics must be developed independently of spatiotemporal or geometrical notions; (2) the insistence that the numbers systems rely on certain mental capacities fundental to thought, in particular on the capacity of the mind to “create”; and (3) the recognition that this “creation” is “creation” according to certain key properties, properties that careful mathematical analysis reveals as essential to the subject matter. (1) is a concern Dedekind shared with Bolzano, Cantor, Frege, and Hilbert; (2) sets Dedekind apart from Frege; and (3) represents a distinctive shift toward the later axiomatic position of Hilbert and somewhat away from the concern with the individual nature of the central abstract mathematical objects which is a central concern of Frege. Much of Dedekind’s position is sketched in the Habilitationsrede of 1854, the procedure there being applied in outline to the extension of the positive whole numbers to the integers, and then to the rational field. However, the two works best known to philosophers are the monographs on irrational numbers (Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen, 1872) and on natural numbers (Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, 1888), both of which pursue the procedure advocated in 1854. In both we find an “analysis” designed to uncover the essential properties involved, followed by a “synthesis” designed to show that there can be such systems, this then followed by a “creation” of objects possessing the properties and nothing more. In the 1872 work, Dedekind suggests that the essence of continuity in the reals is that whenever the line is divided into two halves by a cut, i.e., into two subsets A1 and A2 such that if p 1 A1 and q 1 A2, then p ‹ q and, if p 1 A1 and q ‹ p, then q 1 A1, and if p 1 A2 and q ( p, then q 1 A2 as well, then there is real number r which “produces” this cut, i.e., such that A1 % {p; p ‹ r}, and A2 % {p: r m p}. The task is then to characterize the real numbers so that this is indeed true of them. Dedekind shows that, whereas the rationals themselves do not have this property, the collection of all cuts in the rationals does. Dedekind then “defines” the irrationals through this observation, not directly as the cuts in the rationals themselves, as was done later, but rather through the “creation” of “new (irrational) numbers” to correspond to those rational cuts not hitherto “produced” by a number. The 1888 work starts from the notion of a “mapping” of one object onto another, which for Dedekind is necessary for all exact thought. Dedekind then develops the notion of a one-toone into mapping, which is then used to characterize infinity (“Dedekind infinity”). Using the fundental notion of a chain, Dedekind characterizes the notion of a “simply infinite system,” thus one that is isomorphic to the natural number sequence. Thus, he succeeds in the goal set out in the 1854 lecture: isolating precisely the characteristic properties of the natural number system. But do simply infinite systems, in particular the natural number system, exist? Dedekind now argues: Any infinite system must Dedekind, Richard Dedekind, Richard 210 -   210 contain a simply infinite system (Theorem 72). Correspondingly, Dedekind sets out to prove that there are infinite systems (Theorem 66), for which he uses an infous argument (reminiscent of Bolzano’s from thirty years earlier) involving “my thought-world,” etc. It is generally agreed that the argument does not work, although it is important to remember Dedekind’s wish to demonstrate that since the numbers are to be free creations of the human mind, his proofs should rely only on the properties of the mental. The specific act of “creation,” however, comes in when Dedekind, starting from any simply infinite system, abstracts from the “particular properties” of this, claiming that what results is the simply infinite system of the natural numbers.  CANTOR, CONTINUUM PROBLEM, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. M.H. Dedekind cut.DEDEKIND. de dicto, of what is said (or of the proposition), as opposed to de re, of the thing. Many philosophers believe the following biguous, depending on whether they are interpreted de dicto or de re: (1) It is possible that the number of U.S. states is even. (2) Galileo believes that the earth moves. Assume for illustrative purposes that there are propositions and properties. If (1) is interpreted as de dicto, it asserts that the proposition that the number of U.S. states is even is a possible truth – something true, since there are in fact fifty states. If (1) is interpreted as de re, it asserts that the actual number of states (fifty) has the property of being possibly even – something essentialism takes to be true. Similarly for (2); it may mean that Galileo’s belief has a certain content – that the earth moves – or that Galileo believes, of the earth, that it moves. More recently, largely due to Castañeda and John Perry, many philosophers have come to believe in de se (“of oneself”) ascriptions, distinct from de dicto and de re. Suppose, while drinking with others, I notice that someone is spilling beer. Later I come to realize that it is I. I believed at the outset that someone was spilling beer, but didn’t believe that I was. Once I did, I straightened my glass. The distinction between de se and de dicto attributions is supposed to be supported by the fact that while de dicto propositions must be either true or false, there is no true proposition embeddable within ‘I believe that . . .’ that correctly ascribes to me the belief that I myself  spilling beer. The sentence ‘I  spilling beer’ will not do, because it employs an “essential” indexical, ‘I’. Were I, e.g., to designate myself other than by using ‘I’ in attributing the relevant belief to myself, there would be no explanation of my straightening my glass. Even if I believed de re that LePore is spilling beer, this still does not account for why I lift my glass. For I might not know I  LePore. On the basis of such data, some philosophers infer that de se attributions are irreducible to de re or de dicto attributions. 

KNOWLEDGE DE RE, TOKENREFLEXIVE. E.L. de dicto necessity.NECESSITY. deducibility relation.DEDUCTION, Appendix of Special Symbols. deduction, a finite sequence of sentences whose last sentence is a conclusion of the sequence (the one said to be deduced) and which is such that each sentence in the sequence is an axiom or a premise or follows from preceding sentences in the sequence by a rule of inference. A synonym is ‘derivation’. Deduction is a system-relative concept. It makes sense to say something is a deduction only relative to a particular system of axioms and rules of inference. The very se sequence of sentences might be a deduction relative to one such system but not relative to another. The concept of deduction is a generalization of the concept of proof. A proof is a finite sequence of sentences each of which is an axiom or follows from preceding sentences in the sequence by a rule of inference. The last sentence in the sequence is a theorem. Given that the system of axioms and rules of inference are effectively specifiable, there is an effective procedure for determining, whenever a finite sequence of sentences is given, whether it is a proof relative to that system. The notion of theorem is not in general effective (decidable). For there may be no method by which we can always find a proof of a given sentence or determine that none exists. The concepts of deduction and consequence are distinct. The first is a syntactical; the second is semantical. It was a discovery that, relative to the axioms and rules of inference of classical logic, a sentence S is deducible from a set of sentences K provided that S is a consequence of K. Compactness is an important consequence of this discovery. It is trivial that sentence S is deducible from K just in case S is deducible from Dedekind cut deductíon 211 -   211 some finite subset of K. It is not trivial that S is a consequence of K just in case S is a consequence of some finite subset of K. This compactness property had to be shown. A system of natural deduction is axiomless. Proofs of theorems within a system are generally easier with natural deduction. Proofs of theorems about a system, such as the results mentioned in the previous paragraph, are generally easier if the system has axioms. In a secondary sense, ‘deduction’ refers to an inference in which a speaker claims the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.  AXIOMATIC METHOD, COMPACTNESS THEOREM, EFFECTIVE PROCEDURE, FORMAL SEMANTICS, PROOF THEORY. C.S. deduction, natural.DEDUCTION. deduction, transcendental.KANT. deduction of the categories.KANT. deduction theorem, a result about certain systems of formal logic relating derivability and the conditional. It states that if a formula B is derivable from A (and possibly other assumptions), then the formula APB is derivable without the assumption of A: in symbols, if G 4 {A} Y B then GYAPB. The thought is that, for exple, if Socrates is mortal is derivable from the assumptions All men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then If Socrates is a man he is mortal is derivable from All men are mortal. Likewise, If all men are mortal then Socrates is mortal is derivable from Socrates is a man. In general, the deduction theorem is a significant result only for axiomatic or Hilbert-style formulations of logic. In most natural deduction formulations a rule of conditional proof explicitly licenses derivations of APB from G4{A}, and so there is nothing to prove.  DEDUCTION. S.T.K. deductive closure.CLOSURE. deductive completeness.COMPLETENESS. deductive explanation.COVERING LAW MODEL. deductive justification.JUSTIFICATION. deductive-nomological model.COVERING LAW MODEL. deep structure.

GRMAR, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, TRANSFORMATION RULE. default logic, a formal system for reasoning with defaults, developed by Raymond Reiter in 1980. Reiter’s defaults have the form ‘P:MQ1 , . . . , MQn/R’, read ‘If P is believed and Q1 . . . Qn are consistent with one’s beliefs, then R may be believed’. Whether a proposition is consistent with one’s beliefs depends on what defaults have already been applied. Given the defaults P:MQ/Q and R:M-Q/-Q, and the facts P and R, applying the first default yields Q while applying the second default yields -Q. So applying either default blocks the other. Consequently, a default theory may have several default extensions. Normal defaults having the form P:MQ/Q, useful for representing simple cases of nonmonotonic reasoning, are inadequate for more complex cases. Reiter produces a reasonably clean proof theory for normal default theories and proves that every normal default theory has an extension.  DEFEASIBILITY, NON-MONOTONIC LOGIC. D.N. defeasibility, a property that rules, principles, arguments, or bits of reasoning have when they might be defeated by some competitor. For exple, the epistemic principle ‘Objects normally have the properties they appear to have’ or the normative principle ‘One should not lie’ are defeated, respectively, when perception occurs under unusual circumstances (e.g., under colored lights) or when there is some overriding moral consideration (e.g., to prevent murder). Apparently declarative sentences such as ‘Birds typically fly’ can be taken in part as expressing defeasible rules: take something’s being a bird as evidence that it flies. Defeasible arguments and reasoning inherit their defeasibility from the use of defeasible rules or principles. Recent analyses of defeasibility include circumscription and default logic, which belong to the broader category of non-monotonic logic. The rules in several of these formal systems contain special antecedent conditions and are not truly defeasible since they apply whenever their conditions are satisfied. Rules and arguments in other non-monotonic systems justify their conclusions only when they are not defeated by some other fact, rule, or argument. John Pollock distinguishes between rebutting and undercutting defeaters. ‘Snow is not normally red’ rebuts (in appropriate circumstances) the principle ‘Things that look red normally are red’, while ‘If the available light is red, do not use the principle that things that look red normally are red’ only undercuts the embedded rule. Pollock has infludeduction, natural defeasibility 212 -   212 enced most other work on formal systems for defeasible reasoning. 

DEFAULT LOGIC, EPISTEMOLOGY, NON-MONOTONIC LOGIC. D.N. defeat of reasons.EPISTEMOLOGY, JUSTIFICATION. definiendum (plural: definienda), the expression that is defined in a definition. The expression that gives the definition is the definiens (plural: definientia). In the definition father, male parent, ‘father’ is the definiendum and ‘male parent’ is the definiens. In the definition ‘A human being is a rational animal’, ‘human being’ is the definiendum and ‘rational animal’ is the definiens. Similar terms are used in the case of conceptual analyses, whether they are meant to provide synonyms or not; ‘definiendum’ for ‘analysandum’ and ‘definiens’ for ‘analysans’. In ‘x knows that p if and only if it is true that p, x believes that p, and x’s belief that p is properly justified’, ‘x knows that p’ is the analysandum and ‘it is true that p, x believes that p, and x’s belief that p is properly justified’ is the analysans.  ANALYSIS, DEFINITION, MEANING. T.Y. definiens.DEFINIENDUM. definist, someone who holds that moral terms, such as ‘right’, and evaluative terms, such as ‘good’ – in short, normative terms – are definable in non-moral, non-evaluative (i.e., non-normative) terms. Willi Frankena offers a broader account of a definist as one who holds that ethical terms are definable in non-ethical terms. This would allow that they are definable in nonethical but evaluative terms – say, ‘right’ in terms of what is non-morally intrinsically good. Definists who are also naturalists hold that moral terms can be defined by terms that denote natural properties, i.e., properties whose presence or absence can be determined by observational means. They might define ‘good’ as ‘what conduces to pleasure’. Definists who are not naturalists will hold that the terms that do the defining do not denote natural properties, e.g., that ‘right’ means ‘what is commanded by God’.  ETHICS, MOORE, NATURALISM. B.R. definist fallacy.MOORE. definite description.THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS. definite description operator.Appendix of Special Symbols. definition, specification of the meaning or, alternatively, conceptual content, of an expression. For exple, ‘period of fourteen days’ is a definition of ‘fortnight’. Definitions have traditionally been judged by rules like the following: (1) A definition should not be too narrow. ‘Unmarried adult male psychiatrist’ is too narrow a definition for ‘bachelor’, for some bachelors are not psychiatrists. ‘Having vertebrae and a liver’ is too narrow for ‘vertebrate’, for, even though all actual vertebrate things have vertebrae and a liver, it is possible for a vertebrate thing to lack a liver. (2) A definition should not be too broad. ‘Unmarried adult’ is too broad a definition for ‘bachelor’, for not all unmarried adults are bachelors. ‘Featherless biped’ is too broad for ‘human being’, for even though all actual featherless bipeds are human beings, it is possible for a featherless biped to be non-human. (3) The defining expression in a definition should (ideally) exactly match the degree of vagueness of the expression being defined (except in a precising definition). ‘Adult female’ for ‘woman’ does not violate this rule, but ‘female at least eighteen years old’ for ‘woman’ does. (4) A definition should not be circular. If ‘desirable’ defines ‘good’ and ‘good’ defines ‘desirable’, these definitions are circular. Definitions fall into at least the following kinds: analytical definition: definition whose corresponding biconditional is analytic or gives an analysis of the definiendum: e.g., ‘female fox’ for ‘vixen’, where the corresponding biconditional ‘For any x, x is a vixen if and only if x is a female fox’ is analytic; ‘true in all possible worlds’ for ‘necessarily true’, where the corresponding biconditional ‘For any P, P is necessarily true if and only if P is true in all possible worlds’ gives an analysis of the definiendum. contextual definition: definition of an expression as it occurs in a larger expression: e.g., ‘If it is not the case that Q, then P’ contextually defines ‘unless’ as it occurs in ‘P unless Q’; ‘There is at least one entity that is F and is identical with any entity that is F’ contexdefeat of reasons definition 213 -   213 tually defines ‘exactly one’ as it occurs in ‘There is exactly one F’. Recursive definitions (see below) are an important variety of contextual definition. Another important application of contextual definition is Russell’s theory of descriptions, which defines ‘the’ as it occurs in contexts of the form ‘The so-and-so is such-and-such’. coordinative definition: definition of a theoretical term by non-theoretical terms: e.g., ‘the forty-millionth part of the circumference of the earth’ for ‘meter’. definition by genus and species: When an expression is said to be applicable to some but not all entities of a certain type and inapplicable to all entities not of that type, the type in question is the genus, and the subtype of all and only those entities to which the expression is applicable is the species: e.g., in the definition ‘rational animal’ for ‘human’, the type animal is the genus and the subtype human is the species. Each species is distinguished from any other of the se genus by a property called the differentia. definition in use: specification of how an expression is used or what it is used to express: e.g., ‘uttered to express astonishment’ for ‘my goodness’. Wittgenstein emphasized the importance of definition in use in his use theory of meaning. definition per genus et differenti: definition by genus and difference; se as definition by genus and species. explicit definition: definition that makes it clear that it is a definition and identifies the expression being defined as such: e.g., ‘Father’ means ‘male parent’; ‘For any x, x is a father by definition if and only if x is a male parent’. implicit definition: definition that is not an explicit definition. lexical definition: definition of the kind commonly thought appropriate for dictionary definitions of natural language terms, nely, a specification of their conventional meaning. nominal definition: definition of a noun (usually a common noun), giving its linguistic meaning. Typically it is in terms of macrosensible characteristics: e.g., ‘yellow malleable metal’ for ‘gold’. Locke spoke of nominal essence and contrasted it with real essence. ostensive definition: definition by an exple in which the referent is specified by pointing or showing in some way: e.g., “ ‘Red’ is that color,” where the word ‘that’ is accompanied with a gesture pointing to a patch of colored cloth; “ ‘Pain’ means this,” where ‘this’ is accompanied with an insertion of a pin through the hearer’s skin; “ ‘Kangaroo’ applies to all and only animals like that,” where ‘that’ is accompanied by pointing to a particular kangaroo. persuasive definition: definition designed to affect or appeal to the psychological states of the party to whom the definition is given, so that a claim will appear more plausible to the party than it is: e.g., ‘self-serving manipulator’ for ‘politician’, where the claim in question is that all politicians are immoral. precising definition: definition of a vague expression intended to reduce its vagueness: e.g., ‘snake longer than half a meter and shorter than two meters’ for ‘snake of average length’; ‘having assets ten thousand times the median figure’ for ‘wealthy’. prescriptive definition: stipulative definition that, in a recommendatory way, gives a new meaning to an expression with a previously established meaning: e.g., ‘male whose primary sexual preference is for other males’ for ‘gay’. real definition: specification of the metaphysically necessary and sufficient condition for being the kind of thing a noun (usually a common noun) designates: e.g., ‘element with atomic number 79’ for ‘gold’. Locke spoke of real essence and contrasted it with nominal essence. recursive definition (also called inductive definition and definition by recursion): definition in three clauses in which (1) the expression defined is applied to certain particular items (the base clause); (2) a rule is given for reaching further items to which the expression applies (the recursive, or inductive, clause); and (3) it is stated that the expression applies to nothing else (the closure clause). E.g., ‘John’s parents are John’s ancestors; any parent of John’s ancestor is John’s ancestor; nothing else is John’s ancestor’. By the base clause, John’s mother and father are John’s ancestors. Then by the recursive clause, John’s mother’s parents and John’s father’s parents are John’s ancestors; so are their parents, and so on. Finally, by the last (closure) clause, these people exhaust John’s ancestors. The following defines multiplication in terms of definition definition 214 -   214 addition: ‘0 $ n % 0. (m ! 1) $ n % (m $ n) ! n. Nothing else is the result of multiplying integers’. The base clause tells us, e.g., that 0 $ 4 % 0. The recursive clause tells us, e.g., that (0 ! 1) $ 4 % (0 $ 4) ! 4. We then know that 1 $ 4 % 0 ! 4 % 4. Likewise, e.g., 2 $ 4 % (1 ! 1) $ 4 % (1 $ 4) ! 4 % 4 ! 4 % 8. stipulative definition: definition regardless of the ordinary or usual conceptual content of the expression defined. It postulates a content, rather than aiming to capture the content already associated with the expression. Any explicit definition that introduces a new expression into the language is a stipulative definition: e.g., “For the purpose of our discussion ‘existent’ means ‘perceivable’ “; “By ‘zoobeedoobah’ we shall mean ‘vain millionaire who is addicted to alcohol’.” synonymous definition: definition of a word (or other linguistic expression) by another word synonymous with it: e.g., ‘buy’ for ‘purchase’; ‘madness’ for ‘insanity’. 

ANALYSIS, ESSENTIALISM, MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS. T.Y. definition, contextual.DEFINITION. definition, explicit.BETH’S DEFINABILITY THEOREM, DEFINITION. definition, implicit.BETH’S DEFINABILITY THEOREM. definition in use.DEFINITION, LOGICAL CONSTRUCTION. deflationary theory of truth.PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, TRUTH. degenerate case, an expression used more or less loosely to indicate an individual or class that falls outside of a given background class to which it is otherwise very closely related, often in virtue of an ordering of a more comprehensive class. A degenerate case of one class is often a limiting case of a more comprehensive class. Rest (zero velocity) is a degenerate case of motion (positive velocity) while being a limiting case of velocity. The circle is a degenerate case of an equilateral and equiangular polygon. In technical or scientific contexts, the conventional term for the background class is often “stretched” to cover otherwise degenerate cases. A figure composed of two intersecting lines is a degenerate case of hyperbola in the sense of synthetic geometry, but it is a limiting case of hyperbola in the sense of analytic geometry. The null set is a degenerate case of set in an older sense but a limiting case of set in a modern sense. A line segment is a degenerate case of rectangle when rectangles are ordered by ratio of length to width, but it is not a limiting case under these conditions.  BORDERLINE CASE, LIMITING CASE. J.Cor. degree, also called arity, adicity, in formal languages, a property of predicate and function expressions that determines the number of terms with which the expression is correctly combined to yield a well-formed expression. If an expression combines with a single term to form a wellformed expression, it is of degree one (monadic, singulary). Expressions that combine with two terms are of degree two (dyadic, binary), and so on. Expressions of degree greater than or equal to two are polyadic. The formation rules of a formalized language must effectively specify the degrees of its primitive expressions as part of the effective determination of the class of wellformed formulas. Degree is commonly indicated by an attached superscript consisting of an Arabic numeral. Formalized languages have been studied that contain expressions having variable degree (or variable adicity) and that can thus combine with any finite number of terms. An abstract relation that would be appropriate as extension of a predicate expression is subject to the se terminology, and likewise for function expressions and their associated functions.  FORMAL LANGUAGE, MATHEMATICAL FUNCTION, PROPERTY. C.A.A. degree of belief.BAYESIAN RATIONALITY. degree of belief.PROBABILITY. degree of confirmation.CARNAP. degree of unsolvability, a maximal set of equally complex sets of natural numbers, with comparative complexity of sets of natural numbers construed as recursion-theoretic reducibility ordering. Recursion theorists investigate various notions of reducibility between sets of natural numbers, i.e., various ways of filling in the following schematic definition. For sets A and B of natural numbers: A is reducible to B iff (if and only if) there is an algorithm whereby each membership question about A (e.g., ‘17 1 A?’) could be answered allowing consultation of an definition, contextual degree of unsolvability 215 -   215 “oracle” that would correctly answer each membership question about B. This does not presuppose that there is a “real” oracle for B; the motivating idea is counterfactual: A is reducible to B iff: if membership questions about B were decidable then membership questions about A would also be decidable. On the other hand, the mathematical definitions of notions of reducibility involve no subjunctive conditionals or other intensional constructions. The notion of reducibility is determined by constraints on how the algorithm could use the oracle. Imposing no constraints yields T-reducibility (‘T’ for Turing), the most important and most studied notion of reducibility. Fixing a notion r of reducibility: A is r-equivalent to B iff A is r-reducible to B and B is rreducible to A. If r-reducibility is transitive, r-equivalence is an equivalence relation on the class of sets of natural numbers, one reflecting a notion of equal complexity for sets of natural numbers. A degree of unsolvability relative to r (an r-degree) is an equivalence class under that equivalence relation, i.e., a maximal class of sets of natural numbers any two members of which are r-equivalent, i.e., a maximal class of equally complex (in the sense of r-reducibility) sets of natural numbers. The r-reducibility-ordering of sets of natural numbers transfers to the rdegrees: for d and dH r-degrees, let d m, dH iff for some A 1 d and B 1 dH A is r-reducible to B. The study of r-degrees is the study of them under this ordering. The degrees generated by T-reducibility are the Turing degrees. Without qualification, ‘degree of unsolvability’ means ‘Turing degree’. The least Tdegree is the set of all recursive (i.e., using Church’s thesis, solvable) sets of natural numbers. So the phrase ‘degree of unsolvability’ is slightly misleading: the least such degree is “solvability.” By effectively coding functions from natural numbers to natural numbers as sets of natural numbers, we may think of such a function as belonging to a degree: that of its coding set. Recursion theorists have extended the notions of reducibility and degree of unsolvability to other domains, e.g. transfinite ordinals and higher types taken over the natural numbers.  CHURCH’S THESIS, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS, RECURSIVE FUNCTION THEORY. H.T.H. deism, the view that true religion is natural religion. Some self-styled Christian deists accepted revelation although they argued that its content is essentially the se as natural religion. Most deists dismissed revealed religion as a fiction. God wants his creatures to be happy and has ordained virtue as the means to it. Since God’s benevolence is disinterested, he will ensure that the knowledge needed for happiness is universally accessible. Salvation cannot, then, depend on special revelation. True religion is an expression of a universal human nature whose essence is reason and is the se in all times and places. Religious traditions such as Christianity and Isl originate in credulity, political tyranny, and priestcraft, which corrupt reason and overlay natural religion with impurities. Deism is largely a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century phenomenon and was most prominent in England. ong the more important English deists were John Toland (1670–1722), Anthony Collins (1676–1729), Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), and Thomas Chubb (1679–1747). Continental deists included Voltaire and Reimarus. Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer (1764–1806) were prominent erican deists. Orthodox writers in this period use ‘deism’ as a vague term of abuse. By the late eighteenth century, the term ce to mean belief in an “absentee God” who creates the world, ordains its laws, and then leaves it to its own devices. 

de Maistre, Joseph-Marie (1753–1821), French political theorist, diplomat, and Roman Catholic exponent of theocracy. He was educated by the Jesuits in Turin. His counterrevolutionary political philosophy aimed at restoring the foundations of morality, the fily, society, and the state in postrevolutionary Europe. Against Enlightenment ideals, he reclaimed Thomism, defended the hereditary and absolute monarchy, and chpioned ultrontanism (The Pope, 1821). Considerations on France (1796) argues that the decline of moral and religious values was responsible for the “satanic” 1789 revolution. Hence Christianity and Enlightenment philosophy were engaged in a fight to the death that he claimed the church would eventually win. Deeply pessimistic about human nature, the Essay on the Generating Principle of Political Constitutions (1810) traces the origin of authority in the human craving for order and discipline. Saint deism de Maistre, Joseph-Marie 216 -   216 Petersburg Evenings (1821) urges philosophy to surrender to religion and reason to faith. J.-L.S. demarcation, the line separating empirical science from mathematics and logic, from metaphysics, and from pseudoscience. Science traditionally was supposed to rely on induction, the formal disciplines (including metaphysics) on deduction. In the verifiability criterion, the logical positivists identified the demarcation of empirical science from metaphysics with the demarcation of the cognitively meaningful from the meaningless, classifying metaphysics as gibberish, and logic and mathematics, more charitably, as without sense. Noting that, because induction is invalid, the theories of empirical science are unverifiable, Popper proposed falsifiability as their distinguishing characteristic, and remarked that some metaphysical doctrines, such as atomism, are obviously meaningful. It is now recognized that science is suffused with metaphysical ideas, and Popper’s criterion is therefore perhaps a (rather rough) criterion of demarcation of the empirical from the nonempirical rather than of the scientific from the non-scientific. It repudiates the unnecessary task of demarcating the cognitively meaningful from the cognitively meaningless.  FALSIFIABILITY, INDUCTION, MEANING, METAPHYSICS, POPPER, VERIFIABILITY. D.W.M. demiurge (from Greek demiourgos, ‘artisan’, ‘craftsman’), a deity who shapes the material world from the preexisting chaos. Plato introduces the demiurge in his Timaeus. Because he is perfectly good, the demiurge wishes to communicate his own goodness. Using the Forms as a model, he shapes the initial chaos into the best possible image of these eternal and immutable archetypes. The visible world is the result. Although the demiurge is the highest god and the best of causes, he should not be identified with the God of theism. His ontological and axiological status is lower than that of the Forms, especially the Form of the Good. He is also limited. The material he employs is not created by him. Furthermore, it is disorderly and indeterminate, and thus partially resists his rational ordering. In gnosticism, the demiurge is the ignorant, weak, and evil or else morally limited cause of the cosmos. In the modern era the term has occasionally been used for a deity who is limited in power or knowledge. Its first occurrence in this sense appears to be in J. S. Mill’s Theism (1874).  GNOSTICISM, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, PLATO. W.J.Wa. democracy.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. Democritus (c.460–c.370 B.C.), Greek preSocratic philosopher. He was born at Abdera, in Thrace. Building on Leucippus and his atomism, he developed the atomic theory in The Little World-system and numerous other writings. In response to the Eleatics’ argument that the impossibility of not-being entailed that there is no change, the atomists posited the existence of a plurality of tiny indivisible beings – the atoms – and not-being – the void, or empty space. Atoms do not come into being or perish, but they do move in the void, making possible the existence of a world, and indeed of many worlds. For the void is infinite in extent, and filled with an infinite number of atoms that move and collide with one another. Under the right conditions a concentration of atoms can begin a vortex motion that draws in other atoms and forms a spherical heaven enclosing a world. In our world there is a flat earth surrounded by heavenly bodies carried by a vortex motion. Other worlds like ours are born, flourish, and die, but their astronomical configurations may be different from ours and they need not have living creatures in them. The atoms are solid bodies with countless shapes and sizes, apparently having weight or mass, and capable of motion. All other properties are in some way derivative of these basic properties. The cosmic vortex motion causes a sifting that tends to separate similar atoms as the sea arranges pebbles on the shore. For instance heavier atoms sink to the center of the vortex, and lighter atoms such as those of fire rise upward. Compound bodies can grow by the aggregations of atoms that become entangled with one another. Living things, including humans, originally emerged out of slime. Life is caused by fine, spherical soul atoms, and living things die when these atoms are lost. Human culture gradually evolved through chance discoveries and imitations of nature. Because the atoms are invisible and the only real properties are properties of atoms, we cannot have direct knowledge of anything. Tastes, temperatures, and colors we know only “by convention.” In general the senses cannot give us anything but “bastard” knowledge; but there is a “legitimate” knowledge based on reason, which takes over where the senses leave off – presumably demonstrating that there are atoms that the senses cannot testify of. Democritus offers a causal theory of perception – sometimes called the theory of effluxes – accounting for tastes in terms of certain shapes of atoms and for sight in demarcation Democritus 217 -   217 terms of “effluences” or moving films of atoms that impinge on the eye. Drawing on both atomic theory and conventional wisdom, Democritus develops an ethics of moderation. The aim of life is equanimity (euthumiê), a state of balance achieved by moderation and proportionate pleasures. Envy and bition are incompatible with the good life. Although Democritus was one of the most prolific writers of antiquity, his works were all lost. Yet we can still identify his atomic theory as the most fully worked out of pre-Socratic philosophies. His theory of matter influenced Plato’s Timaeus, and his naturalist anthropology bece the prototype for liberal social theories. Democritus had no immediate successors, but a century later Epicurus transformed his ethics into a philosophy of consolation founded on atomism. Epicureanism thus bece the vehicle through which atomic theory was transmitted to the early modern period.  PRE-SOCRATICS. D.W.G. demonstration.PROOF THEORY. demonstrative.INDEXICAL. demonstrative inference.INFERENCE. demonstrative reasoning.INFERENCE. demonstrative syllogism.ARISTOTLE. De Morgan, Augustus (1806–71), prolific British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of mathematics and logic. He is remembered chiefly for several lasting contributions to logic and philosophy of logic, including discovery and deployment of the concept of universe of discourse, the cofounding of relational logic, adaptation of what are now known as De Morgan’s laws, and several terminological innovations including the expression ‘mathematical induction’. His main logical works, the monograph Formal Logic (1847) and the series of articles “On the Syllogism” (1846–62), demonstrate wide historical and philosophical learning, synoptic vision, penetrating originality, and disarming objectivity. His relational logic treated a wide variety of inferences involving propositions whose logical forms were significantly more complex than those treated in the traditional frework stemming from Aristotle, e.g. ‘If every doctor is a teacher, then every ancestor of a doctor is an ancestor of a teacher’. De Morgan’s conception of the infinite variety of logical forms of propositions vastly widens that of his predecessors and even that of his able contemporaries such as Boole, Hilton, Mill, and Whately. De Morgan did as much as any of his contemporaries toward the creation of modern mathematical logic.  DE MORGAN’S LAWS, LOGICAL FORM, RELATIONAL LOGIC, UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE. J.Cor. De Morgan’s laws, the logical principles - (A 8 B) S - A 7 - B, - (A 7 B) S - A 8 - B, - (-A 8 - B) S A 7 B, and - (- A 7 - B) S A 8 B, though the term is occasionally used to cover only the first two.  DISTRIBUTIVE LAWS. G.F.S. denial, alternative.SHEFFER STROKE. Dennett, Daniel C(lement) (b.1942), erican philosopher, author of books on topics in the philosophy of mind, free will, and evolutionary biology, and tireless advocate of the importance of philosophy for empirical work on evolution and on the nature of the mind. Dennett is perhaps best known for arguing that a creature (or, more generally, a system), S, possesses states of mind if and only if the ascription of such states to S facilitates explanation and prediction of S’s behavior (The Intentional Stance, 1987). (S might be a human being, a chimpanzee, a desktop computer, or a thermostat.) In ascribing beliefs and desires to S we take up an attitude toward S, the intentional stance. We could just as well (although for different purposes) take up other stances: the design stance (we understand S as a kind of engineered system) or the physical stance (we regard S as a purely physical system). It might seem that, although we often enough ascribe beliefs and desires to desktop computers and thermostats, we do not mean to do so literally – as with people. Dennett’s contention, however, is that there is nothing more (nor less) to having beliefs, desires, and other states of mind than being explicable by reference to such things. This, he holds, is not to demean beliefs, but only to affirm that to have a belief is to be describable in this particular way. If you are so describable, then it is true, literally true, that you have beliefs. Dennett extends this approach to consciousness, which he views not as an inwardly observable performance taking place in a “Cartesian Theater,” demonstration Dennett, Daniel C(lement) 218 -   218 but as a story we tell about ourselves, the compilation of “multiple drafts” concocted by neural subsystems (see Conciousness Explained, 1991). Elsewhere (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995) Dennett has argued that principles of Darwinian selection apply to diverse domains including cosmology and human culture, and offered a compatibilist account of free will with an emphasis on agents’ control over their actions (Elbow Room, 1984). 

DARWINISM, FREE WILL PROBLEM, FUNCTIONALISM, INTENTIONALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. J.F.H. denotation, the thing or things that an expression applies to; extension. The term is used in contrast with ‘meaning’ and ‘connotation’. A pair of expressions may apply to the se things, i.e., have the se denotation, yet differ in meaning: ‘triangle’, ‘trilateral’; ‘creature with a heart’, ‘creature with a kidney’; ‘bird’, ‘feathered earthling’; ‘present capital of France’, ‘City of Light’. If a term does not apply to anything, some will call it denotationless, while others would say that it denotes the empty set. Such terms may differ in meaning: ‘unicorn’, ‘centaur’, ‘square root of pi’. Expressions may apply to the se thing(s), yet bring to mind different associations, i.e., have different connotations: ‘persistent’, ‘stubborn’, ‘pigheaded’; ‘white-collar employee’, ‘office worker’, ‘professional paper-pusher’; ‘Lewis Carroll’, ‘Reverend Dodgson’. There can be confusion about the denotation-connotation terminology, because this pair is used to make other contrasts. Sometimes the term ‘connotation’ is used more broadly, so that any difference of either meaning or association is considered a difference of connotation. Then ‘creature with a heart’ and ‘creature with a liver’ might be said to denote the se individuals (or sets) but to connote different properties. In a second use, denotation is the semantic value of an expression. Sometimes the denotation of a general term is said to be a property, rather than the thing(s) having the property. This occurs when the denotation-connotation terminology is used to contrast the property expressed with the connotation. Thus ‘persistent’ and ‘pig-headed’ might be said to denote the se property but differ in connotation.  CONNOTATION, EXTENSIONALISM, INTENSION, MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. T.M. denotative meaning.MEANING. denoting concept.RUSSELL. dense ordering.

ORDERING. denumerable.INFINITY. denying the antecedent.FORMAL FALLACY. Deodorus Cronos.MEGARIANS. deontic logic, the logic of obligation and permission. There are three principal types of formal deontic systems. (1) Standard deontic logic, or SDL, results from adding a pair of monadic deontic operators O and P, read as “it ought to be that” and “it is permissible that,” respectively, to the classical propositional calculus. SDL contains the following axioms: tautologies of propositional logic, OA S - P - A, OA / - O - A, O(A / B) / (OA / OB), and OT, where T stands for any tautology. Rules of inference are modus ponens and substitution. (See the survey of SDL by Dagfinn Follesdal and Risto Hilpinin in R. Hilpinin, ed., Deontic Logic, 1971.) (2) Dyadic deontic logic is obtained by adding a pair of dyadic deontic operators O( / ) and P( / ), to be read as “it ought to be that . . . , given that . . .” and “it is permissible that . . . , given that . . . ,” respectively. The SDL monadic operator O is defined as OA S O(A/T); i.e., a statement of absolute obligation OA becomes an obligation conditional on tautologous conditions. A statement of conditional obligation O(A/B) is true provided that some value realized at some B-world where A holds is better than any value realized at any B-world where A does not hold. This axiological construal of obligation is typically accompanied by these axioms and rules of inference: tautologies of propositional logic, modus ponens, and substitution, P(A/C) S - O(-A/C), O(A & B/C) S [O(A/C) & O(B/C)], O(A/C) / P(A/C), O(T/C) / O(C/C), O(T/C) / O(T/B 7 C), [O(A/B) & O(A/C)] / O(A/B 7 C), [P(B/B 7 C) & O(A/B 7 C)] / O(A/B), and [P(< is the negation of any tautology. (See the comparison of alternative dyadic systems in Lennart Aqvist, Introduction to Deontic Logic and the Theory of Normative Systems, 1987.) (3) Two-sorted deontic logic, due to Castañeda (Thinking and Doing, 1975), pivotally distinguishes between propositions, the bearers of truth-values, and practitions, the contents of commands, imperatives, requests, and such. Deontic operators apply to practitions, yielding propositions. The deontic operators Oi, Pi, Wi, and li are read as “it is obligatory i that,” “it is permissible i that,” “it is wrong i that,” and “it is optional i denotation deontic logic 219 -   219 that,” respectively, where i stands for any of the various types of obligation, permission, and so on. Let p stand for indicatives, where these express propositions; let A and B stand for practitives, understood to express practitions; and allow p* to stand for both indicatives and practitives. For deontic definition there are PiA S - Oi - A, WiA S Oi - A, and LiA S (- OiA & - Oi - A). Axioms and rules of inference include p*, if p* has the form of a truth-table tautology, OiA / - Oi - A, O1A / A, where O1 represents overriding obligation, modus ponens for both indicatives and practitives, and the rule that if (p & A1 & . . . & An) / B is a theorem, so too is (p & OiA1 & . . . & OiAn) / OiB.  DEONTIC PARADOXES, FORMAL LOGIC, MODAL LOGIC. J.E.T. deontic operator.DEONTIC LOGIC. deontic paradoxes, the paradoxes of deontic logic, which typically arise as follows: a certain set of English sentences about obligation or permission appears logically consistent, but when these se sentences are represented in a proposed system of deontic logic the result is a formally inconsistent set. To illustrate, a formulation is provided below of how two of these paradoxes beset standard deontic logic. The contrary-to-duty imperative paradox, made fous by Chisholm (Analysis, 1963), arises from juxtaposing two apparent truths: first, some of us sometimes do what we should not do; and second, when such wrongful doings occur it is obligatory that the best (or a better) be made of an unfortunate situation. Consider this scenario. Art and Bill share an apartment. For no good reason Art develops a strong animosity toward Bill. One evening Art’s animosity takes over, and he steals Bill’s valuable lithographs. Art is later found out, apprehended, and brought before Sue, the duly elected local punishment-and-awards official. An inquiry reveals that Art is a habitual thief with a history of unremitting parole violation. In this situation, it seems that (1)–(4) are all true (and hence mutually consistent): (1) Art steals from Bill. (2) If Art steals from Bill, Sue ought to punish Art for stealing from Bill. (3) It is obligatory that if Art does not steal from Bill, Sue does not punish him for stealing from Bill. (4) Art ought not to steal from Bill. Turning to standard deontic logic, or SDL, let sstand for ‘Art steals from Bill’ and let p stand for ‘Sue punishes Art for stealing from Bill’. Then (1)–(4) are most naturally represented in SDL as follows: (1a) s. (2a) s / Op. (3a) O(- s / - p). (4a) O - s. Of these, (1a) and (2a) entail Op by propositional logic; next, given the SDL axiom O(A / B) / (OA / OB), (3a) implies O - s / O - p; but the latter, taken in conjunction with (4a), entails O - p by propositional logic. In the combination of Op, O - p, and the axiom OA / - O - A, of course, we have a formally inconsistent set. The paradox of the knower, first presented by Lennart Bqvist (Noûs, 1967), is generated by these apparent truths: first, some of us sometimes do what we should not do; and second, there are those who are obligated to know that such wrongful doings occur. Consider the following scenario. Jones works as a security guard at a local store. One evening, while Jones is on duty, Smith, a disgruntled former employee out for revenge, sets the store on fire just a few yards away from Jones’s work station. Here it seems that (1)–(3) are all true (and thus jointly consistent): (1) Smith set the store on fire while Jones was on duty. (2) If Smith set the store on fire while Jones was on duty, it is obligatory that Jones knows that Smith set the store on fire. (3) Smith ought not set the store on fire. Independently, as a consequence of the concept of knowledge, there is the epistemic theorem that (4) The statement that Jones knows that Smith set the store on fire entails the statement that Smith set the store on fire. Next, within SDL (1) and (2) surely appear to imply: (5) It is obligatory that Jones knows that Smith set the store on fire. But (4) and (5) together yield (6) Smith ought to set the store on fire, given the SDL theorem that if A / B is a theorem, so is OA / OB. And therein resides the paradox: not only does (6) appear false, the conjunction of (6) and (3) is formally inconsistent with the SDL axiom OA / - O - A. The overwhelming verdict ong deontic logicians is that SDL genuinely succumbs to the deontic operator deontic paradoxes 220 -   220 deontic paradoxes. But it is controversial what other approach is best followed to resolve these puzzles. Two of the most attractive proposals are Castañeda’s two-sorted system (Thinking and Doing, 1975), and the agent-and-time relativized approach of Fred Feldman (Philosophical Perspectives, 1990).  DEONTIC LOGIC, FORMAL LOGIC, MORAL DILEMMA, SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES. J.E.T. deontological ethics.ETHICS. deontologism, epistemic.EPISTEMIC DEONTOLOGISM. dependence, in philosophy, a relation of one of three main types: epistemic dependence, or dependence in the order of knowing; conceptual dependence, or dependence in the order of understanding; and ontological dependence, or dependence in the order of being. When a relation of dependence runs in one direction only, we have a relation of priority. For exple, if wholes are ontologically dependent on their parts, but the latter in turn are not ontologically dependent on the former, one may say that parts are ontologically prior to wholes. The phrase ‘logical priority’ usually refers to priority of one of the three varieties to be discussed here. Epistemic dependence. To say that the facts in some class B are epistemically dependent on the facts in some other class A is to say this: one cannot know any fact in B unless one knows some fact in A that serves as one’s evidence for the fact in B. For exple, it might be held that to know any fact about one’s physical environment (e.g., that there is a fire in the stove), one must know (as evidence) some facts about the character of one’s own sensory experience (e.g., that one is feeling warm and seeing fles). This would be to maintain that facts about the physical world are epistemically dependent on facts about sensory experience. If one held in addition that the dependence is not reciprocal – that one can know facts about one’s sensory experience without knowing as evidence any facts about the physical world – one would be maintaining that the former facts are epistemically prior to the latter facts. Other plausible (though sometimes disputed) exples of epistemic priority are the following: facts about the behavior of others are epistemically prior to facts about their mental states; facts about observable objects are epistemically prior to facts about the invisible particles postulated by physics; and singular facts (e.g., this crow is black) are epistemically prior to general facts (e.g., all crows are black). Is there a class of facts on which all others epistemically depend and that depend on no further facts in turn – a bottom story in the edifice of knowledge? Some foundationalists say yes, positing a level of basic or foundational facts that are epistemically prior to all others. Empiricists are usually foundationalists who maintain that the basic level consists of facts about immediate sensory experience. Coherentists deny the need for a privileged stratum of facts to ground the knowledge of all others; in effect, they deny that any facts are epistemically prior to any others. Instead, all facts are on a par, and each is known in virtue of the way in which it fits in with all the rest. Sometimes it appears that two propositions or classes of them each epistemically depend on the other in a vicious way – to know A, you must first know B, and to know B, you must first know A. Whenever this is genuinely the case, we are in a skeptical predicent and cannot know either proposition. For exple, Descartes believed that he could not be assured of the reliability of his own cognitions until he knew that God exists and is not a deceiver; yet how could he ever come to know anything about God except by relying on his own cognitions? This is the fous problem of the Cartesian circle. Another exple is the problem of induction as set forth by Hume: to know that induction is a legitimate mode of inference, one would first have to know that the future will resemble the past; but since the latter fact is establishable only by induction, one could know it only if one already knew that induction is legitimate. Solutions to these problems must show that contrary to first appearances, there is a way of knowing one of the problematic propositions independently of the other. Conceptual dependence. To say that B’s are conceptually dependent on A’s means that to understand what a B is, you must understand what an A is, or that the concept of a B can be explained or understood only through the concept of an A. For exple, it could plausibly be claimed that the concept uncle can be understood only in terms of the concept male. Empiricists typically maintain that we understand what an external thing like a tree or a table is only by knowing what experiences it would induce in us, so that the concepts we apply to physical things depend on the concepts we apply to our experideontological ethics dependence 221 -   221 ences. They typically also maintain that this dependence is not reciprocal, so that experiential concepts are conceptually prior to physical concepts. Some empiricists argue from the thesis of conceptual priority just cited to the corresponding thesis of epistemic priority – that facts about experiences are epistemically prior to facts about external objects. Turning the tables, some foes of empiricism maintain that the conceptual priority is the other way about: that we can describe and understand what kind of experience we are undergoing only by specifying what kind of object typically causes it (“it’s a smell like that of pine mulch”). Sometimes they offer this as a reason for denying that facts about experiences are epistemically prior to facts about physical objects. Both sides in this dispute assume that a relation of conceptual priority in one direction excludes a relation of epistemic priority in the opposite direction. But why couldn’t it be the case both that facts about experiences are epistemically prior to facts about physical objects and that concepts of physical objects are conceptually prior to concepts of experiences? How the various kinds of priority and dependence are connected (e.g., whether conceptual priority implies epistemic priority) is a matter in need of further study. Ontological dependence. To say that entities of one sort (the B’s) are ontologically dependent on entities of another sort (the A’s) means this: no B can exist unless some A exists; i.e., it is logically or metaphysically necessary that if any B exists, some A also exists. Ontological dependence may be either specific (the existence of any B depending on the existence of a particular A) or generic (the existence of any B depending merely on the existence of some A or other). If B’s are ontologically dependent on A’s, but not conversely, we may say that A’s are ontologically prior to B’s. The traditional notion of substance is often defined in terms of ontological priority – substances can exist without other things, as Aristotle said, but the others cannot exist without them. Leibniz believed that composite entities are ontologically dependent on simple (i.e., partless) entities – that any composite object exists only because it has certain simple elements that are arranged in a certain way. Berkeley, J. S. Mill, and other phenomenalists have believed that physical objects are ontologically dependent on sensory experiences – that the existence of a table or a tree consists in the occurrence of sensory experiences in certain orderly patterns. Spinoza believed that all finite beings are ontologically dependent on God and that God is ontologically dependent on nothing further; thus God, being ontologically prior to everything else, is in Spinoza’s view the only substance. Sometimes there are disputes about the direction in which a relationship of ontological priority runs. Some philosophers hold that extensionless points are prior to extended solids, others that solids are prior to points; some say that things are prior to events, others that events are prior to things. In the face of such disagreement, still other philosophers (such as Goodman) have suggested that nothing is inherently or absolutely prior to anything else: A’s may be prior to B’s in one conceptual scheme, B’s to A’s in another, and there may be no saying which scheme is correct. Whether relationships of priority hold absolutely or only relative to conceptual schemes is one issue dividing realists and anti-realists. 

depiction, pictorial representation, also sometimes called “iconic representation.” Linguistic representation is conventional: it is only by virtue of a convention that the word ‘cats’ refers to cats. A picture of a cat, however, seems to refer to cats by other than conventional means; for viewers can correctly interpret pictures without special training, whereas people need special training to learn languages. Though some philosophers, such as Goodman (Languages of Art), deny that depiction involves a non-conventional element, most are concerned to give an account of what this non-conventional element consists in. Some hold that it consists in resemblance: pictures refer to their objects partly by resembling them. Objections to this are that anything resembles anything else to some degree; and that resemblance is a symmetric and reflexive relation, whereas depiction is not. Other philosophers avoid direct appeal to resemblance: Richard Wollheim (Painting as an Art) argues that depiction holds by virtue of the intentional deployment of the natural human capacity to see objects in marked surfaces; and dependence, causal depiction 222 -   222 Kendall Walton (Mimesis as Make-Believe) argues that depiction holds by virtue of objects serving as props in reasonably rich and vivid visual ges of make-believe.  MIMESIS, PEIRCE. B.Ga. de re.DE DICTO. de re necessity.

NECESSITY. derivation.DEDUCTION. derivational logicism.LOGICISM. Derrida, Jacques (b.1930), French philosopher, author of deconstructionism, and leading figure in the postmodern movement. Postmodern thought seeks to move beyond modernism by revealing inconsistencies or aporias within the Western European tradition from Descartes to the present. These aporias are largely associated with onto-theology, a term coined by Heidegger to characterize a manner of thinking about being and truth that ultimately grounds itself in a conception of divinity. Deconstruction is the methodology of revelation: it typically involves seeking out binary oppositions defined interdependently by mutual exclusion, such as good and evil or true and false, which function as founding terms for modern thought. The ontotheological metaphysics underlying modernism is a metaphysics of presence: to be is to be present, finally to be absolutely present to the absolute, that is, to the divinity whose own being is conceived as presence to itself, as the coincidence of being and knowing in the Being that knows all things and knows itself as the reason for the being of all that is. Divinity thus functions as the measure of truth. The aporia here, revealed by deconstruction, is that this modernist measure of truth cannot meet its own measure: the coincidence of what is and what is known is an impossibility for finite intellects. Major influences on Derrida include Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, Saussure, and structuralist thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, but it was his early critique of Husserl, in Introduction à “L’Origine de la géometrie” de Husserl (1962), that gained him recognition as a critic of the phenomenological tradition and set the conceptual frework for his later work. Derrida sought to demonstrate that the origin of geometry, conceived by Husserl as the guiding paradigm for Western thought, was a supratemporal ideal of perfect knowing that serves as the goal of human knowledge. Thus the origin of geometry is inseparable from its end or telos, a thought that Derrida later generalizes in his deconstruction of the notion of origin as such. He argues that this ideal cannot be realized in time, hence cannot be grounded in lived experience, hence cannot meet the “principle of principles” Husserl designated as the prime criterion for phenomenology, the principle that all knowing must ground itself in consciousness of an object that is coincidentally conscious of itself. This revelation of the aporia at the core of phenomenology in particular and Western thought in general was not yet labeled as a deconstruction, but it established the formal structure that guided Derrida’s later deconstructive revelations of the metaphysics of presence underlying the modernism in which Western thought culminates.  DECONSTRUCTION, HEIDEGGER,

PHENOMENOLOGY, POSTMODERN. M.C.D. Descartes, René (1596–1650), French philosopher and mathematician, a founder of the “modern age” and perhaps the most important figure in the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century in which the traditional systems of understanding based on Aristotle were challenged and, ultimately, overthrown. His conception of philosophy was all-embracing: it encompassed mathematics and the physical sciences as well as psychology and ethics, and it was based on what he claimed to be absolutely firm and reliable metaphysical foundations. His approach to the problems of knowledge, certainty, and the nature of the human mind played a major part in shaping the subsequent development of philosophy. Life and works. Descartes was born in a small town near Tours that now bears his ne. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother (his mother having died soon after his birth), and at the age of ten he was sent to the recently founded Jesuit college of La Flèche in Anjou, where he remained as a boarding pupil for nine years. At La Flèche he studied classical literature and traditional classics-based subjects such as history and rhetoric as well as natural philosophy (based on the Aristotelian system) and theology. He later wrote of La Flèche that he considered it “one of the best schools in Europe,” but that, as regards the philosophy he had learned there, he saw that “despite being cultivated for many centuries by the best minds, it contained no point which was not disputed and hence doubtful.” At age twenty-two (having taken a law degree de re Descartes, René 223 -   223 at Poitiers), Descartes set out on a series of travels in Europe, “resolving,” as he later put it, “to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found either in myself or the great book of the world.” The most important influence of this early period was Descartes’s friendship with the Dutchman Isaac Beeckman, who awakened his lifelong interest in mathematics – a science in which he discerned precision and certainty of the kind that truly merited the title of scientia (Descartes’s term for genuine systematic knowledge based on reliable principles). A considerable portion of Descartes’s energies as a young man was devoted to pure mathematics: his essay on Geometry (published in 1637) incorporated results discovered during the 1620s. But he also saw mathematics as the key to making progress in the applied sciences; his earliest work, the Compendium Musicae, written in 1618 and dedicated to Beeckman, applied quantitative principles to the study of musical harmony and dissonance. More generally, Descartes saw mathematics as a kind of paradigm for all human understanding: “those long chains composed of very simple and easy reasonings, which geometers customarily use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, gave me occasion to suppose that all the things which fall within the scope of human knowledge are interconnected in the se way” (Discourse on the Method, Part II). In the course of his travels, Descartes found himself closeted, on November 10, 1619, in a “stove-heated room” in a town in southern Germany, where after a day of intense meditation, he had a series of vivid dres that convinced him of his mission to found a new scientific and philosophical system. After returning to Paris for a time, he emigrated to Holland in 1628, where he was to live (though with frequent changes of address) for most of the rest of his life. By 1633 he had ready a treatise on cosmology and physics, Le Monde; but he cautiously withdrew the work from publication when he heard of the condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition for rejecting (as Descartes himself did) the traditional geocentric theory of the universe. But in 1637 Descartes released for publication, in French, a sple of his scientific work: three essays entitled the Optics, Meteorology, and Geometry. Prefaced to that selection was an autobiographical introduction entitled Discourse on the Method of rightly conducting one’s reason and reaching the truth in the sciences. This work, which includes discussion of a number of scientific issues such as the circulation of the blood, contains (in Part IV) a summary of Descartes’s views on knowledge, certainty, and the metaphysical foundations of science. Criticisms of his arguments here led Descartes to compose his philosophical masterpiece, the Meditations on First Philosophy, published in Latin in 1641 – a dratic account of the voyage of discovery from universal doubt to certainty of one’s own existence, and the subsequent struggle to establish the existence of God, the nature and existence of the external world, and the relation between mind and body. The Meditations aroused enormous interest ong Descartes’s contemporaries, and six sets of objections by celebrated philosophers and theologians (including Mersenne, Hobbes, Arnauld, and Gassendi) were published in the se volume as the first edition (a seventh set, by the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin, was included in the second edition of 1642). A few years later, Descartes published, in Latin, a mmoth compendium of his metaphysical and scientific views, the Principles of Philosophy, which he hoped would become a university textbook to rival the standard texts based on Aristotle. In the later 1640s, Descartes bece interested in questions of ethics and psychology, partly as a result of acute questions about the implications of his system raised by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia in a long and fruitful correspondence. The fruits of this interest were published in 1649 in a lengthy French treatise entitled The Passions of the Soul. The se year, Descartes accepted (after much hesitation) an invitation to go to Stockholm to give philosophical instruction to Queen Christina of Sweden. He was required to provide tutorials at the royal palace at five o’clock in the morning, and the strain of this break in his habits (he had maintained the lifelong custom of lying in bed late into the morning) led to his catching pneumonia. He died just short of his fifty-fourth birthday. The Cartesian system. In a celebrated simile, Descartes described the whole of philosophy as like a tree: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk physics, and the branches are the various particular sciences, including mechanics, medicine, and morals. The analogy captures at least three important features of the Cartesian system. The first is its insistence on the essential unity of knowledge, which contrasts strongly with the Aristotelian conception of the sciences as a series of separate disciplines, each with its own methods and standards of precision. The sciences, as Descartes put it in an early notebook, are all “linked together” in a sequence that is in principle as simple and straightforward as the series of numbers. The second point conveyed by the tree simile is the utility of philosophy for ordinary living: the tree is valued for its fruits, and these are gathered, Descartes points out, “not from the roots or the trunk but from the ends of the branches” – the practical sciences. Descartes frequently stresses that his principal motivation is not abstract theorizing for its own sake: in place of the “speculative philosophy taught in the Schools,” we can and should achieve knowledge that is “useful in life” and that will one day make us “masters and possessors of nature.” Third, the likening of metaphysics or “first philosophy” to the roots of the tree nicely captures the Cartesian belief in what has come to be known as foundationalism – the view that knowledge must be constructed from the bottom up, and that nothing can be taken as established until we have gone back to first principles. Doubt and the foundations of belief. In Descartes’s central work of metaphysics, the Meditations, he begins his construction project by observing that many of the preconceived opinions he has accepted since childhood have turned out to be unreliable; so it is necessary, “once in a lifetime” to “demolish everything and start again, right from the foundations.” Descartes proceeds, in other words, by applying what is sometimes called his method of doubt, which is explained in the earlier Discourse on the Method: “Since I now wished to devote myself solely to the search for truth, I thought it necessary to . . . reject as if absolutely false everything in which one could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if I was left believing anything that was entirely indubitable.” In the Meditations we find this method applied to produce a systematic critique of previous beliefs, as follows. Anything based on the senses is potentially suspect, since “I have found by experience that the senses sometimes deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.” Even such seemingly straightforward judgments as “I  sitting here by the fire” may be false, since there is no guarantee that my present experience is not a dre. The dre argument (as it has come to be called) leaves intact the truths of mathematics, since “whether I  awake or asleep two and three make five”; but Descartes now proceeds to introduce an even more radical argument for doubt based on the following dilemma. If there is an omnipotent God, he could presumably cause me to go wrong every time I count two and three; if, on the other hand, there is no God, then I owe my origins not to a powerful and intelligent creator, but to some random series of imperfect causes, and in this case there is even less reason to suppose that my basic intuitions about mathematics are reliable. By the end of the First Meditation, Descartes finds himself in a morass of wholesale doubt, which he dratizes by introducing an imaginary demon “of the utmost power and cunning” who is systematically deceiving him in every possible way. Everything I believe in – “the sky, the earth and all external things” – might be illusions that the demon has devised in order to trick me. Yet this very extremity of doubt, when pushed as far as it will go, yields the first indubitable truth in the Cartesian quest for knowledge – the existence of the thinking subject. “Let the demon deceive me as much as he may, he can never bring it about that I  nothing, so long as I think I  something. . . . I , I exist, is certain, as often as it is put forward by me or conceived in the mind.” Elsewhere, Descartes expresses this cogito argument in the fous phrase “Cogito ergo sum” (“I  thinking, therefore I exist”). Having established his own existence, Descartes proceeds in the Third Meditation to make an inventory of the ideas he finds within him, ong which he identifies the idea of a supremely perfect being. In a much criticized causal argument he reasons that the representational content (or “objective reality”) of this idea is so great that it cannot have originated from inside his own (imperfect) mind, but must have been planted in him by an actual perfect being – God. The importance of God in the Cartesian system can scarcely be overstressed. Once the deity’s existence is established, Descartes can proceed to reinstate his belief in the world around him: since God is perfect, and hence would not systematically deceive, the strong propensity he has given us to believe that many of our ideas come from external objects must, in general, be sound; and hence the external world exists (Sixth Meditation). More important still, Descartes uses the deity to set up a reliable method for the pursuit of truth. Human beings, since they are finite and imperfect, often go wrong; in particular, the data supplied by the senses is often, as Descartes puts it, “obscure and confused.” But each of us can nonetheless avoid error, provided we remember to withhold judgment in such doubtful cases and confine ourselves to the “clear and distinct” perceptions of the pure intellect. A reliable intellect was God’s gift to man, and if we use it with the greatest posDescartes, René Descartes, René 225 -   225 sible care, we can be sure of avoiding error (Fourth Meditation). In this central part of his philosophy, Descartes follows in a long tradition going back to Augustine (with its ultimate roots in Plato) that in the first place is skeptical about the evidence of the senses as against the more reliable abstract perceptions of the intellect, and in the second place sees such intellectual knowledge as a kind of illumination derived from a higher source than man’s own mind. Descartes frequently uses the ancient metaphor of the “natural light” or “light of reason” to convey this notion that the fundental intuitions of the intellect are inherently reliable. The label ‘rationalist’, which is often applied to Descartes in this connection, can be misleading, since he certainly does not rely on reason alone: in the development of his scientific theories he allows a considerable role to empirical observation in the testing of hypotheses and in the understanding of the mechanisms of nature (his “vortex theory” of planetary revolutions is based on observations of the behavior of whirlpools). What is true, nonetheless, is that the fundental building blocks of Cartesian science are the innate ideas (chiefly those of mathematics) whose reliability Descartes takes as guaranteed by their having been implanted in the mind by God. But this in turn gives rise to a major problem for the Cartesian system, which was first underlined by some of Descartes’s contemporaries (notably Mersenne and Arnauld), and which has come to be known as the Cartesian circle. If the reliability of the clear and distinct perceptions of the intellect depends on our knowledge of God, then how can that knowledge be established in the first place? If the answer is that we can prove God’s existence from premises that we clearly and distinctly perceive, then this seems circular; for how are we entitled, at this stage, to assume that our clear and distinct perceptions are reliable? Descartes’s attempts to deal with this problem are not entirely satisfactory, but his general answer seems to be that there are some propositions that are so simple and transparent that, so long as we focus on them, we can be sure of their truth even without a divine guarantee. Cartesian science and dualism. The scientific system that Descartes had worked on before he wrote the Meditations and that he elaborated in his later work, the Principles of Philosophy, attempts wherever possible to reduce natural phenomena to the quantitative descriptions of arithmetic and geometry: “my consideration of matter in corporeal things,” he says in the Principles, “involves absolutely nothing apart from divisions, shapes and motions.” This connects with his metaphysical commitment to relying only on clear and distinct ideas. In place of the elaborate apparatus of the Scholastics, with its plethora of “substantial forms” and “real qualities,” Descartes proposes to mathematicize science. The material world is simply an indefinite series of variations in the shape, size, and motion of the single, simple, homogeneous matter that he terms res extensa (“extended substance”). Under this category he includes all physical and biological events, even complex animal behavior, which he regards as simply the result of purely mechanical processes (for non-human animals as mechanical automata, see Discourse, Part V). But there is one class of phenomena that cannot, on Descartes’s view, be handled in this way, nely conscious experience. Thought, he frequently asserts, is completely alien to, and incompatible with, extension: it occupies no space, is unextended and indivisible. Hence Descartes puts forward a dualistic theory of substance: in addition to the res extensa that makes up the material universe, there is res cogitans, or thinking substance, which is entirely independent of matter. And each conscious individual is a unique thinking substance: “This ‘I’ – that is, the soul, by which I  what I , is entirely distinct from the body, and would not fail to be what it is even if the body did not exist.” Descartes’s arguments for the incorporeality of the soul were challenged by his contemporaries and have been heavily criticized by subsequent commentators. In the Discourse and the Second Meditation, he lays great stress on his ability to form a conception of himself as an existing subject, while at the se time doubting the existence of any physical thing; but this, as the critics pointed out, seems inadequate to establish the conclusion that he is a res cogitans – a being whose whole essence consists simply in thought. I may be able to imagine myself without a body, but this hardly proves that I could in reality exist without one (see further the Synopsis to the Meditations). A further problem is that our everyday experience testifies to the fact that we are not incorporeal beings, but very much creatures of flesh and blood. “Nature teaches me by the sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on,” Descartes admits in the Sixth Meditation, “that I  not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I  very closely Descartes, René Descartes, René 226 -   226 joined and as it were intermingled with it.” Yet how can an incorporeal soul interact with the body in this way? In his later writings, Descartes speaks of the “union of soul and body” as a “primitive notion” (see letters to Elizabeth of May 21 and June 28, 1643); by this he seems to have meant that, just as there are properties (such as length) that belong to body alone, and properties (such as understanding ) that belong to mind alone, so there are items such as sensations that are irreducibly psychophysical, and that belong to me insofar as I  an embodied consciousness. The explanation of such psychophysical events was the task Descartes set himself in his last work, The Passions of the Soul; here he developed his theory that the pineal gland in the brain was the “seat of the soul,” where data from the senses were received (via the nervous system), and where bodily movements were initiated. But despite the wealth of physiological detail Descartes provides, the central philosophical problems associated with his dualistic account of humans as hybrid entities made up of physical body and immaterial soul are, by common consent, not properly sorted out. Influence. Despite the philosophical difficulties that beset the Cartesian system, Descartes’s vision of a unified understanding of reality has retained a powerful hold on scientists and philosophers ever since. His insistence that the path to progress in science lay in the direction of quantitative explanations has been substantially vindicated. His attempt to construct a system of knowledge by starting from the subjective awareness of the conscious self has been equally important, if only because so much of the epistemology of our own time has been a reaction against the autocentric perspective from which Descartes starts out. As for the Cartesian theory of the mind, it is probably fair to say that the dualistic approach is now widely regarded as raising more problems than it solves. But Descartes’s insistence that the phenomena of conscious experience are recalcitrant to explanation in purely physical terms remains deeply influential, and the cluster of profound problems that he raised about the nature of the human mind and its relation to the material world are still very far from being adequately resolved.  COGITO ERGO SUM, FOUNDATIONALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, RATIONALISM. J.COT. description, definite.THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS. description, knowledge by.KNOWLEDGE BY ACQUAINTANCE. description, state.CARNAP. description, structure.CARNAP. descriptions, theory of.

THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS. descriptive emergence.METHODOLOGICAL HOLISM. descriptive emergentism.HOLISM. descriptive individualism.HOLISM. descriptive meaning.EMOTIVISM, MEANING. descriptive metaphysics.METAPHYSICS. descriptive relativism.RELATIVISM. descriptivism, the thesis that the meaning of any evaluative statement is purely descriptive or factual, i.e., determined, apart from its syntactical features, entirely by its truth conditions. Nondescriptivism (of which emotivism and prescriptivism are the main varieties) is the view that the meaning of full-blooded evaluative statements is such that they necessarily express the speaker’s sentiments or commitments. Nonnaturalism, naturalism, and supernaturalism are descriptivist views about the nature of the properties to which the meaning rules refer. Descriptivism is related to cognitivism and moral realism.  EMOTIVISM, ETHICS. B.W.H. descriptivist theory of nes.CAUSAL THEORY OF PROPER NES. de se.DE DICTO, KNOWLEDGE DE RE. desert.MERITARIAN. design, argument from.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. designator, rigid.MEANING. desire, extrinsic.EXTRINSIC DESIRE. desire, intrinsic.EXTRINSIC DESIRE. desire-belief model.INTENTION, MOTIVATION. description, definite desire-belief model 227 -   227 destructive dilemma.DILEMMA. detachment, rule of.LOTTERY PARADOX, MODUS PONENS. determinable, a general characteristic or property analogous to a genus except that while a property independent of a genus differentiates a species that falls under the genus, no such independent property differentiates a determinate that falls under the determinable. The color blue, e.g., is a determinate with respect of the determinable color: there is no property F independent of color such that a color is blue if and only if it is F. In contrast, there is a property, having equal sides, such that a rectangle is a square if and only if it has this property. Square is a properly differentiated species of the genus rectangle. W. E. Johnson introduces the terms ‘determinate’ and ‘determinable’ in his Logic, Part I, Chapter 11. His account of this distinction does not closely resemble the current understanding sketched above. Johnson wants to explain the differences between the superficially similar ‘Red is a color’ and ‘Plato is a man’. He concludes that the latter really predicates something, humanity, of Plato; while the former does not really predicate anything of red. Color is not really a property (or adjective, as Johnson puts it). The determinates red, blue, and yellow are grouped together not because of a property they have in common but because of the ways they differ from each other. Determinates under the se determinable are related to each other (and are thus comparable) in ways in which they are not related to determinates under other determinables. Determinates belonging to different determinables, such as color and shape, are incomparable. ’More determinate’ is often used interchangeably with ‘more specific’. Many philosophers, including Johnson, hold that the characters of things are absolutely determinate or specific. Spelling out what this claim means leads to another problem in analyzing the relation between determinate and determinable. By what principle can we exclude red and round as a determinate of red and red as a determinate of red or round?  JOHNSON, PROPERTY. D.H.S. determinate.

DETERMINABLE. determinism, the view that every event or state of affairs is brought about by antecedent events or states of affairs in accordance with universal causal laws that govern the world. Thus, the state of the world at any instant determines a unique future, and that knowledge of all the positions of things and the prevailing natural forces would permit an intelligence to predict the future state of the world with absolute precision. This view was advanced by Laplace in the early nineteenth century; he was inspired by Newton’s success at integrating our physical knowledge of the world. Contemporary determinists do not believe that Newtonian physics is the supreme theory. Some do not even believe that all theories will someday be integrated into a unified theory. They do believe that, for each event, no matter how precisely described, there is some theory or system of laws such that the occurrence of that event under that description is derivable from those laws together with information about the prior state of the system. Some determinists formulate the doctrine somewhat differently: (a) every event has a sufficient cause; (b) at any given time, given the past, only one future is possible; (c) given knowledge of all antecedent conditions and all laws of nature, an agent could predict at any given time the precise subsequent history of the universe. Thus, determinists deny the existence of chance, although they concede that our ignorance of the laws or all relevant antecedent conditions makes certain events unexpected and, therefore, apparently happen “by chance.” The term ‘determinism’ is also used in a more general way as the ne for any metaphysical doctrine implying that there is only one possible history of the world. The doctrine described above is really scientific or causal determinism, for it grounds this implication on a general fact about the natural order, nely, its governance by universal causal law. But there is also theological determinism, which holds that God determines everything that happens or that, since God has perfect knowledge about the universe, only the course of events that he knows will happen can happen. And there is logical determinism, which grounds the necessity of the historical order on the logical truth that all propositions, including ones about the future, are either true or false. Fatalism, the view that there are forces (e.g., the stars or the fates) that determine all outcomes independently of human efforts or wishes, is claimed by some to be a version of determinism. But others deny this on the ground that determinists do not reject the efficacy of human effort or desire; they simply believe that efforts and desires, which are sometimes effective, are themselves determined by antecedent factors (as in a causal chain of events). destructive dilemma determinism 228 -   228 Since determinism is a universal doctrine, it embraces human actions and choices. But if actions and choices are determined, then some conclude that free will is an illusion. For the action or choice is an inevitable product of antecedent factors that rendered alternatives impossible, even if the agent had deliberated about options. An omniscient agent could have predicted the action or choice beforehand. This conflict generates the problem of free will and determinism.  COMPUTER THEORY, FREE WILL PROBLEM, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. B.B. determinism, hard.FREE WILL PROBLEM. determinism, historical.MARXISM. determinism, linguistic.LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY. determinism, principle of.MILL’S METHODS. determinism, soft.FREE WILL PROBLEM. deterministic automaton.COMPUTER THEORY. deterministic law.CAUSAL LAW. deterrence.JUST WAR THEORY, PUNISHMENT. deviant causal chain.WAYWARD CAUSAL CHAIN. deviant logic.PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC. Dewey, John (1859–1952), erican philosopher, social critic, and theorist of education. During an era when philosophy was becoming thoroughly professionalized, Dewey remained a public philosopher having a profound international influence on politics and education. His career began inauspiciously in his student days at the University of Vermont and then as a high school teacher before he went on to study philosophy at the newly formed Johns Hopkins University. There he studied with Peirce, G. S. Hall, and G. S. Morris, and was profoundly influenced by the version of Hegelian idealism propounded by Morris. After receiving his doctorate in 1884, Dewey moved to the University of Michigan where he rejoined Morris, who had relocated there. At Michigan he had as a colleague the young social psychologist G. H. Mead, and during this period Dewey himself concentrated his writing in the general area of psychology. In 1894 he accepted an appointment as chair of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Education at the University of Chicago, bringing Mead with him. At Chicago Dewey was instrumental in founding the fous laboratory school, and some of his most important writings on education grew out of his work in that experimental school. In 1904 he left Chicago for Columbia University, where he joined F. J. E. Woodbridge, founder of The Journal of Philosophy. He retired from Columbia in 1930 but remained active in both philosophy and public affairs until his death in 1952. Over his long career he was a prolific speaker and writer, as evidenced by a literary output of forty books and over seven hundred articles. Philosophy. At the highest level of generality Dewey’s philosophical orientation can be characterized as a kind of naturalistic empiricism, and the two most fundental notions in his philosophy can be gleaned from the title of his most substantial book, Experience and Nature (1925). His concept of experience had its origin in his Hegelian background, but Dewey divested it of most of its speculative excesses. He clearly conceived of himself as an empiricist but was careful to distinguish his notion of experience both from that of the idealist tradition and from the empiricism of the classical British variety. The idealists had so stressed the cognitive dimension of experience that they overlooked the non-cognitive, whereas he saw the British variety as inappropriately atomistic and subjectivist. In contrast to these Dewey fashioned a notion of experience wherein action, enjoyment, and what he called “undergoing” were integrated and equally fundental. The felt immediacy of experience (what he generally characterized as its aesthetic quality) was basic and irreducible. He then situated cognitive experience against this broader background as arising from and conditioned by this more basic experience. Cognitive experience was the result of inquiry, which was viewed as a process arising from a felt difficulty within our experience, proceeding through the stage of conceptual elaboration of possible resolutions, to a final reconstruction of the experience wherein the initial fragmented situation is transformed into a unified whole. Cognitive inquiry is this mediating process from experience to experience, and knowledge is what makes possible the final more integrated experience, which Dewey termed a “consummation.” On this view knowing is a kind of doing, and the criterion of knowledge is “warranted assertability.” On the first point, Dewey felt that one of the cardinal errors of philosophy from Plato to determinism, hard Dewey, John 229 -   229 the modern period was what he called “the spectator theory of knowledge.” Knowledge had been viewed as a kind of passive recording of facts in the world and success was seen as a matter of the correspondence of our beliefs to these antecedent facts. To the contrary, Dewey viewed knowing as a constructive conceptual activity that anticipated and guided our adjustment to future experiential interactions with our environment. It was with this constructive and purposive view of thinking in mind that Dewey dubbed his general philosophical orientation instrumentalism. Concepts are instruments for dealing with our experienced world. The fundental categories of knowledge are to be functionally understood, and the classical dualisms of philosophy (mind–body, means–end, fact– value) are ultimately to be overcome. The purpose of knowing is to effect some alteration in the experiential situation, and for this purpose some cognitive proposals are more effective than others. This is the context in which “truth” is normally invoked, and in its stead Dewey proposed “warranted assertability.” He eschewed the notion of truth (even in its less dangerous adjectival and adverbial forms, ‘true’ and ‘truly’) because he saw it as too suggestive of a static and finalized correspondence between two separate orders. Successful cognition was really a more dynic matter of a present resolution of a problematic situation resulting in a reconstructed experience or consummation. “Warranted assertability” was the success characterization, having the appropriately normative connotation without the excess metaphysical baggage. Dewey’s notion of experience is intimately tied to his notion of nature. He did not conceive of nature as “the-world-as-it-would-be-independent-of-human-experience” but rather as a developing system of natural transactions admitting of a tripartite distinction between the physicochemical level, the psychophysical level, and the level of human experience with the understanding that this categorization was not to be construed as implying any sharp discontinuities. Experience itself, then, is one of the levels of transaction in nature and is not reducible to the other forms. The more austere, “scientific” representations of nature as, e.g., a purely mechanical system, Dewey construed as merely useful conceptualizations for specific cognitive purposes. This enabled him to distinguish his “naturalism,” which he saw as a kind of nonreductive empiricism, from “materialism,” which he saw as a kind of reductive rationalism. Dewey and Santayana had an ongoing dialogue on precisely this point. Dewey’s view was also naturalistic to the degree that it advocated the universal scope of scientific method. Influenced in this regard by Peirce, he saw scientific method not as restricted to a specific sphere but simply as the way we ought to think. The structure of all reflective thought is future-oriented and involves a movement from the recognition and articulation of a felt difficulty, through the elaboration of hypotheses as possible resolutions of the difficulty, to the stage of verification or falsification. The specific sciences (physics, biology, psychology) investigate the different levels of transactions in nature, but the scientific manner of investigation is simply a generalized sophistication of the structure of common sense and has no intrinsic restriction. Dewey construed nature as an organic unity not marked by any radical discontinuities that would require the introduction of non-natural categories or new methodological strategies. The sharp dualisms of mind and body, the individual and the social, the secular and the religious, and most importantly, fact and value, he viewed as conceptual constructs that have far outlived their usefulness. The inherited dualisms had to be overcome, particularly the one between fact and value inasmuch as it functioned to block the use of reason as the guide for human action. On his view people naturally have values as well as beliefs. Given human nature, there are certain activities and states of affairs that we naturally prize, enjoy, and value. The human problem is that these are not always easy to come by nor are they always compatible. We are forced to deal with the problem of what we really want and what we ought to pursue. Dewey advocated the extension of scientific method to these domains. The deliberative process culminating in a practical judgment is not unlike the deliberative process culminating in factual belief. Both kinds of judgment can be responsible or irresponsible, right or wrong. This deliberative sense of evaluation as a process presupposes the more basic sense of evaluation concerning those dimensions of human experience we prize and find fulfilling. Here too there is a dimension of appropriateness, one grounded in the kind of beings we are, where the ‘we’ includes our social history and development. On this issue Dewey had a very Greek view, albeit one transposed into a modern evolutionary perspective. Fundental questions of value and human fulfillment ultimately bear on our conception of the human commuDewey, John Dewey, John 230 -   230 nity, and this in turn leads him to the issues of democracy and education. Society and education. The ideal social order for Dewey is a structure that allows maximum selfdevelopment of all individuals. It fosters the free exchange of ideas and decides on policies in a manner that acknowledges each person’s capacity effectively to participate in and contribute to the direction of social life. The respect accorded to the dignity of each contributes to the common welfare of all. Dewey found the closest approximation to this ideal in democracy, but he did not identify contemporary democracies with this ideal. He was not content to employ old forms of democracy to deal with new problems. Consistent with instrumentalism, he maintained that we should be constantly rethinking and reworking our democratic institutions in order to make them ever more responsive to changing times. This constant rethinking placed a considerable premium on intelligence, and this underscored the importance of education for democracy. Dewey is probably best known for his views on education, but the centrality of his theory of education to his overall philosophy is not always appreciated. The fundental aim of education for him is not to convey information but to develop critical methods of thought. Education is future-oriented and the future is uncertain; hence, it is parount to develop those habits of mind that enable us adequately to assess new situations and to formulate strategies for dealing with the problematic dimensions of them. This is not to suggest that we should turn our backs on the past, because what we as a people have already learned provides our only guide for future activity. But the past is not to be valued for its own sake but for its role in developing and guiding those critical capacities that will enable us to deal with our ever-changing world effectively and responsibly. With the advent of the analytic tradition as the dominant style of philosophizing in erica, Dewey’s thought fell out of favor. About the only arenas in which it continued to flourish were schools of education. However, with the recent revival of a general pragmatic orientation in the persons of Quine, Putn, and Rorty, ong others, the spirit of Dewey’s philosophy is frequently invoked. Holism, anti-foundationalism, contextualism, functionalism, the blurring of the lines between science and philosophy and between the theoretical and the practical – all central themes in Dewey’s philosophy – have become fashionable. Neo-pragmatism is a contemporary catchphrase. Dewey is, however, more frequently invoked than read, and even the Dewey that is invoked is a truncated version of the historical figure who constructed a comprehensive philosophical vision. 

INSTRUMENTALISM, PEIRCE, PRAGMATISM. C.F.D. dharma, in Hinduism and especially in the early literature of the Vedas, a cosmic rule giving things their nature or essence, or in the human context, a set of duties and rules to be performed or followed to maintain social order, promote general well-being, and be righteous. Pursuit of dharma was considered one of the four fundental pursuits of life, the three others being those of wealth (artha), pleasure (ka), and spiritual liberation (moksha). In the Bhagavad Gita, dharma was made fous as svadharma, meaning one’s assigned duties based on one’s nature and abilities rather than on birth. The Hindu lawgiver Manu (who probably lived between the third century B.C. and the first century A.D.) codified the dharmic duties based on a fourfold order of society and provided concrete guidance to people in discharging their social obligations based on their roles and stations in life. Even though Manu, like the Gita, held that one’s duties and obligations should fit one’s nature rather than be determined by birth, the dharma-oriented Hindu society was eventually characterized by a rigid caste structure and a limited role for women.  BHAGAVAD GITA. D.K.C. Dharmakirti (seventh century A.D.), Indian Yogacara Buddhist philosopher and logician. His works include Pranavarttika (“Explanation of the Touchstones”), a major work in logic and epistemology; and Nyayabindu, an introduction to his views. In Santanantara-siddhi (“Establishment of the Existence of Other Minds”) he defends his perceptual idealism against the charge of solipsism, claiming that he may as legitimately use the argument from analogy for the existence of others (drawing inferences from apparently intelligent behaviors to intelligences that cause them) as his perceptual realist opponents. He criticized Nyaya theistic arguments. He exercised a strong influence on later Indian work in logic. K.E.Y. d’Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich, Baron (1723– 89), French philosopher, a leading materialist and prolific contributor to the Encyclopedia. He dharma d’Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich 231 -   231 was born in the Rhenish Palatinate, settled in France at an early age, and read law at Leiden. After inheriting an uncle’s wealth and title, he bece a solicitor at the Paris “Parlement” and a regular host of philosophical dinners attended by the Encyclopedists and visitors of renown (Gibbon, Hume, Smith, Sterne, Priestley, Beccaria, Franklin). Knowledgeable in chemistry and mineralogy and fluent in several languages, he translated German scientific works and English anti-Christian pphlets into French. Basically, d’Holbach was a synthetic thinker, powerful though not original, who systematized and radicalized Diderot’s naturalism. Also drawing on Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Buffon, Helvétius, and La Mettrie, his treatises were so irreligious and anticlerical that they were published abroad anonymously or pseudonymously: Christianity Unveiled (1756), The Sacred Contagion (1768), Critical History of Jesus (1770), The Social System (1773), and Universal Moral (1776). His masterpiece, the System of Nature (1770), a “Lucretian” compendium of eighteenth-century materialism, even shocked Voltaire. D’Holbach derived everything from matter and motion, and upheld universal necessity. The self-sustaining laws of nature are normative. Material reality is therefore contrasted to metaphysical delusion, self-interest to alienation, and earthly happiness to otherworldly optimism. More vindictive than Toland’s, d’Holbach’s unmitigated critique of Christianity anticipated Feuerbach, Strauss, Marx, and Nietzsche. He discredited supernatural revelation, theism, deism, and pantheism as mythological, censured Christian virtues as unnatural, branded piety as fanatical, and stigmatized clerical ignorance, immorality, and despotism. Assuming that science liberates man from religious hegemony, he advocated sensory and experimental knowledge. Believing that society and education form man, he unfolded a mechanistic anthropology, a eudaimonistic morality, and a secular, utilitarian social and political progr. 

ENCYCLOPEDIA, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. J.-L.S. diagonalization.

DIAGONAL PROCEDURE. diagonal procedure, a method, originated by Cantor, for showing that there are infinite sets that cannot be put in one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers (i.e., enumerated). For exple, the method can be used to show that the set of real numbers x in the interval 0 ‹ x m 1 is not enumerable. Suppose x0, x1, x2, . . . were such an enumeration (x0 is the real correlated with 0; x1, the real correlated with 1; and so on). Then consider the list formed by replacing each real in the enumeration with the unique non-terminating decimal fraction representing it: (The first decimal fraction represents x0; the second, x1; and so on.) By diagonalization we select the decimal fraction shown by the arrows: and change each digit xnn, taking care to avoid a terminating decimal. This fraction is not on our list. For it differs from the first in the tenths place, from the second in the hundredths place, and from the third in the thousandths place, and so on. Thus the real it represents is not in the supposed enumeration. This contradicts the original assumption. The idea can be put more elegantly. Let f be any function such that, for each natural number n, f(n) is a set of natural numbers. Then there is a set S of natural numbers such that n 1 S S n 2 f(n). It is obvious that, for each n, f(n) & S.  CANTOR, INFINITY, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. C.S. dialectic, an argumentative exchange involving contradiction or a technique or method connected with such exchanges. The word’s origin is the Greek dialegein, ‘to argue’ or ‘converse’; in Aristotle and others, this often has the sense ‘argue for a conclusion’, ‘establish by argument’. By Plato’s time, if not earlier, it had acquired a technical sense: a form of argumentation through question and answer. The adjective dialektikos, ‘dialectical’, would mean ‘concerned with dialegein’ or (of persons) ‘skilled in dialegein’; the feminine dialektike is then ‘the art of dialegein’. Aristotle says that Zeno of Elea invented diagonalization dialectic 232 -   232 dialectic. He apparently had in mind Zeno’s paradoxical arguments against motion and multiplicity, which Aristotle saw as dialectical because they rested on premises his adversaries conceded and deduced contradictory consequences from them. A first definition of dialectical argument might then be: ‘argument conducted by question and answer, resting on an opponent’s concessions, and aiming at refuting the opponent by deriving contradictory consequences’. This roughly fits the style of argument Socrates is shown engaging in by Plato. So construed, dialectic is primarily an art of refutation. Plato, however, ce to apply ‘dialectic’ to the method by which philosophers attain knowledge of Forms. His understanding of that method appears to vary from one dialogue to another and is difficult to interpret. In Republic VI–VII, dialectic is a method that somehow establishes “non-hypothetical” conclusions; in the Sophist, it is a method of discovering definitions by successive divisions of genera into their species. Aristotle’s concept of dialectical argument comes closer to Socrates and Zeno: it proceeds by question and answer, normally aims at refutation, and cannot scientifically or philosophically establish anything. Aristotle differentiates dialectical arguments from demonstration (apodeixis), or scientific arguments, on the basis of their premises: demonstrations must have “true and primary” premises, dialectical arguments premises that are “apparent,” “reputable,” or “accepted” (these are alternative, and disputed, renderings of the term endoxos). However, dialectical arguments must be valid, unlike eristic or sophistical arguments. The Topics, which Aristotle says is the first art of dialectic, is organized as a handbook for dialectical debates; Book VIII clearly presupposes a ruledirected, formalized style of disputation presumably practiced in the Academy. This use of ‘dialectic’ reappears in the early Middle Ages in Europe, though as Aristotle’s works bece better known after the twelfth century dialectic was increasingly associated with the formalized disputations practiced in the universities (recalling once again the formalized practice presupposed by Aristotle’s Topics). In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant declared that the ancient meaning of ‘dialectic’ was ‘the logic of illusion’ and proposed a “Transcendental Dialectic” that analyzed the “antinomies” (deductions of contradictory conclusions) to which pure reason is inevitably led when it extends beyond its proper sphere. This concept was further developed by Fichte and Schelling into a traidic notion of thesis, opposing antithesis, and resultant synthesis. Hegel transformed the notion of contradiction from a logical to a metaphysical one, making dialectic into a theory not simply of arguments but of historical processes within the development of “spirit”; Marx transformed this still further by replacing ‘spirit’ with ‘matter’. 

ACADEMY, ARISTOTLE, HEGEL, MARX, PLATO, SOCRATES, TOPICS. R.Sm. dialectical argument.DIALECTIC. dialectical materialism.

MARX, PLEKHANOV. dialecticians.SCHOOL OF NES. diallelon (from ancient Greek di allelon, ‘through one another’), a circular definition. A definition is circular provided either the definiendum occurs in the definiens, as in ‘Law is a lawful command’, or a first term is defined by means of a second term, which in turn is defined by the first term, as in ‘Law is the expressed wish of a ruler, and a ruler is one who establishes laws.’ A diallelus is a circular argument: an attempt to establish a conclusion by a premise that cannot be known unless the conclusion is known in the first place. Descartes, e.g., argued: I clearly and distinctly perceive that God exists, and what I clearly and distinctly perceive is true. Therefore, God exists. To justify the premise that clear and distinct perceptions are true, however, he appealed to his knowledge of God’s existence.  CIRCULAR REASONING, DEFINITION. M.St. diallelus.DIALLELON. dialogism.BAKHTIN. dianoia, Greek term for the faculty of thought, specifically of drawing conclusions from assumptions and of constructing and following arguments. The term may also designate the thought that results from using this faculty. We would use dianoia to construct a mathematical proof; in contrast, a being – if there is such a being it would be a god – that could simply intuit the truth of the theorem would use the faculty of intellectual intuition, noûs. In contrast with noûs, dianoia is the distinctly human faculty of reason. Plato uses noûs and dianoia to designate, respectively, the highest and second levels of the faculties represented on the divided line (Republic 511d–e).  PLATO. E.C.H. dialectical argument dianoia 233 -   233 dichotomy paradox.ZENO’S PARADOXES. dici de omni et nullo.DICTUM DE OMNI ET NULLO. dictum.ABELARD, COMPLEXE SIGNIFICABILE. dictum de omni et nullo, also dici de omni et nullo (Latin, ‘said of all and none’), two principles that were supposed by medieval logicians to underlie all valid syllogisms. Dictum de omni applies most naturally to universal affirmative propositions, maintaining that in such a proposition, whatever falls under the subject term also falls under the predicate term. Thus, in ‘Every whale is a mmal’, whatever is included under ‘whale’ is included under ‘mmal’. Dictum de nullo applies to universal negative propositions, such as ‘No whale is a lizard’, maintaining that whatever falls under the subject term does not fall under the predicate term.  SYLLOGISM. W.E.M. Diderot, Denis (1713–84), French philosopher, Encyclopedist, dratist, novelist, and art critic, a chpion of Enlightenment values. He is known primarily as general editor of the Encyclopedia (1747–73), an analytical and interpretive compendium of eighteenth-century science and technology. A friend of Rousseau and Condillac, Diderot translated Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1745) into French. Revealing Lucretian affinities (Philosophical Thoughts, 1746), he assailed Christianity in The Skeptics’ Walk (1747) and argued for a materialistic and evolutionary universe (Letter on the Blind, 1749); this led to a short imprisonment. Diderot wrote mediocre bourgeois comedies; some bleak fiction (The Nun, 1760); and two satirical dialogues, Reau’s Nephew (1767) and Jacques the Fatalist (1765–84), his masterpieces. He innovatively theorized on dra (Discourse on Dratic Poetry, 1758) and elevated art criticism to a literary genre (Salons in Grimm’s Literary Correspondence). At Catherine II’s invitation, Diderot visited Saint Petersburg in 1773 and planned the creation of a Russian university. Promoting science, especially biology and chemistry, Diderot unfolded a philosophy of nature inclined toward monism. His works include physiological investigations, Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751) and Elements of Physiology (1774–80); a sensationalistic epistemology, On the Interpretation of Nature (1745); an aesthetic, Essays on Painting (1765); a materialistic philosophy of science, D’Alembert’s Dre (1769); an anthropology, Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (1772); and an anti-behavioristic Refutation of Helvétius’ Work “On Man” (1773–80).  ENCYCLOPEDIA. J.-L.S. différance, a French coinage deployed by Derrida in De la Grmatologie (1967), where he defines it as “an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring.” Différance is polysemic, but its key function is to ne the prime condition for the functioning of all language and thought: differing, the differentiation of signs from each other that allows us to differentiate things from each other. Deferring is the process by which signs refer to each other, thus constituting the self-reference essential to language, without ever capturing the being or presence that is the transcendent entity toward which it is aimed. Without the concepts or idealities generated by the iteration of signs, we could never identify a dog as a dog, could not perceive a dog (or any other thing) as such. Perception presupposes language, which, in turn, presupposes the ideality generated by the repetition of signs. Thus there can be no perceptual origin for language; language depends upon an “original repetition,” a deliberate oxymoron that Derrida employs to signal the impossibility of conceiving an origin of language from within the linguistic frework in which we find ourselves. Différance is the condition for language, and language is the condition for experience: whatever meaning we may find in the world is attributed to the differing/ deferring play of signifiers. The notion of différance and the correlative thesis that meaning is language-dependent have been appropriated by radical thinkers in the attempt to demonstrate that political inequalities are grounded in nothing other than the conventions of sign systems governing differing cultures.  DECONSTRUCTION, DERRIDA, PERCEPTION, POSTMODERN. M.C.D. difference.SET THEORY. difference, method of.MILL’S METHODS. difference principle.RAWLS. différend.LYOTARD. differentia.

DEFINITION, TOPICS. dignity, a moral worth or status usually attributed to human persons. Persons are said to have dignity as well as to express it. Persons are typically thought to have (1) “human dignity” (an dichotomy paradox dignity 234 -   234 intrinsic moral worth, a basic moral status, or both, which is had equally by all persons); and (2) a “sense of dignity” (an awareness of one’s dignity inclining toward the expression of one’s dignity and the avoidance of humiliation). Persons can lack a sense of dignity without consequent loss of their human dignity. In Kant’s influential account of the equal dignity of all persons, human dignity is grounded in the capacity for practical rationality, especially the capacity for autonomous self-legislation under the categorical imperative. Kant holds that dignity contrasts with price and that there is nothing – not pleasure nor communal welfare nor other good consequences – for which it is morally acceptable to sacrifice human dignity. Kant’s categorical rejection of the use of persons as mere means suggests a now-common link between the possession of human dignity and human rights (see, e.g., the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights). One now widespread discussion of dignity concerns “dying with dignity” and the right to conditions conducive thereto.  KANT, MORAL STATUS, RIGHTS, VALUE. M.J.M. dilemma, an argument or argument form in which one of the premises is a disjunction. Constructive dilemmas take the form ‘If A and B, if C then D, A or C; therefore B or D’ and are instances of modus ponens in the special case where A is C and B is D; destructive dilemmas are of the form ‘If A then B, if C then D, not-B or not-D; therefore not-A or not-C’ and are likewise instances of modus tollens in that special case. A dilemma in which the disjunctive premise is false is commonly known as a false dilemma. 

MORAL DILEMMA. G.F.S. dilemma, moral.MORAL DILEMMA. Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911), German philosopher and historian whose main project was to establish the conditions of historical knowledge, much as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had for our knowledge of nature. He studied theology, history, and philosophy at Heidelberg and Berlin and in 1882 accepted the chair earlier held by Hegel at the University of Berlin. Dilthey’s first attempt at a critique of historical reason is found in the Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), the last in the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910). He is also a recognized contributor to hermeneutics, literary criticism, and worldview theory. His Life of Schleiermacher and essays on the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Hegel are model works of Geistesgeschichte, in which philosophical ideas are analyzed in relation to their social and cultural milieu. Dilthey holds that life is the ultimate nexus of reality behind which we cannot go. Life is viewed, not primarily in biological terms as in Nietzsche and Bergson, but as the historical totality of human experience. The basic categories whereby we reflect on life provide the background for the epistemological categories of the sciences. According to Dilthey, Aristotle’s category of acting and suffering is rooted in prescientific experience, which is then explicated as the category of efficacy or influence (Wirkung) in the human sciences and as the category of cause (Ursache) in the natural sciences. Our understanding of influence in the human sciences is less removed from the full reality of life than are the causal explanations arrived at in the natural sciences. To this extent the human sciences can claim a priority over the natural sciences. Whereas we have direct access to the real elements of the historical world (psychophysical human beings), the elements of the natural world are merely hypothetical entities such as atoms. The natural sciences deal with outer experiences, while the human sciences are based on inner experience. Inner experience is reflexive and implicitly self-aware, but need not be introspective or explicitly self-conscious. In fact, we often have inner experiences of the se objects that outer experience is about. An outer experience of an object focuses on its physical properties; an inner experience of it on our felt responses to it. A lived experience (Erlebnis) of it includes both. The distinction between the natural and the human sciences is also related to the methodological difference between explanation and understanding. The natural sciences seek causal explanations of nature – connecting the discrete representations of outer experience through hypothetical generalizations. The human sciences aim at an understanding (Verstehen) that articulates the typical structures of life given in lived experience. Finding lived experience to be inherently connected and meaningful, Dilthey opposed traditional atomistic and associationist psychologies and developed a descriptive psychology that Husserl recognized as anticipating phenomenological psychology. In Ideas (1894) Dilthey argued that descriptive psychology could provide a neutral foundation for the other human sciences, but in his later dilemma Dilthey, Wilhelm 235 -   235 hermeneutical writings, which influenced Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gader, he rejected the possibility of a foundational discipline or method. In the Formation, he asserted that all the human sciences are interpretive and mutually dependent. Hermeneutically conceived, understanding is a process of interpreting the “objectifications of life,” the external expressions of human experience and activity. The understanding of others is mediated by these common objectifications and not immediately available through empathy (Einfühlung). Moreover, to fully understand myself I must interpret the expressions of my life just as I interpret the expressions of others. Whereas the natural sciences aim at ever broader generalizations, the human sciences place equal weight on understanding individuality and universality. Dilthey regarded individuals as points of intersection of the social and cultural systems in which they participate. Any psychological contribution to understanding human life must be integrated into this more public frework. Although universal laws of history are rejected, particular human sciences can establish uniformities limited to specific social and cultural systems. In a set of sketches (1911) supplementing the Formation, Dilthey further developed the categories of life in relation to the human sciences. After analyzing formal categories such as the part–whole relation shared by all the sciences, he distinguished the real categories of the human sciences from those of the natural sciences. The most important human science categories are value, purpose, and meaning, but they by no means exhaust the concepts needed to reflect on the ultimate sense of our existence. Such reflection receives its fullest expression in a worldview (Weltanschauung), such as the worldviews developed in religion, art, and philosophy. A worldview constitutes an overall perspective on life that sums up what we know about the world, how we evaluate it emotionally, and how we respond to it volitionally. Since Dilthey distinguished three exclusive and recurrent types of worldview naturalism (e.g., Democritus, Hume), the idealism of freedom (e.g., Socrates, Kant), and objective idealism (e.g., Parmenides, Hegel) – he is often regarded as a relativist. But Dilthey thought that both the natural and the human sciences could in their separate ways attain objective truth through a proper sense of method. Metaphysical formulations of worldviews are relative only because they attempt an impossible synthesis of all truth. 

EINFÜHLUNG, ERLEBNIS, HEGEL, HERMENEUTICS, NIETZSCHE, PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. R.A.M. diminished capacity, a legal defense to criminal liability that exists in two distinct forms: (1) the mens rea variant, in which a defendant uses evidence of mental abnormality to cast doubt on the prosecution’s assertion that, at the time of the crime, the defendant possessed the mental state criteria, the mens rea, required by the legal definition of the offense charged; and (2) the partial responsibility variant, in which a defendant uses evidence of mental abnormality to support a claim that, even if the defendant’s mental state satisfied the mens rea criteria for the offense, the defendant’s responsibility for the crime is diminished and thus the defendant should be convicted of a lesser crime and/or a lesser sentence should be imposed. The mental abnormality may be produced by mental disorder, intoxication, trauma, or other causes. The mens rea variant is not a distinct excuse: a defendant is simply arguing that the prosecution cannot prove the definitional, mental state criteria for the crime. Partial responsibility is an excuse, but unlike the similar, complete excuse of legal insanity, partial responsibility does not produce total acquittal; rather, a defendant’s claim is for reduced punishment. A defendant may raise either or both variants of diminished capacity and the insanity defense in the se case. For exple, a common definition of firstdegree murder requires the prosecution to prove that a defendant intended to kill and did so after premeditation. A defendant charged with this crime might raise both variants as follows. To deny the allegation of premeditation, a defendant might claim that the killing occurred instantaneously in response to a “command hallucination.” If believed, a defendant cannot be convicted of premeditated homicide, but can be convicted of the lesser crime of second-degree murder, which typically requires only intent. And even a defendant who killed intentionally and premeditatedly might claim partial responsibility because the psychotic mental state rendered the agent’s reasons for action nonculpably irrational. In this case, either the degree of crime might be reduced by operation of the partial excuse, rather than by negation of definitional mens rea, or a defendant might be convicted of first-degree murder but given a lesser penalty. In the United States the mens rea variant exists in about half the jurisdictions, although its scope diminished capacity diminished capacity 236 -   236 is usually limited in various ways, primarily to avoid a defendant’s being acquitted and freed if mental abnormality negated all the definitional mental state criteria of the crime charged. In English law, the mens rea variant exists but is limited by the type of evidence usable to support it. No erican jurisdiction has adopted a distinct, straightforward partial responsibility variant, but various analogous doctrines and procedures are widely accepted. For exple, partial responsibility grounds both the doctrine that intentional killing should be reduced from murder to voluntary manslaughter if a defendant acted “in the heat of passion” upon legally adequate provocation, and the sentencing judge’s discretion to award a decreased sentence based on a defendant’s mental abnormality. In addition to such partial responsibility analogues, England, Wales, and Scotland have directly adopted the partial responsibility variant, termed “diminished responsibility,” but it applies only to prosecutions for murder. “Diminished responsibility” reduces a conviction to a lesser crime, such as manslaughter or culpable homicide, for behavior that would otherwise constitute murder.  FREE WILL PROBLEM, MENS REA, PHILOSOPHY OF LAW. S.J.M. diminished responsibility.DIMINISHED CAPACITY. Ding an sich.KANT. Diodoros Cronos.MEGARIANS. Diogenes Laertius.DOXOGRAPHERS, VAGUENESS. Diogenes of Apollonia.PRE-SOCRATICS. Diogenes of Ionoanda.EPICUREANISM. Diogenes the Cynic.CYNICS. direct discourse.INDIRECT DISCOURSE. direct intention.INTENTION. direction of fit, a metaphor that derives from a story in Anscombe’s Intention (1957) about a detective who follows a shopper around town making a list of the things that the shopper buys. As Anscombe notes, whereas the detective’s list has to match the way the world is (each of the things the shopper buys must be on the detective’s list), the shopper’s list is such that the world has to fit with it (each of the things on the list are things that he must buy). The metaphor is now standardly used to describe the difference between kinds of speech act (assertions versus commands) and mental states (beliefs versus desires). For exple, beliefs are said to have the world-to-mind direction of fit because it is in the nature of beliefs that their contents are supposed to match the world: false beliefs are to be abandoned. Desires are said to have the opposite mind-to-world direction of fit because it is in the nature of desires that the world is supposed to match their contents. This is so at least to the extent that the role of an unsatisfied desire that the world be a certain way is to prompt behavior aimed at making the world that way.  ANSCOMBE, BELIEF, MOTIVATION. M.Sm. direct knowledge.BASING RELATION. direct passions.HUME. direct realism, the theory that perceiving is epistemically direct, unmediated by conscious or unconscious inference. Direct realism is distinguished, on the one hand, from indirect, or representative, realism, the view that perceptual awareness of material objects is mediated by an awareness of sensory representations, and, on the other hand, from forms of phenomenalism that identify material objects with states of mind. It might be thought that direct realism is incompatible with causal theories of perception. Such theories invoke causal chains leading from objects perceived (causes) to perceptual states of perceivers (effects). Since effects must be distinct from causes, the relation between an instance of perceiving and an object perceived, it would seem, cannot be direct. This, however, confuses epistemic directness with causal directness. A direct realist need only be committed to the former. In perceiving a tomato to be red, the content of my perceptual awareness is the tomato’s being red. I enter this state as a result of a complex causal process, perhaps. But my perception may be direct in the sense that it is unmediated by an awareness of a representational sensory state from which I  led to an awareness of the tomato. Perceptual error, and more particularly, hallucinations and illusions, are usually thought to pose special difficulties for direct realists. My hallucinating a red tomato, for instance, is not my being directly aware of a red tomato, since I may hallucinate the tomato even when none is present. Perhaps, then, my hallucinating a red tomato is partly a matter of my being directly diminished responsibility direct realism 237 -   237 aware of a round, red sensory representation. And if my awareness in this case is indistinguishable from my perception of an actual red tomato, why not suppose that I  aware of a sensory representation in the veridical case as well? A direct realist may respond by denying that hallucinations are in fact indistinguishable from veridical perceivings or by calling into question the claim that, if sensory representations are required to explain hallucinations, they need be postulated in the veridical case.  PERCEPTION, PHENOMENALISM. J.F.H. direct reference.CAUSAL THEORY OF PROPER NES. direct sense.OBLIQUE CONTEXT. discourse ethics.HABERMAS. discrete time.TIME. disembodiment, the immaterial state of existence of a person who previously had a body. Disembodiment is thus to be distinguished from nonembodiment or immateriality. God and angels, if they exist, are non-embodied, or immaterial. By contrast, if human beings continue to exist after their bodies die, then they are disembodied. As this exple suggests, disembodiment is typically discussed in the context of immortality or survival of death. It presupposes a view according to which persons are souls or some sort of immaterial entity that is capable of existing apart from a body. Whether it is possible for a person to become disembodied is a matter of controversy. Most philosophers who believe that this is possible assume that a disembodied person is conscious, but it is not obvious that this should be the case. 

PERSONAL IDENTITY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, PLATO, SURVIVAL. E.R.W. disjoint.SET THEORY. disjunction.DISJUNCTIVE PROPOSITION, SYLLOGISM. disjunction elimination. (1) The argument form ‘A or B, if A then C, if B then C; therefore, C’ and arguments of this form. (2) The rule of inference that permits one to infer C from a disjunction together with derivations of C from each of the disjuncts separately. This is also known as the rule of disjunctive elimination or V-elimination.  DISJUNCTIVE PROPOSITION. G.F.S. disjunction introduction. (1) The argument form ‘A (or B); therefore, A or B’ and arguments of this form. (2) The rule of inference that permits one to infer a disjunction from either of its disjuncts. This is also known as the rule of addition or Vintroduction.  DISJUNCTIVE PROPOSITION. G.F.S. disjunctive normal form.NORMAL FORM. disjunctive proposition, a proposition whose main propositional operator (main connective) is the disjunction operator, i.e., the logical operator that represents ‘and/or’. Thus, ‘(P-and/orQ)-and-R’ is not a disjunctive proposition because its main connective is the conjunction operation, but ‘P-and/or-(Q-and-R)’ is disjunctive. R.W.B. disjunctive syllogism.SYLLOGISM. disposition, a tendency of an object or system to act or react in characteristic ways in certain situations. Fragility, solubility, and radioactivity are typical physical dispositions; generosity and irritability are typical dispositions of persons. For behaviorism, functionalism, and some forms of materialism, mental events, such as the occurrence of an idea, and states such as beliefs, are also dispositions. Hypothetical or conditional statements are implied by dispositional claims and capture their basic meaning: the glass would shatter if suitably struck; left undisturbed, a radium atom will probably decay in a certain time; etc. These are usually taken as subjunctive rather than material conditionals (to avoid problems like having to count as soluble anything not immersed in water). The characteristic mode of action or reaction – shattering, decaying, etc. – is termed the disposition’s manifestation or display. But it need not be observable. Fragility is a regular or universal disposition; a suitably struck glass invariably shatters. Radioactivity is variable or probabilistic; radium may or may not decay in a certain situation. Dispositions may also be multitrack or multiply manifested,rather than single-track or singly manifested: like hardness or elasticity, they may have different manifestations in different situations. In The Concept of Mind (1949) Ryle argued that there is nothing more to dispositional claims than their associated conditionals: dispositional properties are not occurrent; to possess a dispositional property is not to undergo any episode or occurrence, or to be in a particular state. (Coupled with a positivist rejection of unobservables, direct reference disposition 238 -   238 and a conception of mental episodes and states as dispositions, this supports the view of behaviorism that such episodes and states are nothing but dispositions to observable behavior.) By contrast, realism holds that dispositional talk is also about actual or occurrent properties or states, possibly unknown or unobservable. In particular, it is about the bases of dispositions in intrinsic properties or states: fragility is based in molecular structure, radioactivity in nuclear structure. A disposition’s basis is viewed as at least partly the cause of its manifestation. Some philosophers hold that the bases are categorical, not dispositional (D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind, 1968). Others, notably Popper, hold that all properties are dispositional.  BEHAVIORISM, COUNTERFACTUALS, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, PROPENSITY, STATE. D.S. dispositional belief.BELIEF. dispositional state.STATE. dispositional theory of meaning.MEANING. dispositional theory of memory.MEMORY. disposition to believe.BELIEF. disquotation theory of truth.TRUTH. distinction, formal.FUNDENTUM DIVISIONIS. distinction, mental.FUNDENTUM DIVISIONIS. distinction, real.FUNDENTUM DIVISIONIS. distribution, the property of standing for every individual designated by a term. The Latin term distributio originated in the twelfth century; it was applied to terms as part of a theory of reference, and it may have simply indicated the property of a term prefixed by a universal quantifier. The term ‘dog’ in ‘Every dog has his day’ is distributed, because it supposedly refers to every dog. In contrast, the se term in ‘A dog bit the mailman’ is not distributed because it refers to only one dog. In time, the idea of distribution ce to be used only as a heuristic device for determining the validity of categorical syllogisms: (1) every term that is distributed in a premise must be distributed in the conclusion; (2) the middle term must be distributed at least once. Most explanations of distribution in logic textbooks are perfunctory; and it is stipulated that the subject terms of universal propositions and the predicate terms of negative propositions are distributed. This is intuitive for A-propositions, e.g., ‘All humans are mortal’; the property of being mortal is distributed over each human. The idea of distribution is not intuitive for, say, the predicate term of O-propositions. According to the doctrine, the sentence ‘Some humans are not selfish’ says in effect that if all the selfish things are compared with some select human (one that is not selfish), the relation of identity does not hold between that human and any of the selfish things. Notice that the idea of distribution is not mentioned in this explanation. The idea of distribution is currently disreputable, mostly because of the criticisms of Geach in Reference and Generality (1968) and its irrelevance to standard semantic theories. The related term ‘distributively’ means ‘in a manner designating every item in a group individually’, and is used in contrast with ‘collectively’. The sentence ‘The rocks weighed 100 pounds’ is biguous. If ‘rocks’ is taken distributively, then the sentence means that each rock weighed 100 pounds. If ‘rocks’ is taken collectively, then the sentence means that the total weight of the rocks was 100 pounds.  SYLLOGISM. A.P.M. distributive justice.JUSTICE. distributive laws, the logical principles A 8 (B 7 C) S (A 8 B) 7 (A 7 C) and A 7 (B 8 C) S (A 7 B) 8 (A 7 C). Conjunction is thus said to distribute over disjunction and disjunction over conjunction. 

DE MORGAN’S LAWS. G.F.S. distributively.DISTRIBUTION. divided line, one of three analogies (with the sun and cave) offered in Plato’s Republic (VI, 509d– 511e) as a partial explanation of the Good. Socrates divides a line into two unequal segments: the longer represents the intelligible world and the shorter the sensible world. Then each of the segments is divided in the se proportion. Socrates associates four mental states with the four resulting segments (beginning with the shortest): eikasia, illusion or the apprehension of images; pistis, belief in ordinary physical objects; dianoia, the sort of hypothetical reasondispositional belief divided line 239 -   239 ing engaged in by mathematicians; and noesis, rational ascent to the first principle of the Good by means of dialectic.  PLATO, SOCRATES. W.J.P. divine attributes, properties of God; especially, those properties that are essential and unique to God. ong properties traditionally taken to be attributes of God, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence are naturally taken to mean having, respectively, power, knowledge, and moral goodness to the maximum degree. Here God is understood as an eternal (or everlasting) being of immense power, knowledge, and goodness, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe and is worthy of human worship. Omnipotence is maximal power. Some philosophers, notably Descartes, have thought that omnipotence requires the ability to do absolutely anything, including the logically impossible. Most classical theists, however, understood omnipotence as involving vast powers, while nevertheless being subject to a range of limitations of ability, including the inability to do what is logically impossible, the inability to change the past or to do things incompatible with what has happened, and the inability to do things that cannot be done by a being who has other divine attributes, e.g., to sin or to lie. Omniscience is unlimited knowledge. According to the most straightforward account, omniscience is knowledge of all true propositions. But there may be reasons for recognizing a limitation on the class of true propositions that a being must know in order to be omniscient. For exple, if there are true propositions about the future, omniscience would then include foreknowledge. But some philosophers have thought that foreknowledge of human actions is incompatible with those actions being free. This has led some to deny that there are truths about the future and others to deny that such truths are knowable. In the latter case, omniscience might be taken to be knowledge of all knowable truths. Or if God is eternal and if there are certain tensed or temporally indexical propositions that can be known only by someone who is in time, then omniscience presumably does not extend to such propositions. It is a matter of controversy whether omniscience includes middle knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what an agent would do if other, counterfactual, conditions were to obtain. Since recent critics of middle knowledge (in contrast to Báñez and other sixteenth-century Dominican opponents of Molina) usually deny that the relevant counterfactual conditionals alleged to be the object of such knowledge are true, denying the possibility of middle knowledge need not restrict the class of true propositions a being must know in order to be omniscient. Finally, although the concept of omniscience might not itself constrain how an omniscient being acquires its knowledge, it is usually held that God’s knowledge is neither inferential (i.e., derived from premises or evidence) nor dependent upon causal processes. Omnibenevolenceis, literally, complete desire for good; less strictly, perfect moral goodness. Traditionally it has been thought that God does not merely happen to be good but that he must be so and that he is unable to do what is wrong. According to the former claim God is essentially good; according to the latter he is impeccable. It is a matter of controversy whether God is perfectly good in virtue of complying with an external moral standard or whether he himself sets the standard for goodness. Divine sovereignty is God’s rule over all of creation. According to this doctrine God did not merely create the world and then let it run on its own; he continues to govern it in complete detail according to his good plan. Sovereignty is thus related to divine providence. A difficult question is how to reconcile a robust view of God’s control of the world with libertarian free will. Aseity (or perseity) is complete independence. In a straightforward sense, God is not dependent on anyone or anything for his existence. According to stronger interpretation of aseity, God is completely independent of everything else, including his properties. This view supports a doctrine of divine simplicity according to which God is not distinct from his properties. Simplicity is the property of having no parts of any kind. According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God not only has no spatial or temporal parts, but there is no distinction between God and his essence, between his various attributes (in him omniscience and omnipotence, e.g., are identical), and between God and his attributes. Attributing simplicity to God was standard in medieval theology, but the doctrine has seemed to many contemporary philosophers to be baffling, if not incoherent.  DESCARTES, DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE, MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE, MOLINA, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. E.R.W. divine command ethics, an ethical theory according to which part or all of morality divine attributes divine command ethics 240 -   240 depends upon the will of God as promulgated by divine commands. This theory has an important place in the history of Christian ethics. Divine command theories are prominent in the Franciscan ethics developed by John Duns Scotus and Willi Ockh; they are also endorsed by disciples of Ockh such as d’Ailly, Gerson, and Gabriel Biel; both Luther and Calvin adopt divine command ethics; and in modern British thought, important divine command theorists include Locke, Berkeley, and Paley. Divine command theories are typically offered as accounts of the deontological part of morality, which consists of moral requirements (obligation), permissions (rightness), and prohibitions (wrongness). On a divine command conception, actions forbidden by God are morally wrong because they are thus forbidden, actions not forbidden by God are morally right because they are not thus forbidden, and actions commanded by God are morally obligatory because they are thus commanded. Many Christians find divine command ethics attractive because the ethics of love advocated in the Gospels makes love the subject of a command. Matthew 22:37–40 records Jesus as saying that we are commanded to love God and the neighbor. According to Kierkegaard, there are two reasons to suppose that Christian love of neighbor must be an obligation imposed by divine command: first, only an obligatory love can be sufficiently extensive to embrace everyone, even one’s enemies; second, only an obligatory love can be invulnerable to changes in its objects, a love that alters not when it alteration finds. The chief objection to the theory is that dependence on divine commands would make morality unacceptably arbitrary. According to divine command ethics, murder would not be wrong if God did not exist or existed but failed to forbid it. Perhaps the strongest reply to this objection appeals to the doctrines of God’s necessary existence and essential goodness. God could not fail to exist and be good, and so God could not fail to forbid murder. In short, divine commands are not arbitrary fiats.  ETHICS, LOCKE, OCKH. P.L.Q. divine command theory.DIVINE COMMAND ETHICS, ETHICS. divine foreknowledge, God’s knowledge of the future. It appears to be a straightforward consequence of God’s omniscience that he has knowledge of the future, for presumably omniscience includes knowledge of all truths and there are truths about the future. Moreover, divine foreknowledge seems to be required by orthodox religious commitment to divine prophecy and divine providence. In the former case, God could not reliably reveal what will happen if he does know what will happen. And in the latter case, it is difficult to see how God could have a plan for what happens without knowing what that will be. A problem arises, however, in that it has seemed to many that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action. Some philosophers (notably Boethius) have reasoned as follows: If God knows that a person will do a certain action, then the person must perform that action, but if a person must perform an action, the person does not perform the action freely. So if God knows that a person will perform an action, the person does not perform the action freely. This reason for thinking that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action commits a simple modal fallacy. What must be the case is the conditional that if God knows that a person will perform an action then the person will in fact perform the action. But what is required to derive the conclusion is the implausible claim that from the assumption that God knows that a person will perform an action it follows not simply that the person will perform the action but that the person must perform it. Perhaps other attempts to demonstrate the incompatibility, however, are not as easily dismissed. One response to the apparent dilemma is to say that there really are no such truths about the future, either none at all or none about events, like future free actions, that are not causally necessitated by present conditions. Another response is to concede that there are truths about the future but to deny that truths about future free actions are knowable. In this case omniscience may be understood as knowledge, not of all truths, but of all knowable truths. A third, and historically important, response is to hold that God is eternal and that from his perspective everything is present and thus not future. These responses implicitly agree that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom, but they provide different accounts of omniscience according to which it does not include foreknowledge, or, at

any rate, not foreknowledge of future free actions.  DIVINE ATTRIBUTES, FREE WILL PROBLEM, MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. E.R.W. divine command theory divine foreknowledge 241 -   241 divine sovereignty.DIVINE ATTRIBUTES. division, fallacy of.INFORMAL FALLACY. D-N model.COVERING LAW MODEL. Doctor Irrefragabilis.ALEXANDER OF HALES. Doctor Mirabilis.BACON, ROGER. doctrine of infinite analysis.LEIBNIZ. doctrine of minute perceptions.LEIBNIZ. doctrine of the mean.ARISTOTLE, CHUNG-YUNG. Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge.CARROLL. dogmatism.SKEPTICS. domain, of a science, the class of individuals that constitute its subject matter. Zoology, number theory, and plane geometry have as their respective domains the class of animals, the class of natural numbers, and the class of plane figures. In Posterior Analytics 76b10, Aristotle observes that each science presupposes its domain, its basic concepts, and its basic principles. In modern formalizations of a science using a standard firstorder formal language, the domain of the science is often, but not always, taken as the universe of the intended interpretation or intended model, i.e. as the range of values of the individual variables.  AXIOMATIC METHOD, FORMALIZATION, FORMAL LOGIC, MODEL THEORY, ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT, UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE, VARIABLE. J.Cor. dominance, principle of.NEWCOMB’S PARADOX. dominate.SCHRÖDER-BERNSTEIN THEOREM. donkey sentences, sentences exemplified by ‘Every man who owns a donkey beats it’, ‘If a man owns a donkey, he beats it’, and similar forms, which have posed logical puzzles since medieval times but were noted more recently by Geach. At issue is the logical form of such sentences – specifically, the correct construal of the pronoun ‘it’ and the indefinite noun phrase ‘a donkey’. Translations into predicate logic by the usual strategy of rendering the indefinite as existential quantification and the pronoun as a bound variable (cf. ‘John owns a donkey and beats it’ P (Dx) (x is a donkey & John owns x & John beats x)) are either ill-formed or have the wrong truth conditions. With a universal quantifier, the logical form carries the controversial implication that every donkey-owning man beats every donkey he owns. Efforts to resolve these issues have spawned much significant research in logic and linguistic semantics.  LOGICAL FORM. R.E.W. doomsday argument, an argument (associated chiefly with the mathematician Brandon Carter and the philosopher John Leslie) purporting to show, by appeal to Bayes’s theorem (and Bayes’s rule), that whatever antecedent probability we may have assigned to the hypothesis that human life will end relatively soon is magnified, perhaps greatly, upon our learning (or noticing) that we are ong the first few score thousands of millions of human beings to exist.Leslie’s The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (1996). The argument is based on an allegedly close analogy between the question of the probability of imminent human extinction given our ordinal location in the temporal swath of humanity and the fact that the reader’s ne being ong the first few drawn randomly from an urn may greatly enhance for the reader the probability that the urn contains fairly few nes rather than very many.  BAYESIAN RATIONALITY, BAYES’S THEOREM, PROBABILITY. D.A.J. dot notation.LOGICAL NOTATION. double aspect theory.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. double effect, principle of.PRINCIPLE OF DOUBLE EFFECT. double negation. (1) The principle, also called the law of double negation, that every proposition is logically equivalent to its double negation. Thus, the proposition that Roger is a rabbit is equivalent to the proposition that Roger is not not a rabbit. The law holds in classical logic but not for certain non-classical concepts of negation. In intuitionist logic, for exple, a proposition implies, but need not be implied by, its double negation. (2) The rule of inference, also called the rule of double negation, that permits one to infer the double negation of A from A, and vice versa.  FORMAL LOGIC. G.F.S. double negation, law of

.DOUBLE NEGATION. divine sovereignty double negation, law of 242 -   242 double truth, the theory that a thing can be true in philosophy or according to reason while its opposite is true in theology or according to faith. It serves as a response to conflicts between reason and faith. For exple, on one interpretation of Aristotle, there is only one rational human soul, whereas, according to Christian theology, there are many rational human souls. The theory of double truth was attributed to Averroes and to Latin Averroists such as Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia by their opponents, but it is doubtful that they actually held it. Averroes seems to have held that a single truth is scientifically formulated in philosophy and allegorically expressed in theology. Latin Averroists apparently thought that philosophy concerns what would have been true by natural necessity absent special divine intervention, and theology deals with what is actually true by virtue of such intervention. On this view, there would have been only one rational human soul if God had not miraculously intervened to multiply what by nature could not be multiplied. No one clearly endorsed the view that rational human souls are both only one and also many in number.  AVERROES, SIGER OF BRABANT. P.L.Q. doubt, methodic.DESCARTES. downward saturated set.HINTIKKA SET. doxa.DOXASTIC. doxastic (from Greek doxa, ‘belief’), of or pertaining to belief. A doxastic mental state, for instance, is or incorporates a belief. Doxastic states of mind are to be distinguished, on the one hand, from such non-doxastic states as desires, sensations, and emotions, and, on the other hand, from subdoxastic states. By extension, a doxastic principle is a principle governing belief. A doxastic principle might set out conditions under which an agent’s forming or abandoning a belief is justified (epistemically or otherwise).  REASONS FOR BELIEF. J.F.H. doxastic holism.HOLISM. doxastic voluntarism.VOLUNTARISM. doxographers, compilers of and commentators on the opinions of ancient Greek philosophers. ‘Doxographers’ is an English translation of the modern Latin term coined by Hermann Diels for the title of his work Doxographi Graeci (1879). Here Diels assembled a series of Greek texts in which the views of Greek philosophers from the archaic to the Hellenistic era are set out in a relatively schematic way. In a lengthy introduction Diels reconstructed the history of the writing of these opinions, the doxography; this reconstruction is now a standard part of the historiography of ancient philosophy. The doxography itself is important both as a source of information for early Greek philosophy and also because later writers, ancient, medieval, and modern, often relied on it rather than primary materials. The crucial text for Diels’s reconstruction was the book Physical Opinions of the Philosophers (Placita Philosophorum), traditionally ascribed to Plutarch but no longer thought to be by him. The work lists the views of various philosophers and schools under subject headings such as “What Is Nature?” and “On the Rainbow.” Out of this work and others Diels reconstructed a Collection of Opinions that he ascribed to Aetius (A.D. c.100), a person mentioned by Theodoret (fifth century) as the author of such a work. Diels took Aetius’s ultimate source to be Theophrastus, who wrote a more discursive Physical Opinions. Because Aetius mentions the views of Hellenistic philosophers writing after Theophrastus, Diels postulated an intermediate source, which he called the Vetusta Placita (c.100 B.C.). The most accessible doxographical material is in the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (A.D. c.200), who is, however, mainly interested in biography. He arranges philosophers by schools and treats each school chronologically. I.M. dravya, in Indian philosophies, substance. In Nyaya-Vaishesika all living and non-living things are substances, possessors of qualities (gunas) and causes of effects. Substances come in nine varieties: earth, air, fire, water, ether, time, space, minds, and bodies. For Jainism, there are six types of substances: the principles of motion and rest, space, time, minds, and bodies. Each (except time) is extended and each (except bodies) is immaterial. Visistadvaita, claiming six sorts of substance, includes God as a substance, as does Dvaita, on which all other substances depend for existence. Typically, schools of Buddhism deny that there are any substances, holding that what appear to be such are only bundles of events or states. K.E.Y. dravyasat (Sanskrit, ‘existence as a thing’ or, more loosely, ‘primary existence’), a category used by Indian Buddhist scholars to label the double truth dravyasat 243 -   243 most basic kind of existence that entities can have. It was usually opposed to prajñaptisat, ‘existence as a designation’ or ‘secondary existence’. According to most varieties of Buddhist metaphysics, anything that can be an object of thought or designation must exist in some sense; but some things exist primarily, really, in their own right (dravya-sat), while others exist only as objects of linguistic reference (prajñapti-sat). An exple of the first kind would be a moment of physical form; an exple of the second kind would be an ordinary object such as a pot, since this is composed of a series of existents of the first kind. P.J.G. dre argument.

DESCARTES. Dretske, Fred (b.1932), erican philosopher best known for his externalistic representational naturalism about experience, belief, perception, and knowledge. Educated at Purdue University and the University of Minnesota, he has taught at the University of Wisconsin (1960–88) and Stanford University (1988–98). In Seeing and Knowing (1969) Dretske develops an account of non-epistemic seeing, denying that seeing is believing – that for a subject S to see a dog, say, S must apply a concept to it (dog, animal, furry). The dog must look some way to S (S must visually differentiate the dog, but need not conceptually categorize it). This contrasts with epistemic seeing, where for S to see that a dog is before him, S would have to believe that it is a dog. In Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981), a mind-independent objective sense of ‘information’ is applied to propositional knowledge and belief content. “Information” replaced Dretske’s earlier notion of a “conclusive reason” (1971). Knowing that p requires having a true belief caused or causally sustained by an event that carries the information that p. Also, the semantic content of a belief is identified with the most specific digitally encoded piece of information to which it becomes selectively sensitive during a period of learning. In Explaining Behavior (1988), Dretske’s account of representation (and misrepresentation) takes on a teleological flavor. The semantic meaning of a structure is now identified with its indicator function. A structure recruited for a causal role of indicating F’s, and sustained in that causal role by this ability, comes to mean F – thereby providing a causal role for the content of cognitive states, and avoiding epiphenomenalism about semantic content. In Naturalizing the Mind (1995), Dretske’s theory of meaning is applied to the problems of consciousness and qualia. He argues that the empirically significant features of conscious experience are exhausted by their functional (and hence representational) roles of indicating external sensible properties. He rejects the views that consciousness is composed of a higher-order hierarchy of mental states and that qualia are due to intrinsic, non-representational features of the underlying physical systems. Dretske is also known for his contributions on the nature of contrastive statements, laws of nature, causation, and epistemic non-closure, ong other topics.  INFORMATION THEORY, NATURALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, QUALIA. F.A. dual-aspect theory.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. dual-attribute theory.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. dualism, the view that reality consists of two disparate parts. The crux of dualism is an apparently unbridgeable gap between two incommensurable orders of being that must be reconciled if our assumption that there is a comprehensible universe is to be justified. Dualism is exhibited in the pre-Socratic division between appearance and reality; Plato’s realm of being containing eternal Ideas and realm of becoming containing changing things; the medieval division between finite man and infinite God; Descartes’s substance dualism of thinking mind and extended matter; Hume’s separation of fact from value; Kant’s division between empirical phenomena and transcendental noumena; the epistemological double-aspect theory of Jes and Russell, who postulate a neutral substance that can be understood in separate ways either as mind or brain; and Heidegger’s separation of being and time that inspired Sartre’s contrast of being and nothingness. The doctrine of two truths, the sacred and the profane or the religious and the secular, is a dualistic response to the conflict between religion and science. Descartes’s dualism is taken to be the source of the mind–body problem. If the mind is active unextended thinking and the body is passive unthinking extension, how can these essentially unlike and independently existing substances interact causally, and how can mental ideas represent material things? How, in other words, can the mind know and influence the body, and how can the body affect the mind? Descartes said mind and body interact and that ideas represent material things without resembling them, but dre argument dualism 244 -   244 could not explain how, and concluded merely that God makes these things happen. Proposed dualist solutions to the mind–body problem are Malebranche’s occasionalism (mind and body do not interact but God makes them appear to); Leibniz’s preestablished harmony ong noninteracting monads; and Spinoza’s property dualism of mutually exclusive but parallel attributes expressing the one substance God. Recent mind–body dualists are Popper and John C. Eccles. Monistic alternatives to dualism include Hobbes’s view that the mental is merely the epiphenomena of the material; Berkeley’s view that material things are collections of mental ideas; and the contemporary materialist view of Smart, Armstrong, and Paul and Patricia Churchland that the mind is the brain. A classic treatment of these matters is Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Revolt Against Dualism. Dualism is related to binary thinking, i.e., to systems of thought that are two-valued, such as logic in which theorems are valid or invalid, epistemology in which knowledge claims are true or false, and ethics in which individuals are good or bad and their actions are right or wrong. In The Quest for Certainty, Dewey finds that all modern problems of philosophy derive from dualistic oppositions, particularly between spirit and nature. Like Hegel, he proposes a synthesis of oppositions seen as theses versus antitheses. Recent attacks on the view that dualistic divisions can be explicitly described or maintained have been made by Wittgenstein, who offers instead a classification scheme based on overlapping fily resemblances; by Quine, who casts doubt on the division between analytic or formal truths based on meanings and synthetic or empirical truths based on facts; and by Derrida, who challenges our ability to distinguish between the subjective and the objective. But despite the extremely difficult problems posed by ontological dualism, and despite the cogency of many arguments against dualistic thinking, Western philosophy continues to be predominantly dualistic, as witnessed by the indispensable use of two-valued matrixes in logic and ethics and by the intractable problem of rendering mental intentions in terms of material mechanisms or vice versa.  METAPHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. R.A.W. dualism, Cartesian.DUALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. dualism, ethical.ZOROASTRIANISM. Ducasse, C(urt) J(ohn) (1881–1969), Frenchborn erican philosopher of mind and aesthetician. He arrived in the United States in 1900, received his Ph.D. from Harvard (1912), and taught at the University of Washington (1912–26) and Brown University (1926–58). His most important work is Nature, Mind and Death (1951). The key to his general theory is a non-Humean view of causation: the relation of causing is triadic, involving (i) an initial event, (ii) the set of conditions under which it occurs, and (iii) a resulting event; the initial event is the cause, the resulting event is the effect. On the basis of this view he constructed a theory of categories – an explication of such concepts as those of substance, property, mind, matter, and body. ong the theses he defended were that minds are substances, that they causally interact with bodies, and that human beings are free despite every event’s having a cause. In A Critical Exination of the Belief in a Life after Death (1961), he concluded that “the balance of the evidence so far obtained is on the side of . . . survival.” Like Schopenhauer, whom he admired, Ducasse was receptive to the religious and philosophical writings of the Far East. He wrote with remarkable objectivity on the philosophical problems associated with so-called paranormal phenomena. Ducasse’s epistemological views are developed in Truth, Knowledge and Causation (1968). He sets forth a realistic theory of perception (he says, about sense-qualities, “Berkeley is right and the realists are wrong” and, of material things, “the realists are right and Berkeley is wrong”). He provides the classical formulation of the “adverbial theory” or sense-qualities, according to which such qualities are not objects of experience or awareness but ways of experiencing or of being aware. One does not perceive a red material object by sensing a red sense-datum; for then perceiving would involve three entities – (i) the perceiving subject, (ii) the red sense-datum, and (iii) the red material object. But one may perceive a red material object by sensing redly; then the only entities involved are (i) the perceiving subject and (ii) the material object. Ducasse observes that, analogously, although it may be natural to say “dancing a waltz,” it would be more accurate to speak of “dancing waltzily.”  PERCEPTION, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. R.M.C. duck – rabbit.FIGURE– GROUND. Duhem, Pierre-Maurice-Marie (1861–1916), dualism, Cartesian Duhem, Pierre-Maurice-Marie 245 -   245 French physicist who wrote extensively on the history and philosophy of science. Like Georg Helm, Wilhelm Ostwald, and others, he was an energeticist, believing generalized thermodynics to be the foundation of all of physics and chemistry. Duhem spent his whole scientific life advancing energetics, from his failed dissertation in physics (a version of which was accepted as a dissertation in mathematics), published as Le potentiel thermodynique (1886), to his mature treatise, Traité d’énergétique (1911). His scientific legacy includes the Gibbs-Duhem and DuhemMargules equations. Possibly because his work was considered threatening by the Parisian scientific establishment or because of his right-wing politics and fervent Catholicism, he never obtained the position he merited in the intellectual world of Paris. He taught at the provincial universities of Lille, Rennes, and, finally, Bordeaux. Duhem’s work in the history and philosophy of science can be viewed as a defense of the aims and methods of energetics; whatever Duhem’s initial motivation, his historical and philosophical work took on a life of its own. Topics of interest to him included the relation between history of science and philosophy of science, the nature of conceptual change, the historical structure of scientific knowledge, and the relation between science and religion. Duhem was an anti-atomist (or anti-Cartesian); in the contemporary debates about light and magnetism, Duhem’s anti-atomist stance was also directed against the work of Maxwell. According to Duhem, atomists resolve the bodies perceived by the senses into smaller, imperceptible bodies. The explanation of observable phenomena is then referred to these imperceptible bodies and their motions, suitably combined. Duhem’s rejection of atomism was based on his instrumentalism (or fictionalism): physical theories are not explanations but representations; they do not reveal the true nature of matter, but give general rules of which laws are particular cases; theoretical propositions are not true or false, but convenient or inconvenient. An important reason for treating physics as nonexplanatory was Duhem’s claim that there is general consensus in physics and none in metaphysics – thus his insistence on the autonomy of physics from metaphysics. But he also thought that scientific representations become more complete over time until they gain the status of a natural classification. Accordingly, Duhem attacked the use of models by some scientists, e.g. Faraday and Maxwell. Duhem’s rejection of atomism was coupled with a rejection of inductivism, the doctrine that the only physical principles are general laws known through induction, based on observation of facts. Duhem’s rejection forms a series of theses collectively known as the Duhem thesis: experiments in physics are observations of phenomena accompanied by interpretations; physicists therefore do not submit single hypotheses, but whole groups of them, to the control of experiment; thus, experimental evidence alone cannot conclusively falsify hypotheses. For similar reasons, Duhem rejected the possibility of a crucial experiment. In his historical studies, Duhem argued that there were no abrupt discontinuities between medieval and early modern science – the so-called continuity thesis; that religion played a positive role in the development of science in the Latin West; and that the history of physics could be seen as a cumulative whole, defining the direction in which progress could be expected. Duhem’s philosophical works were discussed by the founders of twentieth-century philosophy of science, including Mach, Poincaré, the members of the Vienna Circle, and Popper. A revival of interest in Duhem’s philosophy began with Quine’s reference in 1953 to the Duhem thesis (also known as the Duhem-Quine thesis). As a result, Duhem’s philosophical works were translated into English – as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1954) and To Save the Phenomena (1969). By contrast, few of Duhem’s extensive historical works – Les origines de la statique (2 vols., 1906–08), Études sur Léonard de Vinci (3 vols., 1906–13), and Système du monde (10 vols., 1913–59), e.g. – have been translated, with five volumes of the Système du monde actually remaining in manuscript form until 1954–59. Unlike his philosophical work, Duhem’s historical work was not sympathetically received by his influential contemporaries, notably George Sarton. His supposed main conclusions were rejected by the next generation of historians of science, who presented modern science as discontinuous with that of the Middle Ages. This view was echoed by historically oriented philosophers of science who, from the early 1960s, emphasized discontinuities as a recurrent feature of change in science – e.g. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).