PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
W.L.R. cave, allegory of the.PLATO. Cavell, Stanley Louis (b.1926), American
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
fundamental 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
examined 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
American philosophy (The Senses of Walden, 1972; and the chapters on Emerson in
This New Yet Unapproachable America, 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 melodrama 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 4065A-
AM 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, among 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
“unnameable” 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 example, 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 example, 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 4065A-
AM 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 examine 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,
Cambridge.CAMBRIDGE 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 fundamentally 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 examination 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
4065A- AM 130 charity, principle of.MEANING. Charron,
Pierre (1541–1603), French Catholic theologian who became 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 became 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 4065A- AM 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 Names, a Confucian program 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 became 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 became 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 names of the two most important trigrams
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 trigrams, the
doubling up of two trigrams forms a hexagram, and there are a total of
sixtyfour hexagrams. The first two hexagrams are also named 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 family backcheng
ming Ch’ien-fu Lun 132 4065A- AM 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 names 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 camp, 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 fundamental 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 4065A-
AM 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 became 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; among 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 4065A- AM 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 came 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
4065A- AM 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 became
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 among the intellectuals. Analytic
philosophy, existentialism, and hermeneutics all have their followers; today even
radicalism has its attraction for certain young scholars. Even though
mainstream 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. Among 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 same 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. Among
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). Among
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 samadhi), 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 became
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 American 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 4065A- AM 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 famous 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 fundamental categories. (f) In
epistemology, he famously 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, examples, or counterexamples 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 same time – but in a different and occasionally
incompatible vein – Saul Kripke formally captured the power of Brouwer’s
counterexamples without recourse to recursive functions and without invoking
either the creating subject or the notion of free choice. chit choice sequence
137 4065A- AM 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, Noam (b.1928), preeminent American
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 grammar 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 grammar than had
previously been given (Syntactic Structures, 1957). He has since developed a number
of highly influential frameworks for the study of natural language grammar
(e.g., Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965; Lectures on Government and
Binding, 1981; The Minimalist Program, 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 Grammar 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 Grammar entails the existence of
innate linguistic principles. Secondly, the hypothesis of a language faculty
entails that our linguistic abilities, at least so far as grammar 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,
GRAMMAR, 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 Diagram 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
fundamental ideas of Neo-Confucian metaphysics. Consequently, heated debates
arose concerning Chou’s diagram, 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 DAMASCUS.
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, Noam ch’üan 138 4065A- AM 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 examinations 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 4065A- AM 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 family 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 same time heeding the importance of moral tradition
as a guide to conduct. A.S.C. Church, Alonzo (1903–95), American logician, mathematician,
and philosopher, known in pure logic for his discovery and application of the
Church lambda operator, one of the central ideas of the Church lambda 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 lambda operator enables direct, unambiguous, symbolic
representation of a range of philosophically and mathematically important
expressions previously representable only ambiguously 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 names of) their
truth-values. CHURCH’S THESIS, COMPUTABILITY,
FORMALIZATION, HILBERT, HILBERT’S PROGRAM, LOGICISM, RECURSIVE FUNCTION THEORY,
SECOND-ORDER LOGIC, TRUTH TABLE, TYPE THEORY. J.Cor. church fathers.PATRISTIC
AUTHORS. Churchland, Patricia Smith (b.1943), Canadianborn American 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
4065A- AM 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 framework,
others as transformed through the sciences. The same 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 American 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 framework. 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
framework 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
program, 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 American
Mathematical Society in April 1935, “that the notion of an effectively
calculable function of positive inteChurchland, Paul M. Church’s thesis 141
4065A- AM 141 gers should be identified with that of a
recursive function. . . .” This proposal has been called Church’s thesis ever
since Kleene used that name in his Introduction to Metamathematics (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 came 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 metamathematics 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, namely 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 fundamental 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
fundamental notions in mathematical logic. Indeed, its proper understanding is
crucial for (judging) the philosophical significance of central
metamathematical 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 example, 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 fundamental
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
4065A- AM 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 framework 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 4065A- AM 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 amateur, 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 example 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 same words in the same order,
nor can logical or grammatical principles transform one into the other. Rather,
they have the same propositional content: they say the same thing in different
words. That is why appealing to one of them to provide reason for believing the
other amounts 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 game 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 example 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 same
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 extramental 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 extramental; (2) that no
coherent account of what extramental 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 among 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 4065A- AM 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, Samuel (1675–1729), English philosopher,
preacher, and theologian. Born in Norwich, he was educated at Cambridge, where
he came 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. James, 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 James Harrington
(1611–77) in seventeenth-century England, modified by eighteenth-century
British and Continental writers and important for the thought of the American
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 4065A-
AM 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,
Adams, and other American colonial and revolutionary thinkers; and some
contemporary communitarian critics of American culture return to classical
republican ideas. MACHIAVELLI, POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY. J.B.S. class paradox.UNEXPECTED EXAMINATION 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 among the Jews, so, for Clement, philosophy among 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(illiam) K(ingdon) (1845–79), British mathematician and philosopher. Educated
at King’s College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he began giving
public lectures in 1868, when he was appointed a fellow of Trinity, and in 1870
became 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 example. 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 stamp upon our character
forever.” Clifford thus rejected Catholicism, to which he had subscribed
originally, and became an agnostic. James’s famous essay “The Will to Believe”
criticizes Clifford’s view. According to James, 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 example, 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 example, 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 4065A-
AM 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, namely: 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 Samuel Rutherforth, William 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 am’), the starting point of Descartes’s system of
knowledge. In his Discourse on the Method (1637), he observes that the
proposition ‘I am 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
4065A- AM 147 is considering both Birmingham and
Boston. She cannot move to both, so she must choose. Dissonance is experienced
by the person if in choosing, say, Birmingham, she acquires knowledge of bad or
unwelcome features of Birmingham and of good or welcome aspects of Boston. The
amount of dissonance depends on the relative intensities of dissonant elements.
Hence, if the only dissonant factor is her learning that Boston is cooler than
Birmingham, 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, namely, 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. ETHICS, INSTRUMENTALISM, INTUITION,
RATIONALITY. 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 programs 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 4065A- AM 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 became 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 grammar, 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 fundamental 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 program 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 programs to parse natural
language input and produce appropriate syntactic and semantic representations.
These differences in objectives among 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
AIprograms 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 frames
(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 example, we have little
awareness of what occurs when we recognize an object as a chair or remember the
name of a client. Some cognitive functions, though, seem to be transparent to
consciousness. For example, 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 4065A- AM 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 example, 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 grammars that they
test by probing whether they generate the sentences of the language and no
others. While grammars 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 grammatical 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 example,
shortly after Chomsky introduced his transformational grammar, psychologists
such as George Miller sought evidence that transformations figured directly in
human language processing. From this beginning, a more complex but enduring
relationship among 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 4065A-
AM 150 solving, such as that
which figures in solving puzzles, playing games, 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
programs that can utilize the same 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 example, 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 same
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
same 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 4065A- AM 151
ularly adapted to the dynamics 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 examined 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 William James, 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 dynamic 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 examining 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 example, 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 4065A-
AM 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. CASSIRER, KANT, NEOKANTIANISM.
H.v.d.L. coherence theory of justification.COHERENTISM. coherence theory of
knowledge.COHERENTISM. 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 amounts 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 4065A- AM 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.
Among 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 4065A- AM 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 among 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 among
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 4065A- AM 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 same 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 among 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 amplified 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 came 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 4065A- AM 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 became 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 came 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 Islamic states are winning it new
readers. CROCE, HEGEL, IDEALISM,
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, WILSON. A.D. color realism.QUALITIES. 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 fundamental 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 4065A- AM 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
familiar 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, namely 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 Lambda 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 same reason it has found several applications
in computer science in the construction and analysis of programming languages.
The techniques of combinatory logic have also been applied in theoretical
linguistics, e.g. in so-called Montague grammar. 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
4065A- AM 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 Iamblichus 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
Ammonius, 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, nicknamed 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
4065A- AM 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 examined; 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 Iamblichus’s pupil Dexippus on the same 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 example, with the surviving
“commentaries” of Ammonius. 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 example, 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 James 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. ARISTOTLE, BOETHIUS,
NEOPLATONISM, PORPHYRY. J.M.D. 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 Pergamum. 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 4065A-
AM 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 Iamblichus (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 Damascius (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 game; similarly, if each
in a group watches the same 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 4065A-
AM 161 dren might promote the
common good without being public goods.
AQUINAS, JUSTICE, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, SUBSIDIARITY.
J.B.M. common notions.STOICISM. common sense philosophy.SCOTTISH COMMON SENSE
PHILOSOPHY. common sensibles.ARISTOTLE, SENSUS COMMUNIS. common
sensism.SCOTTISH COMMON SENSE PHILOSOPHY. communication theory.INFORMATION
THEORY. communism.POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. communitarianism.POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
commutative justice.JUSTICE. compactness.DEDUCTION. 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 familiar 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 example, 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 example, 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 same 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 4065A-
AM 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 Adam de Wodeham 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, among 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 4065A- AM 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 same 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 same 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
program.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 4065A-
AM 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 programming 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 programs
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 program that directs the processing. The processor has an arithmetic-logic
unit for transforming data, and a control for executing the program. 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 examples. 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
programming languages. The higher-level languages are designed for use by human
programmers, 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. Programs 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 programming language has
instructional means for carrying out three kinds of operations: data operations
and transfers, transfers of control from one part of the program to the other,
and program self-modification. Von Neumann designed the first modern
programming language. A programming 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
fundamental 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 4065A-
AM 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 same 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
same and performs the same 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 programming 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 program) 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 programs 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 program deductively. Accordingly, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for
formal arithmetic apply to computer E. It follows from these theorems that no
program can enable computer E to decide of an arbitrary statecomputer theory
computer theory 166 4065A- AM 166 ment of L whether or not that statement
is true. More strongly, there cannot even be a program 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 programs is to instruct
computers in tasks for which they are superior to humans. Computers are being
designed and programmed 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 same
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, dynamically 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, dynamism, 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 dynamic 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 example, 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 amplifies 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 sample 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 4065A- AM 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 example, 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 programming
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, CYBERNETICS, DETERMINISM, GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREMS,
SELF-REPRODUCING AUTOMATON, TURING MACHINE. A.W.B. 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 same 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 4065A-
AM 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 dynamics 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 same 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 same 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 example 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 same
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 same
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 4065A- AM 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 same 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, namely, 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 became his major concern. His break with metaphysics in the Traité
des systèmes (Treaconceptual polarity Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 170
4065A- AM 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 amounting merely to
not-(p & not-q). At the same 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 ambiguity 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 among 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 4065A- AM 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 among 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 example, 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
fundamentally 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 examples in the
preceding paragraph illustrate qualitative confirmation, for no numerical
values of the degree of confirmation were mentioned. (ii) If a gambler, 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 4065A- AM 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. Among 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 fundamentally from confirmation. Many (real or apparent) paradoxes of
confirmation have been posed; the most famous 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, namely, 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,
namely, 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 same 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
example 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
4065A- AM 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 became
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 familial, 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 example 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 4065A-
AM 174 strongly connected, since
either a o b or b o a for any two numbers, including the case where a % b. An
example 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 names 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 Williams, 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 4065A- AM 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 example, 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 same 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 same ultimate aim, and so is agent-neutral. connective,
propositional consequentialism 176 4065A-
AM 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 name (‘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
amounts 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 familiar methods.” After 1904,
Hilbert pursued a new way of giving consistency proofs. This novel way of
proceeding, still aiming for the same goal, was to make use of the formalization
of the theory at hand. However, in the formulation of Hilbert’s Program 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 4065A- AM 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 examples 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 same 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 PROGRAM, PROOF THEORY.
W.S. consistency, axiom of.AXIOM OF CONSISTENCY. consistency,
semantic.CONSISTENCY. consistency, syntactic.CONSISTENCY. Constant, Benjamin,
in full, Henri-Benjamin 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 Madame de Staël and intervened in
parliamentary debates. His pamphlets opposed both extremes, the Jacobin and the
Bonapartist. Impressed by Rousseau’s Social Contract, he came 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
parliamentary democracy, separation of church and state, and a bill of rights.
The high point of his political career came with membership in the Tribunat
(1800–02), a consultative chamber 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). Fundamentally
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. Biancamaria 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
game.GAME THEORY. constative.SPEECH ACT THEORY. constitution, a relation
between concrete particuconsistency, axiom of constitution 178 4065A- AM 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 name, but
Dewey, Popper, Austin, and Wittgenstein are arguably among 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 amount
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
4065A- AM 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 same questions as more traditional theorists,
or answer them in the same way. Traditional theories of justification are
framed 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 same period flourished in
the Anglo-American 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. Among 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 became better known in the
Anglo-American 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 examining 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, Gadamer and Ricoeur must be mentioned. The structuralist movement in
France added another connotation to ‘Continental philosocontiguity Continental
philosophy 180 4065A- AM 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 became 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 4065A- AM 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 same cardinal
number if there is a one-to-one correspondence between them. For example, the
function that sends 0 to 0, 1 to 2, 2 to 4, etc., shows that the set of even
natural numbers has the same cardinal number as the set of all natural numbers,
namely 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 became 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 family 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 4065A-
AM 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
4065A- AM 183
KANT, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CONTRACT, SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. J.Ham.
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 familiar 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 example, ‘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 4065A-
AM 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 named 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 name 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 4065A- AM 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 ambiguity 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 ambiguity
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 ambiguity:
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.
AMBIGUITY, 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 dynamically 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 became 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 4065A- AM 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 example, 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^, amounts 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. counterexample.COUNTERINSTANCE.
counterfactual analysis of causation.CAUSATION. counterfactuals, also called
contrary-to-fact conditionals, subjunctive conditionals that presupcorner
quotes counterfactuals 187 4065A-
AM 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 famous’ 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 example, 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 example. 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 4065A- AM 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 counterexample.
(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 example, 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 example, would be the statement ‘If grass is either red
or green, then grass is red’. (3) A particular example 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 name ‘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 examples 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 4065A- AM 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 among 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, became minister of education, and introduced philosophy into
the curriculum. His eclecticism, transformed into a spiritualism and cult of
the “juste milieu,” became 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 among its premises. The
names 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 William 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 examples 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 4065A-
AM 190 terms ‘explication’ and
‘explanation’ became 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 example, let Hx % ‘x is
hit by hammer’, 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 examples 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 example: 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 4065A-
AM 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, William 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 4065A- AM 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, “Lamp 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 fundamental doctrines of the Torah, Crescas must address the question
discussed by his predecessors Maimonides and Gersonides, namely 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 4065A- AM 193 knowledge, justification, justice,
rightness, and identity (including personal identity and event identity), among
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 American legal realists of the 1920s and 1930s,
the jurisprudential program 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
American 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
among 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 4065A- AM 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 same 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 became 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 Giambattista
Vico (1911) and a famous commentary on Hegel, What Is Living and What Is
critical theory Croce, Benedetto 195 4065A-
AM 195 Dead in the Philosophy of
Hegel (1907), in which he advanced his conception of the “dialectic of
distincts” as more fundamental 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 example, 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 examples 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
programs.
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 same 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 4065A- AM 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 came 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, Damaris, Lady Masham (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 framework. 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.CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS, HYLOZOISM. cultural
relativism.RELATIVISM. Culverwel, Nathaniel.CAMBRIDGE 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 family 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 example,
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 parameter nk is adjustable, the law specifies a family of curves – one
for each numerCudworth, Damaris curve-fitting problem 197 4065A- AM 197
ical value of the parameter. Curve fitting may be used to determine the
best-fitting member of the family, thereby effecting a measurement of the
theoretical parameter, 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 family 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
families run a greater risk of making grossly false assumptions about the true
form of the law. Intuitively, the solution is to choose a simplefamily of
curves that maintains a reasonable degree of fit. The simplicity of a family of
curves is measured by the paucity of parameters. 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 parameters, 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 example 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 example 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 among different curves that fit
the data exactly. Then the problem is to choose the simplest curve from among
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 championed 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 parameters (coefficients) obtained by different colligations of facts
as the consilience of inductions. Different colligations of facts (say on the
same gas at different volume or for other gases) may yield good agreement among
independently measured values of parameters (like the molecular density of the
gas and Boltzmann’s constant). By identifying different parameters 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 family 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 among statisticians that the paucity of parameters 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 4065A- AM 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 example 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
dramatically 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 example 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 amplify 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 example, 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 4065A- AM 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).
COMPUTER THEORY,
INFORMATION THEORY, SYSTEMS THEORY. F.A. Cynics, a classical Greek
philosophical school characterized by asceticism and emphasis on the
sufficiency of virtue for happiness (eudaimonia), boldness in speech, and
shamelessness 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 became 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 came 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 example, he
lived in a wine cask, ate whatever scraps he came across, and wrote approvingly
of cannibalism and incest. One story reports that he carried a lighted lamp 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 shameless as a dog. Diogenes’ most famous 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 famous incident
involving Crates is his marriage to Hipparchia, who took up the Cynic way of
life despite her family’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 4065A- AM 200
tippus of Cyrene (fifth-fourth century B.C.), an associate of Socrates.
Aristippus came to Athens because of Socrates’ fame 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. EUDAIMONISM,
HEDONISM,
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 4065A- AM 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 same valuation led him to postulate the eternality of
terrestrial life. Nietzsche was familiar with Czolbe’s works and incorporated
some of his themes into his philosophy.
.
Czolbe, Heinrich Czolbe,
Heinrich 202 4065A- AM 202 d’Ailly, Pierre (1350–1420), French
Ockhamist 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 among 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 sacramentology 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 Dynamics. 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 became
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 examination
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 Dream
(1769), Diderot’s dialogical apology for materialism.
Damascius (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 Damascus, 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 Ammonius, but came
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.
Danto, Arthur Coleman
(b.1924), American philosopher of art and art history who has also contributed
to the philosophies of history, action, knowledge, science, and metaphilosophy.
Among 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 dreams 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 Gamble. 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 Gamble’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 dynamic).
Moreover, this is not an isolated example. 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 example, 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 came 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 Lamarck 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 came to be limited to just those useful
traits that arose through natural selection. For example, the sutures in the
skulls of mammals make parturition easier, but they are not adaptations in an
evolutionary sense because Danto, Arthur Coleman Darwinism 204 4065A- AM 204
they arose in ancestors that did not give birth to live young, as is indicated
by these same 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 became 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
became 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 Lamarckian 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 same 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 example, he was willing to
accept a minor role for Lamarckian 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 Lamarckian inheritance and insisting that evolutionary change is always
gradual. Eventually Darwinism became 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 4065A- AM 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 same 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 among
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 example, 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), American 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 same 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), namely, 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 4065A- AM 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.
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 example,
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 ample evidence), Church proved that classical predicate logic is not
decidable.
.
DECIDABILITY. 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 4065A- AM 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 Games and Economic Behavior (1946), John von Neumann
and Oskar Morgenstern undid (2) by pushing (1) further: ordinal preferences
among 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
among gambles, 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, Ramsey 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 among gambles. 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 became 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, namely, “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 amounts 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) among
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 among non-candidates as a way to form social
preferences among candidates, thus ruling out the preferences among gambles
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 among 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 Ramsey
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 4065A- AM 208
Alongside such basic properties as transitivity and connexity, a workhorse
among Savage’s assumptions was the “sure-thing principle”: Preferences among
acts having the same 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 among
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 Abraham Wald’s Theory of Statistical
Decision Functions (1950), treating statistical estimation, experimental
design, and hypothesis testing as zero-sum “games against nature.” For an
account of the opposite assimilation, of game theory to probabilistic decision
theory, see Skyrms, Dynamics 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.
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 fundamental
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 fundamental to our cultural practices and languages. Thus there
is no “ordinary language” uncontaminated 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 4065A-
AM 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 among
pieces of language and among 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
fundamental 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
fundamental 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 fundamental 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 fundamental 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 4065A- AM 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
infamous 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 ambiguous, 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 am spilling beer. The
sentence ‘I am 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 am
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 same 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 4065A- AM 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 example, 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.GRAMMAR, 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 example, 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 4065A- AM 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. William
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 example, ‘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 4065A- AM 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 same 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 differentiam: definition by genus and difference; same 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,
namely, 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 example 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 4065A- AM 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 same
terminology, and likewise for function expressions and their associated
functions.
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
4065A- AM 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.
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 same 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 same in all times and places.
Religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam 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. Among 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 American deists.
Orthodox writers in this period use ‘deism’ as a vague term of abuse. By the
late eighteenth century, the term came 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
family, society, and the state in postrevolutionary Europe. Against
Enlightenment ideals, he reclaimed Thomism, defended the hereditary and
absolute monarchy, and championed ultramontanism (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 4065A-
AM 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.
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).
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 4065A- AM 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 ambition 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 became 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 became 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 framework 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, Hamilton, 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.
Dennett, Daniel C(lement)
(b.1942), American 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 4065A- AM 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 same things, i.e., have the same
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 same 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 same 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 same 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
4065A- AM 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 same 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 famous 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 among deontic logicians is
that SDL genuinely succumbs to the deontic operator deontic paradoxes 220
4065A- AM 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 example, 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 example, 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 flames). 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) examples 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 predicament and cannot know either proposition. For
example, 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 famous problem of the Cartesian circle. Another example
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 example, 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 4065A- AM 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. FOUNDATIONALISM,
IDEALISM, METAPHYSICAL REALISM, PHENOMENALISM, SUBSTANCE, SUPERVENIENCE. J.V.C.
dependence, causal.CAUSATION. dependence, epistemic.DEPENDENCE. dependence,
ontological.DEPENDENCE. dependent beauty.BEAUTY. 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 4065A- AM 222
Kendall Walton (Mimesis as Make-Believe) argues that depiction holds by virtue
of objects serving as props in reasonably rich and vivid visual games 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 framework 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 name. 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 4065A- AM 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 same 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 dreams 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 sample 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 dramatic 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 among
Descartes’s contemporaries, and six sets of objections by celebrated philosophers
and theologians (including Mersenne, Hobbes, Arnauld, and Gassendi) were
published in the same 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 mammoth 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 became 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 same 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 am sitting here by the fire” may be false, since there is no guarantee
that my present experience is not a dream. The dream argument (as it has come
to be called) leaves intact the truths of mathematics, since “whether I am
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 dramatizes 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 am nothing, so long as I think I am something. . . . I
am, 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 famous
phrase “Cogito ergo sum” (“I am 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, among 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 4065A-
AM 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 fundamental 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 fundamental 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, namely 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 am what I am, 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 same 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 am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in
a ship, but that I am very closely Descartes, René Descartes, René 226
4065A- AM 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 am 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 names.CAUSAL THEORY OF
PROPER NAMES. 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
4065A- AM 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 same
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 name 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,
namely, 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 4065A- AM 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), American 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 famous
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 fundamental 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
fundamental. 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 4065A- AM 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 fundamental 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 dynamic 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. Fundamental questions of value and
human fulfillment ultimately bear on our conception of the human commuDewey,
John Dewey, John 230 4065A- AM 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
fundamental 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 paramount 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 America, 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, Putnam, and Rorty, among 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 fundamental pursuits of life, the three others being those of
wealth (artha), pleasure (kama), and spiritual liberation (moksha). In the
Bhagavad Gita, dharma was made famous 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
Pramanavarttika (“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 4065A- AM 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 became 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 pamphlets 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 program.
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 example, 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 4065A-
AM 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, came 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 became 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 NAMES. 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 4065A-
AM 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 mammal’, whatever is included under ‘whale’
is included under ‘mammal’. 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, dramatist, novelist, and art critic, a
champion 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, Rameau’s Nephew (1767) and Jacques
the Fatalist (1765–84), his masterpieces. He innovatively theorized on drama
(Discourse on Dramatic 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 Dream (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 Grammatologie (1967), where he defines it
as “an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring.”
Différance is polysemic, but its key function is to name 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 framework 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 4065A- AM 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 same 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 4065A- AM 235
hermeneutical writings, which influenced Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, 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 framework.
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 same case. For example, 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 4065A- AM 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 American jurisdiction has adopted a
distinct, straightforward partial responsibility variant, but various analogous
doctrines and procedures are widely accepted. For example, 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 ment
al states (beliefs versus
desires). For example, 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 am 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 4065A- AM 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 am 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 NAMES. 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 example 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 4065A- AM 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.FUNDAMENTUM DIVISIONIS. distinction, mental.FUNDAMENTUM DIVISIONIS.
distinction, real.FUNDAMENTUM 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 same term in ‘A dog
bit the mailman’ is not distributed because it refers to only one dog. In time,
the idea of distribution came 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 ambiguous. 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 same 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 4065A- AM 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. Among 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 example, 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 4065A- AM 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
William Ockham; they are also endorsed by disciples of Ockham 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, OCKHAM. 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 4065A- AM 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 among 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 name
being among the first few drawn randomly from an urn may greatly enhance for
the reader the probability that the urn contains fairly few names 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 example, 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 4065A- AM 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 example, 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 4065A- AM 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 example of the first kind would be a moment of physical
form; an example 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. dream
argument.DESCARTES. Dretske, Fred (b.1932), American 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, among 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 James 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 dream argument dualism 244 4065A- AM 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 among 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 family 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 American
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. Among
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 Examination 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 4065A- AM 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 thermodynamics 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 thermodynamique (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). CRUCIAL EXPERIMENT,
MACH, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, QUINE, VIENNA CIRCLE. R.Ar. Duhem-Quine
thesis.DUHEM. Duhem-Quine thesis Duhem-Quine thesis 246 4065A- AM 246
Duhem thesis.DUHEM. Dummett, Michael A. E. (b.1925), British philosopher of
language, logic, and mathematics, noted for his sympathy for metaphysical
antirealism and for his exposition of the philosophy of Frege. Dummett regards
allegiance to the principle of bivalence as the hallmark of a realist attitude
toward any field of discourse. This is the principle that any meaningful
assertoric sentence must be determinately either true or else false,
independently of anyone’s ability to ascertain its truth-value by recourse to
appropriate empirical evidence or methods of proof. According to Dummett, the
sentences of any learnable language cannot have verification-transcendent truth
conditions and consequently we should query the intelligibility of certain
statements that realists regard as meaningful. On these grounds, he calls into
question realism about the past and realism in the philosophy of mathematics in
several of the papers in two collections of his essays, Truth and Other Enigmas
(1978) and The Seas of Language (1993). In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics
(1991), Dummett makes clear his view that the fundamental questions of
metaphysics have to be approached through the philosophy of language, and more
specifically through the theory of meaning. Here his philosophical debts to
Frege and Wittgenstein are manifest. Dummett has been the world’s foremost
expositor and champion of Frege’s philosophy, above all in two highly
influential books, Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973) and Frege: Philosophy
of Mathematics (1991). This is despite the fact that Frege himself advocated a
form of Platonism in semantics and the philosophy of mathematics that is quite
at odds with Dummett’s own anti-realist inclinations. It would appear, however,
from what Dummett says in Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993), that he
regards Frege’s great achievement as that of having presaged the “linguistic
turn” in philosophy that was to see its most valuable fruit in the later work
of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s principle that grasp of the meaning of a
linguistic expression must be exhaustively manifested by the use of that
expression is one that underlies Dummett’s own approach to meaning and his
anti-realist leanings. In logic and the philosophy of mathematics this is shown
in Dummett’s sympathy for the intuitionistic approach of Brouwer and Heyting,
which involves a repudiation of the law of excluded middle, as set forth in
Dummett’s own book on the subject, Elements of Intuitionism (1977). BROUWER, MATHEMATICAL INTUITIONISM,
METAPHYSICAL REALISM, WITTGENSTEIN. E.J.L. dunamis, also dynamis (Greek,
‘power’, ‘capacity’), as used by pre-Socratics such as Anaximander and
Anaxagoras, one of the elementary character-powers, such as the hot or the
cold, from which they believed the world was constructed. Plato’s early theory
of Forms borrowed from the concept of character-powers as causes present in
things; courage, e.g., is treated in the Laches as a power in the soul.
Aristotle also used the word in this sense to explain the origins of the
elements. In the Metaphysics (especially Book IX), Aristotle used dunamis in a
different sense to mean ‘potentiality’ in contrast to ‘actuality’ (energeia or
entelecheia). In the earlier sense of dunamis, matter is treated as
potentiality, in that it has the potential to receive form and so be actualized
as a concrete substance. In the later Aristotelian sense of dunamis, dormant
abilities are treated as potentialities, and dunamis is to energeia as sleeping
is to waking, or having sight to seeing.
ARISTOTLE, ENERGEIA. P.Wo. Duns Scotus, John (1266–1308), Scottish
Franciscan metaphysician and philosophical theologian. He lectured at Oxford,
Paris, and Cologne, where he died and his remains are still venerated.
Modifying Avicenna’s conception of metaphysics as the science of being qua being,
but univocally conceived, Duns Scotus showed its goal was to demonstrate God as
the Infinite Being (revealed to Moses as the “I am who am”), whose creative
will is the source of the world’s contingency. Out of love God fashioned each
creature with a unique “haecceity” or particularity formally distinct from its
individualized nature. Descriptively identical with others of its kind, this
nature, conceived in abstraction from haecceity, is both objectively real and
potentially universal, and provides the basis for scientific knowledge that
Peirce calls “Scotistic realism.” Duns Scotus brought many of Augustine’s
insights, treasured by his Franciscan predecessors, into the mainstream of the
Aristotelianism of his day. Their notion of the will’s “supersufficient
potentiality” for self-determination he showed can be reconciled with
Aristotle’s notion of an “active potency,” if one rejects the controDuhem
thesis Duns Scotus, John 247 4065A- AM 247 versial principle that “whatever is moved
is moved by another.” Paradoxically, Aristotle’s criteria for rational and
non-rational potencies prove the rationality of the will, not the intellect,
for he claimed that only rational faculties are able to act in opposite ways
and are thus the source of creativity in the arts. If so, then intellect, with
but one mode of acting determined by objective evidence, is non-rational, and
so is classed with active potencies called collectively “nature.” Only the
will, acting “with reason,” is free to will or nill this or that. Thus “nature”
and “will” represent Duns Scotus’s primary division of active potencies,
corresponding roughly to Aristotle’s dichotomy of non-rational and rational.
Original too is his development of Anselm’s distinction of the will’s twofold
inclination or “affection”: one for the advantageous, the other for justice.
The first endows the will with an “intellectual appetite” for happiness and
actualization of self or species; the second supplies the will’s specific
difference from other natural appetites, giving it an innate desire to love
goods objectively according to their intrinsic worth. Guided by right reason,
this “affection for justice” inclines the will to act ethically, giving it a
congenital freedom from the need always to seek the advantageous. Both natural
affections can be supernaturalized, the “affection for justice” by charity,
inclining us to love God above all and for his own sake; the affection for the
advantageous by the virtue of hope, inclining us to love God as our ultimate
good and future source of beatitude. Another influential psychological theory
is that of intuitive intellectual cognition, or the simple, non-judgmental
awareness of a hereand-now existential situation. First developed as a
necessary theological condition for the face-toface vision of God in the next
life, intellectual intuition is needed to explain our certainty of primary
contingent truths, such as “I think,” “I choose,” etc., and our awareness of
existence. Unlike Ockham, Duns Scotus never made intellectual intuition the basis
for his epistemology, nor believed it puts one in direct contact with any
extramental substance material or spiritual, for in this life, at least, our
intellect works through the sensory imagination. Intellectual intuition seems
to be that indistinct peripheral aura associated with each direct
sensory-intellectual cognition. We know of it explicitly only in retrospect
when we consider the necessary conditions for intellectual memory. It continued
to be a topic of discussion and dispute down to the time of Calvin, who,
influenced by the Scotist John Major, used an auditory rather than a visual
sense model of intellectual intuition to explain our “experience of God.” AUGUSTINE, AVICENNA, OCKHAM. A.B.W. Dutch
book, a bet or combination of bets whereby the bettor is bound to suffer a net
loss regardless of the outcome. A simple example would be a bet on a
proposition p at odds of 3 : 2 combined with a bet on not-p at the same odds,
the total amount of money at stake in each bet being five dollars. Under this
arrangement, if p turned out to be true one would win two dollars by the first
bet but lose three dollars by the second, and if p turned out to be false one
would win two dollars by the second bet but lose three dollars by the first.
Hence, whatever happened, one would lose a dollar. PROBABILITY. R.Ke. Dutch book argument, the
argument that a rational person’s degrees of belief must conform to the axioms
of the probability calculus, since otherwise, by the Dutch book theorem, he
would be vulnerable to a Dutch book. R.Ke. Dutch book theorem, the proposition
that anyone who (a) counts a bet on a proposition p as fair if the odds
correspond to his degree of belief that p is true and who (b) is willing to
make any combination of bets he would regard individually as fair will be
vulnerable to a Dutch book provided his degrees of belief do not conform to the
axioms of the probability calculus. Thus, anyone of whom (a) and (b) are true
and whose degree of belief in a disjunction of two incompatible propositions is
not equal to the sum of his degrees of belief in the two propositions taken
individually would be vulnerable to a Dutch book. R.Ke. duty, what a person is
obligated or required to do. Duties can be moral, legal, parental,
occupational, etc., depending on their foundations or grounds. Because a duty
can have several different grounds, it can be, say, both moral and legal,
though it need not be of more than one type. Natural duties are moral duties
people have simply in virtue of being persons, i.e., simply in virtue of their
nature. There is a prima facie duty to do something if and only if there is an
appropriate basis for doing that thing. For instance, a prima facie moral duty
will be one for which there is a moral basis, i.e., some moral grounds. This conDutch
book duty 248 4065A- AM 248 trasts with an all-things-considered
duty, which is a duty one has if the appropriate grounds that support it
outweigh any that count against it. Negative duties are duties not to do
certain things, such as to kill or harm, while positive duties are duties to
act in certain ways, such as to relieve suffering or bring aid. While the
question of precisely how to draw the distinction between negative and positive
duties is disputed, it is generally thought that the violation of a negative
duty involves an agent’s causing some state of affairs that is the basis of the
action’s wrongness (e.g., harm, death, or the breaking of a trust), whereas the
violation of a positive duty involves an agent’s allowing those states of affairs
to occur or be brought about. Imperfect duties are, in Kant’s words, “duties
which allow leeway in the interest of inclination,” i.e., that permit one to
choose among several possible ways of fulfilling them. Perfect duties do not
allow that leeway. Thus, the duty to help those in need is an imperfect duty
since it can be fulfilled by helping the sick, the starving, the oppressed,
etc., and if one chooses to help, say, the sick, one can choose which of the
sick to help. However, the duty to keep one’s promises and the duty not to harm
others are perfect duties since they do not allow one to choose which promises
to keep or which people not to harm. Most positive duties are imperfect; most
negative ones, perfect. DEONTIC LOGIC,
KANT, RIGHTS, ROSS. B.R. du Vair, Guillaume (1556–1621), French philosopher,
bishop, and political figure. Du Vair and Justus Lipsius were the two most
influential propagators of neo-Stoicism in early modern Europe. Du Vair’s
Sainte Philosophie (“Holy Philosophy,” 1584) and his shorter Philosophie morale
des Stoïques (“Moral Philosophy of the Stoics,” 1585), were translated and
frequently reprinted. The latter presents Epictetus in a form usable by
ordinary people in troubled times. We are to follow nature and live according
to reason; we are not to be upset by what we cannot control; virtue is the
good. Du Vair inserts, moreover, a distinctly religious note. We must be pious,
accept our lot as God’s will, and consider morality obedience to his command.
Du Vair thus Christianized Stoicism, making it widely acceptable. By teaching
that reason alone enables us to know how we ought to live, he became a founder
of modern rationalism in ethics. ETHICS,
HUMAN NATURE, STOICISM. J.B.S. Dvaita Vedanta, a variety of Hinduism according
to which Brahman is an independently existing, omnipotent, omniscient personal
deity. In Dvaita Vedanta, Brahman everlastingly sustains in existence a world
of minds and physical things without their being properly viewed as the body of
Brahman, since this would mistakenly suggest that Brahman is limited and can be
affected in ways analogous to those in which human beings are limited and can
be affected by their bodies. The Upanishadic texts concerning the individual
Aman’s identity to Brahman, and all things being in Brahman, are understood as
asserting dependence on Brahman and resemblance to Brahman rather than
numerical identity with Brahman. Each person is held to have his or her own
essence (cf. the medieval Scholastic notion of a haecceity) and accordingly some
are destined for enlightenment, some for endless transmigration, and some for
misery. K.E.Y. Dworkin, Ronald M. (b.1931), American jurist, political
philosopher, and a central contributor to recent legal and political theory. He
has served as professor of jurisprudence, University of Oxford (1969–98),
professor of law, New York University (1975–), and Quain Professor of
Jurisprudence, University College, London (1998–). He was the first significant
critic of Hart’s positivist analysis of law as based on a determinable set of
social rules. Dworkin argues that the law contains legal principles as well as
legal rules. Legal principles are standards phrased generally (e.g., ‘No one
shall profit from his own wrong’); they do not have a formal “pedigree,” but are
requirements of morality. Nonetheless, courts are obliged to apply such
principles, and thus have no lawmaking discretion. Judicially enforceable legal
rights must derive from antecedent political rights. Dworkin characterizes
rights as political “trumps” – hence his title Taking Rights Seriously (2d ed.,
1978), which collects the papers that defend the views sketched. Dworkin
postulates an idealized judge, Hercules, who can invariably determine what
rights are legally enforceable. Dworkin denies any metaphysical commitments
thereby, and emphasizes instead the constructive and interpretive nature of
both adjudication and legal theory. These arguments are made in papers
collected in A Matter of Principle (1985). Law’s Empire (1986) systematizes his
view. He presents there a theory of “law as integrity.” The court’s obligation
is to make the community’s law the best it can be by finding decisions that
best fit both institutional du Vair, Guillaume Dworkin, Ronald M. 249 4065A- AM 249
history and moral principle. Hercules always best determines the best fit.
Dworkin has also contributed to substantive political theory. He defends a form
of liberalism that makes equality as prominent as liberty. His account of
equality is found in a number of independent papers; see, e.g., “Foundations of
Liberal Equality,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values XI (1990). Dworkin has
applied his liberal theory in two ways. He has continually acted as a critical
watchdog of the U.S. Supreme Court, assessing decisions for their adherence to
the ideals of principle, respect for equality, and achievement of best fit.
Some of these essays are in the two collections mentioned; the most recent are
in Freedom’s Law (1996). Life’s Dominion (1993) derives from these ideals an
account of abortion and euthanasia. Dworkin’s philosophizing has a conceptual
richness and rhetorical fire that, when not wholly under control, give his
theoretical positions a protean quality at the level of detail. Nonetheless,
the ideas that adjudication should be principled and enforce rights, and that
we all deserve equal dignity and respect, exercise a powerful fascination. EUTHANASIA, HART, JURISPRUDENCE, LEGAL
POSITIVISM, MORAL STATUS, NATURAL LAW, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, RIGHTS. R.A.Sh.
Dyad.ACADEMY. dynamic logic, a branch of logic in which, in addition to the
usual category of formulas interpretable as propositions, there is a category
of expressions interpretable as actions. Dynamic logic (originally called the
modal logic of programs) emerged in the late 1970s as one step in a long
tradition within theoretical computer science aimed at providing a way to
formalize the analysis of programs and their action. A particular concern here
was program verification: what can be said of the effect of a program if
started at a certain point? To this end operators [a] and ‹a( were introduced
with the following intuitive readings: [a]A to mean ‘after every terminating
computation according to a it is the case that A’ and ‹a(A to mean ‘after some
terminating computation according to a it is the case that A’. The logic of
these operators may be seen as a generalization of ordinary modal logic: where
modal logic has one box operator A and one diamond operator B, dynamic logic
has one box operator [a] and one diamond operator ‹a( for every program
expression a in the language. In possible worlds semantics for modal logic a
model is a triple (U, R, V) where U is a universe of points, R a binary
relation, and V a valuation assigning to each atomic formula a subset of U. In
dynamic logic, a model is a triple (U, R, V) where U and V are as before but R
is a family of binary relations R(a), one for every program expression a in the
language. Writing ‘Xx A’, where x is a point in U, for ‘A is true at x’ (in the
model in question), we have the following characteristic truth conditions
(truth-functional compounds are evaluated by truth tables, as in modal logic):
Xx P if and only if x is a point in V(P), where P is an atomic formula, Xx[a]A
if and only if, for all y, if x is R(a)- related to y then Xy A, Xx ‹a( if and
only if, for some y, x is R(a)-related to y and Xy A. Traditionally, dynamic
logic will contain machinery for rendering the three regular operators on
programs: ‘!’ (sum), ‘;’ (composition), and ‘*’ (Kleene’s star operation), as well
as the test operator ‘?’, which, operating on a proposition, will yield a
program. The action a ! b consists in carrying out a or carrying out b; the
action a;b in first carrying out a, then carrying out b; the action a* in
carrying out a some finite number of times (not excluding 0); the action ?A in
verifying that A. Only standard models reflect these intuitions: R(a ! b) %
R(a) 4 R(b), R(a;b) % R(a) _ R(b), R(a*) % (R(a))*, R(?A) % {(x,x) : Xx A}
(where ‘*’ is the ancestral star) The smallest propositional dynamic logic
(PDL) is the set of formulas true at every point in every standard model. Note
that dynamic logic analyzes non-deterministic action – this is evident at the
level of atomic programs p where R(p) is a relation, not necessarily a function,
and also in the definitions of R(a + b) and R(a*). Dynamic logic has been
extended in various ways, e.g., to first- and second-order predicate logic.
Furthermore, just as deontic logic, tense logic, etc., are referred to as modal
logic in the wide sense, so extensions of dynamic logic in the narrow sense
such as process logic are often loosely referred to as dynamic logic in the
wide sense. Dyad dynamic logic 250 4065A-
AM 250 The philosophical interest
in dynamic logic rests with the expectation that it will prove a fruitful
instrument for analyzing the concept of action in general: a successful
analysis would be valuable in itself and would also be relevant to other
disciplines such as deontic logic and the logic of imperatives. COMPUTER THEORY, DEONTIC LOGIC, MODAL LOGIC.
K.Seg. dynamis.DUNAMIS, ENERGEIA. dynamism.BOSCOVICH. dynamis dynamism 251
4065A- AM 251 Eckhart, Johannes, called Meister Eckhart
(c.1260–1328), German mystic, theologian, and preacher. Eckhart entered the
Dominican order early and began an academic circuit that took him several times
to Paris as a student and master of theology and that initiated him into ways
of thinking much influenced by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. At Paris,
Eckhart wrote the required commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and
finished for publication at least three formal disputations. But he had already
held office within the Dominicans, and he continued to alternate work as
administrator and as teacher. Eckhart preached throughout these years, and he
continued to write spiritual treatises in the vernacular, of which the most
important is the Book of Divine Consolation (1313/1322). Only about a third of
Eckhart’s main project in Latin, the Opus tripartitum, seems ever to have been
completed. Beginning in the early 1320s, questions were raised about Eckhart’s
orthodoxy. The questions centered on what was characteristic of his teaching,
namely the emphasis on the soul’s attaining “emptiness” so as to “give birth to
God.” The soul is ennobled by its emptying, and it can begin to “labor” with
God to deliver a spark that enacts the miraculous union-and-difference of their
love. After being acquitted of heresy once, Eckhart was condemned on 108
propositions drawn from his writings by a commission at Cologne. The
condemnation was appealed to the Holy See, but in 1329 Eckhart was there judged
“probably heretical” on 17 of 28 propositions drawn from both his academic and
popular works. The condemnation clearly limited Eckhart’s explicit influence in
theology, though he was deeply appropriated not only by mystics such as
Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, but by church figures such as Nicholas of Cusa
and Martin Luther. He has since been taken up by thinkers as different as
Hegel, Fichte, and Heidegger. ALBERTUS
MAGNUS, AQUINAS, PETER LOMBARD. M.D.J. eclecticism.COUSIN. Eco, Umberto
(b.1932), Italian philosopher, intellectual historian, and novelist. A leading
figure in the field of semiotics, the general theory of signs. Eco has devoted
most of his vast production to the notion of interpretation and its role in
communication. In the 1960s, building on the idea that an active process of
interpretation is required to take any sign as a sign, he pioneered
reader-oriented criticism (The Open Work, 1962, 1976; The Role of the Reader,
1979) and championed a holistic view of meaning, holding that all of the
interpreter’s beliefs, i.e., his encyclopedia, are potentially relevant to word
meaning. In the 1970s, equally influenced by Peirce and the French
structuralists, he offered a unified theory of signs (A Theory of Semiotics,
1976), aiming at grounding the study of communication in general. He opposed
the idea of communication as a natural process, steering a middle way between
realism and idealism, particularly of the Sapir-Whorf variety. The issue of
realism looms large also in his recent work. In The Limits of Interpretation
(1990) and Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992), he attacks
deconstructionism. Kant and the Platypus (1997) defends a “contractarian” form
of realism, holding that the reader’s interpretation, driven by the Peircean
regulative idea of objectivity and collaborating with the speaker’s
underdetermined intentions, is needed to fix reference. In his historical
essays, ranging from medieval aesthetics (The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas,
1956) to the attempts at constructing artificial and “perfect” languages (The
Search for the Perfect Language, 1993) to medieval semiotics, he traces the
origins of some central notions in contemporary philosophy of language (e.g.,
meaning, symbol, denotation) and such recent concerns as the language of mind
and translation, to larger issues in the history of philosophy. All his novels
are pervaded by philosophical queries, such as Is the world an ordered whole?
(The Name of the Rose, 1980), and How much interpretation can one tolerate
without falling prey to some conspiracy syndrome? (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988).
Everywhere, he engages the reader in the game of (controlled) interpretations. DECONSTRUCTION, MEANING, SEMIOSIS,
STRUCTURALISM. M.Sa. 252 E 4065A-
AM 252 ecofeminism.ENVIRONMENTAL
PHILOSOPHY. economics, philosophy of.PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS. economics,
welfare.PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS. education, philosophy of.PHILOSOPHY OF
EDUCATION. eduction, the process of initial clarification, as of a phenomenon,
text, or argument, that normally takes place prior to logical analysis. Out of
the flux of vague and confused experiences certain characteristics are drawn
into some kind of order or intelligibility in order that attention can be
focused on them (Aristotle, Physics I). These characteristics often are latent,
hidden, or implicit. The notion often is used with reference to texts as well
as experience. Thus it becomes closely related to exegesis and hermeneutics, tending
to be reserved for the sorts of clarification that precede formal or logical
analyses. HERMENEUTICS. F.S. Edwards,
Jonathan (1703–58), American philosopher and theologian. He was educated at
Yale, preached in New York City, and in 1729 assumed a Congregational pastorate
in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he became a leader in the Great Awakening.
Because of a dispute with his parishioners over qualifications for communion,
he was forced to leave in 1750. In 1751, he took charge of congregations in Stockbridge,
a frontier town sixty miles to the west. He was elected third president of
Princeton in 1757 (but died shortly after inauguration). Edwards deeply
influenced Congregational and Presbyterian theology in America for over a
century, but had little impact on philosophy. Interest in him revived in the
middle of the twentieth century, first among literary scholars and theologians
and later among philosophers. While most of Edwards’s published work defends
the Puritan version of Calvinist orthodoxy, his notebooks reveal an interest in
philosophical problems for their own sake. Although he was indebted to
Continental rationalists like Malebranche, to the Cambridge Platonists, and
especially to Locke, his own contributions are sophisticated and original. The
doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty is explicated by occasionalism, a
subjective idealism similar to Berkeley’s, and phenomenalism. According to
Edwards, what are “vulgarly” called causal relations are mere constant
conjunctions. True causes necessitate their effects. Since God’s will alone
meets this condition, God is the only true cause. He is also the only true
substance. Physical objects are collections of ideas of color, shape, and other
“corporeal” qualities. Finite minds are series of “thoughts” or “perceptions.”
Any substance underlying perceptions, thoughts, and “corporeal ideas” must be
something that “subsists by itself, stands underneath, and keeps up” physical
and mental qualities. As the only thing that does so, God is the only real substance.
As the only true cause and the only real substance, God is “in effect being in
general.” God creates to communicate his glory. Since God’s internal glory is
constituted by his infinite knowledge of, love of, and delight in himself as
the highest good, his “communication ad extra” consists in the knowledge of,
love of, and joy in himself which he bestows upon creatures. The essence of
God’s internal and external glory is “holiness” or “true benevolence,” a
disinterested love of being in general (i.e., of God and the beings dependent
on him). Holiness constitutes “true beauty,” a divine splendor or radiance of
which “secondary” (ordinary) beauty is an imperfect image. God is thus
supremely beautiful and the world is suffused with his loveliness. Vindications
of Calvinist conceptions of sin and grace are found in Freedom of the Will
(1754) and Original Sin (1758). The former includes sophisticated defenses of
theological determinism and compatibilism. The latter contains arguments for
occasionalism and interesting discussions of identity. Edwards thinks that
natural laws determine kinds or species, and kinds or species determine
criteria of identity. Since the laws of nature depend on God’s “arbitrary”
decision, God establishes criteria of identity. He can thus, e.g., constitute
Adam and his posterity as “one thing.” Edwards’s religious epistemology is
developed in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) and On the
Nature of True Virtue (1765). The conversion experience involves the
acquisition of a “new sense of the heart.” Its core is the mind’s apprehension
of a “new simple idea,” the idea of “true beauty.” This idea is needed to
properly understand theological truths. True Virtue also provides the fullest
account of Edwards’s ethics – a moral sense theory that identifies virtue with
benevolence. Although indebted to contemporaries like Hutcheson, Edwards
criticizes their attempts to construct ethics on secular foundations. True
benevolence ecofeminism Edwards, Jonathan 253 4065A- AM 253
embraces being in general. Since God is, in effect, being in general, its
essence is the love of God. A love restricted to family, nation, humanity, or
other “private systems” is a form of self-love.
BERKELEY, CALVIN, FREE WILL PROBLEM, MORAL SENSE THEORY, OCCASIONALISM.
W.J.Wa. effective procedure, a step-by-step recipe for computing the values of
a function. It determines what is to be done at each step, without requiring
any ingenuity of anyone (or any machine) executing it. The input and output of
the procedure consist of items that can be processed mechanically. Idealizing a
little, inputs and outputs are often taken to be strings on a finite alphabet.
It is customary to extend the notion to procedures for manipulating natural
numbers, via a canonical notation. Each number is associated with a string, its
numeral. Typical examples of effective procedures are the standard grade school
procedures for addition, multiplication, etc. One can execute the procedures
without knowing anything about the natural numbers. The term ‘mechanical
procedure’ or ‘algorithm’ is sometimes also used. A function f is computable if
there is an effective procedure A that computes f. For every m in the domain of
f, if A were given m as input, it would produce f(m) as output. Turing machines
are mathematical models of effective procedures. Church’s thesis, or Turing’s
thesis, is that a function is computable provided there is a Turing machine
that computes it. In other words, for every effective procedure, there is a
Turing machine that computes the same function.
CHURCH’S THESIS, COMPUTER THEORY, TURING MACHINE. S.Sha. efficacious
grace.ARNAULD. efficient cause.ARISTOTLE. effluences.DEMOCRITUS. effluxes,
theory of.DEMOCRITUS. ego.FREUD. ego, empirical.KANT. ego, transcendental.KANT.
egocentric particular, a word whose denotation is determined by identity of the
speaker and/or the time, place, and audience of his utterance. Examples are
generally thought to include ‘I,’ ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘this’, ‘that’,
‘now’, ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’. The term ‘egocentric particular’ was
introduced by Russell in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940). In an
earlier work, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (Monist, 1918–19), Russell
called such words “emphatic particulars.” Some important questions arise
regarding egocentric particulars. Are some egocentric particulars more basic
than others so that the rest can be correctly defined in terms of them but they
cannot be correctly defined in terms of the rest? Russell thought all
egocentric particulars can be defined by ‘this’; ‘I’, for example, has the same
meaning as ‘the biography to which this belongs’, where ‘this’ denotes a
sense-datum experienced by the speaker. Yet, at the same time, ‘this’ can be
defined by the combination ‘what I-now notice’. Must we use at least some
egocentric particulars to give a complete description of the world? Our ability
to describe the world from a speaker-neutral perspective, so that the
denotations of the terms in our description are independent of when, where, and
by whom they are used, depends on our ability to describe the world without
using egocentric particulars. Russell held that egocentric particulars are not
needed in any part of the description of the world. CAUSAL THEORY OF PROPER NAMES, INDEXICAL,
TOKEN-REFLEXIVE. P.Mar. egocentric predicament, each person’s apparently
problematic position as an experiencing subject, assuming that all our
experiences are private in that no one else can have them. Two problems concern
our ability to gain empirical knowledge. First, it is hard to see how we gain
empirical knowledge of what others experience, if all experience is private. We
cannot have their experience to see what it is like, for any experience we have
is our experience and so not theirs. Second, it is hard to see how we gain
empirical knowledge of how the external world is, independently of our
experience. All our empirically justified beliefs seem to rest ultimately on
what is given in experience, and if the empirically given is private, it seems it
can only support justified beliefs about the world as we experience it. A third
major problem concerns our ability to communicate with others. It is hard to
see how we describe the world in a language others understand. We give meaning
to some of our words by defining them by other words that already have
effective procedure egocentric predicament 254 4065A- AM 254
meaning, and this process of definition appears to end with words we define
ostensively; i.e., we use them to name something given in experience. If
experiences are private, no one else can grasp the meaning of our ostensively
defined words or any words we use them to define. No one else can understand
our attempts to describe the world.
PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT, PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS. P.Mar. egoism, any
view that, in a certain way, makes the self central. There are several
different versions of egoism, all of which have to do with how actions relate
to the self. Ethical egoism is the view that people ought to do what is in
their own selfinterest. Psychological egoism is a view about people’s motives,
inclinations, or dispositions. One statement of psychological egoism says that,
as a matter of fact, people always do what they believe is in their
self-interest and, human nature being what it is, they cannot do otherwise.
Another says that people never desire anything for its own sake except what
they believe is in their own self-interest. Altruism is the opposite of egoism.
Any ethical view that implies that people sometimes ought to do what is in the
interest of others and not in their self-interest can be considered a form of
ethical altruism. The view that, human nature being what it is, people can do
what they do not believe to be in their self-interest might be called
psychological altruism. Different species of ethical and psychological egoism
result from different interpretations of self-interest and of acting from
self-interest, respectively. Some people have a broad conception of acting from
self-interest such that people acting from a desire to help others can be said
to be acting out of self-interest, provided they think doing so will not, on
balance, take away from their own good. Others have a narrower conception of
acting from selfinterest such that one acts from self-interest only if one acts
from the desire to further one’s own happiness or good. Butler identified
self-love with the desire to further one’s own happiness or good and
self-interested action with action performed from that desire alone. Since we
obviously have other particular desires, such as the desires for honor, for
power, for revenge, and to promote the good of others, he concluded that
psychological egoism was false. People with a broader conception of acting from
self-interest would ask whether anyone with those particular desires would act
on them if they believed that, on balance, acting on them would result in a
loss of happiness or good for themselves. If some would, then psychological
egoism is false, but if, given human nature as it is, no one would, it is true
even if self-love is not the only source of motivation in human beings. Just as
there are broader and narrower conceptions of acting from self-interest, there
are broader and narrower conceptions of self-interest itself, as well as
subjective and objective conceptions of self-interest. Subjective conceptions
relate a person’s self-interest solely to the satisfaction of his desires or to
what that person believes will make his life go best for him. Objective
conceptions see self-interest, at least in part, as independent of the person’s
desires and beliefs. Some conceptions of self-interest are narrower than
others, allowing that the satisfaction of only certain desires is in a person’s
self-interest, e.g., desires whose satisfaction makes that person’s life go
better for her. And some conceptions of self-interest count only the
satisfaction of idealized desires, ones that someone would have after
reflection about the nature of those desires and what they typically lead to,
as furthering a person’s self-interest.
BUTLER, ETHICS, MOTIVATIONAL INTERNALISM, REASONS FOR ACTION. B.R.
egoistic consequentialism.CONSEQUENTIALISM. eidetic intuition.HUSSERL.
eidos.ARISTOTLE, HUSSERL. Eightfold Path.BUDDHISM. eikasia.DIVIDED LINE.
Einfühlung (German, ‘feeling into’), empathy. In contrast to sympathy, where
one’s identity is preserved in feeling with or for the other, in empathy or
Einfühlung one tends to lose oneself in the other. The concept of Einfühlung
received its classical formulation in the work of Theodor Lipps, who
characterized it as a process of involuntary, inner imitation whereby a subject
identifies through feeling with the movement of another body, whether it be the
real leap of a dancer or the illusory upward lift of an architectural column.
Complete empathy is considered to be aesthetic, providing a
non-representational access to beauty. Husserl used a phenomenologically
purified concept of Einfühlung to account for the way the self directly
recognizes the other. Husserl’s student Edith Stein described Einfühlung as a
blind egoism Einfühlung 255 4065A-
AM 255 mode of knowledge that
reaches the experience of the other without possessing it. Einfühlung is not to
be equated with Verstehen or human understanding, which, as Dilthey pointed
out, requires the use of all one’s mental powers, and cannot be reduced to a
mere mode of feeling. To understand is not to apprehend something
empathetically as the projected locus of an actual experience, but to
apperceive the meaning of expressions of experience in relation to their
context. Whereas understanding is reflective, empathy is prereflective. DILTHEY, HUSSERL, VERSTEHEN. R.A.M. Einstein,
Albert (1879–1955), German-born American physicist, founder of the special and
general theories of relativity and a fundamental contributor to several
branches of physics and to the philosophical analysis and critique of modern
physics, notably of relativity and the quantum theory. Einstein was awarded the
Nobel Prize for physics in 1922, “especially for his discovery of the law of
the photoelectric effect.” Born in Ulm in the German state of Württemberg,
Einstein studied physics at the Polytechnic in Zürich, Switzerland. He was
called to Berlin as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (1914)
at the peak of the German ultranationalism that surrounded World War I. His
reaction was to circulate an internationalist “Manifesto to Europeans” and to
pursue Zionist and pacifist programs. Following the dramatic confirmation of
the general theory of relativity (1919) Einstein became an international
celebrity. This fame also made him the frequent target of German anti-Semites,
who, during one notable episode, described the theory of relativity as “a
Jewish fraud.” In 1933 Einstein left Germany for the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton. Although his life was always centered on science, he was
also engaged in the politics and culture of his times. He carried on an
extensive correspondence (whose publication will run to over forty volumes)
with both famous and ordinary people, including significant philosophical
correspondence with Cassirer, Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick, and others. Despite
reservations over logical positivism, he was something of a patron of the
movement, helping to secure academic positions for several of its leading
figures. In 1939 Einstein signed a letter drafted by the nuclear physicist Leo
Szilard informing President Roosevelt about the prospects for harnessing atomic
energy and warning of the German efforts to make a bomb. Einstein did not
further participate in the development of atomic weapons, and later was
influential in the movement against them. In 1952 he was offered, and declined,
the presidency of Israel. He died still working on a unified field theory, and
just as the founders of the Pugwash movement for nuclear disarmament adopted a
manifesto he had cosigned with Russell. Einstein’s philosophical thinking was
influenced by early exposure to Kant and later study of Hume and Mach, whose
impact shows in the operationalism used to treat time in his famous 1905 paper
on special relativity. That work also displays a passion for unity in science
characteristic of nearly all his physical thinking, and that may relate to the
monism of Spinoza, a philosopher whom he read and reread. Einstein’s own understanding
of relativity stressed the invariance of the space-time interval and promoted
realism with regard to the structure of spacetime. Realism also shows up in
Einstein’s work on Brownian motion (1905), which was explicitly motivated by
his long-standing interest in demonstrating the reality of molecules (and
atoms), and in the realist treatment of light quanta in his analysis (1905) of
the photoelectric effect. While he pioneered the development of statistical
physics, especially in his seminal investigations of quantum phenomena
(1905–25), he never broke with his belief in determinism as the only truly
fundamental approach to physical processes. Here again one sees an affinity
with Spinoza. Realism and determinism brought Einstein into conflict with the
new quantum theory (1925–26), whose observer dependence and “flight into
statistics” convinced him that it could not constitute genuinely fundamental
physics. Although influential in its development, he became the theory’s
foremost critic, never contributing to its refinement but turning instead to
the program of unifying the electromagnetic and gravitational fields into one
grand, deterministic synthesis that would somehow make room for quantum effects
as limiting or singular cases. It is generally agreed that his unified field
program was not successful, although his vision continues to inspire other
unification programs, and his critical assessments of quantum mechanics still
challenge the instrumentalism associated with the theory. Einstein’s philosophical
reflections constitute an important chapter in twentieth-century thought. He
understood realism as less a metaphysical doctrine than a motivational program,
and he argued that determinism was a feature of theories rather than an aspect
of the world Einstein, Albert Einstein, Albert 256 4065A- AM 256
directly. Along with the unity of science, other central themes in his thinking
include his rejection of inductivism and his espousal of holism and
constructivism (or conventionalism), emphasizing that meanings, concepts, and
theories are free creations, not logically derivable from experience but
subject rather to overall criteria of comprehensibility, empirical adequacy,
and logical simplicity. Holism is also apparent in his acute analysis of the
testability of geometry and his rejection of Poincaré’s geometric
conventionalism. DETERMINISM, FIELD
THEORY, QUANTUM MECHANICS, RELATIVITY, UNITY OF SCIENCE. A.F. élan
vital.BERGSON. Eleatic School, strictly, two fifth-century B.C. Greek
philosophers, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. (The Ionian Greek colony of Elea or
Hyele in southern Italy became Velia in Roman times and retains that name
today.) A playful remark by Plato in Sophist 242d gave rise to the notion that
Xenophanes of Colophon, who was active in southern Italy and Sicily, was
Parmenides’ teacher, had anticipated Parmenides’ views, and founded the Eleatic
School. Moreover, Melissus of Samos and (according to some ancient sources)
even the atomist philosopher Leucippus of Abdera came to be regarded as “Eleatics,”
in the sense of sharing fundamental views with Parmenides and Zeno. In the
broad and traditional use of the term, the Eleatic School characteristically
holds that “all is one” and that change and plurality are unreal. So stated,
the School’s position is represented best by Melissus. MELISSUS OF SAMOS, PARMENIDES, XENOPHANES.
A.P.D.M. elementary equivalence.CATEGORICAL THEORY. elementary quantification
theory.FORMAL LOGIC. elenchus, a cross-examination or refutation. Typically in
Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates has a conversation with someone who claims to
have some sort of knowledge, and Socrates refutes this claim by showing the
interlocutor that what he thinks he knows is inconsistent with his other
opinions. This refutation is called an elenchus. It is not entirely negative,
for awareness of his own ignorance is supposed to spur the interlocutor to
further inquiry, and the concepts and assumptions employed in the refutations
serve as the basis for positive Platonic treatments of the same topic. In
contrast, sophistic elenchi are merely eristic: they aim simply at the
refutation of an opponent by any means. Thus, Aristotle calls fallacies that
only appear to be refutations “sophistical elenchi.” SOCRATES. E.C.H. Elias.COMMENTARIES ON
ARISTOTLE. eliminability, Ramsey.BETH’s DEFINABILITY THEOREM. eliminative
induction.INDUCTION. eliminative materialism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND.
eliminativism.FOLK PSYCHOLOGY. Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–80), German Princess
whose philosophical reputation rests on her correspondence with Descartes. The
most heavily discussed portion of this correspondence focuses on the
relationship between the mind and the body and on Descartes’s claim that the
mind-body union is a simple notion. Her discussions of free will and of the nature
of the sovereign good also have philosophical interest. DESCARTES, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. M.At.
ellipsis, an expression (spoken or written) from which semantically or
syntactically essential material has been deleted, usually for conciseness.
Elliptical sentences are often used to answer questions without repeating
material occurring in the questions. For example, the word ‘Lincoln’ may be an
answer to the question of the authorship of the Gettysburg Address or to the
question of the birthplace of George Boole. The single word ‘Lincoln’ can be
seen as an elliptical name when used as an ellipsis of ‘Abraham Lincoln’, and
it can be seen as an elliptical sentence when used as an ellipsis for ‘Abraham
Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address’. Other typical elliptical sentences are:
‘Abe is a father of two [children]’, ‘Ben arrives at twelve [noon]’. A typical
ellipsis that occurs in discussion of ellipses involves citing the elliptical
sentences with the deleted material added in brackets (often with ‘sc.’ or ‘scilicet’)
instead of also presenting the complete sentence. Ellipsis also occurs above
the sentential level, e.g. where well-known premises are omitted in the course
of argumentation. The word ‘enthymeme’ designates an elliptical argument
expression from which one or more premise-expressions have been deleted. The
élan vital ellipsis 257 4065A- AM 257 expression ‘elliptic ambiguity’
designates ambiguity arising from ellipsis.
AMBIGUITY, ARGUMENT, LOGICAL FORM. J. Cor. emanationism, a doctrine
about the origin and ontological structure of the world, most frequently
associated with Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, according to which everything
else that exists is an emanation from a primordial unity, called by Plotinus
“the One.” The first product of emanation from the One is Intelligence (noûs),
a realm resembling Plato’s world of Forms. From Intelligence emanates Soul
(psuche), conceived as an active principle that imposes, insofar as that is
possible, the rational structure of Intelligence on the matter that emanates
from Soul. The process of emanation is typically conceived to be necessary and
timeless: although Soul, for instance, proceeds from Intelligence, the notion
of procession is one of logical dependence rather than temporal sequence. The
One remains unaffected and undiminished by emanation: Plotinus likens the One
to the sun, which necessarily emits light from its naturally infinite abundance
without suffering change or loss of its own substance. Although emanationism
influenced some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers, it was incompatible
with those theistic doctrines of divine activity that maintained that God’s
creative choice and the world thus created were contingent, and that God can,
if he chooses, interact directly with individual creatures. PLOTINUS. W.E.M. embodiment, the bodily
aspects of human subjectivity. Embodiment is the central theme in European
phenomenology, with its most extensive treatment in the works of Maurice
MerleauPonty. Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment distinguishes between “the
objective body,” which is the body regarded as a physiological entity, and “the
phenomenal body,” which is not just some body, some particular physiological
entity, but my (or your) body as I (or you) experience it. Of course, it is possible
to experience one’s own body as a physiological entity. But this is not
typically the case. Typically, I experience my body (tacitly) as a unified
potential or capacity for doing this and that – typing this sentence,
scratching that itch, etc. Moreover, this sense that I have of my own motor
capacities (expressed, say, as a kind of bodily confidence) does not depend on
an understanding of the physiological processes involved in performing the
action in question. The distinction between the objective and phenomenal body
is central to understanding the phenomenological treatment of embodiment.
Embodiment is not a concept that pertains to the body grasped as a
physiological entity. Rather it pertains to the phenomenal body and to the role
it plays in our object-directed experiences.
MERLEAU-PONTY, PHENOMENOLOGY. D.Le. emergence.METHODOLOGICAL HOLISM.
emergentism, descriptive.HOLISM. emergent materialism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND.
Emersonian perfectionism.CAVELL. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82), American
philosophical essayist, lecturer, and poet, a leading figure in the
transcendentalist movement. He was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. As a
young man he taught school and served as a Unitarian minister (1826–32). After
he resigned his pastorate in 1832, he traveled to Europe to visit Coleridge,
Carlyle, and Wordsworth. Upon his return, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts,
and began anew as a public lecturer, essayist, and cultural critic. All the
while he maintained a voluminous correspondence and kept a detailed, evocative
journal. Most of this material has been published, and it casts considerable
light on the depth of his thought, at times more so than his public
presentations and books. His life was pockmarked by personal tragedies, notably
the death of his father when Emerson was eight; the death of his first wife,
Ellen, after two years of marriage; and the death of his oldest son, Waldo, at
the age of five. Such afflictions belie the commonly held assumption that
Emerson was a thinker who did not face the intractable problem of evil. To the
contrary, his writings should be read as a continuing struggle to render the
richest possible version of our situation, given that “things are in the saddle
and ride mankind.” Although Emerson did not write a systematic work in
philosophy, he unquestionably bequeathed an important philosophical vision and
countless philosophical pieces. Beginning with his concentration on the motif
of nature, its embracing quality, and the rhythms of our inextricable presence
within its activities, Emerson details the “compensatory” ebb and flow of the
human journey. The human soul and nature are related as “print” to “seal,” and
yet nature is not always beneficent. In his essay “Compensation,” emanationism
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 258 4065A- AM 258 Emerson writes that “the value of the
universe continues to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so
is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion, if the force, so the
limitation.” After the acclaim given the publication of Emerson’s first book,
Nature (1836), he began to gather his public lectures, a presentational medium
at which he was riveting, convincing, and inspiring. In 1841 Emerson published
his Essays – First Series, which included the lovely piece “Circles,” wherein he
follows the blunt maxim “we grizzle every day” with the healing affirmation
that “life is a series of surprises.” This volume also contains
“Self-Reliance,” which furnished a motto for the self-proclaiming intrepidity
of nineteenth-century American individualism. The enthusiastic response to
Emerson’s essays enabled him to publish three additional collections within the
decade: Essays – Second Series (1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849),
and Representative Men (1850). These books and their successors contained
lectures, orations, poems, and addresses over a wide range of topics,
philosophical, personal, characterological, travel, historical, and literary.
Emerson’s prose is swift, clear, and epigrammatic, like a series of written
stochastic probes, resulting in a Yankee crazy quilt, munificent of shape and
color. Emerson spoke to be heard and wrote to be read, especially by the often
denigrated “common” person. In fact, during Emerson’s European lecture tour in
1848, a letter to a London newspaper requested lowering the admission price so
that poorer people could attend, for “to miss him is to lose an important part
of the Nineteenth Century.” Emerson’s deeply democratic attitude had a
reflective philosophical base. He believed that ordinary experience was
epiphanic if we but open ourselves to its virtually infinite messages. Despite
his Brahmanic appearance and demeanor, Emerson was in continuous touch with
ordinary things. He wrote, “Our chief experiences have been casual.” His belief
in the explosive and pedagogical character of ordinary experience is especially
present in his influential oration “The American Scholar.” After criticizing
American thought as thoroughly derivative, he plots the influences necessary to
generate a genuine scholar, paramount among them nature and the learning of the
past, though he cautions us not to be trapped in excessive retrospection at the
expense of “an original relation to the universe.” It is his discussion of
“action” as the third influence on the scholar that enables him to project his
clearest statement of his underlying philosophical commitment. Without action,
“thought can never ripen into truth,” moreover, “thinking is a partial act,”
whereas living is a “total act.” Expressly opposed to any form of psychological,
religious, philosophical, or behavioral dualism, he counsels us that the
spiritual is not set apart, beyond reach of those who toil in the everyday.
Rather, the most profound meanings of the human condition, “lurk” in the
“common,” the “low,” the “familiar,” the “today.” The influence of the thought
of Emerson reaches across class, caste, genre, and persuasion. Thinkers as
diverse as James, Nietzsche, Whitman, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost,
Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Wallace Stevens are among those
deeply indebted to Emerson. Yet, it was Dewey who best caught the enduring
bequest of Emerson, writing of “the final word of Emerson’s philosophy, [as]
the identity of Being, unqualified and immutable, with character.” TRANSCENDENTALISM. J.J.M. emotion, as
conceived by philosophers and psychologists, any of several general types of
mental states, approximately those that had been called “passions” by earlier
philosophers, such as Descartes and Hume. Anger, e.g., is one emotion, fear a
second, and joy a third. An emotion may also be a content-specific type, e.g.,
fear of an earthquake, or a token of an emotion type, e.g., Mary’s present fear
that an earthquake is imminent. The various states typically classified as
emotions appear to be linked together only by overlapping family resemblances
rather than by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Thus an adequate
philosophical or psychological “theory of emotion” should probably be a family
of theories. Even to label these states “emotions” wrongly suggests that they
are all marked by emotion, in the older sense of mental agitation (a
metaphorical extension of the original sense, agitated motion). A person who
is, e.g., pleased or sad about something is not typically agitated. To speak of
anger, fear, joy, sadness, etc., collectively as “the emotions” fosters the
assumption (which James said he took for granted) that these are just
qualitatively distinct feelings of mental agitation. This exaggerates the
importance of agitation and neglects the characteristic differences, noted by
Aristotle, Spinoza, and others, in the types of situations that evoke the
various emotions. One important feature of most emotions is captured by the
older category of passions, in the sense of ‘ways of being acted upon’. In many
lanemotion emotion 259 4065A- AM 259 guages nearly all emotion adjectives are
derived from participles: e.g., the English words ‘amused’, ‘annoyed’, ‘ashamed’,
‘astonished’, ‘delighted’, ‘embarrassed’, ‘excited’, ‘frightened’, ‘horrified’,
‘irritated’, ‘pleased’, ‘terrified’, ‘surprised’, ‘upset’, and ‘worried’. When
we are, e.g., embarrassed, something acts on us, i.e., embarrasses us:
typically, some situation or fact of which we are aware, such as our having on
unmatched shoes. To call embarrassment a passion in the sense of a way of being
acted upon does not imply that we are “passive” with respect to it, i.e., have
no control over whether a given situation embarrasses us and thus no
responsibility for our embarrassment. Not only situations and facts but also
persons may “do” something to us, as in love and hate, and mere possibilities
may have an effect on us, as in fear and hope. The possibility emotions are
sometimes characterized as “forward-looking,” and emotions that are responses
to actual situations or facts are said to be “backward-looking.” These temporal
characterizations are inaccurate and misleading. One may be fearful or hopeful
that a certain event occurred in the past, provided one is not certain as to
whether it occurred; and one may be, e.g., embarrassed about what is going to
occur, provided one is certain it will occur. In various passions the effect on
us may include involuntary physiological changes, feelings of agitation due to
arousal of the autonomic nervous system, characteristic facial expressions, and
inclinations toward intentional action (or inaction) that arise independently
of any rational warrant. Phenomenologically, however, these effects do not
appear to us to be alien and non-rational, like muscular spasms. Rather they
seem an integral part of our perception of the situation as, e.g., an
embarrassing situation, or one that warrants our embarrassment. JAMES-LANGE THEORY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND.
R.M.G. emotions, the seven.KOREAN PHILOSOPHY. emotions, the six.CH’ING. emotive
conjugation, a humorous verbal conjugation, designed to expose and mock
first-person bias, in which ostensibly the same action is described in
successively more pejorative terms through the first, second, and third persons
(e.g., “I am firm, You are stubborn, He is a pig-headed fool”). This example
was used by Russell in the course of a BBC Radio “Brains’ Trust” discussion in
1948. It was popularized later that year when The New Statesman ran a
competition for other examples. An “unprecedented response” brought in 2,000
entries, including: “I am well informed, You listen to gossip, He believes what
he reads in the paper”; and “I went to Oxford, You went to Cambridge, He went
to the London School of Economics” (Russell was educated at Cambridge and later
taught there). RUSSELL. N.G. emotive
meaning.EMOTIVISM, MEANING. emotivism, a noncognitivist metaethical view
opposed to cognitivism, which holds that moral judgments should be construed as
assertions about the moral properties of actions, persons, policies, and other
objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates purport to refer to
properties of such objects, that moral judgments (or the propositions that they
express) can be true or false, and that cognizers can have the cognitive
attitude of belief toward the propositions that moral judgments express.
Noncognitivism denies these claims; it holds that moral judgments do not make
assertions or express propositions. If moral judgments do not express
propositions, the former can be neither true nor false, and moral belief and
moral knowledge are not possible. The emotivist is a noncognitivist who claims
that moral judgments, in their primary sense, express the appraiser’s attitudes
– approval or disapproval – toward the object of evaluation, rather than make
assertions about the properties of that object. Because emotivism treats moral
judgments as the expressions of the appraiser’s pro and con attitudes, it is
sometimes referred to as the boohurrah theory of ethics. Emotivists distinguish
their thesis that moral judgments express the appraiser’s attitudes from the
subjectivist claim that they state or report the appraiser’s attitudes (the
latter view is a form of cognitivism). Some versions of emotivism distinguish
between this primary, emotive meaning of moral judgments and a secondary,
descriptive meaning. In its primary, emotive meaning, a moral judgment
expresses the appraiser’s attitudes toward the object of evaluation rather than
ascribing properties to that object. But secondarily, moral judgments refer to
those non-moral properties of the object of evaluation in virtue of which the
appraiser has and expresses her attitudes. So if I judge that your act of
torture is wrong, my judgment has two components. Its primary, emotive emotions,
the seven emotivism 260 4065A- AM 260 sense is to express my disapproval of
your act. Its secondary, descriptive sense is to denote those non-moral
properties of your act upon which I base my disapproval. These are presumably
the very properties that make it an act of torture – roughly, a causing of
intense pain in order to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure. By making
emotive meaning primary, emotivists claim to preserve the univocity of moral
language between speakers who employ different criteria of application for
their moral terms. Also, by stressing the intimate connection between moral
judgment and the agent’s non-cognitive attitudes, emotivists claim to capture
the motivational properties of moral judgment. Some emotivists have also attempted
to account for ascriptions of truth to moral judgments by accepting the
redundancy account of ascriptions of truth as expressions of agreement with the
original judgment. The emotivist must think that such ascriptions of truth to
moral judgments merely reflect the ascriber’s agreement in noncognitive
attitude with the attitude expressed by the original judgment. Critics of
emotivism challenge these alleged virtues. They claim that moral agreement need
not track agreement in attitude; there can be moral disagreement without
disagreement in attitude (between moralists with different moral views), and
disagreement in attitude without moral disagreement (between moralists and
immoralists). By distinguishing between the meaning of moral terms and speakers’
beliefs about the extension of those terms, critics claim that we can account
for the univocity of moral terms in spite of moral disagreement without
introducing a primary emotive sense for moral terms. Critics also allege that
the emotivist analysis of moral judgments as the expression of the appraiser’s
attitudes precludes recognizing the possibility of moral judgments that do not
engage or reflect the attitudes of the appraiser. For instance, it is not clear
how emotivism can accommodate the amoralist – one who recognizes moral
requirements but is indifferent to them. Critics also charge emotivism with
failure to capture the cognitive aspects of moral discourse. Because emotivism
is a theory about moral judgment or assertion, it is difficult for the emotivist
to give a semantic analysis of moral predicates in unasserted contexts, such as
in the antecedents of conditional moral judgments (e.g., “If he did wrong, then
he ought to be punished”). Finally, one might want to recognize the truth of
some moral judgments, perhaps in order to make room for the possibility of
moral mistakes. If so, then one may not be satisfied with the emotivist’s
appeal to redundancy or disquotational accounts of the ascription of truth.
Emotivism was introduced by Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic (2d ed., 1946)
and refined by C. L. Stevenson in Facts and Values (1963) and Ethics and
Language (1944). COGNITIVISM, ETHICAL
OBJECTIVISM, METAETHICS, MORAL SKEPTICISM, NIHILISM, NONCOGNITIVISM,
PRESCRIPTIVISM. D.O.B. empathic solipsism.SOLIPSISM. empathy, imaginative
projection into another person’s situation, especially for vicarious capture of
its emotional and motivational qualities. The term is an English rendering (by
the AngloAmerican psychologist E. G. Titchener, 1867– 1927) of the German
Einfühlung, made popular by Theodore Lipps (1851–1914), which also covered
imaginative identification with inanimate objects of aesthetic contemplation.
Under ‘sympathy’, many aspects were earlier discussed by Hume, Adam Smith, and
other Scottish philosophers. Empathy has been considered a precondition of
ethical thinking and a major contributor to social bonding and altruism, mental
state attribution, language use, and translation. The relevant spectrum of
phenomena includes automatic and often subliminal motor mimicry of the
expressions or manifestations of another’s real or feigned emotion, pain, or
pleasure; emotional contagion, by which one “catches” another’s apparent
emotion, often unconsciously and without reference to its cause or “object”;
conscious and unconscious mimicry of direction of gaze, with consequent
transfer of attention from the other’s response to its cause; and conscious or
unconscious role-taking, which reconstructs in imagination (with or without
imagery) aspects of the other’s situation as the other “perceives” it. EINFÜHLUNG, EMOTION, EXPRESSION THEORY OF
ART, HUME, PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS, SIMULATION THEORY, SMITH, VERSTEHEN. R.M.G.
Empedocles (c.495–c.435 B.C.), Greek preSocratic philosopher who created a
physical theory in response to Parmenides while incorporating Pythagorean ideas
of the soul into his philosophy. Following Parmenides in his rejection of
coming-to-be and perishing, he accounted for phenomenal change by positing four
elements (his “roots,” rizomata), earth, empathic solipsism Empedocles 261
4065A- AM 261 water, air, and fire. When they mix
together in set proportions they create compound substances such as blood and
bone. Two forces act on the elements, Love and Strife, the former joining the
different elements, the latter separating them. In his cyclical cosmogony the
four elements combine to form the Sphere, a completely homogeneous spherical
body permeated by Love, which, shattered by Strife, grows into a cosmos with
the elements forming distinct cosmic masses of earth, water (the seas), air,
and fire. There is controversy over whether Empedocles posits one or two
periods when living things exist in the cycle. (On one view there are two
periods, between which intervenes a stage of complete separation of the
elements.) Empedocles accepts the Pythagorean view of reincarnation of souls,
seeing life as punishment for an original sin and requiring the expiation of a
pious and philosophical life. Thus the exile and return of the individual soul
reflects in the microcosm the cosmic movement from harmony to division to
harmony. Empedocles’ four elements became standard in natural philosophy down
to the early modern era, and Aristotle recognized his Love and Strife as an
early expression of the efficient cause.
PYTHAGORAS. D.W.G. empirical.A PRIORI. empirical decision theory, the
scientific study of human judgment and decision making. A growing body of
empirical research has described the actual limitations on inductive reasoning.
By contrast, traditional decision theory is normative; the theory proposes
ideal procedures for solving some class of problems. The descriptive study of
decision making was pioneered by figures including Amos Tversky, Daniel
Kahneman, Richard Nisbett, and Lee Ross, and their empirical research has
documented the limitations and biases of various heuristics, or simple rules of
thumb, routinely used in reasoning. The representativeness heuristic is a rule
of thumb used to judge probabilities based on the degree to which one class
represents (or resembles) another class. For example, we assume that basketball
players have a “hot hand” during a particular game – producing an uninterrupted
string of successful shots – because we underestimate the relative frequency
with which such successful runs occur in the entire population of that player’s
record. The availability heuristic is a rule of thumb that uses the ease with
which an instance comes to mind as an index of the probability of an event.
Such a rule is unreliable when salience in memory misleads; for example, most
people (incorrectly) rate death by shark attack as more probable than death by
falling airplane parts. (For an overview, see D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A.
Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, 1982.) These
biases, found in laypeople and statistical experts alike, have a natural
explanation on accounts such as Herbert Simon’s (1957) concept of “bounded
rationality.” According to this view, the limitations on our decision making
are fixed in part by specific features of our psychological architecture. This
architecture places constraints on such factors as processing speed and
information capacity, and this in turn produces predictable, systematic errors
in performance. Thus, rather than proposing highly idealized rules appropriate
to an omniscient Laplacean genius – more characteristic of traditional
normative approaches to decision theory – empirical decision theory attempts to
formulate a descriptively accurate, and thus psychologically realistic, account
of rationality. Even if certain simple rules can, in particular settings,
outperform other strategies, it is still important to understand the causes of
the systematic errors we make on tasks perfectly representative of routine
decision making. Once the context is specified, empirical decision-making
research allows us to study both descriptive decision rules that we follow
spontaneously and normative rules that we ought to follow upon reflection. BAYESIAN RATIONALITY, DECISION THEORY,
HEURISTICS. J.D.T. empirical ego.KANT. empirical meaning.MEANING. empirical
probability.PROBABILITY. empiricism (from empiric, ‘doctor who relies on
practical experience’, ultimately from Greek empeiria, ‘experience’), a type of
theory in epistemology, the basic idea behind all examples of the type being
that experience has primacy in human knowledge and justified belief. Because
empiricism is not a single view but a type of view with many different
examples, it is appropriate to speak not just of empiricism but of empiricisms.
Perhaps the most fundamental distinction to be drawn among the various
empiricisms is that between those consisting of some claim about concepts and
those consisting of some empirical empiricism 262 4065A- AM 262
claim about beliefs – call these, respectively, concept-empiricisms and
belief-empiricisms. Concept-empiricisms all begin by singling out those
concepts that apply to some experience or other; the concept of dizziness,
e.g., applies to the experience of dizziness. And what is then claimed is that
all concepts that human beings do and can possess either apply to some
experience that someone has had, or have been derived from such concepts by
someone’s performing on those concepts one or another such mental operation as
combination, distinction, and abstraction. How exactly my concepts are and must
be related to my experience and to my performance of those mental operations
are matters on which concept-empiricists differ; most if not all would grant we
each acquire many concepts by learning language, and it does not seem plausible
to hold that each concept thus acquired either applies to some experience that
one has oneself had or has been derived from such by oneself. But though
concept-empiricists disagree concerning the conditions for linguistic
acquisition or transmission of a concept, what unites them, to repeat, is the
claim that all human concepts either apply to some experience that someone has
actually had or they have been derived from such by someone’s actually
performing on those the mental operations of combination, distinction, and
abstraction. Most concept-empiricists will also say something more: that the
experience must have evoked the concept in the person having the experience, or
that the person having the experience must have recognized that the concept
applies to his or her experience, or something of that sort. What unites all
belief-empiricists is the claim that for one’s beliefs to possess one or
another truth-relevant merit, they must be related in one or another way to someone’s
experience. Beliefempiricisms differ from each other, for one thing, with
respect to the merit concerning which the claim is made. Some
belief-empiricists claim that a belief does not have the status of knowledge
unless it has the requisite relation to experience; some claim that a belief
lacks warrant unless it has that relation; others claim that a belief is not
permissibly held unless it stands in that relation; and yet others claim that
it is not a properly scientific belief unless it stands in that relation. And
not even this list exhausts the possibilities. Belief-empiricisms also differ
with respect to the specific relation to experience that is said to be
necessary for the merit in question to be present. Some belief-empiricists
hold, for example, that a belief is permissibly held only if its propositional
content is either a report of the person’s present or remembered experience, or
the belief is held on the basis of such beliefs and is probable with respect to
the beliefs on the basis of which it is held. Kant, by contrast, held the
rather different view that if a belief is to constitute (empirical) knowledge,
it must in some way be about experience. Third, belief-empiricisms differ from
each other with respect to the person to whose experience a belief must stand
in the relation specified if it is to possess the merit specified. It need not
always be an experience of the person whose belief is being considered. It
might be an experience of someone giving testimony about it. It should be obvious
that a philosopher might well accept one kind of empiricism while rejecting
others. Thus to ask philosophers whether they are empiricists is a question
void for vagueness. It is regularly said of Locke that he was an empiricist;
and indeed, he was a concept-empiricist of a certain sort. But he embraced no
version whatsoever of belief-empiricism. Up to this point, ‘experience’ has
been used without explanation. But anyone acquainted with the history of
philosophy will be aware that different philosophers pick out different
phenomena with the word; and even when they pick out the same phenomenon, they
have different views as to the structure of the phenomenon that they call
‘experience.’ The differences on these matters reflect yet more distinctions
among empiricisms than have been delineated above. EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGICAL POSITIVISM,
RATIONALISM. N.P.W. empiricism, constructive.SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM. empiricism,
British.RATIONALISM. empiricism, logical.LOGICAL POSITIVISM. enantiamorphs
(from Greek enantios, ‘opposite’, and morphe, ‘form’), objects whose shapes
differ as do those of a right and left hand. One of a pair of enantiamorphs can
be made to look identical in shape to the other by viewing it in a mirror but
not merely by changing its spatial orientation. Enantiamorphs figure
prominently in the work of Kant, who argued that the existence of
enantiamorphic pairs entailed that Leibnizian relational theories of space were
to be rejected in favor of Newtonian absolutist theories, that some facts about
space could be apprehended empiricism, constructive enantiamorphs 263
4065A- AM 263 only by “pure intuition,” and that space
was mind-dependent. KANT, LEIBNIZ. R.Ke.
encrateia.AKRASIA. Encyclopedia, in French, Encyclopédie; full English title:
Encyclopedia, or a Descriptive Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades.
Launched in 1747 by the Parisian publisher Le Breton, who had secured
d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s editorship, the Encyclopedia was gradually released
from 1751 to 1772, despite a temporary revocation of its royal privilege.
Comprising seventeen folio volumes of 17,818 articles and eleven folio volumes
of 2,885 plates, the work required a staff of 272 contributors, writers, and
engravers. It incorporated the accumulated knowledge and rationalist,
secularist views of the French Enlightenment and prescribed economic, social,
and political reforms. Enormously successful, the work was reprinted with
revisions five times before 1789. Contributions were made by the philosophes
Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, d’Holbach, Naigeon, and Saint-Lambert; the
writers Duclos and Marmontel; the theologians Morellet and Malet; enlightened
clerics, e.g. Raynal; explorers, e.g. La Condamine; natural scientists, e.g.
Daubenton; physicians, e.g. Bouillet; the economists Turgot and Quesnay;
engineers, e.g. Perronet; horologists, e.g. Berthoud; and scores of other
experts. “The purpose of an Encyclopedia,” wrote Diderot, “is to collect the
knowledge dispersed on the surface of the earth, and to unfold its general
system” (“Encyclopedia,” Vol. 5, 1755). The Encyclopedia offered the educated
reader a comprehensive, systematic, and descriptive repository of contemporary
liberal and mechanical arts. D’Alembert and Diderot developed a sensationalist
epistemology (“Preliminary Discourse”) under the influence of Locke and
Condillac. They compiled and rationally classified existing knowledge according
to the noetic process (memory, imagination, and reason). Based on the
assumption of the unity of theory and praxis, their approach was positivistic
and utilitarian. The Encyclopedists vindicated experimental reason and the rule
of nature, fostered the practice of criticism, and stimulated the development
of new sciences. In religious matters, they cultivated ambiguity to escape
censorship. Whereas most contributors held either conciliatory or orthodox
positions, d’Alembert, Diderot, and d’Holbach barely concealed their
naturalistic and atheistic opinions. Their radicalism was pervasive.
Supernaturalism, obscurantism, and fanaticism were among the Encyclopedists’
favorite targets. They identified religion with superstition and theology with
black magic; asserted the superiority of natural morality over theological
ethics; demanded religious toleration; and championed human rights. They innovatively
retraced the historical conditions of the development of modern philosophy.
They furthermore pioneered ideas on trade and industry and anticipated the
relevance of historiography, sociology, economics, and linguistics. As the most
ambitious and expansive reference work of its time, the Encyclopedia
crystallized the confidence of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie in the
capacity of reason to dispel the shadows of ignorance and improve society. D’ALEMBERT, D’HOLBACH, DIDEROT, VOLTAIRE.
J.-L.S. Encyclopedists.ENCYCLOPEDIA. end in itself.KANT. endurance.PERDURANCE.
energeia, Greek term coined by Aristotle and often translated as ‘activity’,
‘actuality’, and even ‘act’, but more literally rendered ‘(a state of)
functioning’. Since for Aristotle the function of an object is its telos or
aim, energeia can also be described as an entelecheia or realization (another
coined term he uses interchangeably with energeia). So understood, it can
denote either (a) something’s being functional, though not in use at the
moment, and (b) something’s actually functioning, which Aristotle describes as
a “first realization” and “second realization” respectively (On the Soul II.5).
In general, every energeia is correlative to some dunamis, a capability or
power to function in a certain way, and in the central books of the Metaphysics
Aristotle uses the linkage between these two concepts to explain the relation
of form to matter. He also distinguishes between energeia and kinesis (change
or motion) (Metaphysics IX.6; Nicomachean Ethics X.4). A kinesis is defined by
reference to its terminus (e.g., learning how to multiply) and is thus
incomplete at any point before reaching its conclusion. An energeia, in
contrast, is a state complete in itself (e.g., seeing). Thus, Aristotle says
that at any time that I am seeing, it is also true that I have seen; but it is
not true that at any time I am learning that I have learned. In Greek, this
difference is not so much one of tense as of encrateia energeia 264 4065A- AM 264
aspect: the perfect tense marks a “perfect” or complete state, and not
necessarily prior activity. ARISTOTLE.
V.C. energeticism, also called energetism or energism, the doctrine that energy
is the fundamental substance underlying all change. Its most prominent champion
was the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932). In his address “Die
Überwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus” (“The Conquest of Scientific
Materialism”), delivered at Lübeck in 1895, Ostwald chastised the
atomic-kinetic theory as lacking progress and claimed that a unified science,
energetics, could be based solely on the concept of energy. Many of Ostwald’s
criticisms of materialism and mechanistic reductionism derived from Mach.
Ostwald’s attempts to deduce the fundamental equations of thermodynamics and
mechanics from the principles of energy conservation and transformation were
indebted to the writings of Georg Helm (1874–1919), especially Die Lehre von
Energie (“The Laws of Energy,” 1887) and Die Energetik (“Energetics,” 1898).
Ostwald defended Helm’s factorization thesis that all changes in energy can be
analyzed as a product of intensity and capacity factors. The factorization
thesis and the attempt to derive mechanics and thermodynamics from the
principles of energetics were subjected to devastating criticisms by Boltzmann
and Max Planck. Boltzmann also criticized the dogmatism of Ostwald’s rejection
of the atomickinetic theory. Ostwald’s program to unify the sciences under the
banner of energetics withered in the face of these criticisms. BOLTZMANN, MACH, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. M.C.
energetism, energism.ENERGETICISM. Engels, Friedrich (1820–95), German
socialist and economist who, with Marx, was the founder of what later was
called Marxism. Whether there are significant differences between Marx and
Engels is a question much in dispute among scholars of Marxism. Certainly there
are differences in emphasis, but there was also a division of labor between
them. Engels, and not Marx, presented a Marxist account of natural science and
integrated Darwinian elements in Marxian theory. But they also coauthored major
works, including The Holy Family, The German Ideology (1845), and The Communist
Manifesto (1848). Engels thought of himself as the junior partner in their
lifelong collaboration. That judgment is correct, but Engels’s work is both
significant and more accessible than Marx’s. He gave popular articulations of
their common views in such books as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and
AntiDühring (1878). His work, more than Marx’s, was taken by the Second
International and many subsequent Marxist militants to be definitive of
Marxism. Only much later with some Western Marxist theoreticians did his
influence decline. Engels’s first major work, The Condition of the Working
Class in England (1845), vividly depicted workers’ lives, misery, and
systematic exploitation. But he also saw the working class as a new force
created by the industrial revolution, and he developed an account of how this
new force would lead to the revolutionary transformation of society, including
collective ownership and control of the means of production and a rational
ordering of social life; all this would supersede the waste and disparity of
human conditions that he took to be inescapable under capitalism. The German
Ideology, jointly authored with Marx, first articulated what was later called
historical materialism, a conception central to Marxist theory. It is the view
that the economic structure of society is the foundation of society; as the
productive forces develop, the economic structure changes and with that
political, legal, moral, religious, and philosophical ideas change accordingly.
Until the consolidation of socialism, societies are divided into antagonistic
classes, a person’s class being determined by her relationship to the means of
production. The dominant ideas of a society will be strongly conditioned by the
economic structure of the society and serve the class interests of the dominant
class. The social consciousness (the ruling ideology) will be that which
answers to the interests of the dominant class. From the 1850s on, Engels took
an increasing interest in connecting historical materialism with developments
in natural science. This work took definitive form in his Anti-Dühring, the
first general account of Marxism, and in his posthumously published Dialectics
of Nature. (AntiDühring also contains his most extensive discussion of
morality.) It was in these works that Engels articulated the dialectical method
and a systematic communist worldview that sought to establish that there were
not only social laws expressing empirical regularities in society but also
universal laws of nature and thought. These dialectical laws, Engels believed,
reveal that both nature and society are in a continuous process of evolutionary
though conflict-laden development. Engels should not be considered primarily,
if at all, a speculative philosopher. Like Marx, he was energeticism Engels,
Friedrich 265 4065A- AM 265 critical of and ironical about
speculative philosophy and was a central figure in the socialist movement.
While always concerned that his account be warrantedly assertible, Engels
sought to make it not only true, but also a finely tuned instrument of
working-class emancipation which would lead to a world without classes. MARXISM, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. K.N.
Enlightenment, a late eighteenth-century international movement in thought,
with important social and political ramifications. The Enlightenment is at once
a style, an attitude, a temper – critical, secular, skeptical, empirical, and
practical. It is also characterized by core beliefs in human rationality, in
what it took to be “nature,” and in the “natural feelings” of mankind. Four of
its most prominent exemplars are Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Kant, and Voltaire.
The Enlightenment belief in human rationality had several aspects. (1) Human
beings are free to the extent that their actions are carried out for a reason.
Actions prompted by traditional authority, whether religious or political, are
therefore not free; liberation requires weakening if not also overthrow of this
authority. (2) Human rationality is universal, requiring only education for its
development. In virtue of their common rationality, all human beings have
certain rights, among them the right to choose and shape their individual
destinies. (3) A final aspect of the belief in human rationality was that the
true forms of all things could be discovered, whether of the universe (Newton’s
laws), of the mind (associationist psychology), of good government (the U.S.
Constitution), of a happy life (which, like good government, was “balanced”),
or of beautiful architecture (Palladio’s principles). The Enlightenment was
preeminently a “formalist” age, and prose, not poetry, was its primary means of
expression. The Enlightenment thought of itself as a return to the classical
ideas of the Greeks and (more especially) the Romans. But in fact it provided
one source of the revolutions that shook Europe and America at the end of the
eighteenth century, and it laid the intellectual foundations for both the
generally scientific worldview and the liberal democratic society, which,
despite the many attacks made on them, continue to function as cultural
ideals. HUME, KANT, LIBERALISM, LOCKE,
VOLTAIRE. G.G.B. ens a se (Latin,’a being from itself’), a being that is
completely independent and self-sufficient. Since every creature depends at
least upon God for its existence, only God could be ens a se. In fact, only God
is, and he must be. For if God depended on any other being, he would be
dependent and hence not self-sufficient. To the extent that the ontological
argument is plausible, it depends on conceiving of God as ens a se. In other
words, God as ens a se is the greatest conceivable being. The idea of ens a se
is very important in the Monologion and Proslogion of Anselm, in various works
of Duns Scotus, and later Scholastic thought. Ens a se should be distinguished
from ens ex se, according to Anselm in Monologion. Ens a se is from itself and
not “out of itself.” In other words, ens a se does not depend upon itself for
its own existence, because it is supposed to be dependent on absolutely
nothing. Further, if ens a se depended upon itself, it would cause itself to
exist, and that is impossible, according to medieval and Scholastic
philosophers, who took causality to be irreflexive. (It is also transitive and
asymmetric.) Hence, the medieval idea of ens a se should not be confused with
Spinoza’s idea of causa sui. Later Scholastics often coined abstract terms to
designate the property or entity that makes something to be what it is, in
analogy with forming, say, ‘rigidity’ from ‘rigid’. The Latin term ‘aseitas’ is
formed from the prepositional phrase in ‘ens a se’ in this way; ‘aseitas’ is
translated into English as ‘aseity’. A better-known example of forming an
abstract noun from a concrete word is ‘haecceitas’ (thisness) from ‘haec’
(this). ANSELM, DIVINE ATTRIBUTES, DUNS
SCOTUS, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. A.P.M. ens ex se.ENS A SE. en soi.SARTRE. ens
per accidens.PER ACCIDENS. ens perfectissimo.ENS REALISSIMUM. ens rationis
(Latin, ‘a being of reason’), a thing dependent for its existence upon reason
or thought; sometimes known as an intentional being. Ens rationis is the
contrasting term for a real being (res or ens in re extra animam), such as an
individual animal. Real beings exist independently of thought and are the
foundation for truth. A being of reason depends upon thought or reason for its
existence and is an invention of Enlightenment ens rationis 266 4065A- AM 266
the mind, even if it has a foundation in some real being. (This conception
requires the idea that there are degrees of being.) Two kinds of entia rationis
are distinguished: those with a foundation in reality and those without one.
The objects of logic, which include genera and species, e.g., animal and human,
respectively, are entia rationis that have a foundation in reality, but are
abstracted from it. In contrast, mythic and fictional objects, such as a
chimera or Pegasus, have no foundation in reality. Blindness and deafness are
also sometimes called entia rationis.
AQUINAS, SUÁREZ. A.P.M. ens realissimum (Latin, ‘most real being’), an
informal term for God that occurs rarely in Scholastic philosophers. Within
Kant’s philosophy, it has a technical sense. It is an extension of Baumgarten’s
idea of ens perfectissimum (most perfect being), a being that has the greatest
number of possible perfections to the greatest degree. Since ens perfectissimum
refers to God as the sum of all possibilities and since actuality is greater
than possibility, according to Kant, the idea of God as the sum of all
actualities, that is, ens realissimum, is a preferable term for God. Kant
thinks that human knowledge is “constrained” to posit the idea of a necessary
being. The necessary being that has the best claim to necessity is one that is
completely unconditioned, that is, dependent on nothing; this is ens
realissimum. He sometimes explicates it in three ways: as the substratum of all
realities, as the ground of all realities, and as the sum of all realities. Ens
realissimum is nonetheless empirically invalid, since it cannot be experienced
by humans. It is something ideal for reason, not real in experience. According
to Kant, the ontological argument begins with the concept of ens realissimum
and concludes that an existing object falls under that concept (Critique of
Pure Reason, Book II, chapter 3).
BAUMGARTEN, KANT. A.P.M. entailment.IMPLICATION. entelechy (from Greek
entelecheia), actuality. Aristotle, who coined both terms, treats entelecheia
as a near synonym of energeia when it is used in this sense. Entelecheia
figures in Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the first actuality of the
natural body (On the Soul II.1). This is explained by analogy with knowledge:
first actuality is to knowledge as second actuality is to the active use of
knowledge. ’Entelechy’ is also a technical term in Leibniz for the primitive
active force in every monad, which is combined with primary matter, and from
which the active force, vis viva, is somehow derived. The vitalist philosopher
Hans Driesch used the Aristotelian term in his account of biology. Life, he
held, is an entelechy; and an entelechy is a substantial entity, rather like a
mind, that controls organic processes.
ENERGEIA, PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY. P.Wo. enthymeme, an incompletely stated
syllogism, with one premise, or even the conclusion, omitted. The term
sometimes designates incompletely stated arguments of other kinds. We are
expected to supply the missing premise or draw the conclusion if it is not
stated. The result is supposed to be a syllogistic inference. For example: ‘He
will eventually get caught, for he is a thief’; or ‘He will eventually be
caught, for all habitual thieves get caught’. This notion of enthymeme as an incompletely
stated syllogism has a long tradition and does not seem inconsistent with
Aristotle’s own characterization of it. Thus, Peter of Spain openly declares
that an enthymeme is an argument with a single premise that needs to be reduced
to syllogism. But Peter also points out that Aristotle spoke of enthymeme as
“being of ycos and signum,” and he explains that ycos here means ‘probable
proposition’ while signum expresses the necessity of inference. ‘P, therefore
Q’ is an ycos in the sense of a proposition that appears to be true to all or
to many; but insofar as P has virtually a double power, that of itself and of
the proposition understood along with it, it is both probable and
demonstrative, albeit from a different point of view. SYLLOGISM. I.Bo. entity, abstract.ABSTRACT
ENTITY. entity, theoretical.THEORETICAL TERM. entrenchment.GOODMAN. entropy, in
physics, a measure of disorder; in information theory, a measure of
“information” in a technical sense. In statistical physics the number of
microstates accessible to the various particles of a large system of particles
such as a cabbage or the air in a room is represented as W. Accessible
microstates might be, for instance, energy levels the various particles can
reach. One can greatly simplify the ens realissimum entropy 267 4065A- AM 267
statement of certain laws of nature by introducing a logarithmic measure of
these accessible microstates. This measure, called entropy, is defined by the
formula: S(Entropy) % df. k(lnW), where k is Boltzmann’s constant. When the
entropy of a system increases, the system becomes more random and disordered,
in the sense that a larger number of microstates become available for the
system’s particles to enter. If a large physical system within which exchanges
of energy occur is isolated, exchanging no energy with its environment, the
entropy of the system tends to increase and never decreases. This result of
statistical physics is part of the second law of thermodynamics. In real,
evolving physical systems effectively isolated from their environments, entropy
increases and thus aspects of the system’s organization that depend upon there
being only a limited range of accessible microstates are altered. For example,
a cabbage totally isolated in a container would decay as complicated organic
molecules eventually became unstructured in the course of ongoing exchanges of
energy and attendant entropy increases. In information theory, a state or event
is said to contain more information than a second state or event if the former state
is less probable and thus in a sense more surprising than the latter. Other
plausible constraints suggest a logarithmic measure of information content.
Suppose X is a set of alternative possible states, xi , and p(xi ) is the
probability of each xi 1 X. If state xi has occurred the information content of
that occurrence is taken to be -log2p(xi ). This function increases as the
probability of xi decreases. If it is unknown which xi will occur, it is
reasonable to represent the expected information content of X as the sum of the
information contents of the alternative states xi weighted in each case by the
probability of the state, giving: This is called the Shannon entropy. Both
Shannon entropy and physical entropy can be thought of as logarithmic measures
of disarray. But this statement trades on a broad understanding of ‘disarray’.
A close relationship between the two concepts of entropy should not be
assumed. INFORMATION THEORY, PHILOSOPHY
OF SCIENCE. T.H. envelope paradox, an apparent paradox in decision theory that
runs as follows. You are shown two envelopes, M and N, and are reliably
informed that each contains some finite positive amount of money, that the
amount in one unspecified envelope is twice the amount in the unspecified
other, and that you may choose only one. Call the amount in M ‘m’ and that in N
‘n’. It might seem that: there is a half chance that m % 2n and a half chance
that m = n/2, so that the “expected value” of m is (½)(2n) ! (½)(n/2) % 1.25n,
so that you should prefer envelope M. But by similar reasoning it might seem
that the expected value of n is 1.25m, so that you should prefer envelope
N. DECISION THEORY. D.A.J. environmental
ethics.ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY. environmental philosophy, the critical study
of concepts defining relations between human beings and their non-human
environment. Environmental ethics, a major component of environmental
philosophy, addresses the normative significance of these relations. The
relevance of ecological relations to human affairs has been recognized at least
since Darwin, but the growing sense of human responsibility for their
deterioration, reflected in books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)
and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), has prompted the recent upsurge of
interest. Environmental philosophers have adduced a wide variety of human
attitudes and practices to account for the perceived deterioration, including
religious and scientific attitudes, social institutions, and industrial
technology. Proposed remedies typically urge a reorientation or new “ethic”
that recognizes “intrinsic value” in the natural world. Examples include the
“land ethic” of Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), which pictures humans as belonging
to, rather than owning, the biotic community (“the land”); deep ecology, a
stance articulated by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (b.1912), which
advocates forms of identification with the non-human world; and ecofeminism,
which rejects prevailing attitudes to the natural world that are perceived as
patriarchal. At the heart of environmental ethics lies the attempt to
articulate the basis of concern for the natural world. It encompasses global as
well as local issues, and considers the longer-term ecological, and even
evolutionary, fate of the human and non-human world. Many of its practitioners
question the anthropocentric claim that human beings are the exclusive or even
central focus of envelope paradox environmental philosophy 268 4065A- AM 268
ethical concern. In thus extending both the scope and the grounds of concern,
it presents a challenge to the stance of conventional interhuman ethics. It
debates how to balance the claims of present and future, human and non-human,
sentient and non-sentient, individuals and wholes. It investigates the
prospects for a sustainable relationship between economic and ecological
systems, and pursues the implications of this relationship with respect to
social justice and political institutions. Besides also engaging metaethical
questions about, for example, the objectivity and commensurability of values,
environmental philosophers are led to consider the nature and significance of
environmental change and the ontological status of collective entities such as
species and ecosystems. In a more traditional vein, environmental philosophy
revives metaphysical debates surrounding the perennial question of “man’s place
in nature,” and finds both precedent and inspiration in earlier philosophies
and cultures. APPLIED ETHICS, ETHICS,
FEMINISM, NATURALISM, VALUE. A.Ho. epapoge, Greek term for ‘induction’.
Especially in the logic of Aristotle, epagoge is opposed to argument by
syllogism. Aristotle describes it as “a move from particulars to the
universal.” E.g., premises that the skilled navigator is the best navigator,
the skilled charioteer the best charioteer, and the skilled philosopher the
best philosopher may support the conclusion by epagoge that those skilled in
something are usually the best at it. Aristotle thought it more persuasive and
clearer than the syllogistic method, since it relies on the senses and is
available to all humans. The term was later applied to dialectical arguments
intended to trap opponents. R.C. epicheirema, a polysyllogism in which each
premise represents an enthymematic argument; e.g., ‘A lie creates disbelief, because
it is an assertion that does not correspond to truth; flattery is a lie,
because it is a conscious distortion of truth; therefore, flattery creates
disbelief’. Each premise constitutes an enthymematic syllogism. Thus, the first
premise could be expanded into the following full-fledged syllogism: ‘Every
assertion that does not correspond to truth creates disbelief; a lie is an
assertion that does not correspond to truth; therefore a lie creates
disbelief’. We could likewise expand the second premise and offer a complete
argument for it. Epicheirema can thus be a powerful tool in oral polemics,
especially when one argues regressively, first stating the conclusion with a
sketch of support in terms of enthymemes, and then – if challenged to do so –
expanding any or all of these enthymemes into standard categorical
syllogisms. SYLLOGISM. I.Bo.
Epictetus.STOICISM. Epicureanism, one of the three leading movements
constituting Hellenistic philosophy. It was founded by Epicurus (341–271 B.C.),
together with his close colleagues Metrodorus (c.331– 278), Hermarchus
(Epicurus’s successor as head of the Athenian school), and Polyaenus (d. 278).
He set up Epicurean communities at Mytilene, Lampsacus, and finally Athens (306
B.C.), where his school the Garden became synonymous with Epicureanism. These
groups set out to live the ideal Epicurean life, detached from political
society without actively opposing it, and devoting themselves to philosophical
discussion and the cult of friendship. Their correspondence was anthologized
and studied as a model of the philosophical life by later Epicureans, for whom
the writings of Epicurus and his three cofounders, known collectively as “the
Men,” held a virtually biblical status. Epicurus wrote voluminously, but all
that survives are three brief epitomes (the Letter to Herodotus on physics, the
Letter to Pythocles on astronomy, etc., and the Letter to Menoeceus on ethics),
a group of maxims, and papyrus fragments of his magnum opus On Nature.
Otherwise, we are almost entirely dependent on secondary citations, doxography,
and the writings of his later followers. The Epicurean physical theory is
atomistic, developed out of the fifth-century system of Democritus. Per se
existents are divided into bodies and space, each of them infinite in quantity.
Space is, or includes, absolute void, without which motion would be impossible,
while body is constituted out of physically indivisible particles, “atoms.”
Atoms are themselves further analyzable as sets of absolute “minima,” the
ultimate quanta of magnitude, posited by Epicurus to circumvent the paradoxes
that Zeno of Elea had derived from the hypothesis of infinite divisibility.
Atoms themselves have only the primary properties of shape, size, and weight.
All secondary properties, e.g. color, are generated out of atomic compounds;
given their dependent status, they cannot be added to the list of per se
existents, but it does not follow, as the skeptical tradition in atomism had
held, that they are not real either. Atoms are in constant rapid motion,
epapoge Epicureanism 269 4065A- AM 269 at equal speed (since in the pure void
there is nothing to slow them down). Stability emerges as an overall property
of compounds, which large groups of atoms form by settling into regular
patterns of complex motion, governed by the three motive principles of weight,
collisions, and a minimal random movement, the “swerve,” which initiates new
patterns of motion and blocks the danger of determinism. Our world itself, like
the countless other worlds, is such a compound, accidentally generated and of
finite duration. There is no divine mind behind it, or behind the evolution of
life and society: the gods are to be viewed as ideal beings, models of the
Epicurean good life, and therefore blissfully detached from our affairs.
Canonic, the Epicurean theory of knowledge, rests on the principle that “all
sensations are true.” Denial of empirical cognition is argued to amount to
skepticism, which is in turn rejected as a self-refuting position. Sensations
are representationally (not propositionally) true. In the paradigm case of
sight, thin films of atoms (Greek eidola, Latin simulacra) constantly flood off
bodies, and our eyes mechanically report those that reach them, neither
embroidering nor interpreting. Inference from these guaranteed (photographic,
as it were) data to the nature of external objects themselves involves
judgment, and there alone error can occur. Sensations thus constitute one of
the three “criteria of truth,” along with feelings, a criterion of values and
introspective information, and prolepseis, or naturally acquired generic
conceptions. On the basis of sense evidence, we are entitled to infer the
nature of microscopic or remote phenomena. Celestial phenomena, e.g., cannot be
regarded as divinely engineered (which would conflict with the prolepsis of the
gods as tranquil), and experience supplies plenty of models that would account
for them naturalistically. Such grounds amount to consistency with directly
observed phenomena, and are called ouk antimarturesis (“lack of
counterevidence”). Paradoxically, when several alternative explanations of the
same phenomenon pass this test, all must be accepted: although only one of them
can be true for each token phenomenon, the others, given their intrinsic possibility
and the spatial and temporal infinity of the universe, must be true for tokens
of the same type elsewhere. Fortunately, when it comes to the basic tenets of
physics, it is held that only one theory passes this test of consistency with
phenomena. Epicurean ethics is hedonistic. Pleasure is our innate natural goal,
to which all other values, including virtue, are subordinated. Pain is the only
evil, and there is no intermediate state. Philosophy’s task is to show how
pleasure can be maximized, as follows: Bodily pleasure becomes more secure if
we adopt a simple way of life that satisfies only our natural and necessary
desires, with the support of like-minded friends. Bodily pain, when inevitable,
can be outweighed by mental pleasure, which exceeds it because it can range
over past, present, and future. The highest pleasure, whether of soul or body,
is a satisfied state, “katastematic pleasure.” The pleasures of stimulation
(“kinetic pleasures”), including those resulting from luxuries, can vary this
state, but have no incremental value: striving to accumulate them does not
increase overall pleasure, but does increase our vulnerability to fortune. Our
primary aim should instead be to minimize pain. This is achieved for the body
through a simple way of life, and for the soul through the study of physics,
which achieves the ultimate katastematic pleasure, ”freedom from disturbance”
(ataraxia), by eliminating the two main sources of human anguish, the fears of
the gods and of death. It teaches us (a) that cosmic phenomena do not convey
divine threats, (b) that death is mere disintegration of the soul, with hell an
illusion. To fear our own future non-existence is as irrational as to regret
the non-existence we enjoyed before we were born. Physics also teaches us how
to evade determinism, which would turn moral agents into mindless fatalists:
the swerve doctrine secures indeterminism, as does the logical doctrine that
future-tensed propositions may be neither true nor false. The Epicureans were
the first explicit defenders of free will, although we lack the details of
their positive explanation of it. Finally, although Epicurean groups sought to
opt out of public life, they took a keen and respectful interest in civic
justice, which they analyzed not as an absolute value, but as a contract
between humans to refrain from harmful activity on grounds of utility,
perpetually subject to revision in the light of changing circumstances.
Epicureanism enjoyed widespread popularity, but unlike its great rival Stoicism
it never entered the intellectual bloodstream of the ancient world. Its stances
were dismissed by many as philistine, especially its rejection of all cultural
activities not geared to the Epicurean good life. It was also increasingly
viewed as atheistic, and its ascetic hedonism was misrepresented as crude
sensualism (hence the modern use of ‘epicure’). The school nevertheless
continued to flourish down to and well beyond the end of the Hellenistic age.
In the first century B.C. its exponents Epicureanism Epicureanism 270
4065A- AM 270 included Philodemus, whose fragmentarily
surviving treatise On Signs attests to sophisticated debates on induction
between Stoics and Epicureans, and Lucretius, the Roman author of the great
Epicurean didactic poem On the Nature of Things. In the second century A.D.
another Epicurean, Diogenes of Oenoanda, had his philosophical writings
engraved on stone in a public colonnade, and passages have survived. Thereafter
Epicureanism’s prominence declined. Serious interest in it was revived by
Renaissance humanists, and its atomism was an important influence on early
modern physics, especially through Gassendi.
DOXOGRAPHERS, HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY. D.N.S. Epicurus.EPICUREANISM.
Epimenides paradox.SEMANTIC PARADOXES. epiphenomenalism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND.
episodic.DISPOSITION. episteme.ARISTOTLE. epistemic.PERCEPTION. epistemic
accessibility.EPISTEMOLOGY. epistemic certainty.CERTAINTY. epistemic
deontologism, a duty-based view of the nature of epistemic justification. A
central concern of epistemology is to account for the distinction between
justified and unjustified beliefs. According to epistemic deontologism, the
concept of justification may be analyzed by using, in a specific sense relevant
to the pursuit of knowledge, terms such as ‘ought’, ‘obligatory’,
‘permissible’, and ‘forbidden’. A subject S is justified in believing that p
provided S does not violate any epistemic obligations – those that arise from
the goal of believing what is true and not believing what is false.
Equivalently, S is justified in believing that p provided believing p is – from
the point of view taken in the pursuit of truth – permissible for S. Among
contemporary epistemologists, this view is held by Chisholm, Laurence BonJour,
and Carl Ginet. Its significance is twofold. If justification is a function of
meeting obligations, then it is, contrary to some versions of naturalistic
epistemology, normative. Second, if the normativity of justification is
deontological, the factors that determine whether a belief is justified must be
internal to the subject’s mind. Critics of epistemic deontologism, most
conspicuously Alston, contend that belief is involuntary and thus cannot be a
proper object of obligations. If, e.g., one is looking out the window and
notices that it is raining, one is psychologically forced to believe that it is
raining. Deontologists can reply to this objection by rejecting its underlying
premise: epistemic obligations require that belief be voluntary. Alternatively,
they may insist that belief is voluntary after all, and thus subject to
epistemic obligations, for there is a means by which one can avoid believing
what one ought not to believe: weighing the evidence, or deliberation. EPISTEMOLOGY, JUSTIFICATION. M.St. epistemic
dependence.DEPENDENCE. epistemic holism.HOLISM. epistemic immediacy.IMMEDIACY.
epistemic justification.EPISTEMOLOGY. epistemic logic, the logical
investigation of epistemic concepts and statements. Epistemic concepts include
the concepts of knowledge, reasonable belief, justification, evidence,
certainty, and related notions. Epistemic logic is usually taken to include the
logic of belief or doxastic logic. Much of the recent work on epistemic logic
is based on the view that it is a branch of modal logic. In the early 1950s von
Wright observed that the epistemic notions verified (known to be true),
undecided, and falsified are related to each other in the same way as the
alethic modalities necessary, contingent, and impossible, and behave logically
in analogous ways. This analogy is not surprising in view of the fact that the
meaning of modal concepts is often explained epistemically. For example, in the
1890s Peirce defined informational possibility as that “which in a given (state
of) information is not perfectly known not to be true,” and called
informationally necessary “that which is perfectly known to be true.” The modal
logic of epistemic and doxastic concepts was studied systematically by Hintikka
in his pioneering Knowledge and Belief(1962), which applied to the concepts of
knowledge and belief the semantical method (the method of modal sets) that he
had used earlier for the investigation of modal logic. In this approach, the
truth of the proposition that a knows that p (briefly Kap) in a possible world
(or situation) u is taken to mean that p holds in all epistemic alternatives of
Epicurus epistemic logic 271 4065A-
AM 271 u; these are understood as
worlds compatible with what a knows at u. If the relation of epistemic
alternativeness is reflexive, the principle ‘KapPp’ (only what is the case can
be known) is valid, and the assumption that the alternativeness relation is
transitive validates the so-called KK-thesis, ‘Kap P Ka Ka p’ (if a knows that
p, a knows that a knows that p); these two assumptions together make the logic
of knowledge similar to an S4-type modal logic. If the knowledge operator Ka
and the corresponding epistemic possibility operator Pa are added to
quantification theory with identity, it becomes possible to study the interplay
between quantifiers and epistemic operators and the behavior of individual
terms in epistemic contexts, and analyze such locutions as ‘a knows who (what)
b (some F) is’. The problems of epistemic logic in this area are part of the
general problem of giving a coherent semantical account of propositional
attitudes. If a proposition p is true in all epistemic alternatives of a given
world, so are all logical consequences of p; thus the possible-worlds semantics
of epistemic concepts outlined above leads to the result that a person knows all
logical consequences of what he knows. This is a paradoxical conclusion; it is
called the problem of logical omniscience. The solution of this problem
requires a distinction between different levels of knowledge – for example,
between tacit and explicit knowledge. A more realistic model of knowledge can
be obtained by supplementing the basic possible-worlds account by an analysis
of the processes by which the implicit knowledge can be activated and made
explicit. Modal epistemic logics have found fruitful applications in the recent
work on knowledge representation and in the logic and semantics of questions
and answers in which questions are interpreted as requests for knowledge or
“epistemic imperatives.” EPISTEMOLOGY,
KK-THESIS, MODAL LOGIC. R.Hi. epistemic operator.OPERATOR. epistemic
permissibility.EPISTEMOLOGY. epistemic possibility.EPISTEMIC LOGIC. epistemic
principle, a principle of rationality applicable to such concepts as knowledge,
justification, and reasonable belief. Epistemic principles include the
principles of epistemic logic and principles that relate different epistemic
concepts to one another, or epistemic concepts to nonepistemic ones (e.g.,
semantic concepts). Epistemic concepts include the concepts of knowledge,
reasonable belief, justification, (epistemic) probability, and other concepts
that are used for the purpose of assessing the reasonableness of beliefs and
knowledge claims. Epistemic principles can be formulated as principles
concerning belief systems or information systems, i.e., systems that
characterize a person’s possible doxastic state at a given time; a belief
system may be construed as a set of (accepted) propositions or as a system of
degrees of belief. It is possible to distinguish two kinds of epistemic
principles: (a) principles concerning the rationality of a single belief
system, and (b) principles concerning the rational changes of belief. The
former include the requirements of coherence and consistency for beliefs (and
for probabilities); such principles may be said to concern the statics of
belief systems. The latter principles include various principles of belief
revision and adjustment, i.e., principles concerning the dynamics of belief
systems. CLOSURE, KK-THESIS. R.Hi. epistemic
priority.DEPENDENCE. epistemic privacy, the relation a person has to a
proposition when only that person can have direct or non-inferential knowledge
of the proposition. It is widely thought that people have epistemic privacy
with respect to propositions about certain of their own mental states.
According to this view, a person can know directly that he has certain thoughts
or feelings or sensory experiences. Perhaps others can also know that the
person has these thoughts, feelings, or experiences, but if they can it is only
as a result of inference from propositions about the person’s behavior or
physical condition. INFERENTIAL
KNOWLEDGE, PRIVILEGED ACCESS. R.Fe. epistemic probability.PROBABILITY.
epistemic rationality.IRRATIONALITY. epistemic regress argument, an argument,
originating in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, aiming to show that knowledge
and epistemic justification have a two-tier structure as described by epistemic
foundationalism. It lends itself to the following outline regarding
justification. If you have any justified belief, this belief occurs in an
evidential chain including at least two links: the supporting link (i.e., the
evidence) and the supported link (i.e., the justified belief). This does
epistemic operator epistemic regress argument 272 4065A- AM 272
not mean, however, that all evidence consists of beliefs. Evidential chains
might come in any of four kinds: circular chains, endless chains, chains ending
in unjustified beliefs, and chains anchored in foundational beliefs that do not
derive their justification from other beliefs. Only the fourth, foundationalist
kind is defensible as grounding knowledge and epistemic justification. Could
all justification be inferential? A belief, B1, is inferentially justified when
it owes its justification, at least in part, to some other belief, B2. Whence
the justification for B2? If B2 owes its justification to B1, we have a
troublesome circle. How can B2 yield justification (or evidence) for B1, if B2
owes its evidential status to B1? On the other hand, if B2 owes its justification
to another belief, B3, and B3 owes its justification to yet another belief, B4,
and so on ad infinitum, we have a troublesome endless regress of justification.
Such a regress seems to deliver not actual justification, but at best merely
potential justification, for the belief at its head. Actual finite humans,
furthermore, seem not to be able to comprehend, or to possess, all the steps of
an infinite regress of justification. Finally, if B2 is itself unjustified, it
evidently will be unable to provide justification for B1. It seems, then, that
the structure of inferential justification does not consist of either circular
justification, endless regresses of justification, or unjustified
starter-beliefs. We have foundationalism, then, as the most viable account of
evidential chains, so long as we understand it as the structural view that some
beliefs are justified non-inferentially (i.e., without deriving justification
from other beliefs), but can nonetheless provide justification for other
beliefs. More precisely, if we have any justified beliefs, we have some
foundational, non-inferentially justified beliefs. This regress argument needs
some refinement before its full force can be appreciated. With suitable
refinement, however, it can seriously challenge such alternatives to
foundationalism as coherentism and contextualism. The regress argument has been
a key motivation for foundationalism in the history of epistemology. COHERENTISM, EPISTEMOLOGY, FOUNDATIONALISM.
P.K.M. epistemics.GOLDMAN. epistemic virtue.VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY. epistemology
(from Greek episteme, ‘knowledge’, and logos, ‘explanation’), the study of the
nature of knowledge and justification; specifically, the study of (a) the
defining features, (b) the substantive conditions or sources, and (c) the
limits of knowledge and justification. The latter three categories are
represented by traditional philosophical controversy over the analysis of
knowledge and justification, the sources of knowledge and justification (e.g.,
rationalism versus empiricism), and the viability of skepticism about knowledge
and justification. Kinds of knowledge. Knowledge can be either explicit or
tacit. Explicit knowledge is self-conscious in that the knower is aware of the
relevant state of knowledge, whereas tacit knowledge is implicit, hidden from
self-consciousness. Much of our knowledge is tacit: it is genuine but we are
unaware of the relevant states of knowledge, even if we can achieve awareness
upon suitable reflection. In this regard, knowledge resembles many of our
psychological states. The existence of a psychological state in a person does
not require the person’s awareness of that state, although it may require the
person’s awareness of an object of that state (such as what is sensed or
perceived). Philosophers have identified various species of knowledge: for
example, propositional knowledge (that something is so), non-propositional
knowledge of something (e.g., knowledge by acquaintance, or by direct
awareness), empirical (a posteriori) propositional knowledge, nonempirical (a
priori) propositional knowledge, and knowledge of how to do something.
Philosophical controversy has arisen over distinctions between such species,
for example, over (i) the relations between some of these species (e.g., does
knowing-how reduce to knowledge-that?), and (ii) the viability of some of these
species (e.g., is there really such a thing as, or even a coherent notion of, a
priori knowledge?). A primary concern of classical modern philosophy, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the extent of our a priori knowledge
relative to the extent of our a posteriori knowledge. Such rationalists as
Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza contended that all genuine knowledge of the
real world is a priori, whereas such empiricists as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
argued that all such knowledge is a posteriori. In his Critique of Pure Reason
(1781), Kant sought a grand reconciliation, aiming to preserve the key lessons
of both rationalism and empiricism. Since the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, a posteriori knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that
depends for its supepistemics epistemology 273 4065A- AM 273
porting ground on some specific sensory or perceptual experience; and a priori
knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that does not depend for its
supporting ground on such experience. Kant and others have held that the
supporting ground for a priori knowledge comes solely from purely intellectual
processes called “pure reason” or “pure understanding.” Knowledge of logical
and mathematical truths typically serves as a standard case of a priori
knowledge, whereas knowledge of the existence or presence of physical objects
typically serves as a standard case of a posteriori knowledge. A major task for
an account of a priori knowledge is the explanation of what the relevant purely
intellectual processes are, and of how they contribute to non-empirical
knowledge. An analogous task for an account of a posteriori knowledge is the
explanation of what sensory or perceptual experience is and how it contributes
to empirical knowledge. More fundamentally, epistemologists have sought an
account of propositional knowledge in general, i.e., an account of what is
common to a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Ever since Plato’s Meno and
Theaetetus (c.400 B.C.), epistemologists have tried to identify the essential,
defining components of knowledge. Identifying these components will yield an
analysis of knowledge. A prominent traditional view, suggested by Plato and
Kant among others, is that propositional knowledge (that something is so) has
three individually necessary and jointly sufficient components: justification,
truth, and belief. On this view, propositional knowledge is, by definition,
justified true belief. This is the tripartite definition that has come to be
called the standard analysis. We can clarify it by attending briefly to each of
its three conditions. The belief condition. This requires that anyone who knows
that p (where ‘p’ stands for any proposition or statement) must believe that p.
If, therefore, you do not believe that minds are brains (say, because you have
not considered the matter at all), then you do not know that minds are brains.
A knower must be psychologically related somehow to a proposition that is an
object of knowledge for that knower. Proponents of the standard analysis hold
that only belief can provide the needed psychological relation. Philosophers do
not share a uniform account of belief, but some considerations supply common
ground. Beliefs are not actions of assenting to a proposition; they rather are
dispositional psychological states that can exist even when unmanifested. (You
do not cease believing that 2 ! 2 % 4, for example, whenever your attention
leaves arithmetic.) Our believing that p seems to require that we have a
tendency to assent to p in certain situations, but it seems also to be more
than just such a tendency. What else believing requires remains highly
controversial among philosophers. Some philosophers have opposed the belief condition
of the standard analysis on the ground that we can accept, or assent to, a
known proposition without actually believing it. They contend that we can
accept a proposition even if we fail to acquire a tendency, required by
believing, to accept that proposition in certain situations. On this view,
acceptance is a psychological act that does not entail any dispositional
psychological state, and such acceptance is sufficient to relate a knower
psychologically to a known proposition. However this view fares, one underlying
assumption of the standard analysis seems correct: our concept of knowledge
requires that a knower be psychologically related somehow to a known
proposition. Barring that requirement, we shall be hard put to explain how
knowers psychologically possess their knowledge of known propositions. Even if
knowledge requires belief, belief that p does not require knowledge that p,
since belief can typically be false. This observation, familiar from Plato’s
Theaetetus, assumes that knowledge has a truth condition. On the standard
analysis, if you know that p, then it is true that p. If, therefore, it is
false that minds are brains, then you do not know that minds are brains. It is
thus misleading to say, e.g., that astronomers before Copernicus knew that the
earth is flat; at best, they justifiably believed that they knew this. The
truth condition. This condition of the standard analysis has not attracted any
serious challenge. Controversy over it has focused instead on Pilate’s vexing
question: What is truth? This question concerns what truth consists in, not our
ways of finding out what is true. Influential answers come from at least three
approaches: truth as correspondence (i.e., agreement, of some specified sort,
between a proposition and an actual situation); truth as coherence (i.e.,
interconnectedness of a proposition with a specified system of propositions);
and truth as pragmatic cognitive value (i.e., usefulness of a proposition in
achieving certain intellectual goals). Without assessing these prominent
approaches, we should recognize, in accord with the standard analysis, that our
concept of knowledge seems to have a factual requirement: we epistemology
epistemology 274 4065A- AM 274 genuinely know that p only if it is the
case that p. The pertinent notion of “its being the case” seems equivalent to
the notion of “how reality is” or “how things really are.” The latter notion
seems essential to our notion of knowledge, but is open to controversy over its
explication. The justification condition. Knowledge is not simply true belief.
Some true beliefs are supported only by lucky guesswork and hence do not
qualify as knowledge. Knowledge requires that the satisfaction of its belief
condition be “appropriately related” to the satisfaction of its truth
condition. This is one broad way of understanding the justification condition
of the standard analysis. More specifically, we might say that a knower must
have adequate indication that a known proposition is true. If we understand
such adequate indication as a sort of evidence indicating that a proposition is
true, we have reached the traditional general view of the justification
condition: justification as evidence. Questions about justification attract the
lion’s share of attention in contemporary epistemology. Controversy focuses on
the meaning of ‘justification’ as well as on the substantive conditions for a
belief’s being justified in a way appropriate to knowledge. Current debates
about the meaning of ‘justification’ revolve around the question whether, and
if so how, the concept of epistemic (knowledge-relevant) justification is
normative. Since the 1950s Chisholm has defended the following deontological
(obligation-oriented) notion of justification: the claim that a proposition, p,
is epistemically justified for you means that it is false that you ought to
refrain from accepting p. In other terms, to say that p is epistemically
justified is to say that accepting p is epistemically permissible – at least in
the sense that accepting p is consistent with a certain set of epistemic rules.
This deontological construal enjoys wide representation in contemporary
epistemology. A normative construal of justification need not be deontological;
it need not use the notions of obligation and permission. Alston, for instance,
has introduced a non-deontological normative concept of justification that
relies mainly on the notion of what is epistemically good from the viewpoint of
maximizing truth and minimizing falsity. Alston links epistemic goodness to a
belief’s being based on adequate grounds in the absence of overriding reasons
to the contrary. Some epistemologists shun normative construals of
justification as superfluous. One noteworthy view is that ‘epistemic
justification’ means simply ‘evidential support’ of a certain sort. To say that
p is epistemically justifiable to some extent for you is, on this view, just to
say that p is supportable to some extent by your overall evidential reasons.
This construal will be non-normative so long as the notions of supportability
and an evidential reason are nonnormative. Some philosophers have tried to
explicate the latter notions without relying on talk of epistemic
permissibility or epistemic goodness. We can understand the relevant notion of
“support” in terms of non-normative notions of entailment and explanation (or,
answering why-questions). We can understand the notion of an “evidential
reason” via the notion of a psychological state that can stand in a certain
truth-indicating support relation to propositions. For instance, we might
regard nondoxastic states of “seeming to perceive” something (e.g., seeming to
see a dictionary here) as foundational truth indicators for certain
physical-object propositions (e.g., the proposition that there is a dictionary
here), in virtue of those states being best explained by those propositions. If
anything resembling this approach succeeds, we can get by without the
aforementioned normative notions of epistemic justification. Foundationalism
versus coherentism. Talk of foundational truth indicators brings us to a key
controversy over justification: Does epistemic justification, and thus
knowledge, have foundations, and if so, in what sense? This question can be
clarified as the issue whether some beliefs can not only (a) have their
epistemic justification non-inferentially (i.e., apart from evidential support
from any other beliefs), but also (b) provide epistemic justification for all
justified beliefs that lack such non-inferential justification. Foundationalism
gives an affirmative answer to this issue, and is represented in varying ways
by, e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, Russell, C. I. Lewis, and Chisholm.
Foundationalists do not share a uniform account of non-inferential
justification. Some construe non-inferential justification as
self-justification. Others reject literal self-justification for beliefs, and
argue that foundational beliefs have their non-inferential justification in
virtue of evidential support from the deliverances of non-belief psychological
states, e.g., perception (“seem-ing-to-perceive” states), sensation
(“seeming-to-sense” states), or memory (“seeming-toremember” states). Still
others understand noninferential justification in terms of a belief’s being
“reliably produced,” i.e., caused and sustained by epistemology epistemology
275 4065A- AM 275 some non-belief belief-producing process
or source (e.g., perception, memory, introspection) that tends to produce true
rather than false beliefs. This last view takes the causal source of a belief
to be crucial to its justification. Unlike Descartes, contemporary
foundationalists clearly separate claims to non-inferential, foundational
justification from claims to certainty. They typically settle for a modest
foundationalism implying that foundational beliefs need not be indubitable or
infallible. This contrasts with the radical foundationalism of Descartes. The
traditional competitor to foundationalism is the coherence theory of
justification, i.e., epistemic coherentism. This is not the coherence
definition of truth; it rather is the view that the justification of any belief
depends on that belief’s having evidential support from some other belief via
coherence relations such as entailment or explanatory relations. Notable
proponents include Hegel, Bosanquet, and Sellars. A prominent contemporary
version of epistemic coherentism states that evidential coherence relations
among beliefs are typically explanatory relations. The rough idea is that a
belief is justified for you so long as it either best explains, or is best
explained by, some member of the system of beliefs that has maximal explanatory
power for you. Contemporary coherentism is uniformly systemic or holistic; it
finds the ultimate source of justification in a system of interconnected
beliefs or potential beliefs. One problem has troubled all versions of
coherentism that aim to explain empirical justification: the isolation
argument. According to this argument, coherentism entails that you can be
epistemically justified in accepting an empirical proposition that is
incompatible with, or at least improbable given, your total empirical evidence.
The key assumption of this argument is that your total empirical evidence
includes non-belief sensory and perceptual awareness-states, such as your
feeling pain or your seeming to see something. These are not belief-states.
Epistemic coherentism, by definition, makes justification a function solely of
coherence relations between propositions, such as propositions one believes or
accepts. Thus, such coherentism seems to isolate justification from the
evidential import of non-belief awareness-states. Coherentists have tried to
handle this problem, but no resolution enjoys wide acceptance. Causal and
contextualist theories. Some contemporary epistemologists endorse contextualism
regarding epistemic justification, a view suggested by Dewey, Wittgenstein, and
Kuhn, among others. On this view, all justified beliefs depend for their
evidential support on some unjustified beliefs that need no justification. In
any context of inquiry, people simply assume (the acceptability of) some
propositions as starting points for inquiry, and these “contextually basic”
propositions, though lacking evidential support, can serve as evidential
support for other propositions. Contextualists stress that contextually basic
propositions can vary from context to context (e.g., from theological inquiry
to biological inquiry) and from social group to social group. The main problem
for contextualists comes from their view that unjustified assumptions can provide
epistemic justification for other propositions. We need a precise explanation
of how an unjustified assumption can yield evidential support, how a
non-probable belief can make another belief probable. Contextualists have not
given a uniform explanation here. Recently some epistemologists have
recommended that we give up the traditional evidence condition for knowledge.
They recommend that we construe the justification condition as a causal
condition. Roughly, the idea is that you know that p if and only if (a) you
believe that p, (b) p is true, and (c) your believing that p is causally
produced and sustained by the fact that makes p true. This is the basis of the
causal theory of knowing, which comes with varying details. Any such causal
theory faces serious problems from our knowledge of universal propositions.
Evidently, we know, for instance, that all dictionaries are produced by people,
but our believing that this is so seems not to be causally supported by the
fact that all dictionaries are humanly produced. It is not clear that the
latter fact causally produces any beliefs. Another problem is that causal
theories typically neglect what seems to be crucial to any account of the
justification condition: the requirement that justificational support for a
belief be accessible, in some sense, to the believer. The rough idea is that
one must be able to access, or bring to awareness, the justification underlying
one’s beliefs. The causal origins of a belief are, of course, often very
complex and inaccessible to a believer. Causal theories thus face problems from
an accessibility requirement on justification. Internalism regarding
justification preserves an accessibility requirement on what confers
justification, whereas epistemic externalism rejects this requirement. Debates
over internalism and exepistemology epistemology 276 4065A- AM 276
ternalism abound in current epistemology, but internalists do not yet share a
uniform detailed account of accessibility. The Gettier problem. The standard
analysis of knowledge, however elaborated, faces a devastating challenge that
initially gave rise to causal theories of knowledge: the Gettier problem. In
1963 Edmund Gettier published a highly influential challenge to the view that
if you have a justified true belief that p, then you know that p. Here is one
of Gettier’s counterexamples to this view: Smith is justified in believing the
false proposition that (i) Jones owns a Ford. On the basis of (i), Smith
infers, and thus is justified in believing, that (ii) either Jones owns a Ford
or Brown is in Barcelona. As it happens, Brown is in Barcelona, and so (ii) is
true. So, although Smith is justified in believing the true proposition (ii),
Smith does not know (ii). Gettier-style counterexamples are cases where a person
has justified true belief that p but lacks knowledge that p. The Gettier
problem is the problem of finding a modification of, or an alternative to, the
standard analysis that avoids difficulties from Gettier-style counterexamples.
The controversy over the Gettier problem is highly complex and still unsettled.
Many epistemologists take the lesson of Gettier-style counterexamples to be
that propositional knowledge requires a fourth condition, beyond the
justification, truth, and belief conditions. No specific fourth condition has
received overwhelming acceptance, but some proposals have become prominent. The
so-called defeasibility condition, e.g., requires that the justification
appropriate to knowledge be “undefeated” in the general sense that some appropriate
subjunctive conditional concerning defeaters of justification be true of that
justification. For instance, one simple defeasibility fourth condition requires
of Smith’s knowing that p that there be no true proposition, q, such that if q
became justified for Smith, p would no longer be justified for Smith. So if
Smith knows, on the basis of his visual perception, that Mary removed books
from the library, then Smith’s coming to believe the true proposition that
Mary’s identical twin removed books from the library would not undermine the
justification for Smith’s belief concerning Mary herself. A different approach
shuns subjunctive conditionals of that sort, and contends that propositional
knowledge requires justified true belief that is sustained by the collective
totality of actual truths. This approach requires a detailed account of when
justification is undermined and restored. The Gettier problem is
epistemologically important. One branch of epistemology seeks a precise
understanding of the nature (e.g., the essential components) of propositional
knowledge. Our having a precise understanding of propositional knowledge
requires our having a Gettier-proof analysis of such knowledge. Epistemologists
thus need a defensible solution to the Gettier problem, however complex that
solution is. Skepticism. Epistemologists debate the limits, or scope, of
knowledge. The more restricted we take the limits of knowledge to be, the more
skeptical we are. Two influential types of skepticism are knowledge skepticism
and justification skepticism. Unrestricted knowledge skepticism implies that no
one knows anything, whereas unrestricted justification skepticism implies the
more extreme view that no one is even justified in believing anything. Some
forms of skepticism are stronger than others. Knowledge skepticism in its
strongest form implies that it is impossible for anyone to know anything. A
weaker form would deny the actuality of our having knowledge, but leave open
its possibility. Many skeptics have restricted their skepticism to a particular
domain of supposed knowledge: e.g., knowledge of the external world, knowledge
of other minds, knowledge of the past or the future, or knowledge of
unperceived items. Such limited skepticism is more common than unrestricted
skepticism in the history of epistemology. Arguments supporting skepticism come
in many forms. One of the most difficult is the problem of the criterion, a
version of which has been stated by the sixteenth-century skeptic Montaigne:
“To adjudicate [between the true and the false] among the appearances of
things, we need to have a distinguishing method; to validate this method, we
need to have a justifying argument; but to validate this justifying argument,
we need the very method at issue. And there we are, going round on the wheel.”
This line of skeptical argument originated in ancient Greece, with epistemology
itself. It forces us to face this question: How can we specify what we know
without having specified how we know, and how can we specify how we know without
having specified what we know? Is there any reasonable way out of this
threatening circle? This is one of the most difficult epistemological problems,
and a cogent epistemology must offer a defensible solution to epistemology
epistemology 277 4065A- AM 277 it. Contemporary epistemology still lacks
a widely accepted reply to this urgent problem.
A PRIORI, COHERENTISM, FOUNDATIONALISM, JUSTIFICATION, PERCEPTION,
SKEPTICISM, TRUTH. P.K.M. epistemology, evolutionary.EVOLUTIONARY EPISTEMOLOGY.
epistemology, genetic.PIAGET. epistemology, naturalistic.NATURALISTIC
EPISTEMOLOGY. episyllogism.POLYSYLLOGISM. epoché.HUSSERL, PHENOMENOLOGY.
E-proposition.SYLLOGISM. epsilon.Appendix of Special Symbols. equipollence,
term used by Sextus Empiricus to express the view that there are arguments of
equal strength on all sides of any question and that therefore we should
suspend judgment on every question that can be raised. SEXTUS EMPIRICUS. R.P.
equipossible.EQUIPROBABLE. equiprobable, having the same probability. Sometimes
used in the same way as ‘equipossible’, the term is associated with Laplace’s
(the “classical”) interpretation of probability, where the probability of an
event is the ratio of the number of equipossibilities favorable to the event to
the total number of equipossibilities. For example, the probability of rolling
an even number with a “fair” six-sided die is ½ – there being three
equipossibilities (2, 4, 6) favorable to even, and six equipossibilities (1, 2,
3, 4, 5, 6) in all (and 3 /6 % ½). The concept is now generally thought not to
be widely applicable to the interpretation of probability, since natural
equipossibilities are not always at hand (as in assessing the probability of a
thermonuclear war tomorrow). PROBABILITY.
E.Ee. equivalence, mutual inferability. The following are main kinds: two
statements are materially equivalent provided they have the same truthvalue,
and logically equivalent provided each can be deduced from the other; two
sentences or words are equivalent in meaning provided they can be substituted
for each other in any context without altering the meaning of that context. In
truth-functional logic, two statements are logically equivalent if they can
never have truthvalues different from each other. In this sense of ‘logically
equivalent’ all tautologies are equivalent to each other and all contradictions
are equivalent to each other. Similarly, in extensional set theory, two classes
are equivalent provided they have the same numbers, so that all empty classes
are regarded as equivalent. In a non-extensional set theory, classes would be
equivalent only if their conditions of membership were logically equivalent or
equivalent in meaning. R.P. equivalence, behavioral.TURING MACHINE. equivalence
class.PARTITION, RELATION. equivalence condition.CONFIRMATION. equivalence
relation.PARTITION, RELATION. equivocation, the use of an expression in two or
more different senses in a single context. For example, in ‘The end of anything
is its perfection. But the end of life is death; so death is the perfection of
life’, the expression ‘end’ is first used in the sense of ‘goal or purpose,’
but in its second occurrence ‘end’ means ‘termination.’ The use of the two
senses in this context is an equivocation. Where the context in which the
expression used is an argument, the fallacy of equivocation may be
committed. INFORMAL FALLACY. W.K.W.
equivocation, fallacy of.INFORMAL FALLACY. Er, myth of.MYTH OF ER. Erasmus,
Desiderius (1466?–1536), Dutch scholar and philosopher who played an important
role in Renaissance humanism. Like his Italian forerunners Petrarch, Coluccio
Salutati, Lorenzo Valla, Leonardo Bruni, and others, Erasmus stressed within
philosophy and theology the function of philological precision, grammatical
correctness, and rhetorical elegance. But for Erasmus the virtues of bonae
literarae which are cultivated by the study of authors of Latin and Greek
antiquity must be decisively linked with Christian spirituality. Erasmus has
been called (by Huizinga) the first modern intellectual because he tried to
influence and reform the mentality of society by working within the shadow of
ecclesiastical and political leaders. He epistemology, evolutionary Erasmus,
Desiderius 278 4065A- AM 278 became one of the first humanists to make
efficient use of the then new medium of printing. His writings embrace various
forms, including diatribe, oration, locution, comment, dialogue, and letter.
After studying in Christian schools and living for a time in the monastery of
Steyn near Gouda in the Netherlands, Erasmus worked for different patrons. He
gained a post as secretary to the bishop of Kamerijk, during which time he
wrote his first published book, the Adagia (first edition 1500), a collection
of annotated Latin adages. Erasmus was an adviser to the Emperor Charles V, to
whom he dedicated his Institutio principii christiani (1516). After studies at
the University of Paris, where he attended lectures by the humanist Faber
Stapulensis, Erasmus was put in touch by his patron Lord Mountjoy with the
British humanists John Colet and Thomas More. Erasmus led a restless life,
residing in several European cities including London, Louvain, Basel, Freiburg,
Bologna, Turin (where he was awarded a doctorate of theology in 1506), and
Rome. By using the means of modern philology, which led to the ideal of the
bonae literarae, Erasmus tried to reform the Christian-influenced mentality of
his times. Inspired by Valla’s Annotationes to the New Testament, he completed
a new Latin translation of the New Testament, edited the writings of the early
church fathers, especially St. Hieronymus, and wrote several commentaries on
psalms. He tried to regenerate the spirit of early Christianity by laying bare
its original sense against the background of scholastic interpretation. In his
view, the rituals of the existing church blocked the development of an
authentic Christian spirituality. Though Erasmus shared with Luther a critical
approach toward the existing church, he did not side with the Reformation. His
Diatribe de libero arbitrio (1524), in which he pleaded for the free will of
man, was answered by Luther’s De servo arbitrio. The historically most
influential books of Erasmus were Enchirion militis christiani (1503), in which
he attacked hirelings and soldiers; the Encomium moriae id est Laus stultitiae
(1511), a satire on modern life and the ecclesiastical pillars of society; and
the sketches of human life, the Colloquia (first published in 1518, often
enlarged until 1553). In the small book Querela pacis (1517), he rejected the
ideology of justified wars propounded by Augustine and Aquinas. Against the
madness of war Erasmus appealed to the virtues of tolerance, friendliness, and
gentleness. All these virtues were for him the essence of Christianity. HUMANISM; MORE, THOMAS. H.P. Erfahrung,
German term translated into English, especially since Kant, as ‘experience’.
Kant does not use it as a technical term; rather, it indicates that which
requires explanation through more precisely drawn technical distinctions such
as those among ‘sensibility’, ‘understanding’, and ‘reason’. In the early
twentieth century, Husserl sometimes distinguishes between Erfahrung and
Erlebnis, the former indicating experience as capable of being thematized and
methodically described or analyzed, the latter experience as “lived through”
and never fully available to analysis. Such a distinction occasionally
reappears in later texts of phenomenology and existentialism. ERLEBNIS. J.P.Su. Erigena, John Scotus, also
called John the Scot, Eriugena, and Scottigena (c.810–77), Irish-born scholar
and theologian. He taught grammar and dialectics at the court of Charles the
Bald near Laon from 845 on. In a controversy in 851, John argued that there was
only one predestination, to good, since evil was strictly nothing. Thus no one
is compelled to evil by God’s foreknowledge, since, strictly speaking, God has
no foreknowledge of what is not. But his reliance on dialectic, his Origenist
conception of the world as a place of education repairing the damage done by
sin, his interest in cosmology, and his perceived Pelagian tendencies excited
opposition. Attacked by Prudentius of Troyes and Flores of Lyons, he was
condemned at the councils of Valencia (855) and Langres (859). Charles
commissioned him to translate the works of Pseudo-Dionysius and the Ambigua of
Maximus the Confessor from the Greek. These works opened up a new world, and
John followed his translations with commentaries on the Gospel of John and
Pseudo-Dionysius, and then his chief work, the Division of Nature or Periphyseon
(826–66), in the Neoplatonic tradition. He treats the universe as a procession
from God, everything real in nature being a trace of God, and then a return to
God through the presence of nature in human reason and man’s union with God.
John held that the nature of man is not destroyed by union with God, though it
is deified. He was condemned for pantheism at Paris in 1210. J.Lo. eristic, the
art of controversy, often involving fallacious but persuasive reasoning. The
ancient Sophists brought this art to a high level to achieve their personal
goal. They may have found their material in the “encounters” in the Erfahrung
eristic 279 4065A- AM 279 law courts as well as in daily life. To
enhance persuasion they endorsed the use of unsound principles such as hasty
generalizations, faulty analogies, illegitimate appeal to authority, the post
hoc ergo propter hoc (i.e., “after this, therefore because of this”) and other
presumed principles. Aristotle exposed eristic argumentation in his Sophistical
Refutations, which itself draws examples from Plato’s Euthydemus. From this
latter work comes the famous example: ‘That dog is a father and that dog is
his, therefore that dog is his father’. What is perhaps worse than its obvious
invalidity is that the argument is superficially similar to a sound argument
such as ‘This is a table and this is brown, therefore this is a brown table’.
In the Sophistical Refutations Aristotle undertakes to find procedures for
detection of bad arguments and to propose rules for constructing sound
arguments. DIALECTIC, INFORMAL FALLACY,
SYLLOGISM. I.Bo. Erklärung.VERSTEHEN. Erlebnis, German term for experience used
in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German philosophy. Erlebnis
denotes experience in all its direct immediacy and lived fullness. It contrasts
with the more typical German word Erfahrung, denoting ordinary experience as
mediated through intellectual and constructive elements. As immediate, Erlebnis
eludes conceptualization, in both the lived present and the interiority of
experience. As direct, Erlebnis is also disclosive and extraordinary: it
reveals something real that otherwise escapes thinking. Typical examples
include art, religion, and love, all of which also show the anti-rationalist
and polemical uses of the concept. It is especially popular among the Romantic
mystics like Novalis and the anti-rationalists Nietzsche and Bergson, as well
as in phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, and existentialism. As used in
post-Hegelian German philosophy, the term describes two aspects of
subjectivity. The first concerns the epistemology of the human sciences and of
phenomenology. Against naturalism and objectivism, philosophers appeal to the
ineliminable, subjective qualities of experience to argue that interpreters
must understand “what it is like to be” some experiencing subject, from the
inside. The second use of the term is to denote extraordinary and interior
experiences like art, religion, freedom, and vital energy. In both cases, it is
unclear how such experience could be identified or known in its immediacy, and
much recent German thought, such as Heidegger and hermeneutics, rejects the
concept. ERFAHRUNG, EXISTENTIALISM,
PHENOMENOLOGY. J.Bo. Eros, the Greek god of erotic love. Eros came to be
symbolic of various aspects of love, first appearing in Hesiod in opposition to
reason. In general, however, Eros was seen by Greeks (e.g., Parmenides) as a
unifying force. In Empedocles, it is one of two external forces explaining the
history of the cosmos, the other being Strife. These forces resemble the
“hidden harmony” of Heraclitus. The Symposium of Plato is the best-known
ancient discussion of Eros, containing speeches from various standpoints –
mythical, sophistic, etc. Socrates says he has learned from the priestess
Diotima of a nobler form of Eros in which sexual desire can be developed into
the pursuit of understanding the Form of beauty. The contrast between agape and
Eros is found first in Democritus. This became important in Christian accounts
of love. In Neoplatonism, Eros referred to the mystical union with Being sought
by philosophers. Eros has become important recently in the work of Continental
writers. AGAPE. R.C. erotetic, in the
strict sense, pertaining to questions. Erotetic logic is the logic of
questions. Different conceptions of questions yield different kinds of erotetic
logic. A Platonistic approach holds that questions exist independently of
interrogatives. For P. Tichý, a question is a function on possible worlds, the
right answer being the value of the function at the actual world. Erotetic
logic is the logic of such functions. In the epistemic-imperative approach (of
L. Bqvist, Hintikka, et al.), one begins with a system for epistemic sentences
and embeds this in a system for imperative sentences, thus obtaining sentences
of the form ‘make it the case that I know . . .’ and complex compounds of such
sentences. Certain ones of these are defined to be interrogatives. Then
erotetic logic is the logic of epistemic imperatives and the conditions for
satisfaction of these imperatives. In the abstract interrogative approach (of
N. Belnap, T. Kubigski, and many others), one chooses certain types of
expression to serve as interrogatives, and, for each type, specifies what
expressions count as answers of various kinds (direct, partial, . . .). On this
approach we may say that interrogatives express questions, or we may identify
questions with interrogatives, in Erklärung erotetic 280 4065A- AM 280
which case the only meaning that an interrogative has is that it has the
answers that it does. Either way, the emphasis is on interrogatives, and
erotetic logic is the logic of systems that provide interrogatives and specify
answers to them. In the broad sense, ‘erotetic’ designates what pertains to
utterance-and-response. In this sense erotetic logic is the logic of the
relations between (1) sentences of many kinds and (2) the expressions that
count as appropriate replies to them. This includes not only the relations
between question and answer but also, e.g., between assertion and agreement or
denial, command and report of compliance or refusal, and (for many types of
sentence S) between S and various corrective replies to S (e.g., denial of the
presupposition of S). Erotetic logics may differ in the class of sentences treated,
the types of response counted as appropriate, the assignment of other content
(presupposition, projection, etc.), and other details. DEONTIC LOGIC, EPISTEMIC LOGIC, MODAL LOGIC.
D.H. error theory.MORAL REALISM. Esprit movement.FRENCH PERSONALISM. Esse est
percipi.BERKELEY. essence.ESSENTIALISM. essence, nominal.ESSENTIALISM. essence,
real.ESSENTIALISM. essentialism, a metaphysical theory that objects have
essences and that there is a distinction between essential and non-essential or
accidental predications. Different issues have, however, been central in
debates about essences and essential predication in different periods in the
history of philosophy. In our own day, it is commitment to the notion of de re
modality that is generally taken to render a theory essentialist; but in the
essentialist tradition stemming from Aristotle, discussions of essence and
essential predication focus on the distinction between what an object is and
how it is. According to Aristotle, the universals that an ordinary object
instantiates include some that mark it out as what it is and others that
characterize it in some way but do not figure in an account of what it is. In
the Categories, he tells us that while the former are said of the object, the
latter are merely present in it; and in other writings, he distinguishes
between what he calls kath hauto or per se predications (where these include
the predication of what-universals) and kata sumbebekos or per accidens
predications (where these include the predication of how-universals). He
concedes that universals predicated of an object kath hauto are necessary to
that object; but he construes the necessity here as derivative. It is because a
universal marks out an entity, x, as what x is and hence underlies its being
the thing that it is that the universal is necessarily predicated of x. The
concept of definition is critically involved in Aristotle’s essentialism.
First, it is the kind – infima species – under which an object falls or one of
the items (genus or differentia) included in the definition of that kind that
is predicated of the object kath hauto. But, second, Aristotle’s notion of an
essence just is the notion of the ontological correlate of a definition. The
term in his writings we translate as ‘essence’ is the expression to ti ein
einai (the what it is to be). Typically, the expression is followed by a
substantival expression in the dative case, so that the expressions denoting
essences are phrases like ‘the what it is to be for a horse’ and ‘the what it
is to be for an oak tree’; and Aristotle tells us that, for any kind, K, the
what it is to be for a K just is that which we identify when we provide a
complete and accurate definition of K. Now, Aristotle holds that there is
definition only of universals; and this commits him to the view that there are
no individual essences. Although he concedes that we can provide definitions of
universals from any of his list of ten categories, he gives pride of place to
the essences of universals from the category of substance. Substance-universals
can be identified without reference to essences from other categories, but the
essences of qualities, quantities, and other non-substances can be defined only
by reference to the essences of substances. In his early writings, Aristotle took
the familiar particulars of common sense (things like the individual man and
horse of Categories V) to be the primary substances; and in these writings it
is the essences we isolate by defining the kinds or species under which
familiar particulars fall that are construed as the basic or paradigmatic
essences. However, in later writings, where ordinary particulars are taken to
be complexes of matter and form, it is the substantial forms of familiar
particulars that are the primary substances, so their essences are the primary
or basic essences; and a central theme in Aristotle’s most mature writings is
the idea that the primary substances and their essences are necessarily one and
the same in number. error theory essentialism 281 4065A- AM 281
The conception of essence as the ontological correlate of a definition – often
called quiddity – persists throughout the medieval tradition; and in early
modern philosophy, the idea that the identity of an object is constituted by
what it is plays an important role in Continental rationalist thinkers. Indeed,
in the writings of Leibniz, we find the most extreme version of traditional
essentialism. Whereas Aristotle had held that essences are invariably general,
Leibniz insisted that each individual has an essence peculiar to it. He called
the essence associated with an entity its complete individual concept; and he
maintained that the individual concept somehow entails all the properties
exemplified by the relevant individual. Accordingly, Leibniz believed that an omniscient
being could, for each possible world and each possible individual, infer from
the individual concept of that individual the whole range of properties
exemplified by that individual in that possible world. But, then, from the
perspective of an omniscient being, all of the propositions identifying the
properties the individual actually exhibits would express what Aristotle called
kath hauto predications. Leibniz, of course, denied that our perspective is
that of an omniscient being; we fail to grasp individual essences in their
fullness, so from our perspective, the distinction between essential and
accidental predications holds. While classical rationalists espoused a
thoroughgoing essentialism, the Aristotlelian conceptions of essence and
definition were the repeated targets of attacks by classical British
empiricists. Hobbes, e.g., found the notion of essence philosophically useless
and insisted that definition merely displays the meanings conventionally
associated with linguistic expressions. Locke, on the other hand, continued to
speak of essences; but he distinguished between real and nominal essences. As
he saw it, the familiar objects of common sense are collections of copresent
sensible ideas to which we attach a single name like ‘man’ or ‘horse’.
Identifying the ideas constitutive of the relevant collection gives us the
nominal essence of a man or a horse. Locke did not deny that real essences
might underlie such collections, but he insisted that it is nominal rather than
real essences to which we have epistemic access. Hume, in turn, endorsed the
idea that familiar objects are collections of sensible ideas, but rejected the
idea of some underlying real essence to which we have no access; and he
implicitly reinforced the Hobbesian critique of Aristotelian essences with his
attack on the idea of de re necessities. So definition merely expresses the
meanings we conventionally associate with words, and the only necessity
associated with definition is linguistic or verbal necessity. From its origins,
the twentieth-century analytic tradition endorsed the classical empiricist
critique of essences and the Humean view that necessity is merely linguistic.
Indeed, even the Humean concession that there is a special class of statements
true in virtue of their meanings came into question in the forties and fifties,
when philosophers like Quine argued that it is impossible to provide a
noncircular criterion for distinguishing analytic and synthetic statements. So
by the late 1950s, it had become the conventional wisdom of philosophers in the
Anglo-American tradition that both the notion of a real essence and the
derivative idea that some among the properties true of an object are essential
to that object are philosophical dead ends. But over the past three decades,
developments in the semantics of modal logic have called into question
traditional empiricist skepticism about essence and modality and have given
rise to a rebirth of essentialism. In the late fifties and early sixties,
logicians (like Kripke, Hintikka, and Richard Montague) showed how formal
techniques that have as their intuitive core the Leibnizian idea that necessity
is truth in all possible worlds enable us to provide completeness proofs for a
whole range of nonequivalent modal logics. Metaphysicians seized on the
intuitions underlying these formal methods. They proposed that we take the
picture of alternative possible worlds seriously and claimed that attributions
of de dicto modality (necessity and possibility as they apply to propositions)
can be understood to involve quantification over possible worlds. Thus, to say
that a proposition, p, is necessary is to say that for every possible world, W,
p is true in W; and to say that p is possible is to say that there is at least
one possible world, W, such that p is true in W. These metaphysicians went on
to claim that the framework of possible worlds enables us to make sense of de
re modality. Whereas de dicto modality attaches to propositions taken as a
whole, an ascription of de re modality identifies the modal status of an
object’s exemplification of an attribute. Thus, we speak of Socrates as being
necessarily or essentially rational, but only contingently snub-nosed.
Intuitively, the essential properties of an object are those it could not have
lacked; whereas its contingent properties are properties it exemplifies but
could have failed to exemplify. The “friends of possible worlds” insisted that
we can make perfectly good sense of this intuitive distinction if we say that
an object, essentialism essentialism 282 4065A-
AM 282 x, exhibits a property, P,
essentially just in case x exhibits P in the actual world and in every possible
world in which x exists and that x exhibits P merely contingently just in case
x exhibits P in the actual world, but there is at least one possible world, W,
such that x exists in W and fails to exhibit P in W. Not only have these
neo-essentialists invoked the Leibnizian conception of alternative possible
worlds in characterizing the de re modalities, many have endorsed Leibniz’s
idea that each object has an individual essence or what is sometimes called a
haecceity. As we have seen, the intuitive idea of an individual essence is the
idea of a property an object exhibits essentially and that no other object
could possibly exhibit; and contemporary essentialists have fleshed out this
intuitive notion by saying that a property, P, is the haecceity or individual
essence of an object, x, just in case (1) x exhibits P in the actual world and
in all worlds in which x exists and (2) there is no possible world where an
object distinct from x exhibits P. And some defenders of individual essences
(like Plantinga) have followed Leibniz in holding that the haecceity of an
object provides a complete concept of that object, a property such that it
entails, for every possible world, W, and every property, P, either the
proposition that the object in question has P in W or the proposition that it
fails to have P in W. Accordingly, they agree that an omniscient being could
infer from the individual essence of an object a complete account of the
history of that object in each possible world in which it exists. ARISTOTLE, DEFINITION, HAECCEITY, MODAL
LOGIC, NECESSITY, POSSIBLE WORLDS. M.J.L. essentialism, mereological.HAECCEITY,
MEREOLOGY. essential property.PROPERTY. eternal recurrence.ETERNAL RETURN.
eternal return, the doctrine that the same events, occurring in the same
sequence and involving the same things, have occurred infinitely many times in
the past and will occur infinitely many times in the future. Attributed most
notably to the Stoics and Nietzsche, the doctrine is antithetical to
philosophical and religious viewpoints that claim that the world order is
unique, contingent in part, and directed toward some goal. The Stoics interpret
eternal return as the consequence of perpetual divine activity imposing
exceptionless causal principles on the world in a supremely rational,
providential way. The world, being the best possible, can only be repeated
endlessly. The Stoics do not explain why the best world cannot be everlasting,
making repetition unnecessary. It is not clear whether Nietzsche asserted
eternal return as a cosmological doctrine or only as a thought experiment
designed to confront one with the authenticity of one’s life: would one affirm
that life even if one were consigned to live it over again without end? On
either interpretation, Nietzsche’s version, like the Stoic version, stresses
the inexorability and necessary interconnectedness of all things and events,
although unlike the Stoic version, it rejects divine providence. NIETZSCHE, STOICISM. W.E.M. eternal return,
law of.COMPUTER THEORY. eternity.DIVINE ATTRIBUTES. ethical
absolutism.RELATIVISM. ethical constructivism, a form of anti-realism about
ethics which holds that there are moral facts and truths, but insists that
these facts and truths are in some way constituted by or dependent on our moral
beliefs, reactions, or attitudes. For instance, an ideal observer theory that
represents the moral rightness and wrongness of an act in terms of the moral
approval and disapproval that an appraiser would have under suitably idealized
conditions can be understood as a form of ethical constructivism. Another form
of constructivism identifies the truth of a moral belief with its being part of
the appropriate system of beliefs, e.g., of a system of moral and nonmoral
beliefs that is internally coherent. Such a view would maintain a coherence
theory of moral truth. Moral relativism is a constructivist view that allows
for a plurality of moral facts and truths. Thus, if the idealizing conditions
appealed to in an ideal observer theory allow that different appraisers can
have different reactions to the same actions under ideal conditions, then that
ideal observer theory will be a version of moral relativism as well as of
ethical constructivism. Or, if different systems of moral beliefs satisfy the
appropriate epistemic conditions (e.g. are equally coherent), then the truth or
falsity of particular moral beliefs will have to be relativized to different
moral systems or codes. ETHICAL
OBJECTIVISM, ETHICS, IDEAL OBSERVER, RELATIVISM. D.O.B. essentialism,
mereological ethical constructivism 283 4065A-
AM 283 ethical
conventionalism.RELATIVISM. ethical dualism.ZOROASTRIANISM. ethical egoism.EGOISM.
ethical eudaimonism.EUDAIMONISM. ethical hedonism.HEDONISM. ethical
intuitionism.ETHICS. ethical naturalism.ETHICS, MORAL REALISM, NATURALISM.
ethical nihilism.RELATIVISM. ethical objectivism, the view that the objects of
the most basic concepts of ethics (which may be supposed to be values,
obligations, duties, oughts, rights, or what not) exist, or that facts about
them hold, objectively and that similarly worded ethical statements by
different persons make the same factual claims (and thus do not concern merely
the speaker’s feelings). To say that a fact is objective, or that something has
objective existence, is usually to say that its holding or existence is not
derivative from its being thought to hold or exist. (In the Scholastic
terminology still current in the seventeenth century ‘objective’ had the more
or less contrary meaning of having status only as an object of thought.) In
contrast, fact, or a thing’s existence, is subjective if it holds or exists
only in the sense that it is thought to hold or exist, or that it is merely a
convenient human posit for practical purposes. A fact holds, or an object
exists, intersubjectively if somehow its acknowledgment is binding on all
thinking subjects (or all subjects in some specified group), although it does
not hold or exist independently of their thinking about it. Some thinkers
suppose that intersubjectivity is all that can ever properly be meant by
objectivity. Objectivism may be naturalist or non-naturalist. The naturalist
objectivist believes that values, duties, or whatever are natural phenomena
detectable by introspection, perception, or scientific inference. Thus values
may be identified with certain empirical qualities of (anybody’s) experience,
or duties with empirical facts about the effects of action, e.g. as promoting
or hindering social cohesion. The non-naturalist objectivist (eschewing what
Moore called the naturalistic fallacy) believes that values or obligations (or
whatever items he thinks most basic in ethics) exist independently of any
belief about them, but that their existence is not a matter of any ordinary
fact detectable in the above ways but can be revealed to ethical intuition as
standing in a necessary (but not analytic) relation to natural phenomena.
‘Ethical subjectivism’ usually means the doctrine that ethical statements are
simply reports on the speaker’s feelings (though, confusingly enough, such
statements may be objectively true or false). Perhaps it ought to mean the
doctrine that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Attitude
theories of morality, for which such statements express, rather than report
upon, the speaker’s feelings, are also, despite the objections of their
proponents, sometimes called subjectivist. In a more popular usage an objective
matter of fact is one on which all reasonable persons can be expected to agree,
while a matter is subjective if various alternative opinions can be accepted as
reasonable. What is subjective in this sense may be quite objective in the more
philosophical sense in question above.
ETHICS, MOORE, MORAL REALISM. T.L.S.S. ethical pragmatism.MORAL
EPISTEMOLOGY. ethical relativism.RELATIVISM. ethical skepticism.RELATIVISM.
ethics, the philosophical study of morality. The word is also commonly used
interchangeably with ‘morality’ to mean the subject matter of this study; and
sometimes it is used more narrowly to mean the moral principles of a particular
tradition, group, or individual. Christian ethics and Albert Schweitzer’s
ethics are examples. In this article the word will be used exclusively to mean
the philosophical study. Ethics, along with logic, metaphysics, and
epistemology, is one of the main branches of philosophy. It corresponds, in the
traditional division of the field into formal, natural, and moral philosophy, to
the last of these disciplines. It can in turn be divided into the general study
of goodness, the general study of right action, applied ethics, metaethics,
moral psychology, and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. These divisions
are not sharp, and many important studies in ethics, particularly those that
examine or develop whole systems of ethics, are interdivisional. Nonetheless,
they facilitate the identification of different problems, movements, and
schools within the discipline. ethical conventionalism ethics 284 4065A- AM 284
The first two, the general study of goodness and the general study of right
action, constitute the main business of ethics. Correlatively, its principal
substantive questions are what ends we ought, as fully rational human beings,
to choose and pursue and what moral principles should govern our choices and
pursuits. How these questions are related is the discipline’s principal
structural question, and structural differences among systems of ethics reflect
different answers to this question. In contemporary ethics, the study of
structure has come increasingly to the fore, especially as a preliminary to the
general study of right action. In the natural order of exposition, however, the
substantive questions come first. Goodness and the question of ends.
Philosophers have typically treated the question of the ends we ought to pursue
in one of two ways: either as a question about the components of a good life or
as a question about what sorts of things are good in themselves. On the first
way of treating the question, it is assumed that we naturally seek a good life;
hence, determining its components amounts to determining, relative to our
desire for such a life, what ends we ought to pursue. On the second way, no
such assumption about human nature is made; rather it is assumed that whatever
is good in itself is worth choosing or pursuing. The first way of treating the
question leads directly to the theory of human well-being. The second way leads
directly to the theory of intrinsic value. The first theory originated in
ancient ethics, and eudaimonia was the Greek word for its subject, a word
usually translated ‘happiness,’ but sometimes translated ‘flourishing’ in order
to make the question of human well-being seem more a matter of how well a
person is doing than how good he is feeling. These alternatives reflect the
different conceptions of human well-being that inform the two major views
within the theory: the view that feeling good or pleasure is the essence of
human well-being and the view that doing well or excelling at things worth
doing is its essence. The first view is hedonism in its classical form. Its
most famous exponent among the ancients was Epicurus. The second view is
perfectionism, a view that is common to several schools of ancient ethics. Its
adherents include Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Among the moderns, the
best-known defenders of classical hedonism and perfectionism are respectively
J. S. Mill and Nietzsche. Although these two views differ on the question of
what human well-being essentially consists in, neither thereby denies that the
other’s answer has a place in a good human life. Indeed, mature statements of
each typically assign the other’s answer an ancillary place. Thus, hedonism, as
expounded by Epicurus, takes excelling at things worth doing – exercising one’s
intellectual powers and moral virtues in exemplary and fruitful ways, e.g. – as
the tried and true means to experiencing life’s most satisfying pleasures. And
perfectionism, as developed in Aristotle’s ethics, underscores the importance
of pleasure – the deep satisfaction that comes from doing an important job
well, e.g. – as a natural concomitant of achieving excellence in things that
matter. The two views, as expressed in these mature statements, differ not so
much in the kinds of activities they take to be central to a good life as in
the ways they explain the goodness of such a life. The chief difference between
them, then, is philosophical rather than prescriptive. The second theory, the theory
of intrinsic value, also has roots in ancient ethics, specifically, Plato’s
theory of Forms. But unlike Plato’s theory, the basic tenets of which include
certain doctrines about the reality and transcendence of value, the theory of
intrinsic value neither contains nor presupposes any metaphysical theses. At
issue in the theory is what things are good in themselves, and one can take a
position on this issue without committing oneself to any thesis about the
reality or unreality of goodness or about its transcendence or immanence. A
list of the different things philosophers have considered good in themselves
would include life, happiness, pleasure, knowledge, virtue, friendship, beauty,
and harmony. The list could easily be extended. An interest in what constitutes
the goodness of the various items on the list has brought philosophers to focus
primarily on the question of whether something unites them. The opposing views
on this question are monism and pluralism. Monists affirm the list’s unity;
pluralists deny it. Plato, for instance, was a monist. He held that the
goodness of everything good in itself consisted in harmony and therefore each
such thing owed its goodness to its being harmonious. Alternatively, some
philosophers have proposed pleasure as the sole constituent of goodness.
Indeed, conceiving of pleasure as a particular kind of experience or state of
consciousness, they have proposed this kind of experience as the only thing
good in itself and characterized all other good things as instrumentally good,
as owing their goodness to their ethics ethics 285 4065A- AM 285
being sources of pleasure. Thus, hedonism too can be a species of monism. In
this case, though, one must distinguish between the view that it is one’s own
experiences of pleasure that are intrinsically good and the view that anyone’s
experiences of pleasure, indeed, any sentient being’s experiences of pleasure,
are intrinsically good. The former is called (by Sidgwick) egoistic hedonism,
the latter universal hedonism. This distinction can be made general, as a
distinction between egoistic and universal views of what is good in itself or,
as philosophers now commonly say, between agent-relative and agent-neutral
value. As such, it indicates a significant point of disagreement in the theory
of intrinsic value, a disagreement in which the seeming arbitrariness and
blindness of egoism make it harder to defend. In drawing this conclusion,
however, one must be careful not to mistake these egoistic views for views in
the theory of human well-being, for each set of views represents a set of
alternative answers to a different question. One must be careful, in other
words, not to infer from the greater defensibility of universalism vis-à-vis
egoism that universalism is the predominant view in the general study of
goodness. Right action. The general study of right action concerns the
principles of right and wrong that govern our choices and pursuits. In modern
ethics these principles are typically given a jural conception. Accordingly,
they are understood to constitute a moral code that defines the duties of men
and women who live together in fellowship. This conception of moral principles
is chiefly due to the influence of Christianity in the West, though some of its
elements were already present in Stoic ethics. Its ascendancy in the general
study of right action puts the theory of duty at the center of that study. The
theory has two parts: the systematic exposition of the moral code that defines
our duties; and its justification. The first part, when fully developed,
presents complete formulations of the fundamental principles of right and wrong
and shows how they yield all moral duties. The standard model is an axiomatic
system in mathematics, though some philosophers have proposed a technical system
of an applied science, such as medicine or strategy, as an alternative. The
second part, if successful, establishes the authority of the principles and so
validates the code. Various methods and criteria of justification are commonly
used; no single one is canonical. Success in establishing the principles’
authority depends on the soundness of the argument that proceeds from whatever
method or criterion is used. One traditional criterion is implicit in the idea
of an axiomatic system. On this criterion, the fundamental principles of right
and wrong are authoritative in virtue of being self-evident truths. That is,
they are regarded as comparable to axioms not only in being the first
principles of a deductive system but also in being principles whose truth can
be seen immediately upon reflection. Use of this criterion to establish the
principles’ authority is the hallmark of intuitionism. Once one of the dominant
views in ethics, its position in the discipline has now been seriously eroded
by a strong, twentieth-century tide of skepticism about all claims of
self-evidence. Currently, the most influential method of justification
consistent with using the model of an axiomatic system to expound the morality
of right and wrong draws on the jural conception of its principles. On this
method, the principles are interpreted as expressions of a legislative will,
and accordingly their authority derives from the sovereignty of the person or
collective whose will they are taken to express. The oldest example of the method’s
use is the divine command theory. On this theory, moral principles are taken to
be laws issued by God to humanity, and their authority thus derives from God’s
supremacy. The theory is the original Christian source of the principles’ jural
conception. The rise of secular thought since the Enlightenment has, however,
limited its appeal. Later examples, which continue to attract broad interest
and discussion, are formalism and contractarianism. Formalism is best
exemplified in Kant’s ethics. It takes a moral principle to be a precept that
satisfies the formal criteria of a universal law, and it takes formal criteria
to be the marks of pure reason. Consequently, moral principles are laws that
issue from reason. As Kant puts it, they are laws that we, as rational beings,
give to ourselves and that regulate our conduct insofar as we engage each
other’s rational nature. They are laws for a republic of reason or, as Kant
says, a kingdom of ends whose legislature comprises all rational beings.
Through this ideal, Kant makes intelligible and forceful the otherwise obscure
notion that moral principles derive their authority from the sovereignty of
reason. Contractarianism also draws inspiration from Kant’s ethics as well as
from the social contract theories of Locke and Rousseau. Its fullest and most
influential statement appears in the work of Rawls. On this view, moral
principles represent ethics ethics 286 4065A-
AM 286 the ideal terms of social
cooperation for people who live together in fellowship and regard each other as
equals. Specifically, they are taken to be the conditions of an ideal agreement
among such people, an agreement that they would adopt if they met as an
assembly of equals to decide collectively on the social arrangements governing
their relations and reached their decision as a result of open debate and
rational deliberation. The authority of moral principles derives, then, from
the fairness of the procedures by which the terms of social cooperation would
be arrived at in this hypothetical constitutional convention and the assumption
that any rational individual who wanted to live peaceably with others and who
imagined himself a party to this convention would, in view of the fairness of
its procedures, assent to its results. It derives, that is, from the
hypothetical consent of the governed. Philosophers who think of a moral code on
the model of a technical system of an applied science use an entirely different
method of justification. In their view, just as the principles of medicine
represent knowledge about how best to promote health, so the principles of
right and wrong represent knowledge about how best to promote the ends of
morality. These philosophers, then, have a teleological conception of the code.
Our fundamental duty is to promote certain ends, and the principles of right
and wrong organize and direct our efforts in this regard. What justifies the
principles, on this view, is that the ends they serve are the right ones to
promote and the actions they prescribe are the best ways to promote them. The
principles are authoritative, in other words, in virtue of the wisdom of their
prescriptions. Different teleological views in the theory of duty correspond to
different answers to the question of what the right ends to promote are. The most
common answer is happiness; and the main division among the corresponding views
mirrors the distinction in the theory of intrinsic value between egoism and
universalism. Thus, egoism and universalism in the theory of duty hold,
respectively, that the fundamental duty of morality is to promote, as best as
one can, one’s own happiness and that it is to promote, as best as one can, the
happiness of humanity. The former is ethical egoism and is based on the ideal
of rational self-love. The latter is utilitarianism and is based on the ideal
of rational benevolence. Ethical egoism’s most famous exponents in modern
philosophy are Hobbes and Spinoza. It has had few distinguished defenders since
their time. Bentham and J. S. Mill head the list of distinguished defenders of
utilitarianism. The view continues to be enormously influential. On these
teleological views, answers to questions about the ends we ought to pursue
determine the principles of right and wrong. Put differently, the general study
of right action, on these views, is subordinate to the general study of
goodness. This is one of the two leading answers to the structural question
about how the two studies are related. The other is that the general study of
right action is to some extent independent of the general study of goodness. On
views that represent this answer, some principles of right and wrong, notably
principles of justice and honesty, prescribe actions even though more evil than
good would result from doing them. These views are deontological. Fiat justitia
ruat coelum captures their spirit. The opposition between teleology and
deontology in ethics underlies many of the disputes in the general study of
right action. The principal substantive and structural questions of ethics
arise not only with respect to the conduct of human life generally but also
with respect to specific walks of life such as medicine, law, journalism,
engineering, and business. The examination of these questions in relation to
the common practices and traditional codes of such professions and occupations
has resulted in the special studies of applied ethics. In these studies, ideas
and theories from the general studies of goodness and right action are applied
to particular circumstances and problems of some profession or occupation, and
standard philosophical techniques are used to define, clarify, and organize the
ethical issues found in its domain. In medicine, in particular, where rapid
advances in technology create, overnight, novel ethical problems on matters of
life and death, the study of biomedical ethics has generated substantial
interest among practitioners and scholars alike. Metaethics. To a large extent,
the general studies of goodness and right action and the special studies of
applied ethics consist in systematizing, deepening, and revising our beliefs
about how we ought to conduct our lives. At the same time, it is characteristic
of philosophers, when reflecting on such systems of belief, to examine the
nature and grounds of these beliefs. These questions, when asked about ethical
beliefs, define the field of metaethics. The relation of this field to the
other studies is commonly represented by taking the other studies to constitute
the field of ethics proper and then taking metaethics to be the study of the
concepts, methods of justificaethics ethics 287 4065A- AM 287
tion, and ontological assumptions of the field of ethics proper. Accordingly,
metaethics can proceed from either an interest in the epistemology of ethics or
an interest in its metaphysics. On the first approach, the study focuses on
questions about the character of ethical knowledge. Typically, it concentrates
on the simplest ethical beliefs, such as ‘Stealing is wrong’ and ‘It is better
to give than to receive’, and proceeds by analyzing the concepts in virtue of
which these beliefs are ethical and examining their logical basis. On the
second approach, the study focuses on questions about the existence and
character of ethical properties. Typically, it concentrates on the most general
ethical predicates such as goodness and wrongfulness and considers whether
there truly are ethical properties represented by these predicates and, if so,
whether and how they are interwoven into the natural world. The two approaches
are complementary. Neither dominates the other. The epistemological approach is
comparative. It looks to the most successful branches of knowledge, the natural
sciences and pure mathematics, for paradigms. The former supplies the paradigm
of knowledge that is based on observation of natural phenomena; the latter
supplies the paradigm of knowledge that seemingly results from the sheer
exercise of reason. Under the influence of these paradigms, three distinct
views have emerged: naturalism, rationalism, and noncognitivism. Naturalism
takes ethical knowledge to be empirical and accordingly models it on the
paradigm of the natural sciences. Ethical concepts, on this view, concern
natural phenomena. Rationalism takes ethical knowledge to be a priori and
accordingly models it on the paradigm of pure mathematics. Ethical concepts, on
this view, concern morality understood as something completely distinct from,
though applicable to, natural phenomena, something whose content and structure
can be apprehended by reason independently of sensory inputs. Noncognitivism,
in opposition to these other views, denies that ethics is a genuine branch of
knowledge or takes it to be a branch of knowledge only in a qualified sense. In
either case, it denies that ethics is properly modeled on science or
mathematics. On the most extreme form of noncognitivism, there are no genuine
ethical concepts; words like ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, and ‘evil’ have no
cognitive meaning but rather serve to vent feelings and emotions, to express
decisions and commitments, or to influence attitudes and dispositions. On less
extreme forms, these words are taken to have some cognitive meaning, but
conveying that meaning is held to be decidedly secondary to the purposes of
venting feelings, expressing decisions, or influencing attitudes. Naturalism is
well represented in the work of Mill; rationalism in the works of Kant and the
intuitionists. And noncognitivism, which did not emerge as a distinctive view
until the twentieth century, is most powerfully expounded in the works of C. L.
Stevenson and Hare. Its central tenets, however, were anticipated by Hume,
whose skeptical attacks on rationalism set the agenda for subsequent work in
metaethics. The metaphysical approach is centered on the question of
objectivity, the question of whether ethical predicates represent real
properties of an external world or merely apparent or invented properties,
properties that owe their existence to the perception, feeling, or thought of
those who ascribe them. Two views dominate this approach. The first, moral realism,
affirms the real existence of ethical properties. It takes them to inhere in
the external world and thus to exist independently of their being perceived.
For moral realism, ethics is an objective discipline, a discipline that
promises discovery and confirmation of objective truths. At the same time,
moral realists differ fundamentally on the question of the character of ethical
properties. Some, such as Plato and Moore, regard them as purely intellective
and thus irreducibly distinct from empirical properties. Others, such as
Aristotle and Mill, regard them as empirical and either reducible to or at
least supervenient on other empirical properties. The second view, moral
subjectivism, denies the real existence of ethical properties. On this view, to
predicate, say, goodness of a person is to impose some feeling, impulse, or
other state of mind onto the world, much as one projects an emotion onto one’s
circumstances when one describes them as delightful or sad. On the assumption
of moral subjectivism, ethics is not a source of objective truth. In ancient
philosophy, moral subjectivism was advanced by some of the Sophists, notably
Protagoras. In modern philosophy, Hume expounded it in the eighteenth century
and Sartre in the twentieth century. Regardless of approach, one (and perhaps
the central) problem of metaethics is how value is related to fact. On the
epistemological approach, this problem is commonly posed as the question of
whether judgments of value are derivable from statements of fact. Or, to be
more exact, can there be a logically valid argument whose conethics ethics 288
4065A- AM 288 clusion is a judgment of value and all of
whose premises are statements of fact? On the metaphysical approach, the
problem is commonly posed as the question of whether moral predicates represent
properties that are explicable as complexes of empirical properties. At issue,
in either case, is whether ethics is an autonomous discipline, whether the
study of moral values and principles is to some degree independent of the study
of observable properties and events. A negative answer to these questions
affirms the autonomy of ethics; a positive answer denies ethics’ autonomy and
implies that it is a branch of the natural sciences. Moral psychology. Even
those who affirm the autonomy of ethics recognize that some facts, particularly
facts of human psychology, bear on the general studies of goodness and right
action. No one maintains that these studies float free of all conception of
human appetite and passion or that they presuppose no account of the human
capacity for voluntary action. It is generally recognized that an adequate
understanding of desire, emotion, deliberation, choice, volition, character,
and personality is indispensable to the theoretical treatment of human
well-being, intrinsic value, and duty. Investigations into the nature of these
psychological phenomena are therefore an essential, though auxiliary, part of
ethics. They constitute the adjunct field of moral psychology. One area of
particular interest within this field is the study of those capacities by
virtue of which men and women qualify as moral agents, beings who are
responsible for their actions. This study is especially important to the theory
of duty since that theory, in modern philosophy, characteristically assumes a
strong doctrine of individual responsibility. That is, it assumes principles of
culpability for wrongdoing that require, as conditions of justified blame, that
the act of wrongdoing be one’s own and that it not be done innocently. Only
moral agents are capable of meeting these conditions. And the presumption is
that normal, adult human beings qualify as moral agents whereas small children
and nonhuman animals do not. The study then focuses on those capacities that
distinguish the former from the latter as responsible beings. The main issue is
whether the power of reason alone accounts for these capacities. On one side of
the issue are philosophers like Kant who hold that it does. Reason, in their
view, is both the pilot and the engine of moral agency. It not only guides one
toward actions in conformity with one’s duty, but it also produces the desire
to do one’s duty and can invest that desire with enough strength to overrule
conflicting impulses of appetite and passion. On the other side are
philosophers, such as Hume and Mill, who take reason to be one of several
capacities that constitute moral agency. On their view, reason works strictly
in the service of natural and sublimated desires, fears, and aversions to
produce intelligent action, to guide its possessor toward the objects of those
desires and away from the objects of those fears. It cannot, however, by itself
originate any desire or fear. Thus, the desire to act rightly, the aversion to
acting wrongly, which are constituents of moral agency, are not products of
reason but are instead acquired through some mechanical process of
socialization by which their objects become associated with the objects of
natural desires and aversions. On one view, then, moral agency consists in the
power of reason to govern behavior, and being rational is thus sufficient for
being responsible for one’s actions. On the other view, moral agency consists
in several things including reason, but also including a desire to act rightly
and an aversion to acting wrongly that originate in natural desires and
aversions. On this view, to be responsible for one’s actions, one must not only
be rational but also have certain desires and aversions whose acquisition is
not guaranteed by the maturation of reason. Within moral psychology, one
cardinal test of these views is how well they can accommodate and explain such
common experiences of moral agency as conscience, weakness, and moral dilemma.
At some point, however, the views must be tested by questions about freedom.
For one cannot be responsible for one’s actions if one is incapable of acting
freely, which is to say, of one’s own free will. The capacity for free action
is thus essential to moral agency, and how this capacity is to be explained,
whether it fits within a deterministic universe, and if not, whether the notion
of moral responsibility should be jettisoned, are among the deepest questions
that the student of moral agency must face. What is more, they are not
questions to which moral psychology can furnish answers. At this point, ethics
descends into metaphysics. BIOETHICS,
CONTRACTARIANISM, HEDONISM, JUSTICE, MORALITY, NATURALISM, PERFECTIONISM,
UTILITARIANISM. J.D. ethics, autonomy of.ETHICS. ethics, deontological.ETHICS.
ethics, autonomy of ethics, deontological 289 4065A- AM 289
ethics, divine command.DIVINE COMMAND ETHICS. ethics,
environmental.ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY. ethics, evolutionary.PHILOSOPHY OF
BIOLOGY. ethics, teleological.ETHICS. ethics of belief.CLIFFORD. ethics of
love.DIVINE COMMAND ETHICS. ethnography, an open-ended family of techniques
through which anthropologists investigate cultures; also, the organized
descriptions of other cultures that result from this method. Cultural
anthropology – ethnology – is based primarily on fieldwork through which
anthropologists immerse themselves in the life of a local culture (village,
neighborhood) and attempt to describe and interpret aspects of the culture.
Careful observation is one central tool of investigation. Through it the
anthropologist can observe and record various features of social life, e.g.
trading practices, farming techniques, or marriage arrangements. A second
central tool is the interview, through which the researcher explores the
beliefs and values of members of the local culture. Tools of historical
research, including particularly oral history, are also of use in ethnography,
since the cultural practices of interest often derive from a remote point in
time. ETHNOLOGY. D.E.L. ethnology, the
comparative and analytical study of cultures; cultural anthroplogy.
Anthropologists aim to describe and interpret aspects of the culture of various
social groups – e.g., the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, rice villages of
the Chinese Canton Delta, or a community of physicists at Livermore Laboratory.
Topics of particular interest include religious beliefs, linguistic practices,
kinship arrangements, marriage patterns, farming technology, dietary practices,
gender relations, and power relations. Cultural anthropology is generally
conceived as an empirical science, and this raises several methodological and
conceptual difficulties. First is the role of the observer. The injection of an
alien observer into the local culture unavoidably disturbs that culture.
Second, there is the problem of intelligibility across cultural systems –
radical translation. One goal of ethnographic research is to arrive at an
interpretation of a set of beliefs and values that are thought to be radically
different from the researcher’s own beliefs and values; but if this is so, then
it is questionable whether they can be accurately translated into the
researcher’s conceptual scheme. Third, there is the problem of empirical
testing of ethnographic interpretations. To what extent do empirical procedures
constrain the construction of an interpretation of a given cultural milieu?
Finally, there is the problem of generalizability. To what extent does
fieldwork in one location permit anthropologists to generalize to a larger
context – other villages, the dispersed ethnic group represented by this
village, or this village at other times?
ETHNOGRAPHY, PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. D.E.L. ethnomethodology,
a phenomenological approach to interpreting everyday action and speech in various
social contexts. Derived from phenomenological sociology and introduced by
Harold Garfinkel, the method aims to guide research into meaningful social
practices as experienced by participants. A major objective of the method is to
interpret the rules that underlie everyday activity and thus constitute part of
the normative basis of a given social order. Research from this perspective
generally focuses on mundane social activities – e.g., psychiatrists evaluating
patients’ files, jurors deliberating on defendants’ culpability, or coroners judging
causes of death. The investigator then attempts to reconstruct an underlying
set of rules and ad hoc procedures that may be taken to have guided the
observed activity. The approach emphasizes the contextuality of social practice
– the richness of unspoken shared understandings that guide and orient
participants’ actions in a given practice or activity. VERSTEHEN. D.E.L. Eucken,
Rudolf.LEBENSPHILOSOPHIE. Euclid.EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY. Euclidean geometry, the
version of geometry that includes among its axioms the parallel axiom, which
asserts that, given a line L in a plane, there exists just one line in the
plane that passes through a point not on L but never meets L. The phrase
‘Euclidean geometry’ refers both to the doctrine of geometry to be found in Euclid’s
Elements (fourth century B.C.) and to the mathematical discipline that was
built on this basis afterward. In order to present properties of rectilinear
and curvilinear curves in the plane and solids in space, Euclid sought
definitions, axioms, ethics, divine command Euclidean geometry 290 4065A- AM 290
and postulates to ground the reasoning. Some of his assumptions belonged more
to the underlying logic than to the geometry itself. Of the specifically
geometrical axioms, the least self-evident stated that only one line passes
through a point in a plane parallel to a non-coincident line within it, and
many efforts were made to prove it from the other axioms. Notable forays were
made by G. Saccheri, J. Playfair, and A. M. Legendre, among others, to put forward
results logically contradictory to the parallel axiom (e.g., that the sum of
the angles between the sides of a triangle is greater than 180°) and thus
standing as candidates for falsehood; however, none of them led to paradox. Nor
did logically equivalent axioms (such as that the angle sum equals 180°) seem
to be more or less evident than the axiom itself. The next stages of this line
of reasoning led to non-Euclidean geometry. From the point of view of logic and
rigor, Euclid was thought to be an apotheosis of certainty in human knowledge;
indeed, ‘Euclidean’ was also used to suggest certainty, without any particular
concern with geometry. Ironically, investigations undertaken in the late
nineteenth century showed that, quite apart from the question of the parallel
axiom, Euclid’s system actually depended on more axioms than he had realized,
and that filling all the gaps would be a formidable task. Pioneering work done
especially by M. Pasch and G. Peano was brought to a climax in 1899 by Hilbert,
who produced what was hoped to be a complete axiom system. (Even then the axiom
of continuity had to wait for the second edition!) The endeavor had
consequences beyond the Euclidean remit; it was an important example of the
growth of axiomatization in mathematics as a whole, and it led Hilbert himself
to see that questions like the consistency and completeness of a mathematical
theory must be asked at another level, which he called metamathematics. It also
gave his work a formalist character; he said that his axiomatic talk of points,
lines, and planes could be of other objects. Within the Euclidean realm,
attention has fallen in recent decades upon “neo-Euclidean” geometries, in
which the parallel axiom is upheld but a different metric is proposed. For
example, given a planar triangle ABC, the Euclidean distance between A and B is
the hypotenuse AB; but the “rectangular distance” AC ! CB also satisfies the
properties of a metric, and a geometry working with it is very useful in, e.g.,
economic geography, as anyone who drives around a city will readily
understand. NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY,
PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. I.G.-G. eudaimonia.ARISTOTLE, EUDAIMONISM.
eudaimonism (from Greek eudaimonia, ‘happiness’, ‘flourishing’), the ethical
doctrine that happiness is the ultimate justification for morality. The ancient
Greek philosophers typically begin their ethical treatises with an account of
happiness, and then argue that the best way to achieve a happy life is through
the cultivation and exercise of virtue. Most of them make virtue or virtuous
activity a constituent of the happy life; the Epicureans, however, construe
happiness in terms of pleasure, and treat virtue as a means to the end of
pleasant living. Ethical eudaimonism is sometimes combined with psychological eudaimonism
– i.e., the view that all free, intentional action is aimed ultimately at the
agent’s happiness. A common feature of ancient discussions of ethics, and one
distinguishing them from most modern discussions, is the view that an agent
would not be rationally justified in a course of action that promised less
happiness than some alternative open to him. Hence it seems that most of the
ancient theories are forms of egosim. But the ancient theories differ from
modern versions of egoism since, according to the ancients, at least some of
the virtues are dispositions to act from primarily other-regarding motives:
although the agent’s happiness is the ultimate justification of virtuous
action, it is not necessarily what motivates such action. Since happiness is
regarded by most of the ancients as the ultimate end that justifies our
actions, their ethical theories seem teleological; i.e., right or virtuous
action is construed as action that contributes to or maximizes the good. But
appearances are again misleading, for the ancients typically regard virtuous
action as also valuable for its own sake and hence constitutive of the agent’s
happiness. EGOISM, ETHICS, HEDONISM,
UTILITARIANISM. D.T.D. Eudoxus of Cnidus (c.408–c.355 B.C.), Greek astronomer
and mathematician, a student of Plato. He created a test of the equality of two
ratios, invented the method of exhaustion for calculating areas and volumes
within curved boundaries, and introduced an astronomical system consisting of
homocentric celestial spheres. This system views the visible universe as a set
of twenty-seven spheres contained one inside the other and each concentric to
the earth. Every celestial body is located on the equator of an ideal
eudaimonia Eudoxus of Cnidus 291 4065A-
AM 291 sphere that revolves with
uniform speed on its axis. The poles are embedded in the surface of another
sphere, which also revolves uniformly around an axis inclined at a constant
angle to that of the first sphere. In this way enough spheres are introduced to
capture the apparent motions of all heavenly bodies. Aristotle adopted the
system of homocentric spheres and provided a physical interpretation for it in
his cosmology. R.E.B. Euler diagram, a logic diagram invented by the
mathematician Euler that represents standard form statements in syllogistic
logic by two circles and a syllogism by three circles. In modern adaptations of
Euler diagrams, distributed terms are represented by complete circles and
undistributed terms by partial circles (circle segments or circles made with
dotted lines): Euler diagrams are more perspicuous ways of showing validity and
invalidity of syllogisms than Venn diagrams, but less useful as a mechanical
test of validity since there may be several choices of ways to represent a
syllogism in Euler diagrams, only one of which will show that the syllogism is
invalid. SYLLOGISM, VENN DIAGRAM. R.P.
Eurytus of Croton.PRE-SOCRATICS. euthanasia, broadly, the beneficent timing or
negotiation of the death of a sick person; more narrowly, the killing of a
human being on the grounds that he is better off dead. In an extended sense,
the word ‘euthanasia’ is used to refer to the painless killing of non-human
animals, in our interests at least as much as in theirs. Active euthanasia is
the taking of steps to end a person’s – especially a patient’s – life. Passive
euthanasia is the omission or termination of means of prolonging life, on the
grounds that the person is better off without them. The distinction between
active and passive euthanasia is a rough guide for applying the more
fundamental distinction between intending the patient’s death and pursuing
other goals, such as the relief of her pain, with the expectation that she will
die sooner rather than later as a result. Voluntary euthanasia is euthanasia with
the patient’s consent, or at his request. Involuntary euthanasia is euthanasia
over the patient’s objections. Non-voluntary euthanasia is the killing of a
person deemed incompetent with the consent of someone – say a parent –
authorized to speak on his behalf. Since candidates for euthanasia are
frequently in no condition to make major decisions, the question whether there
is a difference between involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia is of great
importance. Few moralists hold that life must be prolonged whatever the cost.
Traditional morality forbids directly intended euthanasia: human life belongs
to God and may be taken only by him. The most important arguments for
euthanasia are the pain and indignity suffered by those with incurable
diseases, the burden imposed by persons unable to take part in normal human
activities, and the supposed right of persons to dispose of their lives however
they please. Non-theological arguments against euthanasia include the danger of
expanding the principle of euthanasia to an everwidening range of persons and
the opacity of death and its consequent incommensurability with life, so that
we cannot safely judge that a person is better off dead. BIOETHICS, ETHICS, INFORMED CONSENT. P.E.D.
event, anything that happens; an occurrence. Two fundamental questions about
events, which philosophers have usually treated together, are: (1) Are there
events?, and (2) If so, what is their nature? Some philosophers simply assume
that there are events. Others argue for that, typically through finding
semantic theories for ordinary claims that apparently concern the fact that
some agent has done something or that some thing has changed. Most philosophers
presume that the events whose existence is proved by such arguments are
abstract particulars, “particulars” in the sense that they are non-repeatable
and spatially locatable, “abstract” in the sense that more than one event can
occur simultaneously in the same place. The theories of events espoused by
Davidson (in his causal view), Kim (though his view may be unstable in this
respect), Jonathan Bennett, and Lawrence Lombard take them to be abstract
particulars. However, Chisholm takes Euler diagram event 292 4065A- AM 292
events to be abstract universals; and Quine and Davidson (in his later view)
take them to be concrete particulars. Some philosophers who think of events as
abstract particulars tend to associate the concept of an event with the concept
of change; an event is a change in some object or other (though some
philosophers have doubts about this and others have denied it outright). The
time at which an event, construed as a particular, occurs can be associated
with the (shortest) time at which the object, which is the subject of that
event, changes from the having of one property to the having of another,
contrary property. Events inherit whatever spatial locations they have from the
spatial locations, if any, of the things that those events are changes in.
Thus, an event that is a change in an object, x, from being F to being G, is
located wherever x is at the time it changes from being F to being G. Some
events are those of which another event is composed (e.g., the sinking of a
ship seems composed of the sinkings of its parts). However, it also seems clear
that not every group of events comprises another; there just is no event
composed of a certain explosion on Venus and my birth. Any adequate theory
about the nature of events must address the question of what properties, if
any, such things have essentially. One issue is whether the causes (or effects)
of events are essential to those events. A second is whether it is essential to
each event that it be a change in the entity it is in fact a change in. A third
is whether it is essential to each event that it occur at the time at which it
in fact occurs. A chief component of a theory of events is a criterion of
identity, a principle giving conditions necessary and sufficient for an event e
and an event eH to be one and the same event. Quine holds that events may be
identified with the temporal parts of physical objects, and that events and
physical objects would thus share the same condition of identity: sameness of
spatiotemporal location. Davidson once proposed that events are identical
provided they have the same causes and effects. More recently, Davidson
abandoned this position in favor of Quine’s. Kim takes an event to be the
exemplification of a property (or relation) by an object (or objects) at a
time. This idea has led to his view that an event e is the same as an event eH if
and only if e and eH are the exemplifications of the same property by the same
object(s) at the same time. Lombard’s view is a variation on this account, and
is derived from the idea of events as the changes that physical objects undergo
when they alter. CAUSATION, DAVIDSON,
METAPHYSICS, PERDURANCE, QUINE. L.B.L. event causation.CAUSATION.
everlasting.DIVINE ATTRIBUTES. evidence, information bearing on the truth or
falsity of a proposition. In philosophical discussions, a person’s evidence is
generally taken to be all the information a person has, positive or negative,
relevant to a proposition. The notion of evidence used in philosophy thus
differs from the ordinary notion according to which physical objects, such as a
strand of hair or a drop of blood, counts as evidence. One’s information about
such objects could be evidence in the philosophical sense. The concept of
evidence plays a central role in our understanding of knowledge and
rationality. According to a traditional and widely held view, one has knowledge
only when one has a true belief based on very strong evidence. Rational belief
is belief based on adequate evidence, even if that evidence falls short of what
is needed for knowledge. Many traditional philosophical debates, such as those
about our knowledge of the external world, the rationality of religious belief,
and the rational basis for moral judgments, are largely about whether the
evidence we have in these areas is sufficient to yield knowledge or rational
belief. The senses are a primary source of evidence. Thus, for most, if not
all, of our beliefs, ultimately our evidence traces back to sensory experience.
Other sources of evidence include memory and the testimony of others. Of
course, both of these sources rely on the senses in one way or another.
According to rationalist views, we can also get evidence for some propositions
through mere reason or reflection, and so reason is an additional source of
evidence. The evidence one has for a belief may be conclusive or inconclusive.
Conclusive evidence is so strong as to rule out all possibility of error. The
discussions of skepticism show clearly that we lack conclusive evidence for our
beliefs about the external world, about the past, about other minds, and about
nearly any other topic. Thus, an individual’s perceptual experiences provide
only inconclusive evidence for beliefs about the external world since such
experiences can be deceptive or hallucinatory. Inconclusive, or prima facie,
evidence can always be defeated or event causation evidence 293 4065A- AM 293
overridden by subsequently acquired evidence, as, e.g., when testimonial
evidence in favor of a proposition is overridden by the evidence provided by
subsequent experiences. EPISTEMOLOGY,
SKEPTICISM. R.Fe. evidence of the senses.EVIDENCE. evidentialism, in the
philosophy of religion, the view that religious beliefs can be rationally
accepted only if they are supported by one’s “total evidence,” understood to
mean all the other propositions one knows or justifiably believes to be true.
Evidentialists typically add that, in order to be rational, one’s degree of
belief should be proportioned to the strength of the evidential support.
Evidentialism was formulated by Locke as a weapon against the sectarians of his
day and has since been used by Clifford (among many others) to attack religious
belief in general. A milder form of evidentialism is found in Aquinas, who,
unlike Clifford, thinks religion can meet the evidentialist challenge. A
contrasting view is fideism, best understood as the claim that one’s
fundamental religious convictions are not subject to independent rational
assessment. A reason often given for this is that devotion to God should be
one’s “ultimate concern,” and to subject faith to the judgment of reason is to
place reason above God and make of it an idol. Proponents of fideism include
Tertullian, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and some Wittgensteinians. A third view,
which as yet lacks a generally accepted label, may be termed experientialism;
it asserts that some religious beliefs are directly justified by religious
experience. Experientialism differs from evidentialism in holding that
religious beliefs can be rational without being supported by inferences from
other beliefs one holds; thus theistic arguments are superfluous, whether or
not there are any sound ones available. But experientialism is not fideism; it
holds that religious beliefs may be directly grounded in religious experience
wtihout the mediation of other beliefs, and may be rationally warranted on that
account, just as perceptual beliefs are directly grounded in perceptual
experience. Recent examples of experientialism are found in Plantinga’s
“Reformed Epistemology,” which asserts that religious beliefs grounded in
experience can be “properly basic,” and in the contention of Alston that in
religious experience the subject may be “perceiving God.” PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. W.Has. evidential
reason.EPISTEMOLOGY. evil, moral.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. evil,
natural.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. evil, problem of.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
evolution.DARWINISM. evolutionary epistemology, a theory of knowledge inspired
by and derived from the fact and processes of organic evolution (the term was
coined by the social psychologist Donald Campbell). Most evolutionary
epistemologists subscribe to the theory of evolution through natural selection,
as presented by Darwin in the Origin of Species (1859). However, one does find
variants, especially one based on some kind of neoLamarckism, where the
inheritance of acquired characters is central (Spencer endorsed this view) and
another based on some kind of jerky or “saltationary” evolutionism (Thomas
Kuhn, at the end of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, accepts this
idea). There are two approaches to evolutionary epistemology. First, one can
think of the transformation of organisms and the processes driving such change
as an analogy for the growth of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge.
“Darwin’s bulldog,” T. H. Huxley, was one of the first to propose this idea. He
argued that just as between organisms we have a struggle for existence, leading
to the selection of the fittest, so between scientific ideas we have a struggle
leading to a selection of the fittest. Notable exponents of this view today
include Stephen Toulmin, who has worked through the analogy in some detail, and
David Hull, who brings a sensitive sociological perspective to bear on the
position. Karl Popper identifies with this form of evolutionary epistemology,
arguing that the selection of ideas is his view of science as bold conjecture
and rigorous attempt at refutation by another name. The problem with this
analogical type of evolutionary epistemology lies in the disanalogy between the
raw variants of biology (mutations), which are random, and the raw variants of
science (new hypotheses), which are very rarely random. This difference
probably accounts for the fact that whereas Darwinian evolution is not
genuinely progressive, science is (or seems to be) the paradigm of a
progressive enterprise. Because of this problem, a second set of
epistemologists inspired by evolution insist that one must take the biology
literally. This evidence of the senses evolutionary epistemology 294
4065A- AM 294 group, which includes Darwin, who
speculated in this way even in his earliest notebooks, claims that evolution
predisposes us to think in certain fixed adaptive patterns. The laws of logic,
e.g., as well as mathematics and the methodological dictates of science, have
their foundations in the fact that those of our would-be ancestors who took
them seriously survived and reproduced, and those that did not did not. No one
claims that we have innate knowledge of the kind demolished by Locke. Rather,
our thinking is channeled in certain directions by our biology. In an update of
the biogenetic law, therefore, one might say that whereas a claim like 5 ! 7 %
12 is phylogenetically a posteriori, it is ontogenetically a priori. A major
division in this school is between the continental evolutionists, most notably
the late Konrad Lorenz, and the Anglo-Saxon supporters, e.g. Michael Ruse. The
former think that their evolutionary epistemology simply updates the critical
philosophy of Kant, and that biology both explains the necessity of the
synthetic a priori and makes reasonable belief in the thing-in-itself. The
latter deny that one can ever get that necessity, certainly not from biology,
or that evolution makes reasonable a belief in an objectively real world,
independent of our knowing. Historically, these epistemologists look to Hume and
in some respects to the American pragmatists, especially William James. Today,
they acknowledge a strong family resemblance to such naturalized
epistemologists as Quine, who has endorsed a kind of evolutionary epistemology.
Critics of this position, e.g. Philip Kitcher, usually strike at what they see
as the soft scientific underbelly. They argue that the belief that the mind is
constructed according to various innate adaptive channels is without warrant.
It is but one more manifestation of today’s Darwinians illicitly seeing
adaptation everywhere. It is better and more reasonable to think knowledge is
rooted in culture, if it is person-dependent at all. A mark of a good
philosophy, like a good science, is that it opens up new avenues for research.
Although evolutionary epistemology is not favored by conventional philosophers,
who sneer at the crudities of its (frequently nonphilosophically trained)
proselytizers, its supporters feel convinced that they are contributing to a
forward-moving philosophical research program. As evolutionists, they are used
to things taking time to succeed.
DARWINISM, EPISTEMOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY, SOCIAL BIOLOGY. M.Ru.
evolutionary ethics.PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY. evolutionary psychology, the
subfield of psychology that explains human behavior and cultural arrangements
by employing evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology to discover,
catalog, and analyze psychological mechanisms. Human minds allegedly possess
many innate, special-purpose, domain-specific psychological mechanisms
(modules) whose development requires minimal input and whose operations are
context-sensitive, mostly automatic, and independent of one another and of
general intelligence. (Disagreements persist about the functional isolation and
innateness of these modules.) Some evolutionary psychologists compare the mind
– with its specialized modules – to a Swiss army knife. Different modules
substantially constrain behavior and cognition associated with language,
sociality, face recognition, and so on. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize
that psychological phenomena reflect the influence of biological evolution.
These modules and associated behavior patterns assumed their forms during the
Pleistocene. An evolutionary perspective identifies adaptive problems and
features of the Pleistocene environment that constrained possible solutions.
Adaptive problems often have cognitive dimensions. For example, an evolutionary
imperative to aid kin presumes the ability to detect kin. Evolutionary
psychologists propose models to meet the requisite cognitive demands. Plausible
models should produce adaptive behaviors and avoid maladaptive ones – e.g.,
generating too many false positives when identifying kin. Experimental
psychological evidence and social scientific field observations aid assessment
of these proposals. These modules have changed little. Modern humans manage
with primitive hunter-gatherers’ cognitive equipment amid the rapid cultural
change that equipment produces. The pace of that change outstrips the ability of
biological evolution to keep up. Evolutionary psychologists hold, consequently,
that: (1) contrary to sociobiology, which appeals to biological evolution
directly, exclusively evolutionary explanations of human behavior will not
suffice; (2) contrary to theories of cultural evolution, which appeal to
biological evolution analogically, it is at least possible that no cultural
arrangement has ever been adaptive; and (3) contrary to social scientists, who
appeal to some general conception of learning or socialization to explain
cultural transmission, specialized psychological evolutionary ethics
evolutionary psychology 295 4065A-
AM 295 mechanisms contribute
substantially to that process. COGNITIVE
SCIENCE, DARWINISM, MODULARITY, PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, SOCIAL
BIOLOGY. R.N.Mc. exact similarity.IDENTITY. examination, paradox of
the.UNEXPECTED EXAMINATION PARADOX. exciting reason.HUTCHESON. excluded middle,
principle of.PRINCIPLE OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE. exclusionary reason.JURISPRUDENCE.
exclusive disjunction.DISJUNCTIVE PROPOSITION. excuse.JUSTIFICATION.
exemplarism.BONAVENTURE. exemplification.CONCEPTUALISM. existence.SUBSISTENCE.
existence, ‘is’ of.IS. existential.HEIDEGGER. existential generalization, a
rule of inference admissible in classical quantification theory. It allows one
to infer an existentially quantified statement DxA from any instance A (a/x) of
it. (Intuitively, it allows one to infer ‘There exists a liar’ from ‘Epimenides
is a liar’.) It is equivalent to universal instantiation – the rule that allows
one to infer any instance A (a/x) of a universally quantified statement ExA
from ExA. (Intuitively, it allows one to infer ‘My car is valuable’ from
‘Everything is valuable’.) Both rules can also have equivalent formulations as
axioms; then they are called specification (ExA / A (a/x)) and
particularization ((A(a/x) / DxA)). All of these equivalent principles are
denied by free logic, which only admits weakened versions of them. In the case
of existential generalization, the weakened version is: infer DxA from A(a/x)
& E!a. (Intuitively: infer ‘There exists a liar’ from ‘Epimenides is a liar
and Epimenides exists’.) EXISTENTIAL
INSTANTIATION, FORMAL LOGIC, FREE LOGIC, UNIVERSAL INSTANTIATION. E.Ben.
existential graph.PEIRCE. existential import, a commitment to the existence of
something implied by a sentence, statement, or proposition. For example, in
Aristotelian logic (though not in modern quantification theory), any sentence
of the form ‘All F’s are G’s’ implies ‘There is an F that is a G’ and is thus
said to have as existential import a commitment to the existence of an F that
is a G. According to Russell’s theory of descriptions, sentences containing
definite descriptions can likewise have existential import since ‘The F is a G’
implies ‘There is an F’. The presence of singular terms is also often claimed
to give rise to existential commitment. Underlying this notion of existential
import is the idea – long stressed by W. V. Quine – that ontological commitment
is measured by existential sentences (statements, propositions) of the form
(Dv) f. ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT. G.F.S.
existential instantiation, a rule of inference admissible in classical
quantification theory. It allows one to infer a statement A from an
existentially quantified statement DxB if A can be inferred from an instance
B(a/x) of DxB, provided that a does not occur in either A or B or any other
premise of the argument (if there are any). (Intuitively, it allows one to
infer a contradiction C from ‘There exists a highest prime’ if C can be
inferred from ‘a is a highest prime’ and a does not occur in C.) Free logic
allows for a stronger form of this rule: with the same provisions as above, A
can be inferred from DxB if it can be inferred from B(a/x) & E!a.
(Intuitively, it is enough to infer ‘There is a highest natural number’ from ‘a
is a highest prime and a exists’.)
FORMAL LOGIC, FREE LOGIC. E.Ben. existentialism, a philosophical and
literary movement that came to prominence in Europe, particularly in France,
immediately after World War II, and that focused on the uniqueness of each
human individual as distinguished from abstract universal human qualities.
Historians differ as to antecedents. Some see an existentialist precursor in
Pascal, whose aphoristically expressed Catholic fideism questioned the power of
rationalist thought and preferred the God of Scripture to the abstract “God of
the philosophers.” Many agree that Kierkegaard, whose fundamentally similar but
Protestant fideism was based on a profound unwillingness to situate either God
or any individual’s relationship with God within a systematic philosophy, as
Hegel had done, should be exact similarity existentialism 296 4065A- AM 296
considered the first modern existentialist, though he too lived long before the
term emerged. Others find a proto-existentialist in Nietzsche, because of the
aphoristic and anti-systematic nature of his writings, and on the literary
side, in Dostoevsky. (A number of twentiethcentury novelists, such as Franz
Kafka, have been labeled existentialists.) A strong existentialist strain is to
be found in certain other theist philosophers who have written since
Kierkegaard, such as Lequier, Berdyaev, Marcel, Jaspers, and Buber, but Marcel
later decided to reject the label ‘existentialist’, which he had previously
employed. This reflects its increasing identification with the atheistic
existentialism of Sartre, whose successes, as in the novel Nausea, and the
philosophical work Being and Nothingness, did most to popularize the word. A
mass-audience lecture, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” which Sartre (to his
later regret) allowed to be published, provided the occasion for Heidegger,
whose early thought had greatly influenced Sartre’s evolution, to take his
distance from Sartre’s existentialism, in particular for its self-conscious
concentration on human reality over Being. Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism,
written in reply to a French admirer, signals an important turn in his
thinking. Nevertheless, many historians continue to classify Heidegger as an
existentialist – quite reasonably, given his early emphasis on existential
categories and ideas such as anxiety in the presence of death, our sense of
being “thrown” into existence, and our temptation to choose anonymity over
authenticity in our conduct. This illustrates the difficulty of fixing the term
‘existentialism’. Other French thinkers of the time, all acquaintances of
Sartre’s, who are often classified as existentialists, are Camus, Simone de
Beauvoir, and, though with less reason, Merleau-Ponty. Camus’s novels, such as
The Stranger and The Plague, are cited along with Nausea as epitomizing the
uniqueness of the existentialist antihero who acts out of authenticity, i.e.,
in freedom from any conventional expectations about what so-called human nature
(a concept rejected by Sartre) supposedly requires in a given situation, and
with a sense of personal responsibility and absolute lucidity that precludes
the “bad faith” or lying to oneself that characterizes most conventional human
behavior. Good scholarship prescribes caution, however, about superimposing too
many Sartrean categories on Camus. In fact the latter, in his brief
philosophical essays, notably The Myth of Sisyphus, distinguishes
existentialist writers and philosophers, such as Kierkegaard, from absurdist
thinkers and heroes, whom he regards more highly, and of whom the mythical
Sisyphus (condemned eternally by the gods to roll a huge boulder up a hill
before being forced, just before reaching the summit, to start anew) is the
epitome. Camus focuses on the concept of the absurd, which Kierkegaard had used
to characterize the object of his religious faith (an incarnate God). But for
Camus existential absurdity lies in the fact, as he sees it, that there is
always at best an imperfect fit between human reasoning and its intended
objects, hence an impossibility of achieving certitude. Kierkegaard’s leap of
faith is, for Camus, one more pseudo-solution to this hard, absurdist reality.
Almost alone among those named besides Sartre (who himself concentrated more on
social and political thought and became indebted to Marxism in his later
years), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) unqualifiedly accepted the existentialist
label. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she attempted, using categories familiar in
Sartre, to produce an existentialist ethics based on the recognition of radical
human freedom as “projected” toward an open future, the rejection of
inauthenticity, and a condemnation of the “spirit of seriousness” (akin to the
“spirit of gravity” criticized by Nietzsche) whereby individuals identify
themselves wholly with certain fixed qualities, values, tenets, or prejudices.
Her feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, relies heavily on the distinction,
part existentialist and part Hegelian in inspiration, between a life of
immanence, or passive acceptance of the role into which one has been
socialized, and one of transcendence, actively and freely testing one’s
possibilities with a view to redefining one’s future. Historically, women have
been consigned to the sphere of immanence, says de Beauvoir, but in fact a
woman in the traditional sense is not something that one is made, without
appeal, but rather something that one becomes. The Sartrean ontology of Being
and Nothingness, according to which there are two fundamental asymmetrical
“regions of being,” being-in-itself and being-for-itself, the latter having no
definable essence and hence, as “nothing” in itself, serving as the ground for
freedom, creativity, and action, serves well as a theoretical framework for an
existentialist approach to human existence. (Being and Nothingness also names a
third ontological region, being-for-others, but that may be disregarded here.)
However, it would be a mistake to treat even Sartre’s existentialist insights,
much less those of others, as dependent on this ontology, to which he himself
made little direct existentialism existentialism 297 4065A- AM 297
reference in his later works. Rather, it is the implications of the common
central claim that we human beings exist without justification (hence
“absurdly”) in a world into which we are “thrown,” condemned to assume full
responsibility for our free actions and for the very values according to which
we act, that make existentialism a continuing philosophical challenge,
particularly to ethicists who believe right choices to be dictated by our
alleged human essence or nature. CAMUS,
EVIDENTIALISM, HEIDEGGER, KIERKEGAARD, SARTRE. W.L.M. existential
polarity.POLARITY. existential proposition.EXISTENTIAL IMPORT. existential
quantifier.FORMAL LOGIC. Existenz philosophy.JASPERS. ex nihilo.CREATION EX
NIHILO. expected return.SAINT PETERSBURG PARADOX. expected utility.NEWCOMB’s
PARADOX, SAINT PETERSBURG PARADOX. experientialism.EVIDENTIALISM. experimentum
crusis.CRUCIAL EXPERIMENT. explaining reason.REASONS FOR ACTION, REASONS FOR
BELIEF. explanandum.EXPLANATION. explanans.EXPLANATION. explanation, an act of
making something intelligible or understandable, as when we explain an event by
showing why or how it occurred. Just about anything can be the object of
explanation: a concept, a rule, the meaning of a word, the point of a chess
move, the structure of a novel. However, there are two sorts of things whose
explanation has been intensively discussed in philosophy: events and human
actions. Individual events, say the collapse of a bridge, are usually explained
by specifying their cause: the bridge collapsed because of the pressure of the
flood water and its weakened structure. This is an example of causal
explanation. There usually are indefinitely many causal factors responsible for
the occurrence of an event, and the choice of a particular factor as “the
cause” appears to depend primarily on contextual considerations. Thus, one
explanation of an automobile accident may cite the icy road condition; another
the inexperienced driver; and still another the defective brakes. Context may
determine which of these and other possible explanations is the appropriate
one. These explanations of why an event occurred are sometimes contrasted with
explanations of how an event occurred. A “how” explanation of an event consists
in an informative description of the process that has led to the occurrence of
the event, and such descriptions are likely to involve descriptions of causal
processes. The covering law model is an influential attempt to represent the
general form of such explanations: an explanation of an event consists in
“subsuming,” or “covering,” it under a law. When the covering law is
deterministic, the explanation is thought to take the form of a deductive
argument: a statement – the explanandum – describing the event to be explained
is logically derived from the explanans – the law together with statements of
antecedent conditions. Thus, we might explain why a given rod expanded by
offering this argument: ‘All metals expand when heated; this rod is metallic
and it was heated; therefore, it expanded’. Such an explanation is called a
deductive-nomological explanation. On the other hand, probabilistic or
statistical laws are thought to yield statistical explanations of individual
events. Thus, the explanation of the contraction of a contagious disease on the
basis of exposure to a patient with the disease may take the form of a
statistical explanation. Details of the statistical model have been a matter of
much controversy. It is sometimes claimed that although explanations, whether
in ordinary life or in the sciences, seldom conform fully to the covering law
model, the model nevertheless represents an ideal that all explanations must
strive to attain. The covering law model, though influential, is not
universally accepted. Human actions are often explained by being “rationalized’
– i.e., by citing the agent’s beliefs and desires (and other “intentional”
mental states such as emotions, hopes, and expectations) that constitute a
reason for doing what was done. You opened the window because you wanted some
fresh air and believed that by opening the window you could secure this result.
It has been a controversial issue whether such rationalizing explanations are
causal; i.e., whether they invoke beliefs and desires as a cause of the action.
Another issue is whether existential polarity explanation 298 4065A- AM 298
these “rationalizing” explanations must conform to the covering law model, and
if so, what laws might underwrite such explanations. CAUSATION, COVERING LAW MODEL, PHILOSOPHY OF
SCIENCE. J.K. explanation, covering law.
COVERING LAW MODEL.
explanation, deductive.COVERING LAW MODEL. explanation, inductive.COVERING LAW
MODEL. explanation, purposive.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. explanation, subsumption
theory of.COVERING LAW MODEL. explanation, teleological.TELEOLOGY. explanatory
emergence.METHODOLOGICAL HOLISM. explanatory reductionism.METHODOLOGICAL
HOLISM. explicit definition.BETH’s DEFINABILITY THEOREM, DEFINITION. exponible.
In medieval logic, exponible propositions were those that needed to be
expounded, i.e., elaborated in order to make clear their true logical form. A
modern example might be: ‘Giorgione was so called because of his size’, which
has a misleading form, suggesting a simple predication, whereas it really
means, ‘Giorgione was called “Giorgione” because of his size’. Medieval
examples were: ‘Every man except Socrates is running’, expounded as ‘Socrates
is not running and every man other than Socrates is running’; and ‘Only
Socrates says something true’, uttered by, say, Plato, which Albert of Saxony
claims should be expounded not only as ‘Socrates says something true and no one
other than Socrates says something true’, but needs a third clause, ‘Plato says
something false’. This last example brings out an important aspect of exponible
propositions, namely, their use in sophisms. Sophismatic treatises were a
common medieval genre in which metaphysical and logical issues were approached
dialectically by their application in solving puzzle cases. Another important
ingredient of exponible propositions was their containing a particular term,
sometimes called the exponible term; attention on such terms was focused in the
study of syncategorematic expressions, especially in the thirteenth century.
However, note that such exponible terms could only be expounded in context, not
by an explicit definition. Syncategorematic terms that produced exponible
propositions were terms such as ‘twice’, ‘except’, ‘begins’ and ‘ceases’, and
‘insofar as’ (e.g. ‘Socrates insofar as he is rational is risible’). SYNCATEGOREMATA. S.L.R. exportation (1) In
classical logic, the principle that (A 8 B) / C is logically equivalent to A /
(B / C). (2) The principle ((A 8 B) P C) P (A P (B P C)), which relevance
logicians hold to be fallacious when ‘P’ is read as ‘entails’. (3) In
discussions of propositional attitude verbs, the principle that from ‘a Vs that
b is a(n) f’ one may infer ‘a Vs f-hood of b’, where V has its relational (transparent)
sense. For example, exportation (in sense 3) takes one from ‘Ralph believes
that Ortcutt is a spy’ to ‘Ralph believes spyhood of Ortcutt’, wherein
‘Ortcutt’ can now be replaced by a bound variable to yield ‘(Dx) (Ralph
believes spyhood of x)’.
QUANTIFYING IN, RELEVANCE
LOGIC. G.F.S. expressibility logicism.LOGICISM. expressionism.EXPRESSION THEORY
OF ART. expression theory of art, a theory that defines art as the expression
of feelings or emotion (sometimes called expressionism in art). Such theories
first acquired major importance in the nineteenth century in connection with
the rise of Romanticism. Expression theories are as various as the different
views about what counts as expressing emotion. There are four main variants.
(1) Expression as communication. This requires that the artist actually have
the feelings that are expressed, when they are initially expressed. They are
“embodied” in some external form, and thereby transmitted to the perceiver. Leo
Tolstoy (1828–1910) held a view of this sort. (2) Expression as intuition. An
intuition is the apprehension of the unity and individuality of something. An
intuition is “in the mind,” and hence the artwork is also. Croce held this
view, and in his later work argued that the unity of an intuition is
established by feeling. (3) Expression as clarification. An artist starts out
with vague, undefined feelings, and expression is a process of coming to
clarify, articulate, and understand them. This view retains Croce’s idea that
expression is in the artist’s mind, as well as explanation, covering law
expression theory of art 299 4065A-
AM 299 his view that we are all
artists to the degree that we articulate, clarify, and come to understand our
own feelings. Collingwood held this view. (4) Expression as a property of the
object. For an artwork to be an expression of emotion is for it to have a given
structure or form. Suzanne K. Langer (1895–1985) argued that music and the
other arts “presented” or exhibited structures or forms of feeling in general. AESTHETICS, INSTITUTIONAL THEORY OF ART.
S.L.F. expressive completeness.COMPLETENESS. expressive meaning.MEANING.
extension.INTENSION. extensionalism, a family of ontologies and semantic
theories restricted to existent entities. Extensionalist ontology denies that
the domain of any true theory needs to include non-existents, such as
fictional, imaginary, and impossible objects like Pegasus the winged horse or
round squares. Extensionalist semantics reduces meaning and truth to
set-theoretical relations between terms in a language and the existent objects,
standardly spatiotemporal and abstract entities, that belong to the term’s
extension. The extension of a name is the particular existent denoted by the
name; the extension of a predicate is the set of existent objects that have the
property represented by the predicate. The sentence ‘All whales are mammals’ is
true in extensionalist semantics provided there are no whales that are not
mammals, no existent objects in the extension of the predicate ‘whale’ that are
not also in the extension of ‘mammal’. Linguistic contexts are extensional if:
(i) they make reference only to existent objects; (ii) they support
substitution of codesignative terms (referring to the same thing), or of
logically equivalent propositions, salva veritate (without loss of truthvalue);
and (iii) it is logically valid to existentially quantify (conclude that There
exists an object such that . . . etc.) objects referred to within the context.
Contexts that do not meet these requirements are intensional, non-extensional,
or referentially opaque. The implications of extensionalism, associated with
the work of Frege, Russell, Quine, and mainstream analytic philosophy, are to
limit its explanations of mind and meaning to existent objects and material-mechanical
properties and relations describable in an exclusively extensional idiom.
Extensionalist semantics must try to analyze away apparent references to
nonexistent objects, or, as in Russell’s extensionalist theory of definite
descriptions, to classify all such predications as false. Extensionalist
ontology in the philosophy of mind must eliminate or reduce propositional
attitudes or de dicto mental states, expressed in an intensional idiom, such as
‘believes that ————’, ‘fears that ————’, and the like, usually in favor of
extensional characterizations of neurophysiological states. Whether
extensionalist philosophy can satisfy these explanatory obligations, as the
thesis of extensionality maintains, is controversial. ABSTRACT ENTITY, INTENSIONALITY, PHILOSOPHY
OF LANGUAGE, RUSSELL,
THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS,
TRUTH. D.J. extensionality, axiom of.SET THEORY. extensionality
thesis.EXTENSIONALISM. extensive abstraction.WHITEHEAD. extensive
magnitude.MAGNITUDE. externalism, the view that there are objective reasons for
action that are not dependent on the agent’s desires, and in that sense
external to the agent. Internalism (about reasons) is the view that reasons for
action must be internal in the sense that they are grounded in motivational
facts about the agent, e.g. her desires and goals. Classic internalists such as
Hume deny that there are objective reasons for action. For instance, whether
the fact that an action would promote health is a reason to do it depends on
whether one has a desire to be healthy. It may be a reason for some and not for
others. The doctrine is hence a version of relativism; a fact is a reason only
insofar as it is so connected to an agent’s psychological states that it can
motivate the agent. By contrast, externalists hold that not all reasons depend
on the internal states of particular agents. Thus an externalist could hold
that promoting health is objectively good and that the fact that an action
would promote one’s health is a reason to perform it regardless of whether one
desires health. This dispute is closely tied to the debate over motivational
internalism, which may be conceived as the view that moral beliefs (for
instance) are, by virtue of entailing motivation, internal reasons for action.
Those who reject motivational internalism must either deny that expressive
completeness externalism 300 4065A-
AM 300 (sound) moral beliefs
always provide reasons for action or hold that they provide external
reasons. ETHICS, MOTIVATIONAL
INTERNALISM, RELATIVISM. W.T. externalism, content.
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND.
externalism, epistemological.EPISTEMOLOGY. externalism,
motivational.MOTIVATIONAL INTERNALISM. external negation.NEGATION. external
reason.EXTERNALISM. external relation.RELATION. exteroception.PERCEPTION.
extrasensory perception.PARAPSYCHOLOGY. extrinsic desire, a desire of something
for its conduciveness to something else that one desires. Extrinsic desires are
distinguished from intrinsic desires, desires of items for their own sake, or
as ends. Thus, an individual might desire financial security extrinsically, as
a means to her happiness, and desire happiness intrinsically, as an end. Some
desires are mixed: their objects are desired both for themselves and for their
conduciveness to something else. Jacques may desire to jog, e.g., both for its
own sake (as an end) and for the sake of his health. A desire is strictly
intrinsic if and only if its object is desired for itself alone. A desire is
strictly extrinsic if and only if its object is not desired, even partly, for
its own sake. (Desires for “good news” – e.g., a desire to hear that one’s
child has survived a car accident – are sometimes classified as extrinsic
desires, even if the information is desired only because of what it indicates
and not for any instrumental value that it may have.) Desires of each kind help
to explain action. Owing partly to a mixed desire to entertain a friend, Martha
might acquire a variety of extrinsic desires for actions conducive to that
goal. Less happily, intrinsically desiring to be rid of his toothache, George
might extrinsically desire to schedule a dental appointment. If all goes well
for Martha and George, their desires will be satisfied, and that will be due in
part to the effects of the desires upon their behavior. ACTION THEORY, INTENTION, MOTIVATIONAL
EXPLANATION, VALUE. A.R.M. extrinsic property.RELATION. extrinsic
relation.RELATION. externalism, content extrinsic relation 301 4065A- AM 301
fa, Chinese term for (1) a standard, model, paradigm, or exemplar; (2) proper
procedure, behavior, or technique; (3) a rule or law; (4) dharma. A mental
image (yi) of a circle, a compass, and a particular circle can each serve as a
fa for identifying circles. The sage-kings, their institutions, and their
behavior are all fa for rulers to emulate. Methods of governing (e.g., by
reward and punishment) are fa. Explicit laws or bureaucratic rules are also fa.
(See Mo Tzu, “Dialectical Chapters,” and Kuan Tzu, chapter 6, “Seven
Standards.”) After the introduction of Buddhism to China, fa is used to translate
‘dharma’. BUDDHISM, DHARMA, MO TZU.
B.W.V.N. fa-chia.
CHINESE LEGALISM.
fact.STATE OF AFFAIRS. facticity.HEIDEGGER, SARTRE. factual
content.ANALYTIC–SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION. fact–value distinction, the apparently
fundamental difference between how things are and how they should be. That
people obey the law (or act honestly or desire money) is one thing; that they
should is quite another. The first is a matter of fact, the second a matter of
value. Hume is usually credited with drawing the distinction when he noticed
that one cannot uncontroversially infer an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ (the is–ought
gap). From the fact, say, that an action would maximize overall happiness, we
cannot legitimately infer that it ought to be done – without the introduction
of some (so far suppressed) evaluative premise. We could secure the inference
by assuming that one ought always to do what maximizes overall happiness. But
that assumption is evidently evaluative. And any other premise that might link
the non-evaluative premises to an evaluative conclusion would look equally
evaluative. No matter how detailed and extensive the non-evaluative premises,
it seems no evaluative conclusion follows (directly and as a matter of logic).
Some have replied that at least a few non-evaluative claims do entail
evaluative ones. To take one popular example, from the fact that some promise
was made, we might (it appears) legitimately infer that it ought to be kept,
other things equal – and this without the introduction of an evaluative
premise. Yet many argue that the inference fails, or that the premise is
actually evaluative, or that the conclusion is not. Hume himself was both bold
and brief about the gap’s significance, claiming simply that paying attention
to it “wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that
the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of
objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason” (Treatise of Human Nature). Others have
been more expansive. Moore, for instance, in effect relied upon the gap to
establish (via the open question argument) that any attempt to define
evaluative terms using non-evaluative ones would commit the naturalistic
fallacy. Moore’s main target was the suggestion that ‘good’ means “pleasant”
and the fallacy, in this context, is supposed to be misidentifying an
evaluative property, being good, with a natural property, being pleasant.
Assuming that evaluative terms have meaning, Moore held that some could be
defined using others (he thought, e.g., that ‘right’ could be defined as
“productive of the greatest possible good”) and that the rest, though
meaningful, must be indefinable terms denoting simple, non-natural, properties.
Accepting Moore’s use of the open question argument but rejecting both his
non-naturalism and his assumption that evaluative terms must have (descriptive)
meaning, emotivists and prescriptivists (e.g. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and Hare)
argued that evaluative terms have a role in language other than to denote
properties. According to them, the primary role of evaluative language is not
to describe, but to prescribe. The logical gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, they
argue, establishes both the difference between fact and value and the
difference between describing (how things are) and recommending (how they might
be). Some naturalists, though, acknowledge the gap and yet maintain that the
evaluative claims nonetheless do refer to natural properties. In the process
they deny the ontological force of the open question argument and 302 F 4065A- AM 302
treat evaluative claims as describing a special class of facts. ETHICS, MOORE, MORAL REALISM. G.S.-M. faculty
psychology, the view that the mind is a collection of departments responsible
for distinct psychological functions. Related to faculty psychology is the
doctrine of localization of function, wherein each faculty has a specific brain
location. Faculty psychologies oppose theories of mind as a unity with one
function (e.g., those of Descartes and associationism) or as a unity with
various capabilities (e.g., that of Ockham), and oppose the related holistic
distributionist or mass-action theory of the brain. Faculty psychology began
with Aristotle, who divided the human soul into five special senses, three
inner senses (common sense, imagination, memory) and active and passive mind.
In the Middle Ages (e.g., Aquinas) Aristotle’s three inner senses were
subdivied, creating more elaborate lists of five to seven inward wits. Islamic
physicianphilosophers such as Avicenna integrated Aristotelian faculty psychology
with Galenic medicine by proposing brain locations for the faculties. Two
important developments in faculty psychology occurred during the eighteenth
century. First, Scottish philosophers led by Reid developed a version of
faculty psychology opposed to the empiricist and associationist psychologies of
Locke and Hume. The Scots proposed that humans were endowed by God with a set
of faculties permitting knowledge of the world and morality. The Scottish
system exerted considerable influence in the United States, where it was widely
taught as a moral, character-building discipline, and in the nineteenth century
this “Old Psychology” opposed the experimental “New Psychology.” Second,
despite then being called a charlatan, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) laid the
foundation for modern neuropsychology in his work on localization of function.
Gall rejected existing faculty psychologies as philosophical, unbiological, and
incapable of accounting for everyday behavior. Gall proposed an innovative
behavioral and biological list of faculties and brain localizations based on
comparative anatomy, behavior study, and measurements of the human skull.
Today, faculty psychology survives in trait and instinct theories of
personality, Fodor’s theory that mental functions are implemented by
neurologically “encapsulated” organs, and localizationist theories of the
brain. ARISTOTLE, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND,
PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY. T.H.L. faith.BAD FAITH, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
fallacy.FORMAL FALLACY, INFORMAL FALLACY. fallacy of accent.INFORMAL FALLACY.
fallacy of accident.INFORMAL FALLACY. fallacy of affirming the
consequent.FORMAL FALLACY. fallacy of composition.INFORMAL FALLACY. fallacy of
denying the antecedent.FORMAL FALLACY. fallacy of division.INFORMAL FALLACY.
fallacy of equivocation.INFORMAL FALLACY. fallacy of false cause.INFORMAL
FALLACY. fallacy of four terms.SYLLOGISM. fallacy of hasty
generalization.INFORMAL FALLACY. fallacy of irrelevant conclusion.INFORMAL
FALLACY. fallacy of many questions.INFORMAL FALLACY. fallacy of misplaced
concreteness.
WHITEHEAD. fallacy of
secundum quid.INFORMAL FALLACY. fallibilism, the doctrine, relative to some
significant class of beliefs or propositions, that they are inherently
uncertain and possibly mistaken. The most extreme form of the doctrine
attributes uncertainty to every belief; more restricted forms attribute it to
all empirical beliefs or to beliefs concerning the past, the future, other
minds, or the external world. Most contemporary philosophers reject the
doctrine in its extreme form, holding that beliefs about such things as
elementary logical principles and the character of one’s current feelings
cannot possibly be mistaken. Philosophers who reject fallibilism in some form
generally insist that certain beliefs are analytically true, self-evident, or
intuitively obvious. These means of supporting the infallibility of faculty
psychology fallibilism 303 4065A-
AM 303 some beliefs are now
generally discredited. W. V. Quine has cast serious doubt on the very notion of
analytic truth, and the appeal to self-evidence or intuitive obviousness is
open to the charge that those who officially accept it do not always agree on
what is thus evident or obvious (there is no objective way of identifying it),
and that beliefs said to be self-evident have sometimes been proved false, the
causal principle and the axiom of abstraction (in set theory) being striking
examples. In addition to emphasizing the evolution of logical and mathematical
principles, fallibilists have supported their position mainly by arguing that
the existence and nature of mind-independent objects can legitimately be
ascertained only be experimental methods and that such methods can yield
conclusions that are, at best, probable rather than certain. B.A. false cause,
fallacy of.INFORMAL FALLACY. false consciousness, (1) lack of clear awareness
of the source and significance of one’s beliefs and attitudes concerning
society, religion, or values; (2) objectionable forms of ignorance and false
belief; (3) dishonest forms of self-deception. Marxists (if not Marx) use the
expression to explain and condemn illusions generated by unfair economic
relationships. Thus, workers who are unaware of their alienation, and “happy
homemakers” who only dimly sense their dependency and quiet desperation, are
molded in their attitudes by economic power relationships that make the status
quo seem natural, thereby eclipsing their long-term best interests. Again,
religion is construed as an economically driven ideology that functions as an
“opiate” blocking clear awareness of human needs. Collingwood interprets false
consciousness as self-corrupting untruthfulness in disowning one’s emotions and
ideas (The Principles of Art, 1938). BAD
FAITH, EXISTENTIALISM. M.W.M. false dilemma.DILEMMA. false pleasure, pleasure
taken in something false. If it is false that Jones is honest, but Smith
believes Jones is honest and is pleased that Jones is honest, then Smith’s
pleasure is false. If pleasure is construed as an intentional attitude, then
the truth or falsity of a pleasure is a function of whether its intentional
object obtains. On this view, S’s being pleased that p is a true pleasure if an
only if S is pleased that p and p is true. S’s being pleased that p is a false
pleasure if and only if S is pleased that p and p is false. Alternatively,
Plato uses the expression ‘false pleasure’ to refer to things such as the
cessation of pain or neutral states that are neither pleasant nor painful that
a subject confuses with genuine or true pleasures. Thus, being released from
tight shackles might mistakenly be thought pleasant when it is merely the
cessation of a pain. HEDONISM, VALUE.
N.M.L. falsifiability.POPPER, TESTABILITY. falsification.POPPER.
falsum.Appendix of Special Symbols. family resemblance.WITTGENSTEIN. Fang,
Thomé H. (1899–1976), Chinese philosopher of culture. Educated at the
University of Nanking and the University of Wisconsin, he had an early interest
in Dewey’s pragmatism, but returned to the ideals of Chinese philosophy during
World War II. He had a grand philosophical scheme, always discussing issues
from a comparative viewpoint through perspectives of ancient Greek, modern
European, Chinese, and Indian thought. He exerted a profound influence on
younger philosophers in Taiwan after 1949.
CHINESE PHILOSOPHY. S.-h.L. Farabi, al-.AL-FARABI. fascism.POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY. fatalism.FREE WILL PROBLEM. feature-placing discourse.
STRAWSON. Fechner, Gustav
Theodor (1801–87), German physicist and philosopher whose Elemente der
Psychophysik (1860; English translation, 1966) inaugurated experimental
psychology. Obsessed with the mind–body problem, Fechner advanced an identity
theory in which every object is both mental and physical, and in support
invented psychophysics – the “exact science of the functional relations . . .
between mind and body.” Fechner began with the concept of the limen, or sensory
threshold. The absolute threshold is the stimulus strength (R, Reiz) needed to
create a conscious sensation (S), and the relative threshold is the strength that
must be added to a stimulus for a just noticeable difference (jnd) to be
perceived. E. H. Weber (1795–1878) had shown that a constant ratio held between
relative threshold and false cause, fallacy of Fechner, Gustav Theodor 304
4065A- AM 304 stimulus magnitude, Weber’s law: DR/R %
k. By experimentally determining jnd’s for pairs of stimulus magnitudes (such
as weights), Fechner formulated his “functional relation,” S % k log R,
Fechner’s law, an identity equation of mind and matter. Later psychophysicists
replaced it with a power law, R % kSn, where n depends on the kind of stimulus.
The importance of psychophysics to psychology consisted in its showing that
quantification of experience was possible, and its providing a general paradigm
for psychological experimentation in which controlled stimulus conditions are
systematically varied and effects observed. In his later years, Fechner brought
the experimental method to bear on aesthetics (Vorschule der Aesthetik, 1876).
T.H.L. Fechner’s law.FECHNER. feedback.CYBERNETICS. feedforward.CYBERNETICS.
felicific calculus.BENTHAM. felicity conditions.
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