H. P. Grice, "The critique of conversational reason"

CRITERIUM -- criterion, problem of the Epistemology A criterion is a test or standard by which truth, existence, identity, or meaning can be determined. There is an influential question concerning the relation between criteria and that for which they are criteria, called the problem of the criterion. The problem was originally formulated by Sextus Empiricus in the Outline of Pyrrhonism (II, 4). To know the truth, one needs a proof that what one knows is the truth. How, then, can a proof be true? It seems that any proof requires a criterion to confirm it, and the criterion needs a proof to demonstrate its truth. That involves a circular process of reasoning. This paradox has historically had various formulations and has been a subject of wide discussion. Chisholm presents the problem in this way: We have two general questions in epistemology: (A) “What do we know?” and “How do we know anything?” Question A concerns the extent of our knowledge, and B the criterion for knowledge. However, if we try to answer A, we must answer B first. To know whether things are really as they seem to be, we need to have a procedure for distinguishing appearance from reality. On the other hand, if we want to answer question B, we must answer question A first. For to know whether a procedure is good or proper, we must first know the distinction between appearance and reality. To get out of this circle, we must show that we can justify our criteria of knowledge without appealing to what these criteria countenance as knowledge. This involves the distinction of different levels of knowledge and different levels of justification. Fulfilling this task has become one of the major problems of epistemology and of philosophy in general. “The problem of the criterion seems to me to be one of the most important and one of the most difficult of all the problems of philosophy. I am tempted to say that one has not begun to philosophise until one has faced this problem and has recognised how unappealing, in the end, each of the possible solutions is.” Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing -- CRITICUM -- critical realism criterion of verifiability Philosophical method, epistemology, philosophy of language A test proposed by logical positivists to distinguish genuine propositions from pseudopropositions. By virtue of demonstrating that metaphysics is composed of pseudo-propositions, they attempted to show that philosophy, as a genuine branch of knowledge, must be distinguished from metaphysics. What purports to be a factual proposition has cognitive sense if and only if it is empirically verifiable. If it cannot be shown to be true or false, it is factually insignificant, although it can perhaps have emotive meaning for those who utter it. We can distinguish between practical verifiability and verifiability in principle. Many propositions could, with sufficient effort, be verified in practice. For others, such as “there are planets of stars in other galaxies,” we can conceive of an observation allowing us to decide its truth or falsity, but lack the means which would enable us actually to make such an observation. Because we know that being in a position to make the observation would allow verification, this kind of proposition is verifiable in principle. There is a further distinction between a strong and a weak sense of verifiable. According to the strong sense, held by Schlick, a proposition is verifiable if and only if its truth is conclusively or practically established in experience; according to the weak sense, developed by Ayer, a proposition is verifiable if it is possible for experience to render it probable. “The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability.” Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic critical cognitivism Epistemology A term introduced by Roderick Chisholm for an approach to the problem of how to formulate the criterion that determines disputed knowledge claims, such as knowledge of ethical facts, religious knowledge, knowledge of other minds, or knowledge of the past and future. The difficulty with this kind of knowledge is to show how we can infer from what is directly evident to what is indirectly evident. We may reasonably assume that we have just four sources that yield knowledge, that is, external perception, inner consciousness, memory, and reason. None of them can individually and directly provide us with knowledge of the disputed type. We have also induction and deduction, but they do not help either. Chisholm then attempts to establish the existence of principles of evidence other than the principles of induction and deduction and called this approach critical cognitivism. It tells us under what conditions cognitive states will confer evidence or reasonableness upon propositions about external things. It takes the knowledge produced by other approaches as sign or evidence for more dubious knowledge and reaches the latter from the former facts of experience. “The other type of answer might be called critical cognitivism. If we take this approach, we will not say that there are empirical sentences that might serve as translations of the sentences expressing our ethical knowledge; but we will say that there are empirical truths which enable us to know certain truths of ethics.” Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge --- critical ethics, another name for meta-ethics critical idealism, another term for transcendental idealism critical realism Epistemology, metaphysics An American epistemological movement that flourished in the early twentieth century. Its representatives include George Santayana, Roy Wood Sellars, and Arthur O. Lovejoy. The movement took its name from Sellars’s book Critical Realism (1916). A volume, Essays in Critical Realism: A Cooperative Study of the Problem of Knowledge (1920), became the manifesto of the school. By claiming that there is an objective and independent physical world that is the object of knowledge, critical realism opposed idealism. It also opposed the naive version of direct realism proposed by the new realists, specifically their claim that we directly perceive the objective things themselves. Critical realism is called “critical” because it claims that what is present directly in consciousness are mental states and not the physical things as such. They held that the mind knows the external world via the mediation of the mental. Critical realists tried to account for the relationship between the mediating elements and what they represent. They believed their accounts to be the most reasonable way to explain phenomena such as error, illusion, and perceptual variation. However, critical realists had many disagreements over the nature of the mediating elements and the roles they filled. Candidates for the mediating elements ranged over essences, ideas, and sense-data. Because of differences, critical realism did not survive as a school. “Critical realism accepts physical realism. Like common sense, it holds to the belief that there are physical things; and, like enlightened common sense, its idea of the physical world is moulded by the conclusions of science. It is a criticism of naive realism, and an attempt to free it from its presupposition that knowledge is, or can be, an intuition of the physical thing itself.” Sellars, Essays in Critical Realism -- critical theory Ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of social science A type of social theory that originated with Western Marxist thinkers attached to the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Leading critical theorists included Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. The Institute moved to Geneva and during the Second World War to the United States, but it returned to Germany in 1950. The original proponents of critical theory are also called the Frankfurt school. The project of critical theory was inspired by Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” in which Marx said, “Philosophers have given different interpretations of the world; the point is to change it.” Critical theory rejected the attempt of logical positivism to find universal laws in the human sciences. It held that modern science and technology have been totally reduced to an administrative system governed by a purely technological rationality. To counteract this, critical theory focused on the superstructure rather than the economic base of societies and emphasized moral, political, and religious values. It claimed that knowledge is relative to human interest and introduced a wide range of cultural criticism into Marxist social theory. It sought to reveal the false embodiment of the ideals of reason in the social and political conditions of capitalist societies -- Critical theory sought to identify the possibility of social change and to promote a selfreflective, domination-free society. Critical theory developed into a new phase with the work of Jürgen Habermas, who was based at the same Institute. Habermas’s ambition was to replace the technological rationality predominant in modern societies with communicative rationality, which reaches conclusions through discussion and dialogue. He tries to achieve this goal by shifting philosophical emphasis from the subject–object relation to the process of intersubjective communication. He believes that the act of communication anticipates the goal of critical theory and also establishes a universalistic discourse ethics as the evaluative foundation of social critique. “The expression ‘critical theory’ has been applied to a wide range of different theoretical standpoints. In its narrowest sense, it refers to the views advocated by members of the Frankfurt school, especially in the early writings of Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse.” Keat and Urry, Social Theory as Science -- critical thinking, another term for informal logic -- Critique of Judgement Aesthetics, philosophy of science The third and last critique in Kant’s critical philosophy. First published in 1790, the Critique of Judgement is an examination of the power or faculty of judgment, that is, the possibility of making judgments. This issue is related to the schematism of the first critique. Kant divides judgment into two kinds: a determinant judgment applies a rule or concept to particular instances, and a reflective judgment (or judgment of reflection) discovers the rule or concept under which a given particular instance falls. The thinking in determinant judgment is from the universal to the particular, but in reflective judgment, the thinking is from the particular to the universal. The Critique of Judgement concerns reflective judgment, especially its two most problematic forms: aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment. The book is divided into two parts: the critique of aesthetic judgment of taste, and the critique of teleological judgment. Each has its own analytic and dialectic. There are generally two approaches to the third Critique. One approach emphasizes its role in the whole critical enterprise. The first critique discussed the realm of nature, the second the realm of freedom, and the third is viewed as a bridge that combines these two realms and completes the critical philosophy. The other approach focuses on the critique of aesthetic judgment of taste. The analytic of this part includes an analytic of the beautiful and an analytic of the sublime, which are viewed as the origin of modern aesthetics. On this approach, these questions of aesthetics are considered independently. “A Critique of pure reason, i.e. of our faculty of judging on a priori principles, would be incomplete if the critical examination of judgement, which is a faculty of knowledge, and as such, lays a claim to independent principles, were not dealt with separately.” Kant, Critique of Judgement -- Critique of Practical Reason Ethics The second critique of Kant’s critical philosophy, first published in 1788. The book was divided into two parts: the doctrine of the elements of pure practical reason and the methodology of pure practical reason. The former part was further divided into the Analytic and the Dialectic. The Analytic sought to determine synthetic a priori principles about what we ought to do and to demonstrate the legitimacy of these principles. The Dialectic dealt with an antinomy concerning the definition of the highest good, with the conflicting theses represented by Epicurus and the Stoics. While the first critique rejected the traditional metaphysical notions of God, freedom, and immortality as objects of knowledge, the Critique of Practical Reason justified them for morality as postulated objects of faith. The book elaborated and developed the central ideas about morality that Kant established in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). “. . . reason, which contains constitutive a priori principles solely in respect of the faculty of desire, gets its holding assigned to it by the Critique of Practical Reason.” Kant, Critique of Judgement -- Critique of Pure Reason Epistemology, metaphysics Kant’s greatest masterpiece, one of the most important books in the history of Western philosophy. It fundamentally shaped the development of modern philosophy. For Kant, a critique was a critical examination, and pure reason was contrasted with empirical reason, with pure reason seeking to provide knowledge independent of experience. Kant saw a critique of pure reason as a critical examination of these claims of pure reason conducted by pure reason itself. While the logical use of reason unifies knowledge already gained through other faculties, pure reason tries to add to our knowledge through its own labors, and thus becomes the source of dialectical error. Pure reason is also the name that followers of Wolff gave to their philosophy, which was dominant in Kant’s time. Kant’s criticism of pure reason has both of these aspects in mind. The first Critique is an examination of the limits and conditions of human theoretical reason. It was first published in 1781, but very extensively revised for its second edition in 1787. The first edition is designated A and the second edition B. In modern editions and translations, the page numbers of both editions are normally marked in the margin. The book is divided into two parts: the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements and the Transcendental Doctrine of Methods. The former occupies five-sixths of the book, and the Doctrine of Methods is merely a systematic presentation of the basic elements of knowledge discovered in the previous part. The Doctrine of the Elements is divided into the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Logic, which is further divided into the Transcendental Analytic and the Transcendental Dialectic. The first Critique purported to carry out a Copernican revolution in philosophy by proposing that objects must conform to our knowledge rather than our knowledge to objects. This position is related to the complex and controversial claims of Kant’s transcendental idealism, which he sought to combine with empirical realism. The Transcendental Aesthetic deals with sensibility. Kant sought to demonstrate that sensibility has a priori forms, space and time, that are subjective forms of intuition. He also offered influential claims about the nature of mathematics. The Transcendental Analytic deals with understanding. Kant proposed his table of categories as pure concepts of the understanding and a schematism for the application of the categories to sensible objects. The claim that judgment and perception involve both sensibility and understanding is a major theme of the first Critique. The crucially important transcendental deduction of the categories attempted to justify our use of the categories as conditions for the possibility of experience. Kant also provided important examinations of individual categories and of ourselves as subjects of experience. These two parts attempt to answer Kant’s central question of how synthetic a priori judgments are possible. Kant tried to provide a metaphysical foundation for Newtonian physics. The pure concepts of understanding can only be applied to a spatiotemporal phenomenal world. Once human reason attempts to make use of them beyond our experience to things-in-themselves, illusions, errors, or antinomies are generated. According to Kant, this is the source of the errors of traditional metaphysics. The task of the transcendental dialectic, which is concerned with reason, is to expose these errors. “I do not mean by this [the critique of pure reason] a critique of books and systems, but of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952) Italian idealist philosopher and historian, born in Pescasseroli, Abruzzi. Deeply influenced by Hegel, Croce maintained that philosophy and history are unified. His philosophy of spirit distinguished four levels of mental activity: the aesthetic, the logical, the economic, and the ethical. His most influential philosophical work is in the field of aesthetics. He claimed that aesthetics is the science of intuitive cognition and that all art is lyrical in character. He pioneered the expression theory of art, which was later developed by Collingwood. Croce founded the journal La Critica in 1904. From 1925, he was the main anti-fascist Italian intellectual, and he was also active in public life after the Second World War. His most important book is Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistics (1902). Other works include Logic as the Science of Pure Concept (1905), Philosophy of the Practical, the Economical, and the Ethical (1909), Poetry and Literature: An Introduction to Its Criticism and History (1936).