pearsianism – after D. F. Pears, one of Grice’s collaborators in the
Play Group. “In them days, we would never publish, since the only philosophers
we were interested in communicating with we saw at least every Saturday!” –
With D. F. Pears, and J. F. Thomson, H. P. Grice explored topics in the philosophy
of action and ‘philosophical psychology.’ Actually, Grice carefully writes
‘philosophy of action.’ Why? Well, because while with Pears and Thomson he
explored toopics like ‘intending’ and ‘deciding,’ it was always with a vew
towards ‘acting,’ or ‘doing.’ Grice is
very clear on this, “even fastidiously so,” as Blackburn puts it. In the
utterance of an imperative, or an intention, which may well be other-directed,
the immediate response or effect in your co-conversationalist is a
‘recognition,’ i. e. what Grice calls an ‘uptake,’ some sort of
‘understanding.’ In the case of these ‘desiderative’ moves, the recognition is
that the communicator WILLS something. Grice uses a ‘that’-clause attached to
‘will,’ so that he can formulate the proposition “p” – whose realization is in
question. Now, this ‘will’ on the part of the ‘communicator’ needs to be
‘transmitted.’ So the communicator’s will includes his will that his emissee
will adopt this will. “And eventually act upon it!” So, you see, while it looks
as if Pears and Thomson and Grice are into ‘philosophical psychology,’ they are
into ‘praxis.’ Not alla Althuser, but almost! Pears explored the idea of the
conversational implicatum in connection, obviously, with action. There is a
particular type of conditional that relates to action. Grice’s example, “If I
COULD do it, I would climb Mt. Everest on hands and knees.” Grice and Pears, and indeed Thomson, analysed
this ‘if.’ Pears thinks that ‘if’ conversationally implicates ‘if and only if.’
Grice called that “Perfecct pears.”
peirce: c. s. – H. P.
Grice, “Lectures on C. S. Peirce’s general theory of signs,” Oxford;
philosopher, the founder of the philosophical movement called pragmatism.
Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second son of Benjamin Peirce,
who was professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard and one of America’s
leading mathematicians. Charles Peirce studied at Harvard and in 1863 received a degree in chemistry.
In 1861 he began work with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and remained in
this service for thirty years. Simultaneously with his professional career as a
scientist, Peirce worked in logic and philosophy. He lectured on philosophy and
logic at various universities and institutes, but was never able to obtain a
permanent academic position as a teacher of philosophy. In 7 he retired to
Milford, Pennsylvania, and devoted the rest of his life to philosophical work.
He earned a meager income from occasional lectures and by writing articles for
periodicals and dictionaries. He spent his last years in extreme poverty and
ill health. Pragmatism. Peirce formulated the basic principles of pragmatism in
two articles, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”
187778. The title of the latter paper refers to Descartes’s doctrine of clear
and distinct ideas. According to Peirce, the criteria of clarity and
distinctness must be supplemented by a third condition of meaningfulness, which
states that the meaning of a proposition or an “intellectual conception” lies
in its “practical consequences.” In his paper “Pragmatism” 5 he formulated the
“Principle of Pragmatism” or the “Pragmatic Maxim” as follows: In order to
ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception we should consider what
practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of
that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire
meaning of the conception. By “practical consequences” Peirce means conditional
propositions of the form ‘if p, then q’, where the antecedent describes some
action or experimental condition, and the consequent describes an observable
phenomenon or a “sensible effect.” According to the Pragmatic Maxim, the
meaning of a proposition or of an “intellectual conception” can be expressed as
a conjunction of such “practical conditionals.” The Pragmatic Maxim might be
criticized on the ground that many meaningful sentences e.g., theoretical
hypotheses do not entail any “practical consequences” in themselves, but only
in conjunction with other hypotheses. Peirce anticipated this objection by
observing that “the maxim of pragmatism is that a conception can have no
logical effect or import differing from that of a second conception except so
far as, taken in connection with other conceptions and intentions, it might
conceivably modify our practical conduct differently from that of the second
conception” “Pragmatism and Abduction,” 3. Theory of inquiry and philosophy of
science. Peirce adopted Bain’s definition of belief as “that which a man is
prepared to act upon.” Belief guides action, and as a content of belief a
proposition can be regarded as a maxim of conduct. According to Peirce, belief
is a satisfactory and desirable state, whereas the opposite of belief, the
state of doubt, is an unsatisfactory state. The starting point of inquiry is
usually some surprising phenomenon that is inconsistent with one’s previously
accepted beliefs, and that therefore creates a state of doubt. The purpose of
inquiry is the replacement of this state by that of belief: “the sole aim of
inquiry is the settlement of opinion.” A successful inquiry leads to stable
opinion, a state of belief that need not later be given up. Peirce regarded the
ultimate stability of opinion as a criterion of truth and reality: “the real .
. . is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally
result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me.”
He accepted, however, an objectivist conception of truth and reality: the
defining characteristic of reality is its independence of the opinions of
individual persons. In “The Fixation of Belief” Peirce argued that the
scientific method, a method in which we let our beliefs be determined by
external reality, “by something upon which our thinking has no effect,” is the
best way of settling opinion. Much of his philosophical work was devoted to the
analysis of the various forms of inference and argument employed in science. He
studied the concept of probability and probabilistic reasoning in science,
criticized the subjectivist view of probability, and adopted an objectivist
conception, according to which probability can be defined as a relative
frequency in the long run. Peirce distinguished between three main types of
inference, which correspond to three stages of inquiry: i abduction, a
tentative acceptance of an explanatory hypothesis which, if true, would make
the phenomenon under investigation intelligible; ii deduction, the derivation
of testable consequences from the explanatory hypothesis; and iii induction,
the evaluation of the hypothesis in the light of these consequences. He called
this method of inquiry the inductive method; in the contemporary philosophy of
science it is usually called the hypothetico-deductive method. According to
Peirce, the scientific method can be viewed as an application of the pragmatic
maxim: the testable consequences derived from an explanatory hypothesis
constitute its concrete “meaning” in the sense of the Pragmatic Maxim. Thus the
Maxim determines the admissibility of a hypothesis as a possible meaningful
explanation. According to Pierce, inquiry is always dependent on beliefs that
are not subject to doubt at the time of the inquiry, but such beliefs might be
questioned on some other occasion. Our knowledge does not rest on indubitable
“first premises,” but all beliefs are dependent on other beliefs. According to
Peirce’s doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always
tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the
certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by
continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own
mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth. Logic, the theory
of signs, and the philosophy of language. In “The Logic of Relatives,”
published in 3 in a collection of papers by himself and his students at the
Johns Hopkins Studies in Logic by
Members of the Johns Hopkins , Peirce formalized relational statements by using
subscript indices for individuals individual variables, and construed the
quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘every’ as variable binding operators; thus Peirce can
be regarded together Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Sanders 652 652 with the G. logician Frege as one of
the founders of quantification theory predicate logic. In his paper “On the
Algebra of Logic A Contribution to the
Philosophy of Notation” 5 he interpreted propositional logic as a calculus of
truth-values, and defined logically necessary truth in propositional logic as
truth for all truth-value assignments to sentential letters. He studied the
logic of modalities and in the 0s he invented a system of logical graphs called
“existential graphs”, based on a diagrammatic representation of propositions,
in which he anticipated some basic ideas of the possible worlds semantics of
modal logic. Peirce’s letters and notebooks contain significant logical and
philosophical insights. For example, he examined three-valued truth tables
“Triadic Logic”, and discovered in 6 the possibility of representing the
truth-functional connectives of propositional logic by electrical switching
circuits. Peirce regarded logic as a part of a more general area of inquiry,
the theory of signs, which he also called semeiotic nowadays usually spelled
‘semiotics’. According to Peirce, sign relations are triadic, involving the
sign itself, its object or what the sign stands for, and an interpretant which
determines how the sign represents the object; the interpretant can be regarded
as the meaning of the sign. The interpretant of a sign is another sign which in
turn has its own interpretant or interpretants; such a sequence of
interpretants ends in an “ultimate logical interpretant,” which is “a change of
habit of conduct.” On the basis of the triadic character of the sign relation
Peirce distinguished three divisions of signs. These divisions were based on i
the character of the sign itself, ii the relation between the sign and its
object, and iii the way in which the interpretant represents the object. These
divisions reflect Peirce’s system of three fundamental ontological categories,
which he termed Quality or Firstness, Relation or Secondness, and
Representation or Thirdness. Thus, according to the first division, a sign can
be a a qualisign, a mere quality or appearance a First; b a sinsign or token,
an individual object, or event a Second; or c a legisign or a general type a
Third. Secondly, signs can be divided into icons, indices, and symbols on the
basis of their relations to their objects: an icon refers to an object on the
basis of its similarity to the object in some respect; an index stands in a
dynamic or causal relation to its object; whereas a symbol functions as a sign
of an object by virtue of a rule or habit of interpretation. Peirce’s third
division divides signs into rhemes predicative signs, propositional signs
propositions, and arguments. Some of the concepts and distinctions introduced
by Peirce, e.g., the distinction between “types” and “tokens” and the division
of signs into “icons,” “indices,” and “symbols,” have become part of the
standard conceptual repertoire of philosophy and semiotics. In his philosophy
of language Peirce made a distinction between a proposition and an assertion,
and studied the logical character of assertive speech acts. Metaphysics. In
spite of his critical attitude toward traditional metaphysics, Peirce believed
that metaphysical questions can be discussed in a meaningful way. According to
Peirce, metaphysics studies the most general traits of reality, and “kinds of
phenomena with which every man’s experience is so saturated that he usually
pays no particular attention to them.” The basic categories of Firstness,
Secondness, and Thirdness mentioned above occupy a central position in Peirce’s
metaphysics. Especially in his later writings he emphasized the reality and
metaphysical irreducibility of Thirdness, and defended the view that general
phenomena for example, general laws cannot be regarded as mere conjunctions of
their actual individual instances. This view was associated with Peirce’s
synechism, the doctrine that the world contains genuinely continuous phenomena.
He regarded synechism as a new form of Scholastic realism. In the area of
modalities Peirce’s basic categories appear as possibility, actuality, and
necessity. Here he argued that reality cannot be identified with existence or
actuality, but comprises real objective possibilities. This view was partly
based on his realization that many conditional statements, for instance the
“practical” conditionals expressing the empirical import of a proposition in
the sense of the Pragmatic Maxim, cannot be construed as material or
truth-functional conditionals, but must be regarded as modal subjunctive
conditionals. In his cosmology Peirce propounded the doctrine of tychism, according
to which there is absolute chance in the universe, and the basic laws of nature
are probabilistic and inexact. Peirce’s position in contemporary philosophy.
Peirce had few disciples, but some of his students and colleagues became
influential figures in philosophy and
science, e.g., the philosophers James, Royce, and Dewey and the economist
Thorstein Veblen. Peirce’s pragmatism Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles
Sanders 653 653 became widely known
through James’s lectures and writings, but Peirce was dissatisfied with James’s
version of pragmatism, and renamed his own form of it ‘pragmaticism’, which
term he considered to be “ugly enough to keep it safe from kidnappers.”
Pragmatism became an influential philosophical movement during the twentieth
century through Dewey philosophy of science and philosophy of education, C. I.
Lewis theory of knowledge, Ramsey, Ernest Nagel, and Quine philosophy of
science. Peirce’s work in logic influenced, mainly through his contacts with
the G. logician Ernst Schröder, the model-theoretic tradition in
twentieth-century logic. There are three comprehensive collections of Peirce’s
papers: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce 158, vols. 16 edited by
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. 78 edited by Arthur Burks; The New
Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce 6, edited by Carolyn Eisele; and
Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition 2.
Peirce’s law, the
principle ‘A P B P A P A’, which holds in classical logic but fails in the eyes
of relevance logicians when ‘ P’ is read as ‘entails’.
Pelagianism, the doctrine
in Christian theology that, through the exercise of free will, human beings can
attain moral perfection. A broad movement devoted to this proposition was only
loosely associated with its eponymous leader. Pelagius c.354c.425, a lay
theologian from Britain or Ireland, taught in Rome prior to its sacking in 410.
He and his disciple Celestius found a forceful adversary in Augustine, whom
they provoked to stiffen his stance on original sin, the bondage of the will,
and humanity’s total reliance upon God’s grace and predestination for
salvation. To Pelagius, this constituted fatalism and encouraged moral apathy.
God would not demand perfection, as the Bible sometimes suggested, were that
impossible to attain. Rather grace made the struggle easier for a sanctity that
would not be unreachable even in its absence. Though in the habit of sinning,
in consequence of the fall, we have not forfeited the capacity to overcome that
habit nor been released from the imperative to do so. For all its moral
earnestness this teaching seems to be in conflict with much of the New
Testament, especially as interpreted by Augustine, and it was condemned as
heresy in 418. The bondage of the will has often been reaffirmed, perhaps most
notably by Luther in dispute with Erasmus. Yet Christian theology and practice
have always had their sympathizers with Pelagianism and with its reluctance to
attest the loss of free will, the inevitability of sin, and the utter necessity
of God’s grace.
per accidens Latin, ‘by
accident’, by, as, or being an accident or non-essential feature. A per
accidens predication is one in which an accident is predicated of a substance.
The terminology is medieval. Note that the accident and substance themselves,
not words standing for them, are the terms of the predication relation. An ens
entity per accidens is either an accident or the “accidental unity” of a
substance and an accident Descartes, e.g., insists that a person is not a per
accidens union of body and mind.
perceptum: the traditional distinction is perceptum-conceptum: nihil
est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu. this is Grice on sense-datum.
Grice feels that the kettle is hot; Grice sees that the kettle is hot; Grice
perceives that the kettle is hot. WoW:251 uses this example. It may be argued
that the use of ‘see’ is there NOT factive. Cf. “I feel hot but it’s not hot.”
Grice modifies the thing to read, “DIRECTLY PERCEIVING”: Grice only indirectly
perceives that the kettle is hot’ if what he is doing is ‘seeing’ that the
kettle is hot. When Grice sees that the kettle is hot, it is a ‘secondary’
usage of ‘see,’ because it means that Grice perceives that the kettle has some
visual property that INDICATES the presence of hotness (Grice uses phi for the
general formula). Cf. sensum. Lewis and Short have “sentĭo,” which they
render, aptly, as “to sense,” ‘to discern by the senses; to feel, hear, see,
etc.; to perceive, be sensible of (syn. percipio).”
Note that Price is also cited by Grice in Personal identity. Grice: That pillar
box seems red to me. The locus classicus in the philosophical literature for
Grices implicatum. Grice introduces a dout-or-denial condition for an utterance
of a phenomenalist report (That pillar-box seems red to me). Grice attacks
neo-Wittgensteinian approaches that regard the report as _false_. In a long
excursus on implication, he compares the phenomenalist report with utterances
like He has beautiful handwriting (He is hopeless at philosophy), a
particularised conversational implicatum; My wife is in the kitchen or the
garden (I have non-truth-functional grounds to utter this), a generalised
conversational implicatum; She was poor but she was honest (a Great-War
witty (her poverty and her honesty contrast), a conventional implicatum; and
Have you stopped beating your wife? an old Oxonian conundrum. You have
been beating your wife, cf. Smith has not ceased from eating iron, a
presupposition. More importantly, he considers different tests for each
concoction! Those for the conversational implicatum will become crucial:
cancellability, calculability, non-detachability, and indeterminacy. In the
proceedings he plays with something like the principle of conversational
helpfulness, as having a basis on a view of conversation as rational
co-operation, and as giving the rationale to the implicatum. Past the excursus,
and back to the issue of perception, he holds a conservative view as presented
by Price at Oxford. One interesting reprint of Grices essay is in Daviss volume
on Causal theories, since this is where it belongs! White’s response is usually
ignored, but shouldnt. White is an interesting Australian philosopher at Oxford
who is usually regarded as a practitioner of ordinary-language philosophy.
However, in his response, White hardly touches the issue of the implicature
with which Grice is primarily concerned. Grice found that a full reprint from
the PAS in a compilation also containing the James Harvard would be too
repetitive. Therefore, he omits the excursus on implication. However, the way
Grice re-formulates what that excursus covers is very interesting. There is the
conversational implicatum, particularised (Smith has beautiful handwriting) and
generalised (My wife is in the kitchen or in the garden). Then there is the
præsuppositum, or presupposition (You havent stopped beating your wife).
Finally, there is the conventional implicatum (She was poor, but she was
honest). Even at Oxford, Grices implicature goes, philosophers ‒ even Oxonian
philosophers ‒ use imply for all those different animals! Warnock had attended
Austins Sense and Sensibilia (not to be confused with Sense and Sensibility by
Austen), which Grice found boring, but Warnock didnt because Austin reviews his
"Berkeley." But Warnock, for obvious reasons, preferred
philosophical investigations with Grice. Warnock reminisces that Grice once
tells him, and not on a Saturday morning, either, How clever language is, for
they find that ordinary language does not need the concept of a visum. Grice
and Warnock spent lovely occasions exploring what Oxford has as the philosophy of
perception. While Grice later came to see philosophy of perception as a bit or
an offshoot of philosophical psychology, the philosophy of perception is
concerned with that treasured bit of the Oxonian philosophers lexicon, the
sense-datum, always in the singular! The cause involved is crucial. Grice plays
with an evolutionary justification of the material thing as the denotatum of a
perceptual judgement. If a material thing causes the sense-datum of a nut, that
is because the squarrel (or squirrel) will not be nourished by the sense datum
of the nut; only by the nut! There are many other items in the Grice Collection
that address the topic of perception – notably with Warnock, and criticizing
members of the Ryle group like Roxbee-Cox (on vision, cf. visa ‒ taste, and
perception, in general – And we should not forget that Grice contributed a
splendid essay on the distinction of the senses to Butlers Analytic philosophy,
which in a way, redeemed a rather old-fashioned discipline by shifting it to
the idiom of the day, the philosophy of perception: a retrospective, with
Warnock, the philosophy of perception, : perception, the philosophy of
perception, visum. Warnock was possibly the only philosopher at Oxford
Grice felt congenial enough to engage in different explorations in the
so-called philosophy of perception. Their joint adventures involved the
disimplicature of a visum. Grice later approached sense data in more
evolutionary terms: a material thing is to be vindicated transcendentally, in
the sense that it is a material thing (and not a sense datum or collection
thereof) that nourishes a creature like a human. Grice was particularly
grateful to Warnock. By reprinting the full symposium on “Causal theory” of
perception in his influential s. of Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Warnock had
spread Grices lore of implicature all over! In some parts of the draft he uses
more on visa, vision, vision, with Warnock, vision. Of the five senses,
Grice and Warnock are particularly interested in seeing. As Grice will put it later,
see is a factive. It presupposes the existence of the event reported after the
that-clause; a visum, however, as an intermediary between the material thing
and the perceiver does not seem necessary in ordinary discourse. Warnock will
reconsider Grices views too (On what is seen, in Sibley). While Grice uses
vision, he knows he is interested in Philosophers paradox concerning seeing,
notably Witters on seeing as, vision, taste and the philosophy of perception,
vision, seeing. As an Oxonian philosopher, Grice was of course more
interested in seeing than in vision. He said that Austin would criticise even
the use of things like sensation and volition, taste, The Grice Papers,
keyword: taste, the objects of the five senses, the philosophy of perception, perception,
the philosophy of perception; philosophy of perception, vision, taste,
perception. Mainly with Warnock. Warnock repr. Grice’s “Causal
theory” in his influential Reading in Philosophy, The philosophy of perception,
perception, with Warnock, with Warner; perception. Warnock learns about
perception much more from Grice than from Austin, taste, The philosophy of
perception, the philosophy of perception, notes with Warnock on visum, : visum,
Warnock, Grice, the philosophy of perception. Grice kept the lecture
notes to a view of publishing a retrospective. Warnock recalled Grice
saying, how clever language is! Grice took the offer by Harvard University
Press, and it was a good thing he repr. part of “Causal theory.” However, the
relevant bits for his theory of conversation as rational co-operation lie in
the excursus which he omitted. What is Grices implicature: that one should
consider the topic rather than the method here, being sense datum, and
causation, rather than conversational helpfulness. After all, That pillar box
seems red to me, does not sound very helpful. But the topic of Causal theory is
central for his view of conversation as rational co-operation. Why? P1 gets
an impression of danger as caused by the danger out there. He communicates the
danger to P1, causing in P2 some behaviour. Without
causation, or causal links, the very point of offering a theory of conversation
as rational co-operation seems minimized. On top, as a metaphysician, he was
also concerned with cause simpliciter. He was especially proud that Price’s
section on the casual theory of perception, from his Belief, had been repr.
along with his essay in the influential volume by Davis on “Causal theories.”
In “Actions and events,” Grice further explores cause now in connection with
Greek aitia. As Grice notes, the original usage of this very Grecian item is
the one we find in rebel without a cause, cause-to, rather than cause-because.
The two-movement nature of causing is reproduced in the conversational
exchange: a material thing causes a sense datum which causes an expression
which gets communicated, thus causing a psychological state which will cause a
behaviour. This causation is almost representational. A material thing or a
situation cannot govern our actions and behaviours, but a re-præsentatum of it
might. Govern our actions and behaviour is Grices correlate of what a team of
North-Oxfordshire cricketers can do for North-Oxfordshire: what North
Oxfordshire cannot do for herself, Namesly, engage in a game of cricket! In Retrospective
epilogue he casts doubts on the point of his causal approach. It is a short
paragraph that merits much exploration. Basically, Grice is saying his
causalist approach is hardly an established thesis. He also proposes a similar
serious objection to his view in Some remarks about the senses, the other essay
in the philosophy of perception in Studies. As he notes, both engage with some
fundamental questions in the philosophy of perception, which is hardly the same
thing as saying that they provide an answer to each question! Grice: The
issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine
point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several philosophical
theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined in order to see whether
or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have been
discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. Examples which
occur to me are the following six. You cannot see a knife ‘as’ a knife, though
you may see what is not a knife ‘as’ a knife (keyword: ‘seeing as’). When he
said he ‘knew’ that the objects before him were human hands, Moore was guilty
of misusing ‘know.’ For an occurrence to be properly said to have a ‘cause,’ it
must be something abnormal or unusual (keyword: ‘cause’). For an action to be
properly described as one for which the agent is ‘responsible,’ it must be the
sort of action for which people are condemned (keyword: responsibility). What
is actual is not also possible (keyword: actual). What is known by me to be the
case is not also believed by me to be the case (keyword: ‘know’ – cf. Urmson on
‘scalar set’). And cf. with the extra examples he presents in “Prolegomena.” I
have no doubt that there will be other candidates besides the six which I have
mentioned. I must emphasize that I am not saying that all these examples are
importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for
all I know, they may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted
by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is
characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not
condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it
without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead
to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detectcd, we should make sure
that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are. “Causal theory”,
knowledge and belief, knowledge, belief, philosophical psychology. Grice: the
doxastic implicatum. I know only implicates I do not believe. The following is
a mistake by a philosopher. What is known by me to be the case is not also
believed by me to be the case. The topic had attracted the attention of some
Oxonian philosophers such as Urmson in Parenthetical verbs. Urmson speaks of a
scale: I know can be used parenthetically, as I believe can. For Grice, to
utter I believe is obviously to make a weaker conversational move than you
would if you utter I know. And in this case, an approach to informativeness in
terms of entailment is in order, seeing that I know entails I believe. A is
thus allowed to infer that the utterer is not in a position to make the
stronger claim. The mechanism is explained via his principle of conversational
helpfulness. Philosophers tend two over-use these two basic psychological
states, attitudes, or stances. Grice is concerned with Gettier-type cases, and
also the factivity of know versus the non-factivity of believe. Grice follows
the lexicological innovations by Hintikka: the logic of belief is doxastic; the
logic of knowledge is epistemic. The last thesis that Grice lists in Causal
theory that he thinks rests on a big mistake he formulates as: What is known by
me to be the case is NOT also believed by me to be the case. What are his
attending remarks? Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly
concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an
isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I
think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently
parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment
of the same general kind. An example which occurs to me is the following: What
is known by me to be the case is not also believed by me to be the case. I must
emphasise that I am not saying that this example is importantly similar to the
thesis which I have been criticising, only that, for all I know, it may be. To
put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me
to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one
contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of
manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is
to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the
linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are
reasonably clear what SORT of nuances they are! The ætiological
implicatum. Grice. For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it
must be something abnormal or unusual. This is an example Grice lists in Causal
theory but not in Prolegomena. But cf. ‘responsible’ – and Hart and Honoré on
accusation -- accusare
"call to account, make complaint against," from ad causa, from “ad,”
with regard to, as in ‘ad-’) + causa, a cause; a lawsuit,’ v. cause. For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it
must be something abnormal or unusual. Similar commentary to his example on
responsible/condemnable apply. The objector may stick with the fact that he is
only concerned with proper utterances. Surely Grice wants to go to a
pre-Humeian account of causation, possible Aristotelian, aetiologia. Where
everything has a cause, except, for Aristotle, God! What are his attending
remarks? Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be
thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are
several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined
in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis
which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general
kind. An example which occurs to me is the following: What is known by me to be
the case is not also believed by me to be the case. I must emphasise that I am
not saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have
been criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more
generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of
manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of
philosophising. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely
suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with
the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have
detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances
they are! Causal theory, cause, causality, causation, conference, colloquium,
Stanford, cause, metaphysics, the abnormal/unusual implicatum, ætiology,
ætiological implicatum. Grice: the ætiological implicatum. Grices explorations
on cause are very rich. He is concerned with some alleged misuse of cause in
ordinary language. If as Hume suggests, to cause is to will, one would say that
the decapitation of Charles I wills his death, which sounds harsh, if not
ungrammatical, too. Grice later relates cause to the Greek aitia, as he should.
He notes collocations like rebel without a cause. For the Greeks, or Grecians,
as he called them, and the Griceians, it is a cause to which one should be
involved in elucidating. A ‘cause to’ connects with the idea of freedom.
Grice was constantly aware of the threat of mechanism, and his idea was to provide
philosophical room for the idea of finality, which is not mechanistically
derivable. This leads him to discussion of overlap and priority of, say, a
physical-cum-physiological versus a psychological theory explaining this or
that piece of rational behaviour. Grice can be Wittgensteinian when citing
Anscombes translation: No psychological concept without the behaviour the
concept is brought to explain. It is best to place his later treatment of
cause with his earlier one in Causal theory. It is surprising Grice does not
apply his example of a mistake by a philosopher to the causal bit of his causal
theory. Grice states the philosophical mistake as follows: For an occurrence to
be properly said to have a cause, it must be something abnormal or unusual.
This is an example Grice lists in Causal theory but not in Prolegomena. For an
occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be something abnormal
or unusual. A similar commentary to his example on responsible/condemnable
applies: The objector may stick with the fact that he is only concerned with
PROPER utterances. Surely Grice wants to embrace a pre-Humeian account of
causation, possible Aristotelian. Keyword: Aitiologia, where everything has a
cause, except, for Aristotle, God! What are his attending remarks? Grice
writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather
a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several
philosophical theses or dicta which would Grice thinks need to be examined in
order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which
Grice has been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind.
One example which occurs to Grice is the following: For an occurrence to be
properly said to have a cause, it must be something abnormal or unusual. Grice
feels he must emphasise that he is not saying that this example is importantly
similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know,
it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my
objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of
more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this
kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution
is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the
linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are
reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are! Re:
responsibility/condemnation. Cf. Mabbott, Flew on punishment, Philosophy. And
also Hart. At Corpus, Grice enjoys his tutor Hardies resourcefulness in the
defence of what may be a difficult position, a characteristic illustrated by an
incident which Hardie himself once told Grice about himself. Hardie had parked
his car and gone to a cinema. Unfortunately, Hardie had parked his car on top
of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights were, at
the time, controlled by the passing traffic. As a result, the lights are
jammed, and it requires four policemen to lift Hardies car off the strip. The
police decides to prosecute. Grice indicated to Hardie that this hardly
surprised him and asked him how he fared. Oh, Hardie says, I got off. Then
Grice asks Hardie how on earth he managed that! Quite simply, Hardie answers. I
just invoked Mills method of difference. The police charged me with causing an
obstruction at 4 p.m. I told the police that, since my car was parked at 2
p.m., it could not have been my car which caused the obstruction at 4 p.m. This
relates to an example in Causal theory that he Grice does not discuss in
Prolegomena, but which may relate to Hart, and closer to Grice, to Mabbotts
essay on Flew on punishment, in Philosophy. Grice states the philosophical
mistake as follows: For an action to be properly described as one for which the
agent is responsible, it must be thc sort of action for which people are
condemned. As applied to Hardie. Is Hardie irresponsible? In any case, while
condemnable, he was not! Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly
concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an
isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I
think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently
parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment
of the same general kind. An example which occurs to me is the following: For
an action to be properly described as one for which the agent is responsible,
it must be the sort of action for which people are condemned. I must emphasise
that I am not saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis
which I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the
matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to
involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one
contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of
manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is
to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the
linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are
reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are. The modal example, what is
actual is not also possible, should discussed under Indicative conditonals,
Grice on Macbeth’s implicature: seeing a dagger as a dagger. Grice elaborates
on this in Prolegomena, but the austerity of Causal theory is charming, since
he does not give a quote or source. Obviously, Witters. Grice writes: Witters
might say that one cannot see a knife as a knife, though one may see what is
not a knife as a knife. The issue, Grice notes, with which I have been mainly
concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an
isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I
think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently
parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment
of the same general kind. An example which occurs to Grice is the following:
You cannot see a knife as a knife, though you may see what is not a knife as a
knife. Grice feels that he must emphasise that he is not saying that this
example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing,
only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the
position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre
which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I
am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark
on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush
ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make
sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are! Is this a
dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch
thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision,
sensible to feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false
creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as
palpable as this which now I draw. Thou marshallst me the way that I was going;
and such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o the other
senses, Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, and on thy blade and
dudgeon gouts of blood, which was not so before. Theres no such thing: It is
the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. Now oer the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtaind sleep; witchcraft
celebrates Pale Hecates offerings, and witherd murder, Alarumd by his sentinel,
the wolf, Whose howls his watch, thus with his stealthy pace. With
Tarquins ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure
and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very
stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which
now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold
breath gives. I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not,
Duncan; for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell. The Moore
example is used both in “Causal theory” and “Prolegomena.” But the use in
“Causal Theory” is more austere: Philosophers mistake: Malcolm: When Moore said
he knew that the objects before him were human hands, he was guilty of misusing
the word know. Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned
may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one.
There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be
examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the
thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same
general kind. An example which occurs to me is the following: When Moore said
he knew that the objects before him were human hands, he was guilty of misusing
the word know. I must emphasise that I am not saying that this example is
importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for
all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted
by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is
characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not
condemning this kind of manoeuvre. Grice is merely suggesting that to embark on
it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush
ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make
sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are! So surely
Grice is meaning: I know that the objects before me are human hands as uttered
by Moore is possibly true. Grice was amused by the fact that while at Madison,
Wisc., Moore gave the example: I know that behind those curtains there is a
window. Actually he was wrong, as he soon realised when the educated
Madisonians corrected him with a roar of unanimous laughter. You see, the
lecture hall of the University of Wisconsin at Madison is a rather, shall we
say, striking space. The architect designed the lecture hall with a parapet
running around the wall just below the ceiling, cleverly rigged with indirect
lighting to create the illusion that sun light is pouring in through windows from
outside. So, Moore comes to give a lecture one sunny day. Attracted as he was
to this eccentric architectural detail, Moore gives an illustration of
certainty as attached to common sense. Pointing to the space below the ceiling,
Moore utters. We know more things than we think we know. I know, for example,
that the sunlight shining in from outside proves At which point he was somewhat startled (in
his reserved Irish-English sort of way) when his audience burst out laughing!
Is that a proof of anything? Grice is especially concerned with I seem He needs
a paradeigmatic sense-datum utterance, and intentionalist as he was, he finds
it in I seem to see a red pillar box before me. He is relying on Paul. Grice
would generalise a sense datum by φ I seem to perceive that the alpha is phi.
He agrees that while cause may be too much, any sentence using because will do:
At a circus: You seem to be seeing that an elephant is coming down the street
because an elephant is coming down the street. Grice found the causalist theory
of perception particularly attractive since its objection commits one same
mistake twice: he mischaracterises the cancellable implicatum of both seem and
cause! While Grice is approaching the philosophical item in the
philosophical lexicon, perceptio, he is at this stage more interested in
vernacular that- clauses such as sensing that, or even more vernacular ones
like seeming that, if not seeing that! This is of course philosophical (cf.
aesthetikos vs. noetikos). L and S have “perceptĭo,” f. perceptio, as used by
Cicero (Ac. 2, 7, 22) translating catalepsis, and which they render as “a
taking, receiving; a gathering in, collecting;’ frugum fruetuumque reliquorum,
Cic. Off. 2, 3, 12: fructuum;’ also as perception, comprehension, cf.: notio,
cognition; animi perceptiones, notions, ideas; cognitio aut perceptio, aut si
verbum e verbo volumus comprehensio, quam κατάληψιν illi vocant; in philosophy,
direct apprehension of an object by the mind, Zeno Stoic.1.20, Luc. Par. 4,
al.; τῶν μετεώρων;” ἀκριβὴς κ. Certainty; pl., perceptions, Stoic.2.30, Luc.
Herm.81, etc.; introduced into Latin by Cicero, Plu. Cic. 40. As for “causa”
Grice is even more sure he was exploring a time-honoured philosophical topic.
The entry in L and S is “causa,’ perh. root “cav-“ of “caveo,” prop. that which
is defended or protected; cf. “cura,” and that they render as, unhelpfully, as
“cause,” “that by, on account of, or through which any thing takes place or is
done;” “a cause, reason, motive, inducement;” also, in gen., an occasion,
opportunity; oeffectis; factis, syn.
with ratio, principium, fons, origo, caput; excusatio, defensio; judicium,
controversia, lis; partes, actio; condicio, negotium, commodum, al.);
correlated to aition, or aitia, cause, δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν,” cf. Pl. Ti.
68e, Phd. 97a sq.; on the four causes of Arist. v. Ph. 194b16, Metaph. 983a26:
αἰ. τοῦ γενέσθαι or γεγονέναι Pl. Phd. 97a; τοῦ μεγίστου ἀγαθοῦ τῇ πόλει αἰτία
ἡ κοινωνία Id. R. 464b: αἰτίᾳ for the sake of, κοινοῦ τινος ἀγαθοῦ.” Then there
is “αἴτιον” (cf. ‘αἴτιος’) is used like “αἰτία” in the sense of cause, not in
that of ‘accusation.’ Grice goes back to perception at a later stage,
reminiscing on his joint endeavours with akin Warnock, Ps karulise elatically,
potching and cotching obbles, Pirotese, Pirotese, creature construction,
philosophical psychology. Grice was fascinated by Carnaps Ps which
karulise elatically. Grice adds potching for something like perceiving and
cotching for something like cognising. With his essay Some remarks about
the senses, Grice introduces the question by which criterion we
distinguish our five senses into the contemporary philosophy of perception. The
literature concerning this question is not very numerous but the discussion is
still alive and was lately inspired by the volume The Senses2. There are four
acknowledged possible answers to the question how we distinguish the senses,
all of them already stated by Grice. First, the senses are distinguished by the
properties we perceive by them. Second, the senses are distinguished by the
phenomenal qualities of the perception itself or as Grice puts it “by the
special introspectible character of the experiences” Third, the senses are
distinguished by the physical stimuli that are responsible for the relevant
perceptions. Fourth, The senses are distinguished by the sense-organs that are
(causally) involved in the production of the relevant perceptions. Most
contributions discussing this issue reject the third and fourth answers in a
very short argumentation. Nearly all philosophers writing on the topic vote
either for the first or the second answer. Accordingly, most part of the debate
regarding the initial question takes the form of a dispute between these two
positions. Or” was a big thing in Oxford philosophy. The only known
published work of Wood, our philosophy tutor at Christ Church, was an essay in
Mind, the philosophers journal, entitled “Alternative Uses of “Or” ”, a work
which was every bit as indeterminate as its title. Several years later he
published another paper, this time for the Aristotelian Society, entitled On
being forced to a conclusion. Cf. Grice and Wood on the demands of
conversational reason. Wood, The force of linguistic rules. Wood, on the
implicatum of or in review in Mind of Connor, Logic. The five senses, as Urmson
notes, are to see that the sun is shining, to hear that the car collided, to
feel that her pulse is beating, to smell that something has been smoking and to
taste that. An interesting piece in that it was commissioned by Butler, who
knew Grice from his Oxford days. Grice cites Wood and Albritton. Grice is
concerned with a special topic in the philosophy of perception, notably the
identification of the traditional five senses: vision, audition, taste,
smell, and tact. He introduces what is regarded in the philosophical literature
as the first thought-experiment, in terms of the senses that Martians may have.
They have two pairs of eyes: are we going to allow that they see with both
pairs? Grice introduces a sub-division of seeing: a Martian x-s an object with
his upper pair of eyes, but he y-s an object with the lower pair of eyes. In
his exploration, he takes a realist stance, which respects the ordinary
discursive ways to approach issues of perception. A second interesting point is
that in allowing this to be repr. in Butlers Analytic philosophy, Grice is
demonstrating that analytic philosophers should NOT be obsessed with ordinary
language. Butlers compilation, a rather dry one, is meant as a response to the
more linguistic oriented ones by Flew (Grices first tutee at St. Johns, as it
happens), also published by Blackwell, and containing pieces by Austin, and
company. One philosopher who took Grice very seriously on this was Coady, in
his The senses of the Martians. Grice provides a serious objection to his own
essay in Retrospective epilogue We see with our eyes. I.e. eye is
teleologically defined. He notes that his way of distinguishing the senses is
hardly an established thesis. Grice actually advances this topic in his earlier
Causal theory. Grice sees nothing absurd in the idea that a non-specialist
concept should contain, so to speak, a blank space to be filled in by the
specialist; that this is so, e.g., in the case of the concept of seeing is
perhaps indicated by the consideration that if we were in doubt about the
correctness of speaking of a certain creature with peculiar sense-organs as
seeing objects, we might well wish to hear from a specialist a comparative
account of the human eye and the relevant sense-organs of the creature in
question. He returns to the point in Retrospective epilogue with a bit of
doxastic humility, We see with our eyes is analytic ‒ but
philosophers should take that more seriously. Grice tested the playmates
of his children, aged 7 and 9, with Nothing can be green and red all
over. Instead, Morley Bunker preferred
philosophy undergrads. Aint that boring? To give examples:
Summer follows Spring was judged analytic by Morley-Bunkers informants, as
cited by Sampson, in Making sense (Clarendon) by highly significant majorities
in each group of Subjectss, while We see with our eyes was given near-even
split votes by each group. Over all, the philosophers were somewhat more
consistent with each other than the non-philosophers. But that global finding
conceals results for individual sentences that sometimes manifested the
opposed tendency. Thus, Thunderstorms are electrical disturbances in the
atmosphere is judged analytic by a highly significant majority of the
non-philosophers, while a non-significant majority of the philosophers deemed
it non-analytic or synthetic. In this case, it seems, philosophical training,
surely not brain-washing, induces the realisation that well-established results
of contemporary science are not necessary truths. In other cases, conversely,
cliches of current philosophical education impose their own mental blinkers on
those who undergo it: Nothing can be completely red and green all over is
judged analytic by a significant majority of philosophers but only by a
non-significant majority of non-philosophers. All in all, the results argue
strongly against the notion that our inability to decide consistently whether
or not some statement is a necessary truth derives from lack of skill in
articulating our underlying knowledge of the rules of our language. Rather, the
inability comes from the fact that the question as posed is unreal. We choose
to treat a given statement as open to question or as unchallengeable in the
light of the overall structure of beliefs which we have individually
evolved in order to make sense of our individual experience. Even the cases
which seem clearly analytic or synthetic are cases which individuals judge
alike because the relevant experiences are shared by the whole community, but
even for such cases one can invent hypothetical or suppositional future
experiences which, if they should be realised, would cause us to revise our
judgements. This is not intended to call into question the special status of
the truths of logic, such as either Either it is raining or it is not. He
is of course inclined to accept the traditional view according to which logical
particles such as not and or are distinct from the bulk of the vocabulary in
that the former really are governed by clear-cut inference rules. Grice
does expand on the point. Refs.: Under sense-datum, there are groups of essays.
The obvious ones are the two essays on the philosophy of perception in WOW. A
second group relates to his research with G. J. Warnock, where the keywords are
‘vision,’ ‘taste,’ and ‘perception,’ in general. There is a more recent group
with this research with R. Warner. ‘Visum’ and ‘visa’ are good keywords, and
cf. the use of ‘senses’ in “Some remarks about the senses,” in BANC.Philo: Grice’s
favourite philosopher, after Ariskant. The [Greek: protos logos anapodeiktos]
of the Stoic logic ran thus [Greek: ei hemera esti, phos estin ... alla men
hemera estin phos ara estin] (Sext. _P.H._ II. 157, and other passages qu.
Zeller 114). This bears a semblance of inference and isnot so utterly tautological as Cic.'s translation, which
merges [Greek: phos] and [Greek: hemera] into one word, or that of Zeller (114,
note). Si
dies est lucet: a better trans of
Greek: ei phos estin, hemera estin] than was given in 96, where see n. _Aliter
Philoni_: not Philo of Larissa, but a noted dialectician, pupil of Diodorus the
Megarian, mentioned also in 75. The dispute between Diodorus and Philo is
mentioned in Sext. _A.M._ VIII. 115--117 with the same purpose as here, see
also Zeller 39. Conexi = Gr. “synemmenon,” cf. Zeller 109. This was the proper
term for the hypothetical judgment. _Superius_: the Greek: synemmenon consists
of two parts, the hypothetical part and the affirmative--called in Greek
[Greek: hegoumenon] and [Greek: legon]; if one is admitted the other follows of
course.Philo's criterion for the truth of “if p, q” is truth-functional. Philo’s
truth-functional criterion is generally accepted as a minimal condition.Philo
maintains that “If Smith is in London, he, viz. Smith, is attending the meeting
there, viz. in London” is true (i) when the antecedens (“Smith is in London”)
is true and the consequens (“Smith is in London at a meeting”) is true (row 1)
and (ii) when the antecedent is false (rows 3 and 4); false only when the antecedens
(“Smith is in London”) is true and the consequens (“Smith is in London, at a
meeting”) is false. (Sext. Emp., A.
M., 2.113-114).
Philo’s “if p, q” is what Whitehead
and Russell call, misleadingly, ‘material’ implication, for it’s neither an
implication, nor materia.In “The Influence of Grice on Philo,” Shropshire puts
forward the thesis that Philo was aware of Griceian ideas on relative identity,
particularly time-relative identity. Accordingly, Philo uses subscript for
temporal indexes. Once famous discussion took place one long winter night.“If
it is day, it is night.”“False!” Diodorus screamed.“True,” his tutee Philo
courteously responded. “But true at night only.”Philo's suggestion is
remarkable – although not that remarkable if we assume he read the now lost
Griceian tract.Philo’s “if,” like Grice’s “if,” – on a bad day -- deviates
noticeably from what Austin (and indeed, Austen) used to refer to as ‘ordinary’
language.As Philo rotundly says: “The Griceian ‘if’ requires abstraction on the
basis of a concept of truth-functionality – and not all tutees will succeed in
GETTING that.” The hint was on Strawson.Philo's ‘if’ has been criticised on two
counts. First, as with Whitehead’s and Russell’s equally odd ‘if,’ – which they
symbolise with an ‘inverted’ C, to irritate Johnson, -- “They think ‘c’ stands
for either ‘consequentia’ or ‘contentum’ -- in the case of material
implication, for the truth of the conditional no connection (or better, Kant’s
relation) of content between antecedent and consequent is required. Uttered or
emitted during the day, e. g. ‘If virtue
benefits, it is day’ is Philonianly true. This introduces a variant of the
so-called ‘paradoxes’ of material implication (Relevance Logic, Conditionals 2.3;
also, English Oxonian philosopher Lemmon 59-60, 82). This or that ancient
philosopher was aware of what he thought was a ‘problem’ for Philo’s ‘if.’
Vide: SE, ibid. 113-117). On
a second count, due to the time-dependency or relativity of the ‘Hellenistic’ ‘proposition,’
Philo's truth-functional criterion implies that ‘if p, q’ changes its truth-value
over time, which amuses Grice, but makes Strawson sick. In Philo’s infamous
metalinguistic disquotational version that Grice finds genial:‘If it is day, it
is night’ is true if it is night, but false if it is day. This is
counter-intuitive in Strawson’s “London,” urban, idiolect (Grice is from the
Heart of England) as regards an utterance in ‘ordinary-language’ involving
‘if.’“We are not THAT otiose at busy London!On a third count, as the concept of
“if” (‘doubt’ in Frisian) also meant to provide for consequentia between from a
premise to a conclusio, this leads to the “rather” problematic result –
Aquinas, S. T. ix. 34) that an ‘argumentum,’ as Boethius calls it, can in
principle change from being valid to being invalid and vice versa, which did
not please the Saint Thomas (Aquinas), “or God, matter of fact.”From Sextus: A.
M., 2.113ffA non-simple proposition is such composed of a duplicated
proposition or of this or that differing proposition. A complex proposition is
controlled by this or that conjunction. 109. Of
these let us take the hypo-thetical proposition, so-called. This, then, is
composed of a duplicated proposition or of differing propositions, by means of
the conjunction “if” (Gr. ‘ei,’ L. ‘si’, German ‘ob’). Thus, e. g. from a
duplicated proposition and the conjunction “if” (Gr. ‘ei,’ L. ‘si,’ G.
‘ob’) there is composed such a hypothetical proposition as this. “If it is day,
it is day’ (110) and from differing
propositions, and by means of the conjunction “if” , one in this
form, “If it is day, it is light.” “Si dies est, lucet.” And of the two propositions
contained in the hypo-thetical proposition, or subordinating clause that which
is placed immediately AFTER the conjunction or subordinating particle “if”
is called “ante-cedent,” or “first;” and ‘if’ being ‘noncommutative,’ and
the other one “consequent” or “second,” EVEN if the whole proposition
is reversed IN ORDER OF EXPRESSION – this is a conceptual issue, not a
grammatical one! -- as thus — “It is light, if it is day.” For in this,
too, the proposition, “It is light,” (lucet) is called consequent although
it is UTTERED first, and ‘It is day’ antecedent, although it is UTTERED second,
owing to the fact that it is placed after the conjunction or subordinating
particle “if.” 111. Such
then is the construction of the hypothetical proposition, and a proposition of
this kind seems to “promise” (or suggest, or implicate) that the ‘consequent’
(or super-ordinated or main proposition) logically follows the ‘antecedens,’ or
sub-ordinated proposition. If the antecedens is true, the consequens is true.
Hence, if this sort of “promise,” suggestio, implicature, or what have you, is
fulfilled and the consequens follows the antecedent, the hypothetical
proposition is true. If the promise is not fulfilled, it is false (This is
something Strawson grants as a complication in the sentence exactly after the
passage that Grice extracts – Let’s revise Strawson’s exact wording. Strawson
writes:“There is much more to be noted about ‘if.’ In particular, about whether
the antecedens has to be a ‘GOOD’ antecedens, i. e. a ‘good’ ground – not
inadmissible evidence, say -- or good reason for accepting the consequens, and
whether THIS is a necessary condition for the whole ‘if’ utterance to be TRUE.’
Surely not for Philo. Philo’s criterion is that an ‘if’ utterance is true iff it
is NOT the case that the antecedens is true and it is not the case that the
consequens is true. 112. Accordingly,
let us begin at once with this problem, and consider whether any hypothetical
proposition can be found which is true and which fulfills the promise or
suggestio or implicature described. Now all philosophers agree that a hypothetical
proposition is true when the consequent follows the antecedent. As to when the
consequens follows from the antecedens philosophers such as Grice and his tutee
Strawson disagree with one another and propound conflicting criteria. 113. Philo and Grice
declares that the ‘if’ utterance is true whenever it is not the case that
the antecedens (“Smith is in London”) is true and it is not the case that the
consequens (“Smith is in London attending a meeting”) is true. So that,
according to Grice and Philo (vide, “The influence of Grice on Philo”), the
hypothetical is true in three ways or rows (row 1, row 3, and row 4) and false
in one way or row (second row, antecedens T and consequence F). For the first
row, whenever the ‘if’ utterance begins with truth and ends in truth it is
true. E. g. “If it is day, it is light.” “Si dies est, lux est.”For row 4: the
‘if’ utterance is also true whenever the antecedens is false and the consequens
is false. E. g. “If the earth flies, the earth has wings.” ει
πέταται ή γή, πτέρυγας έχει
ή γή (“ei petatai he ge, pteguras ekhei
he ge”) (Si terra volat, habet alas.”)114. Likewise
also that which begins with what is false and ends with what is true is true,
as thus — If the earth flies, the earth exists. “Si terra volat, est
terra”. dialecticis,
in quibus ſubtilitatem nimiam laudando, niſi fallimur, tradu xit Callimachus. 2
Cujus I. ſpecimen nobis fervavit se XTVS EMPI . RIC V S , a qui de Diodori,
Philonis & Chryſippi diſſenſu circa propofi tiones connexas prolixe
diſſerit. Id quod paucis ita comprehendit ci . CERO : 6 In hoc ipfo , quod in
elementis dialectici docent, quomodo judi care oporteat, verum falſumne fit ,
fi quid ita connexum eſt , ut hoc: fi dies eft, lucet, quanta contentio eft,
aliter Diodoro, aliter Philoni, Chry fappo aliter placet. Quæ ut clarius
intelligantur, obſervandum eſt, Dia lecticos in propofitionum conditionatarum ,
quas connexas vocabant, explicatione in eo convenisse, verum esse consequens,
si id vera consequentia deducatur ex antecedente; falsum, si non ſequatur; in
criterio vero , ex quo dijudicanda est consequentiæ veritas, definiendo inter
se diſſenſiſſe. Et Philo quidem veram esse propoſitionem connexam putabat, fi
& antecedens & consequens verum esset , & ſi antecedens atque
conſequens falsum eſſet, & fi a falſo incipiens in verum defineret, cujus
primi exemplum eſt : “Si dies est, lux est,” secondi. “Si terra volat, habet
alas.” Tertii. “Si terra volat, est terra.” Solum vero falsum , quando
incipiens a vero defineret in falſum . Diodorus autem hoc falſum interdum eſſe,
quod contingere pof ſet, afferens, omne quod contigit , ex confequentiæ
complexu removit , ficque, quod juxta Philonem verum eft, fi dies eſt, ego
diſſero, falſum eſſe pronunciavit, quoniam contingere poffit, ut quis, ſi dies
fit, non differat, ſed fileat. Ex qua Dialecticorum diſceptatione Sextus
infert, incertum eſſe criterium propoſitionum hypotheticarum . Ex quibus parca
, ut de bet, manu prolatis, judicium fieri poteſt , quam miſeranda facies
fuerit shia lecticæ eriſticæ , quæ ad materiam magis argumentorum , quam ad
formam - & ad verba magis, quam ideas, quæ ratiocinia conſtituunt
refpiciens, non potuit non innumeras ſine modo & ratione technias &
difficultates ftruere, facile fumi inſtar diſſipandas, fi ad ipſam ratiocinandi
& ideas inter ſe con ferendi & ex tertia judicandi formam attendatur.
Quod fi enim inter ve ritate conſequentiæ & confequentis, ( liceat
pauliſper cum ſcholaſticis barbare loqui diſtinxiffent, inanis diſputatio in
pulverem abiiffet, & eva nuiſſet; nam de prima Diodorus, de altera Philo ,
& hic quidem inepte & minus accurate loquebatur. Sed hæc ws šv zapóów .
Ceterum II. in fo phiſma t) Coutra Gramm . S.309.Log. I. II.S. 115.Seqq. )
Catalogum Diodororum ſatis longum exhi # Nominateas CLEM . ALE X. Strom . I. IV
. ber FABRIC. Bibl.Gr. vol. II. p . 775. pag. 522. % ) Cujusverſus vide apud
LAERT. & SEXT. * Contra Iovinian . I. I. conf. MENAG. ad l. c. H . cc.
Laërt . & Hiſt. phil. mal. Ø . 60 . ubi tamen quatuor A ) Adv. Logic. I. c
. noininat, cum quinque fuerint. b ) Acad. 29. I. IV . 6. 47. DE SECTAM E
GARICA phiſinatibus ftruendis Diodorum excelluiffe, non id folum argumentum
eft, nuod is quibusdam auctor argumenti, quod velatum dicitur , fuifle aflera
tur, fed & quod argumentum dominans invexerit, de quo, ne his nugis lectori
moleſti fimus, Epictetum apud ARRIANVM conſuli velimus. Er ad hæc quoque
Dialecticæ peritiæ acumina referendum eſt argumentum , quo nihilmoveri
probabat. Quod ita sexTvs enarrat: Si quid move tur, aut in eo , in quo eft ,
loco movetur, aut in eo , in quo non eſt. At neque in quo eſt movetur, manet
enim in eo , fi in eo eft ; nec vero , in quo non eſt,movetur; ubi enim aliquid
non eſt, ibi neque agere quidquam ne que pati poteft. Non ergo movetur quicquam
. Quo argumento non ideo ufus eſt Diodorus, quod putat Sextus, ut more
Eleaticorum probaret : non darimotum in rerum natura, & nec interire
quicquam nec oriri ; fed ut ſubtilitatem ingenii dialecticam oftenderet,
verbisque circumveniret. Qua ratione Diodorum mire depexum dedit
Herophilusmedicus. Cum enim luxato humero ad eum veniffet Diodorus, ut ipſum
curaret , facete eum irriſit, eodem argumento probando humerum non excidiffe :
adeo ut precaretur fophifta , omiffis iis cavillationibus adhiberet ei
congruens ex artemedica remedium . f . . Tandem & III . inter atomiſticæ p
hiloſophiæ ſectatores numerari folet Diodorus, eo quod énocy iso xei dueen
CÁMata minima & indiviſibilia cor pora Itatuerit,numero infinita ,
magnitudine finita , ut ex veteribus afferunt præter SEXTVM , & EVSEBIVŠ, \
CHALCIDIVS, ISTOBAEVS k alii , quibus ex recentioribus concinunt cvDWORTHVS 1
& FABRICIV'S. * Quia vero veteres non addunt, an indiviſibilia & minima
ifta corpuſcula , omnibus qualitatibus præter figuram & fitum fpoliata
poſuerit, fine formi dine oppoſiti inter ſyſtematis atomiſtici fectatores numerari
non poteſt. Nam alii quoque philoſophi ejusmodi infecabilia corpuſcula
admiſerunt ; nec tamen atomos Democriticos ſtatuerunt. "Id quod acute
monuit cel. MOSHEMIV S . n . irAnd it is
false only in this one way, when it begins with truth and ends in what is
false, as in a proposition of this kind. “If it is day, it is night.” “Si dies
est, nox est”. (Cf. Cole Porter, “Night
and day, day and night!”.For if it IS day, the clause ‘It is day’ is
true, and this is the antecedent, but the clause ‘It is night,’ which is
the consequens, is false. But when uttered at night, it is true. 115. — But Diodorus asserts
that the hypothetical proposition is true which neither admitted nor
admits of beginning with truth and ending in falsehood. And this is in
conflict with the statement of Philo. For a hypothetical of this kind — If
it is day, I am conversing, when at the present moment it is day and I am
conversing, is true according to Philo since it begins with the true
clause It is day and ends with the true I am conversing; but according
to Diodorus it is false, for it admits of beginning with a clause that is, at
one time, true and ending in the false clause I am conversing, when I
have ceased speaking; also it admitted of beginning with truth and ending with
the falsehood I am conversing, 116. for
before I began to converse it began with the truth It is day and
ended in the falsehood I am conversing. Again, a proposition in this
form — If it is night, I am conversing, when it is day and I am
silent, is likewise true according to Philo, for it begins with what is false
and ends in what is false; but according to Diodorus it is false, for it admits
of beginning with truth and ending in falsehood, after night has come on, and
when I, again, am not conversing but keeping silence. 117. Moreover, the
proposition If it is night, it is day, when it is day, is true
according to Philo for the reason that it begins with the false It is
night and ends in the true It is day; but according to Diodorus it is
false for the reason that it admits of beginning, when night comes on, with the
truth It is night and ending in the falsehood It is day.Philo is
sometimes called ‘Philo of Megara,’ where ‘of’ is used alla Nancy Mitford, of
Chatworth. Although no essay by Philo is preserved (if he wrote it), there are
a number of reports of his doctrine, not all positive!Some think Philo made a
groundbreaking contribution to the development of semantics (influencing
Peirce, but then Peirce was influenced by the World in its totality), in
particular to the philosophy of “as if” (als ob), or “if.”A conditional (sunêmmenon), as Philo calls it, is a
non-simple, i. e. molecular, non atomic, proposition composed of two
propositions, a main, or better super-ordinated proposition, or consequens, and
a sub-ordinated proposition, the antecedens, and the subordinator ‘if’. Philo
invented (possibly influenced by Frege) what he (Frege, not Philo) calls
truth-functionality.Philo puts forward a criterion of truth as he called what
Witters will have as a ‘truth table’ for ‘if’ (or ‘ob,’ cognate with Frisian
gif, doubt).A conditional is is true in three truth-value combinations, and
false when and only when its antecedent is true and
its consequent is false.The Philonian ‘if’ Whitehead and Russell re-labelled
‘material’ implication – irritating Johnson who published a letter in The
Times, “… and dealing with the paradox of implication.”For Philo, like Grice, a
proposition is a function of time that can have different truth-values at
different times—it may change its truth-value over time. In Philo’s
disquotational formula for ‘if’:“If it is day, ‘if it is day, it is night’ is
false; if it is night, ‘if it is day, it is night’ is true.”(Tarski translated
to Polish, in which language Grice read it).Philo’s ramblings on ‘if’ lead to
foreshadows of Whitehead’s and Russell’s ‘paradox of implication’ that
infuriated Johnson – In Russell’s response in the Times, he makes it plain:
“Johnson shouldn’t be using ‘paradox’ in the singular. Yours, etc. Baron
Russell, Belgravia.”Sextus Empiricus [S. E.] M. 8.109–117, gives a precis of Johnson’s paradox of
implication, without crediting Johnson. Philo and Diodorus each considered the
four modalities possibility, impossibility, necessity and non-necessity. These
were conceived of as modal properties or modal values of propositions, not as
modal operators. Philo defined them as follows: ‘Possible is that which is
capable of being true by the proposition’s own nature … necessary is that which
is true, and which, as far as it is in itself, is not capable of being false.
Non-necessary is that which as far as it is in itself, is capable of being
false, and impossible is that which by its own nature is not capable of being
true.’ Boethius fell in love with Philo, and he SAID it! (In Arist. De Int., sec. ed., 234–235
Meiser).Cf. (Epict. Diss.
II.19). Aristotle’s De
Interpretatione 9 (Aulus
Gellius 11.12.2–3).
perception, the
extraction and use of information about one’s environment exteroception and
one’s own body interoception. The various external senses sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste though they overlap to some extent, are
distinguished by the kind of information e.g., about light, sound, temperature,
pressure they deliver. Proprioception, perception of the self, concerns stimuli
arising within, and carrying information about, one’s own body e.g., acceleration, position, and orientation
of the limbs. There are distinguishable stages in the extraction and use of
sensory information, one an earlier stage corresponding to our perception of
objects and events, the other, a later stage, to the perception of facts about
these objects. We see, e.g., both the cat on the sofa an object and that the
cat is on the sofa a fact. Seeing an object or event a cat on the sofa, a person on the street, or
a vehicle’s movement does not require
that the object event be identified or recognized in any particular way
perhaps, though this is controversial, in any way whatsoever. One can, e.g.,
see a cat on the sofa and mistake it for a rumpled sweater. Airplane lights are
often misidentified as stars, and one can see the movement of an object either
as the movement of oneself or under some viewing conditions as Peirce’s law
perception 654 654 expansion or
contraction. Seeing objects and events is, in this sense, non-epistemic: one
can see O without knowing or believing that it is O that one is seeing. Seeing
facts, on the other hand, is epistemic; one cannot see that there is a cat on
the sofa without, thereby, coming to know that there is a cat on the sofa.
Seeing a fact is coming to know the fact in some visual way. One can see
objects the fly in one’s soup,
e.g., without realizing that there is a
fly in one’s soup thinking, perhaps, it is a bean or a crouton; but to see a
fact, the fact that there is a fly in one’s soup is, necessarily, to know it is
a fly. This distinction applies to the other sense modalities as well. One can
hear the telephone ringing without realizing that it is the telephone perhaps
it’s the TV or the doorbell, but to hear a fact, that it is the telephone that
is ringing, is, of necessity, to know that it is the telephone that is ringing.
The other ways we have of describing what we perceive are primarily variations
on these two fundamental themes. In seeing where he went, when he left, who
went with him, and how he was dressed, e.g., we are describing the perception
of some fact of a certain sort without revealing exactly which fact it is. If
Martha saw where he went, then Martha saw hence, came to know some fact having
to do with where he went, some fact of the form ‘he went there’. In speaking of
states and conditions the condition of his room, her injury, and properties the
color of his tie, the height of the building, we sometimes, as in the case of
objects, mean to be describing a non-epistemic perceptual act, one that carries
no implications for what if anything is known. In other cases, as with facts,
we mean to be describing the acquisition of some piece of knowledge. One can
see or hear a word without recognizing it as a word it might be in a foreign
language, but can one see a misprint and not know it is a misprint? It
obviously depends on what one uses ‘misprint’ to refer to: an object a word
that is misprinted or a fact the fact that it is misprinted. In examining and
evaluating theories whether philosophical or psychological of perception it is
essential to distinguish fact perception from object perception. For a theory
might be a plausible theory about the perception of objects e.g., psychological
theories of “early vision” but not at all plausible about our perception of
facts. Fact perception, involving, as it does, knowledge and, hence, belief
brings into play the entire cognitive system memory, concepts, etc. in a way
the former does not. Perceptual relativity
e.g., the idea that what we perceive is relative to our language, our
conceptual scheme, or the scientific theories we have available to “interpret”
phenomena is quite implausible as a
theory about our perception of objects. A person lacking a word for, say,
kumquats, lacking this concept, lacking a scientific way of classifying these
objects are they a fruit? a vegetable? an animal?, can still see, touch, smell,
and taste kumquats. Perception of objects does not depend on, and is therefore
not relative to, the observer’s linguistic, conceptual, cognitive, and
scientific assets or shortcomings. Fact perception, however, is another matter.
Clearly one cannot see that there are kumquats in the basket as opposed to
seeing the objects, the kumquats, in the basket if one has no idea of, no
concept of, what a kumquat is. Seeing facts is much more sensitive and, hence,
relative to the conceptual resources, the background knowledge and scientific
theories, of the observer, and this difference must be kept in mind in
evaluating claims about perceptual relativity. Though it does not make objects
invisible, ignorance does tend to make facts perceptually inaccessible. There
are characteristic experiences associated with the different senses. Tasting a
kumquat is not at all like seeing a kumquat although the same object is
perceived indeed, the same fact that it
is a kumquat may be perceived. The
difference, of course, is in the subjective experience one has in perceiving
the kumquat. A causal theory of perception of objects holds that the perceptual
object, what it is we see, taste, smell, or whatever, is that object that
causes us to have this subjective experience. Perceiving an object is that
object’s causing in the right way one to have an experience of the appropriate
sort. I see a bean in my soup if it is, in fact whether I know it or not is
irrelevant, a bean in my soup that is causing me to have this visual
experience. I taste a bean if, in point of fact, it is a bean that is causing
me to have the kind of taste experience I am now having. If it is unknown to me
a bug, not a bean, that is causing these experiences, then I am unwittingly
seeing and tasting a bug perhaps a bug
that looks and tastes like a bean. What object we see taste, smell, etc. is
determined by the causal facts in question. What we know and believe, how we
interpret the experience, is irrelevant, although it will, of course, determine
what we say we see and taste. The same is to be said, with appropriate changes,
for our perception of facts the most significant change being the replacement
of belief for experience. I see that there is a bug in my soup if the fact that
there is a bug in my soup causes me to perception perception 655 655 believe that there is a bug in my soup.
I can taste that there is a bug in my soup when this fact causes me to have
this belief via some taste sensation. A causal theory of perception is more
than the claim that the physical objects we perceive cause us to have
experiences and beliefs. This much is fairly obvious. It is the claim that this
causal relation is constitutive of perception, that necessarily, if S sees O,
then O causes a certain sort of experience in S. It is, according to this
theory, impossible, on conceptual grounds, to perceive something with which one
has no causal contact. If, e.g., future events do not cause present events, if
there is no backward causation, then we cannot perceive future events and
objects. Whether or not future facts can be perceived or known depends on how
liberally the causal condition on knowledge is interpreted. Though conceding
that there is a world of mind-independent objects trees, stars, people that
cause us to have experiences, some philosophers
traditionally called representative realists argue that we nonetheless do not directly
perceive these external objects. What we directly perceive are the effects
these objects have on us an internal
image, idea, or impression, a more or less depending on conditions of
observation accurate representation of the external reality that helps produce
it. This subjective, directly apprehended object has been called by various
names: a sensation, percept, sensedatum, sensum, and sometimes, to emphasize
its representational aspect, Vorstellung G., ‘representation’. Just as the
images appearing on a television screen represent their remote causes the
events occurring at some distant concert hall or playing field, the images
visual, auditory, etc. that occur in the mind, the sensedata of which we are
directly aware in normal perception, represent or sometimes, when things are
not working right, misrepresent their external physical causes. The
representative realist typically invokes arguments from illusion, facts about
hallucination, and temporal considerations to support his view. Hallucinations
are supposed to illustrate the way we can have the same kind of experience we
have when as we commonly say we see a real bug without there being a real bug
in our soup or anywhere else causing us to have the experience. When we
hallucinate, the bug we “see” is, in fact, a figment of our own imagination, an
image i.e., sense-datum in the mind that, because it shares some of the
properties of a real bug shape, color, etc., we might mistake for a real bug.
Since the subjective experiences can be indistinguishable from that which we
have when as we commonly say we really see a bug, it is reasonable to infer the
representative realist argues that in normal perception, when we take ourselves
to be seeing a real bug, we are also directly aware of a buglike image in the
mind. A hallucination differs from a normal perception, not in what we are
aware of in both cases it is a sense-datum but in the cause of these
experiences. In normal perception it is an actual bug; in hallucination it is,
say, drugs in the bloodstream. In both cases, though, we are caused to have the
same thing: an awareness of a buglike sense-datum, an object that, in normal
perception, we naively take to be a real bug thus saying, and encouraging our
children to say, that we see a bug. The argument from illusion points to the
fact that our experience of an object changes even when the object that we
perceive or say we perceive remains unchanged. Though the physical object the
bug or whatever remains the same color, size, and shape, what we experience
according to this argument changes color, shape, and size as we change the
lighting, our viewing angle, and distance. Hence, it is concluded, what we
experience cannot really be the physical object itself. Since it varies with
changes in both object and viewing conditions, what we experience must be a
causal result, an effect, of both the object we commonly say we see the bug and
the conditions in which we view it. This internal effect, it is concluded, is a
sense-datum. Representative realists have also appealed to the fact that
perceiving a physical object is a causal process that takes time. This temporal
lag is most dramatic in the case of distant objects e.g., stars, but it exists
for every physical object it takes time for a neural signal to be transmitted
from receptor surfaces to the brain. Consequently, at the moment a short time
after light leaves the object’s surface we see a physical object, the object
could no longer exist. It could have ceased to exist during the time light was
being transmitted to the eye or during the time it takes the eye to communicate
with the brain. Yet, even if the object ceases to exist before we become aware
of anything before a visual experience occurs, we are, or so it seems, aware of
something when the causal process reaches its climax in the brain. This
something of which we are aware, since it cannot be the physical object it no
longer exists, must be a sense-datum. The representationalist concludes in this
“time-lag argument,” therefore, that even when the physperception perception
656 656 ical object does not cease to
exist this, of course, is the normal situation, we are directly aware, not of
it, but of its slightly later-occurring representation. Representative realists
differ among themselves about the question of how much if at all the sense-data
of which we are aware resemble the external objects of which we are not aware.
Some take the external cause to have some of the properties the so-called
primary properties of the datum e.g., extension and not others the so-called secondary
properties e.g., color. Direct or naive
realism shares with representative realism a commitment to a world of
independently existing objects. Both theories are forms of perceptual realism.
It differs, however, in its view of how we are related to these objects in
ordinary perception. Direct realists deny that we are aware of mental
intermediaries sensedata when, as we ordinarily say, we see a tree or hear the
telephone ring. Though direct realists differ in their degree of naïveté about
how and in what respect perception is supposed to be direct, they need not be
so naive as sometimes depicted as to deny the scientific facts about the causal
processes underlying perception. Direct realists can easily admit, e.g., that
physical objects cause us to have experiences of a particular kind, and that
these experiences are private, subjective, or mental. They can even admit that
it is this causal relationship between object and experience that constitutes
our seeing and hearing physical objects. They need not, in other words, deny a
causal theory of perception. What they must deny, if they are to remain direct
realists, however, is an analysis of the subjective experience that objects
cause us to have into an awareness of some object. For to understand this experience
as an awareness of some object is, given the wholly subjective mental character
of the experience itself, to interpose a mental entity what the experience is
an awareness of between the perceiver and the physical object that causes him
to have this experience, the physical object that is supposed to be directly
perceived. Direct realists, therefore, avoid analyzing a perceptual experience
into an act sensing, being aware of, being acquainted with and an object the
sensum, sense-datum, sensation, mental representation. The experience we are
caused to have when we perceive a physical object or event is, instead, to be
understood in some other way. The adverbial theory is one such possibility. As
the name suggests, this theory takes its cue from the way nouns and adjectives
can sometimes be converted into adverbs without loss of descriptive content.
So, for instance, it comes to pretty much the same thing whether we describe a
conversation as animated adjective or say that we conversed animatedly an adverb.
So, also, according to an adverbialist, when, as we commonly say, we see a red
ball, the red ball causes in us a moment later an experience, yes, but not as
the representative realist says an awareness mental act of a sense-datum mental
object that is red and circular adjectives. The experience is better understood
as one in which there is no object at all, as sensing redly and circularly
adverbs. The adverbial theorist insists that one can experience circularly and
redly without there being, in the mind or anywhere else, red circles this, in
fact, is what the adverbialist thinks occurs in dreams and hallucinations of
red circles. To experience redly is not to have a red experience; nor is it to
experience redness in the mind. It is, says the adverbialist, a way or a manner
of perceiving ordinary objects especially red ones seen in normal light. Just
as dancing gracefully is not a thing we dance, so perceiving redly is not a
thing and certainly not a red thing in
the mind that we experience. The adverbial
theory is only one option the direct realist has of acknowledging the causal
basis of perception while, at the same time, maintaining the directness of our
perceptual relation with independently existing objects. What is important is
not that the experience be construed adverbially, but that it not be
interpreted, as representative realists interpret it, as awareness of some
internal object. For a direct realist, the appearances, though they are
subjective mind-dependent are not objects that interpose themselves between the
conscious mind and the external world. As classically understood, both naive
and representative realism are theories about object perception. They differ
about whether it is the external object or an internal object an idea in the mind
that we most directly apprehend in ordinary sense perception. But they need not
although they usually do differ in their analysis of our knowledge of the world
around us, in their account of fact perception. A direct realist about object
perception may, e.g., be an indirect realist about the facts that we know about
these objects. To see, not only a red ball in front of one, but that there is a
red ball in front of one, it may be necessary, even on a direct theory of
object perception, to infer or in some way derive this fact from facts that are
known more directly perception perception about one’s experiences of the ball.
Since, e.g., a direct theorist may be a causal theorist, may think that seeing
a red ball is in part constituted by the having of certain sorts of experience,
she may insist that knowledge of the cause of these experiences must be derived
from knowledge of the experience itself. If one is an adverbialist, e.g., one
might insist that knowledge of physical objects is derived from knowledge of
how redly? bluely? circularly? squarely? one experiences these objects. By the
same token, a representative realist could adopt a direct theory of fact
perception. Though the objects we directly see are mental, the facts we come to
know by experiencing these subjective entities are facts about ordinary
physical objects. We do not infer at least at no conscious level that there is
a bug in our soup from facts known more directly about our own conscious
experiences from facts about the sensations the bug causes in us. Rather, our
sensations cause us, directly, to have beliefs about our soup. There is no
intermediate belief; hence, there is no intermediate knowledge; hence, no
intermediate fact perception. Fact perception is, in this sense, direct. Or so
a representative realist can maintain even though committed to the indirect
perception of the objects bug and soup involved in this fact. This merely
illustrates, once again, the necessity of distinguishing object perception from
fact perception.
Percival, T.: English
physician and author of Medical Ethics 1803. He was central in bringing the
Western traditions of medical ethics from prayers and oaths e.g., the
Hippocratic oath toward more detailed, modern codes of proper professional
conduct. His writing on the normative aspects of medical practice was part
ethics, part prudential advice, part professional etiquette, and part
jurisprudence. Medical Ethics treated standards for the professional conduct of
physicians relative to surgeons and apothecaries pharmacists and general
practitioners, as well as hospitals, private practice, and the law. The issues
Percival addressed include privacy, truth telling, rules for professional
consultation, human experimentation, public and private trust, compassion,
sanity, suicide, abortion, capital punishment, and environmental nuisances.
Percival had his greatest influence in England and America. At its founding in
1847, the Medical Association used
Medical Ethics to guide its own first code of medical ethics.
perdurance, in one common
philosophical use, the property of being temporally continuous and having
temporal parts. There are at least two conflicting theories about temporally
continuous substances. According to the first, temporally continuous substances
have temporal parts they perdure, while according to the second, they do not.
In one ordinary philosophical use, endurance is the property of being
temporally continuous and not having temporal parts. There are modal versions
of the aforementioned two theories: for example, one version of the first
theory is that necessarily, temporally continuous substances have temporal
parts, while another version implies that possibly, they do not. Some versions
of the first theory hold that a temporally continuous substance is composed of
instantaneous temporal parts or “object-stages,” while on other versions these
object-stages are not parts but boundaries.
perfect competition, the
state of an ideal market under the following conditions: a every consumer in
the market is a perfectly rational maximizer of utility; b every producer is a
perfect maximizer of profit; c there is a very large ideally infinite number of
producers of the good in question, which ensures that no producer can set the
price for its output otherwise, an imperfect competitive state of oligopoly or
monopoly obtains; and d every producer provides a product perfectly
indistinguishable from that of other producers if consumers could distinguish
products to the point that there was no longer a very large number of producers
for each distinguishable good, competition would again be imperfect. Under
these conditions, the market price is equal to the marginal cost of producing
the last unit. This in turn determines the market supply of the good, since
each producer will gain by increasing production when price exceeds marginal
cost and will generally cut losses by decreasing production when marginal cost
exceeds price. Perfect competition is sometimes perceptual realism perfect
competition 658 658 thought to have normative
implications for political philosophy, since it results in Pareto optimality.
The concept of perfect competition becomes extremely complicated when a
market’s evolution is considered. Producers who cannot equate marginal cost
with the market price will have negative profit and must drop out of the
market. If this happens very often, then the number of producers will no longer
be large enough to sustain perfect competition, so new producers will need to
enter the market.
perfectionism, an ethical
view according to which individuals and their actions are judged by a maximal
standard of achievement specifically,
the degree to which they approach ideals of aesthetic, intellectual, emotional,
or physical “perfection.” Perfectionism, then, may depart from, or even
dispense with, standards of conventional morality in favor of standards based
on what appear to be non-moral values. These standards reflect an admiration
for certain very rare levels of human achievement. Perhaps the most
characteristic of these standards are artistic and other forms of creativity;
but they prominently include a variety of other activities and emotional states
deemed “noble” e.g., heroic endurance in
the face of great suffering. The perfectionist, then, would also tend toward a
rather non-egalitarian even
aristocratic view of humankind. The rare
genius, the inspired few, the suffering but courageous artist these examples of human perfection are
genuinely worthy of our estimation, according to this view. Although no fully worked-out
system of “perfectionist philosophy” has been attempted, aspects of all of
these doctrines may be found in such philosophers as Nietzsche. Aristotle, as
well, appears to endorse a perfectionist idea in his characterization of the
human good. Just as the good lyre player not only exhibits the characteristic
activities of this profession but achieves standards of excellence with respect
to these, the good human being, for Aristotle, must achieve standards of
excellence with respect to the virtue or virtues distinctive of human life in
general.
Peripatetic School, also
called Peripatos, the philosophical community founded by Aristotle at a public
gymnasium the Lyceum after his return to Athens in c.335 B.C. The derivation of
‘Peripatetic’ from the alleged Aristotelian custom of “walking about”
peripatein is probably wrong. The name should be explained by reference to a
“covered walking hall” peripatos among the school facilities. A scholarch or
headmaster presided over roughly two classes of members: the presbyteroi or
seniors, who probably had some teaching duties, and the neaniskoi or juniors.
No evidence of female philosophers in the Lyceum has survived. During
Aristotle’s lifetime his own lectures, whether for the inner circle of the
school or for the city at large, were probably the key attraction and core
activity; but given Aristotle’s knack for organizing group research projects,
we may assume that young and old Peripatetics spent much of their time working
on their own specific assignments either at the library, where they could
consult works of earlier writers, or at some kind of repository for specimens
used in zoological and botanical investigations. As a resident alien, Aristotle
could not own property in Athens and hence was not the legal owner of the
school. Upon his final departure from Athens in 322, his longtime collaborator
Theophrastus of Eresus in Lesbos c.370287 succeeded him as scholarch.
Theophrastus was an able Aristotelian who wrote extensively on metaphysics,
psychology, physiology, botany, ethics, politics, and the history of
philosophy. With the help of the Peripatetic dictator Demetrius of Phaleron, he
was able to secure property rights over the physical facilities of the school.
Under Theophrastus, the Peripatos continued to flourish and is said to have had
2,000 students, surely not all at the same time. His successor, Strato of
Lampsakos c.335269, had narrower interests and abandoned key Aristotelian
tenets. With him a progressive decline set in, to which the early loss of Aristotle’s
personal library, taken to Asia Minor by Neleus of Skepsis, certainly
contributed. By the first century B.C. the Peripatos had ceased to exist.
Philosophers of later periods sympathetic to Aristotle’s views have also been
called Peripatetics.
Perry, Ralph Barton
18767, philosopher who taught at
Harvard and wrote extensively in ethics,
social philosophy, and the theory of knowledge. He received a Pulitzer Prize in
6 for The Thought and Character of William James, a biography of his teacher and
colleague. Perry’s other major works include: The Moral Economy 9, General
Theory of Value 6, Puritanism and Democracy 4, and Realms of Value 4. He is
perhaps best known for his views on value. He writes in General Theory of
Value, “Any object, whatever it be, acquires value when any interest, whatever
it be, is taken in it; just as anything whatsoever becomes a target when anyone
whosoever aims at it.” Something’s having value is nothing but its being the
object of some interest, and to know whether it has value one need only know
whether it is the object of someone’s interest. Morality aims at the promotion
of the moral good, which he defines as “harmonious happiness.” This consists in
the reconciliation, harmonizing, and fulfillment of all interests. Perry’s
epistemological and metaphysical views were part of a revolt against idealism
and dualism. Along with five other philosophers, he wrote The New Realism 2.
The “New Realists” held that the objects of perception and memory are directly
presented to consciousness and are just what they appear to be; nothing
intervenes between the knower and the external world. The view that the objects
of perception and memory are presented by means of ideas leads, they argued, to
idealism, skepticism, and absurdity. Perry is also known for having developed,
along with E. B. Holt, the “specific response” theory, which is an attempt to
construe belief and perception in terms of bodily adjustment and behavior.
personal identity:
explored by H. P. Grice in “Personal Identity,” Mind – and H. P. Grice, “The
logical construction theory of personal identity,” and “David Hume on the
vagaries of personal identity.” -- the numerical identity over time of persons.
The question of what personal identity consists in is the question of what it
is what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for a person existing at
one time and a person existing at another time to be one and the same person.
Here there is no question of there being any entity that is the “identity” of a
person; to say that a person’s identity consists in such and such is just
shorthand for saying that facts about personal identity, i.e., facts to the
effect that someone existing at one time is the same as someone existing at
another time, consist in such and such. This should not be confused with the
usage, common in ordinary speech and in psychology, in which persons are said
to have identities, and, sometimes, to seek, lose, or regain their identities,
where one’s “identity” intimately involves a set of values and goals that
structure one’s life. The words ‘identical’ and ‘same’ mean nothing different
in judgments about persons than in judgments about other things. The problem of
personal identity is therefore not one of defining a special sense of
‘identical,’ and it is at least misleading to characterize it as defining a
particular kind of identity. Applying Quine’s slogan “no entity without
identity,” one might say that characterizing any sort of entity involves
indicating what the identity conditions for entities of that sort are so, e.g.,
part of the explanation of the concept of a set is that sets having the same
members are identical, and that asking what the identity of persons consists in
is just a way of asking what sorts of things persons are. But the main focus in
traditional discussions of the topic has been on one kind of identity judgment
about persons, namely those asserting “identity over time”; the question has
been about what the persistence of persons over time consists in. What has made
the identity persistence of persons of special philosophical interest is partly
its epistemology and partly its connections with moral and evaluative matters.
The crucial epistemological fact is that persons have, in memory, an access to
their own past histories that is unlike the access they have to the histories
of other things including other persons; when one remembers doing or
experiencing something, one normally has no need to employ any criterion of
identity in order to know that the subject of the remembered action or
experience is i.e., is identical with oneself. The moral and evaluative matters
include moral responsibility someone can be held responsible for a past action
only Peripatos personal identity 660
660 if he or she is identical to the person who did it and our concern
for our own survival and future well-being since it seems, although this has
been questioned, that what one wants in wanting to survive is that there should
exist in the future someone who is identical to oneself. The modern history of
the topic of personal identity begins with Locke, who held that the identity of
a person consists neither in the identity of an immaterial substance as
dualists might be expected to hold nor in the identity of a material substance
or “animal body” as materialists might be expected to hold, and that it
consists instead in “same consciousness.” His view appears to have been that
the persistence of a person through time consists in the fact that certain
actions, thoughts, experiences, etc., occurring at different times, are somehow
united in memory. Modern theories descended from Locke’s take memory continuity
to be a special case of something more general, psychological continuity, and
hold that personal identity consists in this. This is sometimes put in terms of
the notion of a “person-stage,” i.e., a momentary “time slice” of the history
of a person. A series of person-stages will be psychologically continuous if
the psychological states including memories occurring in later members of the
series grow out of, in certain characteristic ways, those occurring in earlier
members of it; and according to the psychological continuity view of personal
identity, person-stages occurring at different times are stages of the same
person provided they belong to a single, non-branching, psychologically
continuous series of person-stages. Opponents of the Lockean and neo-Lockean
psychological continuity view tend to fall into two camps. Some, following
Butler and Reid, hold that personal identity is indefinable, and that nothing
informative can be said about what it consists in. Others hold that the
identity of a person consists in some sort of physical continuity perhaps the identity of a living human
organism, or the identity of a human brain. In the actual cases we know about
putting aside issues about non-bodily survival of death, psychological
continuity and physical continuity go together. Much of the debate between
psychological continuity theories and physical continuity theories has centered
on the interpretation of thought experiments involving brain transplants,
brain-state transfers, etc., in which these come apart. Such examples make
vivid the question of whether our fundamental criteria of personal identity are
psychological, physical, or both. Recently philosophical attention has shifted
somewhat from the question of what personal identity consists in to questions
about its importance. The consideration of hypothetical cases of “fission” in
which two persons at a later time are psychologically continuous with one
person at an earlier time has suggested to some that we can have survival or at any rate what matters in survival without personal identity, and that our
self-interested concern for the future is really a concern for whatever future
persons are psychologically continuous with us.
personalism, a version of
personal idealism that flourished in the United States principally at
Boston from the late nineteenth century
to the mid-twentieth century. Its principal proponents were Borden Parker Bowne
1847 0 and three of his students: Albert Knudson 18733; Ralph Flewelling 18710,
who founded The Personalist; and, most importantly, Edgar Sheffield Brightman
43. Their personalism was both idealistic and theistic and was influential in
philosophy and in theology. Personalism traced its philosophical lineage to
Berkeley and Leibniz, and had as its foundational insight the view that all
reality is ultimately personal. God is the transcendent person and the ground
or creator of all other persons; nature is a system of objects either for or in
the minds of persons. Both Bowne and Brightman considered themselves
empiricists in the tradition of Berkeley. Immediate experience is the starting
point, but this experience involves a fundamental knowledge of the self as a personal
being with changing states. Given this pluralism, the coherence, order, and
intelligibility of the universe are seen to derive from God, the uncreated
person. Bowne’s God is the eternal and omnipotent being of classical theism,
but Brightman argued that if God is a real person he must be construed as both
temporal and finite. Given the fact of evil, God is seen as gradually gaining
control over his created world, with regard to which his will is intrinsically
limited. Another version of personalism developed in France out of the
neo-Scholastic tradition. E. Mounier 550, Maritain, and Gilson identified
themselves as personalists, inasmuch as they viewed the infinite person God and
finite persons as the source and locus of intrinsic value. They did not, however,
view the natural order as intrinsically personal.
personhood, the condition
or property of being a person, especially when this is considered to entail
moral and/or metaphysical importance. Personhood has been thought to involve
various traits, including moral agency; reason or rationality; language, or the
cognitive skills language may support such as intentionality and
self-consciousness; and ability to enter into suitable relations with other
persons viewed as members of a self-defining group. Buber emphasized the
difference between the I-It relationship holding between oneself and an object,
and the IThou relationship, which holds between oneself and another person who
can be addressed. Dennett has construed persons in terms of the “intentional stance,”
which involves explaining another’s behavior in terms of beliefs, desires,
intentions, etc. Questions about when personhood begins and when it ends have
been central to debates about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, since
personhood has often been viewed as the mark, if not the basis, of a being’s
possession of special moral status.
Peter Lombard, theologian and author of the Book of
Sentences Liber sententiarum, a renowned theological sourcebook in the later
Middle Ages. Peter was educated at Bologna, Reims, and Paris before teaching in
the school of Notre Dame in Paris. He became a canon at Notre Dame in 114445
and was elected bishop of Paris in 1159. His extant works include commentaries
on the Psalms written in the mid-1130s and on the epistles of Paul c.113941; a
collection of sermons; and his one-volume summary of Christian doctrine, the
Sentences completed by 1158. The Sentences consists of four books: Book I, On
the Trinity; Book II, On the Creation of Things; Book III, On the Incarnation;
and Book IV, “On the Doctrine of Signs or Sacraments.” His discussion is
organized around particular questions or issues e.g., “On Knowledge,
Foreknowledge, and Providence” Book I, “Is God the Cause of Evil and Sin?” Book
II. For a given issue Peter typically presents a brief summary, accompanied by
short quotations, of main positions found in Scripture and in the writings of
the church fathers and doctors, followed by his own determination or
adjudication of the matter. Himself a theological conservative, Peter seems to
have intended this sort of compilation of scriptural and ancient doctrinal
teaching as a counter to the popularity, fueled by the recent recovery of
important parts of Aristotle’s logic, of the application of dialectic to
theological matters. The Sentences enjoyed wide circulation and admiration from
the beginning, and within a century of its composition it became a standard
text in the theology curriculum. From the midthirteenth through the
mid-fourteenth century every student of theology was required, as the last
stage in obtaining the highest academic degree, to lecture and comment on
Peter’s text. Later medieval thinkers often referred to Peter as “the Master”
magister, thereby testifying to the Sentences’ preeminence in theological
training. In lectures and commentaries, the greatest minds of this period used
Peter’s text as a framework in which to develop their own original positions
and debate with their contemporaries. As a result the Sentences-commentary
tradition is an extraordinarily rich repository of later medieval philosophical
and theological thought.
Peter of Spain. It is now
thought that there were two Peters of Spain. The prelate and philosopher was born in Lisbon,
studied at Paris, and taught medicine at Siena 124850. He served in various
ecclesiastical posts in Portugal and Italy 125073 before being elected pope as
John XXI in 1276. He wrote several books on philosophical psychology and
compiled the famous medical work Thesaurus pauperum. The second Peter of Spain
was a Dominican who lived during the
first half of the thirteenth century. His Tractatus, later called Summulae
logicales, received over 166 printings during subsequent centuries. The
Tractatus presents the essentials of Aristotelian logic propositions, universals,
categories, syllogism, dialectical topics, and the sophistical fallacies and
improves on the mnemonic verses of William Sherwood; he then introduces the
subjects of the so-called parva logicalia supposition, relatives, ampliation,
personality Peter of Spain 662 662
appellation, restriction, distribution, all of which were extensively developed
in the later Middle Ages. There is not sufficient evidence to claim that Peter
wrote a special treatise on consequences, but his understanding of conditionals
as assertions of necessary connection undoubtedly played an important role in
the rules of simple, as opposed to as-of-now, consequences.
phantasia Grecian,
‘appearance’, ‘imagination’, 1 the state we are in when something appears to us
to be the case; 2 the capacity in virtue of which things appear to us. Although
frequently used of conscious and imagistic experiences, ‘phantasia’ is not
limited to such states; in particular, it can be applied to any propositional
attitude where something is taken to be the case. But just as the English
‘appears’ connotes that one has epistemic reservations about what is actually
the case, so ‘phantasia’ suggests the possibility of being misled by
appearances and is thus often a subject of criticism. According to Plato,
phantasia is a “mixture” of sensation and belief; in Aristotle, it is a
distinct faculty that makes truth and falsehood possible. The Stoics take a
phantasia to constitute one of the most basic mental states, in terms of which
other mental states are to be explained, and in rational animals it bears the
propositional content expressed in language. This last use becomes prominent in
ancient literary and rhetorical theory to designate the ability of language to
move us and convey subjects vividly as well as to range beyond the bounds of
our immediate experience. Here lie the origins of the modern concept of
imagination although not the Romantic distinction between fancy and
imagination. Later Neoplatonists, such as Proclus, take phantasia to be
necessary for abstract studies such as geometry, by enabling us to envision
spatial relations.
Phenomenalism: one of the
twelve labours of H. P. Grice, the view that propositions asserting the
existence of physical objects are equivalent in meaning to propositions asserting
that subjects would have certain sequences of sensations were they to have
certain others. The basic idea behind phenomenalism is compatible with a number
of different analyses of the self or conscious subject. A phenomenalist might
understand the self as a substance, a particular, or a construct out of actual
and possible experience. The view also is compatible with any number of
different analyses of the visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and
kinesthetic sensations described in the antecedents and consequents of the
subjunctive conditionals that the phenomenalist uses to analyze physical object
propositions as illustrated in the last paragraph. Probably the most common
analysis of sensations adopted by traditional phenomenalists is a sense-datum
theory, with the sense-data construed as mind-dependent entities. But there is
nothing to prevent a phenomenalist from accepting an adverbial theory or theory
of appearing instead. The origins of phenomenalism are difficult to trace, in
part because early statements of the view were usually not careful. In his
Dialogues, Berkeley hinted at phenomenalism when he had Philonous explain how
he could reconcile an ontology containing only minds and ideas with the story
of a creation that took place before the existence of people. Philonous
imagines that if he had been present at the creation he should have seen
things, i.e., had sensations, in the order described in the Bible. It can also
be argued, however, that J. S. Mill in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s
Philosophy was the first to put forth a clearly phenomenalistic analysis when
he identified matter with the “permanent possibility of sensation.” When Mill
explained what these permanent possibilities are, he typically used
conditionals that describe the sensations one would have if one were placed in
certain conditions. The attraction of classical phenomenalism grew with the
rise of logical positivism and its acceptance of the verifiability criterion of
meaning. Phenomenalists were usually foundationalists who were convinced that
justified belief in the physical world rested ultimately on our
noninferentially justified beliefs about our sensations. Implicitly committed
to the view that only deductive and inductive inferences are legitimate, and
further assuming that to be justified in believing one proposition P on the
basis of another E, one must be justified in believing both E and that E makes
P probable, the phenomenalist saw an insuperable difficulty in justifying
belief in ordinary statements about the physical world given prevalent
conceptions of physical petitio principii phenomenalism 663 663 objects. If all we ultimately have as
our evidence for believing in physical objects is what we know about the
occurrence of sensation, how can we establish sensation as evidence for the
existence of physical objects? We obviously cannot deduce the existence of
physical objects from any finite sequence of sensations. The sensations could,
e.g., be hallucinatory. Nor, it seems, can we observe a correlation between
sensation and something else in order to generate the premises of an inductive
argument for the conclusion that sensations are reliable indicators of physical
objects. The key to solving this problem, the phenomenalist argues, is to reduce
assertions about the physical world to complicated assertions about the
sequences of sensations a subject would have were he to have certain others.
The truth of such conditionals, e.g., that if I have the clear visual
impression of a cat, then there is one before me, might be mind-independent in
the way in which one wants the truth of assertions about the physical world to
be mind-independent. And to the phenomenalist’s great relief, it would seem
that we could justify our belief in such conditional statements without having
to correlate anything but sensations. Many philosophers today reject some of
the epistemological, ontological, and metaphilosophical presuppositions with
which phenomenalists approached the problem of understanding our relation to the
physical world through sensation. But the argument that was historically most
decisive in convincing many philosophers to abandon phenomenalism was the
argument from perceptual relativity first advanced by Chisholm in “The Problem
of Perception.” Chisholm offers a strategy for attacking any phenomenalistic
analysis. The first move is to force the phenomenalist to state a conditional
describing only sensations that is an alleged consequence of a physical object
proposition. C. I. Lewis, e.g., in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation,
claims that the assertion P that there is a doorknob before me and to the left
entails C that if I were to seem to see a doorknob and seem to reach out and
touch it then I would seem to feel it. Chisholm argues that if P really did
entail C then there could be no assertion R that when conjoined with P did not
entail C. There is, however, such an assertion: I am unable to move my limbs
and my hands but am subject to delusions such that I think I am moving them; I
often seem to be initiating a grasping motion but with no feeling of contacting
anything. Chisholm argues, in effect, that what sensations one would have if
one were to have certain others always depends in part on the internal and
external physical conditions of perception and that this fact dooms any attempt
to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of a physical object
proposition couched in terms that describe only connections between
sensations.
Phenomenology – referred
ironically by J. L. Austin as “linguistic phenomenology,” in the twentieth
century, the philosophy developed by Husserl and some of his followers. The
term has been used since the mideighteenth century and received a carefully
defined technical meaning in the works of both Kant and Hegel, but it is not
now used to refer to a homogeneous and systematically developed philosophical
position. The question of what phenomenology is may suggest that phenomenology
is one among the many contemporary philosophical conceptions that have a clearly
delineated body of doctrines and whose essential characteristics can be
expressed by a set of wellchosen statements. This notion is not correct,
however. In contemporary philosophy there is no system or school called
“phenomenology,” characterized by a clearly defined body of teachings.
Phenomenology is neither a school nor a trend in contemporary philosophy. It is
rather a movement whose proponents, for various reasons, have propelled it in
many distinct directions, with the result that today it means different things
to different people. While within the phenomenological movement as a whole
there are several related currents, they, too, are by no means homogeneous.
Though these currents have a common point of departure, they do not project
toward the same destination. The thinking of most phenomenologists has changed
so greatly that their respective views can be presented adequately only by
showing them in their gradual development. This is true not only for Husserl,
founder of the phenomenological movement, but also for such later
phenomenologists as Scheler, N. Hartmann, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.
To anyone who studies the phenomenological movement without prejudice the
differences among its many currents are obvious. It has been phenomenal property
phenomenology 664 664 said that
phenomenology consists in an analysis and description of consciousness; it has
been claimed also that phenomenology simply blends with existentialism.
Phenomenology is indeed the study of essences, but it also attempts to place
essences back into existence. It is a transcendental philosophy interested only
in what is “left behind” after the phenomenological reduction is performed, but
it also considers the world to be already there before reflection begins. For
some philosophers phenomenology is speculation on transcendental subjectivity,
whereas for others it is a method for approaching concrete existence. Some use
phenomenology as a search for a philosophy that accounts for space, time, and
the world, just as we experience and “live” them. Finally, it has been said
that phenomenology is an attempt to give a direct description of our experience
as it is in itself without taking into account its psychological origin and its
causal explanation; but Husserl speaks of a “genetic” as well as a
“constitutive” phenomenology. To some people, finding such an abundance of
ideas about one and the same subject constitutes a strange situation; for
others it is annoying to contemplate the “confusion”; and there will be those
who conclude that a philosophy that cannot define its own scope does not
deserve the discussion that has been carried on in its regard. In the opinion
of many, not only is this latter attitude not justified, but precisely the
opposite view defended by Thevenaz should be adopted. As the term
‘phenomenology’ signifies first and foremost a methodical conception, Thevenaz
argues that because this method, originally developed for a very particular and
limited end, has been able to branch out in so many varying forms, it manifests
a latent truth and power of renewal that implies an exceptional fecundity.
Speaking of the great variety of conceptions within the phenomenological
movement, Merleau-Ponty remarked that the responsible philosopher must
recognize that phenomenology may be practiced and identified as a manner or a
style of thinking, and that it existed as a movement before arriving at a
complete awareness of itself as a philosophy. Rather than force a living
movement into a system, then, it seems more in keeping with the ideal of the
historian as well as the philosopher to follow the movement in its development,
and attempt to describe and evaluate the many branches in and through which it
has unfolded itself. In reality the picture is not as dark as it may seem at
first sight. Notwithstanding the obvious differences, most phenomenologists
share certain insights that are very important for their mutual philosophical
conception as a whole. In this connection the following must be mentioned: 1
Most phenomenologists admit a radical difference between the “natural” and the
“philosophical” attitude. This leads necessarily to an equally radical
difference between philosophy and science. In characterizing this difference
some phenomenologists, in agreement with Husserl, stress only epistemological
issues, whereas others, in agreement with Heidegger, focus their attention
exclusively on ontological topics. 2 Notwithstanding this radical difference,
there is a complicated set of relationships between philosophy and science. Within
the context of these relationships philosophy has in some sense a foundational
task with respect to the sciences, whereas science offers to philosophy at
least a substantial part of its philosophical problematic. 3 To achieve its
task philosophy must perform a certain reduction, or epoche, a radical change
of attitude by which the philosopher turns from things to their meanings, from
the ontic to the ontological, from the realm of the objectified meaning as
found in the sciences to the realm of meaning as immediately experienced in the
“life-world.” In other words, although it remains true that the various
phenomenologists differ in characterizing the reduction, no one seriously
doubts its necessity. 4 All phenomenologists subscribe to the doctrine of intentionality,
though most elaborate this doctrine in their own way. For Husserl
intentionality is a characteristic of conscious phenomena or acts; in a deeper
sense, it is the characteristic of a finite consciousness that originally finds
itself without a world. For Heidegger and most existentialists it is the human
reality itself that is intentional; as Being-in-the-world its essence consists
in its ek-sistence, i.e., in its standing out toward the world. 5 All
phenomenologists agree on the fundamental idea that the basic concern of
philosophy is to answer the question concerning the “meaning and Being” of
beings. All agree in addition that in trying to materialize this goal the
philosopher should be primarily interested not in the ultimate cause of all finite
beings, but in how the Being of beings and the Being of the world are to be
constituted. Finally, all agree that in answering the question concerning the
meaning of Being a privileged position is to be attributed to subjectivity,
i.e., to that being which questions the Being of beings. Phenomenologists
differ, however, the moment they have to specify what is meant by subjectivity.
As noted above, whereas Husserl conceives it as a worldless monad, Heidegger
and most later phenomenologists conceive it as being-in-the-world. Referring to
Heidegger’s reinterpretation of his phenomenology, Husserl writes: one
misinterprets my phenomenology backwards from a level which it was its very
purpose to overcome, in other words, one has failed to understand the fundamental
novelty of the phenomenological reduction and hence the progress from mundane
subjectivity i.e., man to transcendental subjectivity; consequently one has
remained stuck in an anthropology . . . which according to my doctrine has not
yet reached the genuine philosophical level, and whose interpretation as
philosophy means a lapse into “transcendental anthropologism,” that is,
“psychologism.” 6 All phenomenologists defend a certain form of intuitionism
and subscribe to what Husserl calls the “principle of all principles”:
“whatever presents itself in ‘intuition’ in primordial form as it were in its
bodily reality, is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though
only within the limits in which it then presents itself.” Here again, however,
each phenomenologist interprets this principle in keeping with his general
conception of phenomenology as a whole. Thus, while phenomenologists do share
certain insights, the development of the movement has nevertheless been such
that it is not possible to give a simple definition of what phenomenology is.
The fact remains that there are many phenomenologists and many phenomenologies.
Therefore, one can only faithfully report what one has experienced of
phenomenology by reading the phenomenologists.
Philo Judaeus c.20
B.C.A.D. 40, Jewish Hellenistic philosopher of Alexandria who composed the bulk
of his work in the form of commentaries and discourses on Scripture. He made
the first known sustained attempt to synthesize its revealed teachings with the
doctrines of classical philosophy. Although he was not the first to apply the
methods of allegorical interpretation to Scripture, the number and variety of
his interpretations make Philo unique. With this interpretive tool, he
transformed biblical narratives into Platonic accounts of the soul’s quest for
God and its struggle against passion, and the Mosaic commandments into specific
manifestations of general laws of nature. Philo’s most influential idea was his
conception of God, which combines the personal, ethical deity of the Bible with
the abstract, transcendentalist theology of Platonism and Pythagoreanism. The
Philonic deity is both the loving, just God of the Hebrew Patriarchs and the
eternal One whose essence is absolutely unknowable and who creates the material
world by will from primordial matter which He creates ex nihilo. Besides the
intelligible realm of ideas, which Philo is the earliest known philosopher to
identify as God’s thoughts, he posited an intermediate divine being which he
called, adopting scriptural language, the logos. Although the exact nature of
the logos is hard to pin down Philo
variously and, without any concern for consistency, called it the
“first-begotten Son of the uncreated Father,” “Second God,” “idea of ideas,”
“archetype of human reason,” and “pattern of creation” its main functions are clear: to bridge the
huge gulf between the transcendent deity and the lower world and to serve as
the unifying law of the universe, the ground of its order and rationality. A
philosophical eclectic, Philo was unknown to medieval Jewish philosophers but,
beyond his anticipations of Neoplatonism, he had a lasting impact on
Christianity through Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ambrose.
Philolaus, pre-Socratic
Grecian philosopher from Croton in southern Italy, the first Pythagorean to
write a book. The surviving fragments of it are the earliest primary texts for
Pythagoreanism, but numerous spurious fragments have also been preserved.
Philolaus’s book begins with a cosmogony and includes astronomical, medical,
and psychological doctrines. His major innovation was to argue that the cosmos
and everything in it is a combination not just of unlimiteds what is structured
and ordered, e.g. material elements but also of limiters structural and ordering
elements, e.g. shapes. These elements are held together in a harmonia fitting
together, which comes to be in accord with perspicuous mathematical
relationships, such as the whole number ratios that correspond to the harmonic
intervals e.g. octave % phenotext Philolaus 666 666 1 : 2. He argued that secure knowledge
is possible insofar as we grasp the number in accordance with which things are
put together. His astronomical system is famous as the first to make the earth
a planet. Along with the sun, moon, fixed stars, five planets, and
counter-earth thus making the perfect number ten, the earth circles the central
fire a combination of the limiter “center” and the unlimited “fire”.
Philolaus’s influence is seen in Plato’s Philebus; he is the primary source for
Aristotle’s account of Pythagoreanism.
philosophical
biology: Grice liked to regard himself as a philosophical biologist, and indeed
philosophical physiologist. bioethics, the subfield of ethics that concerns the
ethical issues arising in medicine and from advances in biological science. One
central area of bioethics is the ethical issues that arise in relations between
health care professionals and patients. A second area focuses on broader issues
of social justice in health care. A third area concerns the ethical issues
raised by new biological knowledge or technology. In relations between health
care professionals and patients, a fundamental issue is the appropriate role of
each in decision making about patient care. More traditional views assigning
principal decision-making authority to physicians have largely been replaced
with ideals of shared decision making that assign a more active role to
patients. Shared decision making is thought to reflect better the importance of
patients’ self-determination in controlling their care. This increased role for
patients is reflected in the ethical and legal doctrine of informed consent,
which requires that health care not be rendered without the informed and
voluntary consent of a competent patient. The requirement that consent be
informed places a positive responsibility on health care professionals to
provide their patients with the information they need to make informed
decisions about care. The requirement that consent be voluntary requires that
treatment not be forced, nor that patients’ decisions be coerced or
manipulated. If patients lack the capacity to make competent health care
decisions, e.g. young children or cognitively impaired adults, a surrogate,
typically a parent in the case of children or a close family member in the case
of adults, must decide for them. Surrogates’ decisions should follow the
patient’s advance directive if one exists, be the decision the patient would
have made in the circumstances if competent, or follow the patient’s best
interests if the patient has never been competent or his or her wishes are not
known. A major focus in bioethics generally, and treatment decision making in
particular, is care at or near the end of life. It is now widely agreed that
patients are entitled to decide about and to refuse, according to their own
values, any lifesustaining treatment. They are also entitled to have desired
treatments that may shorten their lives, such as high doses of pain medications
necessary to relieve severe pain from cancer, although in practice pain
treatment remains inadequate for many patients. Much more controversial is
whether more active means to end life such as physician-assisted suicide and
voluntary euthanasia are morally permissible in indibhavanga bioethics 88 88 vidual cases or justified as public
policy; both remain illegal except in a very few jurisdictions. Several other
moral principles have been central to defining professionalpatient
relationships in health care. A principle of truth telling requires that
professionals not lie to patients. Whereas in the past it was common,
especially with patients with terminal cancers, not to inform patients fully
about their diagnosis and prognosis, studies have shown that practice has
changed substantially and that fully informing patients does not have the bad
effects for patients that had been feared in the past. Principles of privacy
and confidentiality require that information gathered in the
professionalpatient relationship not be disclosed to third parties without
patients’ consent. Especially with highly personal information in mental health
care, or information that may lead to discrimination, such as a diagnosis of
AIDS, assurance of confidentiality is fundamental to the trust necessary to a
wellfunctioning professionalpatient relationship. Nevertheless, exceptions to
confidentiality to prevent imminent and serious harm to others are well
recognized ethically and legally. More recently, work in bioethics has focused
on justice in the allocation of health care. Whereas nearly all developed
countries treat health care as a moral and legal right, and ensure it to all
their citizens through some form of national health care system, in the United
States about 15 percent of the population remains without any form of health
insurance. This has fed debates about whether health care is a right or
privilege, a public or individual responsibility. Most bioethicists have
supported a right to health care because of health care’s fundamental impact on
people’s well-being, opportunity, ability to plan their lives, and even lives
themselves. Even if there is a moral right to health care, however, few defend
an unlimited right to all beneficial health care, no matter how small the
benefit and how high the cost. Consequently, it is necessary to prioritize or
ration health care services to reflect limited budgets for health care, and
both the standards and procedures for doing so are ethically controversial.
Utilitarians and defenders of cost-effectiveness analysis in health policy support
using limited resources to maximize aggregate health benefits for the
population. Their critics argue that this ignores concerns about equity,
concerns about how health care resources and health are distributed. For
example, some have argued that equity requires giving priority to treating the
worst-off or sickest, even at a sacrifice in aggregate health benefits;
moreover, taking account in prioritization of differences in costs of different
treatments can lead to ethically problematic results, such as giving higher
priority to providing very small benefits to many persons than very large but
individually more expensive benefits, including life-saving interventions, to a
few persons, as the state of Oregon found in its initial widely publicized
prioritization program. In the face of controversy over standards for rationing
care, it is natural to rely on fair procedures to make rationing decisions.
Other bioethics issues arise from dramatic advances in biological knowledge and
technology. Perhaps the most prominent example is new knowledge of human
genetics, propelled in substantial part by the worldwide Human Genome Project,
which seeks to map the entire human genome. This project and related research
will enable the prevention of genetically transmitted diseases, but already
raises questions about which conditions to prevent in offspring and which
should be accepted and lived with, particularly when the means of preventing
the condition is by abortion of the fetus with the condition. Looking further
into the future, new genetic knowledge and technology will likely enable us to
enhance normal capacities, not just prevent or cure disease, and to manipulate
the genes of future children, raising profoundly difficult questions about what
kinds of persons to create and the degree to which deliberate human design
should replace “nature” in the creation of our offspring. A dramatic example of
new abilities to create offspring, though now limited to the animal realm, was
the cloning in Scotland in 7 of a sheep from a single cell of an adult sheep;
this event raised the very controversial future prospect of cloning human
beings. Finally, new reproductive technologies, such as oocyte egg donation,
and practices such as surrogate motherhood, raise deep issues about the meaning
and nature of parenthood and families. Philosophical
biology -- 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.
philosophical
historian – Grice as – longitudinal unity -- Danto, A. C. 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 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 0s, 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.
Philosophical
mathematics. Grice thought that “7 + 5 = 12” was either synthetic or analytic –
“but hardly both”. Grice on real numbers -- 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.
Philosophical mathematics: Grice on “7 + 5 = 12” -- Dedekind, R. G.
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?, 8, 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 8 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 210 210 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. Philosophical mathematics --
mathematical analysis, also called standard analysis, the area of mathematics
pertaining to the so-called real number system, i.e. the area that can be based
on an axiom set whose intended interpretation (standard model) has the set of
real numbers as its domain (universe of discourse). Thus analysis includes,
among its many subbranches, elementary algebra, differential and integral
calculus, differential equations, the calculus of variations, and measure
theory. Analytic geometry involves the application of analysis to geometry.
Analysis contains a large part of the mathematics used in mathematical physics.
The real numbers, which are representable by the ending and unending decimals,
are usefully construed as (or as corresponding to) distances measured, relative
to an arbitrary unit length, positively to the right and negatively to the left
of an arbitrarily fixed zero point along a geometrical straight line. In
particular, the class of real numbers includes as increasingly comprehensive
proper subclasses the natural numbers, the integers (positive, negative, and
zero), the rational numbers (or fractions), and the algebraic numbers (such as
the square root of two). Especially important is the presence in the class of
real numbers of non-algebraic (or transcendental) irrational numbers such as
pi. The set of real numbers includes arbitrarily small and arbitrarily large,
finite quantities, while excluding infinitesimal and infinite quantities.
Analysis, often conceived as the mathematics of continuous magnitude, contrasts
with arithmetic (natural number theory), which is regarded as the mathematics
of discrete magnitude. Analysis is often construed as involving not just the
real numbers but also the imaginary (complex) numbers. Traditionally analysis
is expressed in a second-order or higher-order language wherein its axiom set
has categoricity; each of its models is isomorphic to (has the same structure
as) the standard model. When analysis is carried out in a first-order language,
as has been increasingly the case since the 1950s, categoricity is impossible
and it has nonstandard mass noun mathematical analysis models in addition to
its standard model. A nonstandard model of analysis is an interpretation not
isomorphic to the standard model but nevertheless satisfying the axiom set.
Some of the nonstandard models involve objects reminiscent of the much-despised
“infinitesimals” that were essential to the Leibniz approach to calculus and
that were subject to intense criticism by Berkeley and other philosophers and
philosophically sensitive mathematicians. These non-standard models give rise
to a new area of mathematics, non-standard analysis, within which the
fallacious arguments used by Leibniz and other early analysts form the
heuristic basis of new and entirely rigorous proofs. -- mathematical function,
an operation that, when applied to an entity (set of entities) called its
argument(s), yields an entity known as the value of the function for that
argument(s). This operation can be expressed by a functional equation of the
form y % f(x) such that a variable y is said to be a function of a variable x
if corresponding to each value of x there is one and only one value of y. The x
is called the independent variable (or argument of the function) and the y the
dependent variable (or value of the function). (Some definitions consider the
relation to be the function, not the dependent variable, and some definitions
permit more than one value of y to correspond to a given value of x, as in x2 !
y2 % 4.) More abstractly, a function can be considered to be simply a special
kind of relation (set of ordered pairs) that to any element in its domain
relates exactly one element in its range. Such a function is said to be a
one-to-one correspondence if and only if the set {x,y} elements of S and {z,y}
elements of S jointly imply x % z. Consider, e.g., the function {(1,1), (2,4),
(3,9), (4,16), (5,25), (6,36)}, each of whose members is of the form (x,x2) –
the squaring function. Or consider the function {(0,1), (1,0)} – which we can
call the negation function. In contrast, consider the function for exclusive
alternation (as in you may have a beer or glass of wine, but not both). It is
not a one-to-one correspondence. For, 0 is the value of (0,1) and of (1,0), and
1 is the value of (0,0) and of (1,1). If we think of a function as defined on
the natural numbers – functions from Nn to N for various n (most commonly n % 1
or 2) – a partial function is a function from Nn to N whose domain is not
necessarily the whole of Nn (e.g., not defined for all of the natural numbers).
A total function from Nn to N is a function whose domain is the whole of Nn
(e.g., all of the natural numbers). -- mathematical induction, a method of
definition and a method of proof. A collection of objects can be defined
inductively. All members of such a collection can be shown to have a property by
an inductive proof. The natural numbers and the set of well-formed formulas of
a formal language are familiar examples of sets given by inductive definition.
Thus, the set of natural numbers is inductively defined as the smallest set, N,
such that: (B) 0 is in N and (I) for any x in N the successor of x is in N. (B)
is the basic clause and (I) the inductive clause of this definition. Or
consider a propositional language built on negation and conjunction. We start
with a denumerable class of atomic sentence symbols ATOM = {A1, A2, . . .}.
Then we can define the set of well-formed formulas, WFF, as the smallest set of
expressions such that: (B) every member of ATOM is in WFF and (I) if x is in
WFF then (- x) is in WFF and if x and y are in WFF then (x & y) is in WFF.
We show that all members of an inductively defined set have a property by
showing that the members specified by the basis have that property and that the
property is preserved by the induction. For example, we show that all WFFs have
an even number of parentheses by showing (i) that all ATOMs have an even number
of parentheses and (ii) that if x and y have an even number of parentheses then
so do (- x) and (x & y). This shows that the set of WFFs with an even
number of parentheses satisfies (B) and (I). The set of WFFs with an even
number of parentheses must then be identical to WFF, since – by definition –
WFF is the smallest set that satisfies (B) and (I). Ordinary proof by
mathematical induction shows that all the natural numbers, or all members of
some set with the order type of the natural numbers, share a property. Proof by
transfinite induction, a more general form of proof by mathematical induction,
shows that all members of some well-ordered set have a certain property. A set
is well-ordered if and only if every non-empty subset of it has a least
element. The natural numbers are well-ordered. It is a consequence of the axiom
of choice that every set can be well-ordered. Suppose that a set, X, is
well-ordered and that P is the subset of X whose mathematical constructivism
mathematical induction 541 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 541 members have
the property of interest. Suppose that it can be shown for any element x of X,
if all members of X less that x are in P, then so is x. Then it follows by
transfinite induction that all members of X have the property, that X % P. For
if X did not coincide with P, then the set of elements of x not in P would be
non-empty. Since X is well-ordered, this set would have a least element, x*.
But then by definition, all members of X less than x* are in P, and by
hypothesis x* must be in P after all.. -- mathematical intuitionism, a
twentieth-century movement that reconstructs mathematics in accordance with an
epistemological idealism and a Kantian metaphysics. Specifically, Brouwer, its
founder, held that there are no unexperienced truths and that mathematical
objects stem from the a priori form of those conscious acts which generate
empirical objects. Unlike Kant, however, Brouwer rejected the apriority of space
and based mathematics solely on a refined conception of the intuition of time.
Intuitionistic mathematics. According to Brouwer, the simplest mathematical act
is to distinguish between two diverse elements in the flow of consciousness. By
repeating and concatenating such acts we generate each of the natural numbers,
the standard arithmetical operations, and thus the rational numbers with their
operations as well. Unfortunately, these simple, terminating processes cannot
produce the convergent infinite sequences of rational numbers that are needed
to generate the continuum (the nondenumerable set of real numbers, or of points
on the line). Some “proto-intuitionists” admitted infinite sequences whose
elements are determined by finitely describable rules. However, the set of all
such algorithmic sequences is denumerable and thus can scarcely generate the
continuum. Brouwer’s first attempt to circumvent this – by postulating a single
intuition of an ever growing continuum – mirrored Aristotle’s picture of the
continuum as a dynamic whole composed of inseparable parts. But this approach
was incompatible with the set-theoretic framework that Brouwer accepted, and by
1918 he had replaced it with the concept of an infinite choice sequence. A
choice sequence of rational numbers is, to be sure, generated by a “rule,” but
the rule may leave room for some degree of freedom in choosing the successive
elements. It might, e.g., simply require that the n ! 1st choice be a rational
number that lies within 1/n of the nth choice. The set of real numbers
generated by such semideterminate sequences is demonstrably non-denumerable.
Following his epistemological beliefs, Brouwer admitted only those properties
of a choice sequence which are determined by its rule and by a finite number of
actual choices. He incorporated this restriction into his version of set theory
and obtained a series of results that conflict with standard (classical)
mathematics. Most famously, he proved that every function that is fully defined
over an interval of real numbers is uniformly continuous. (Pictorially, the
graph of the function has no gaps or jumps.) Interestingly, one corollary of
this theorem is that the set of real numbers cannot be divided into mutually
exclusive subsets, a property that rigorously recovers the Aristotelian picture
of the continuum. The clash with classical mathematics. Unlike his disciple
Arend Heyting, who considered intuitionistic and classical mathematics as
separate and therefore compatible subjects, Brouwer viewed them as incompatible
treatments of a single subject matter. He even occasionally accused classical
mathematics of inconsistency at the places where it differed from intuitionism.
This clash concerns the basic concept of what counts as a mathematical object.
Intuitionism allows, and classical mathematics rejects, objects that may be
indeterminate with respect to some of their properties. Logic and language.
Because he believed that mathematical constructions occur in prelinguistic
consciousness, Brouwer refused to limit mathematics by the expressive capacity
of any language. Logic, he claimed, merely codifies already completed stages of
mathematical reasoning. For instance, the principle of the excluded middle
stems from an “observational period” during which mankind catalogued finite
phenomena (with decidable properties); and he derided classical mathematics for
inappropriately applying this principle to infinitary aspects of mathematics.
Formalization. Brouwer’s views notwithstanding, in 1930 Heyting produced formal
systems for intuitionistic logic (IL) and number theory. These inspired further
formalizations (even of the theory of choice sequences) and a series of
proof-theoretic, semantic, and algebraic studies that related intuitionistic
and classical formal systems. Stephen Kleene, e.g., interpreted IL and other
intuitionistic formal systems using the classical theory of recursive
functions. Gödel, who showed that IL cannot coincide with any finite
many-valued logic, demonstrated its relation to the modal logic, S4; and Kripke
provided a formal semantics for IL similar to the possible worlds semantics for
S4. For a while the study of intuitionistic formal systems used strongly
classical methods, but since the 1970s intuitionistic methods have been
employed as well. Meaning. Heyting’s formalization reflected a theory of
meaning implicit in Brouwer’s epistemology and metaphysics, a theory that
replaces the traditional correspondence notion of truth with the notion of
constructive proof. More recently Michael Dummett has extended this to a
warranted assertability theory of meaning for areas of discourse outside of
mathematics. He has shown how assertabilism provides a strategy for combating
realism about such things as physical objects, mental objects, and the past. --
mathematical structuralism, the view that the subject of any branch of
mathematics is a structure or structures. The slogan is that mathematics is the
science of structure. Define a “natural number system” to be a countably
infinite collection of objects with one designated initial object and a
successor relation that satisfies the principle of mathematical induction.
Examples of natural number systems are the Arabic numerals and an infinite
sequence of distinct moments of time. According to structuralism, arithmetic is
about the form or structure common to natural number systems. Accordingly, a
natural number is something like an office in an organization or a place in a
pattern. Similarly, real analysis is about the real number structure, the form
common to complete ordered fields. The philosophical issues concerning
structuralism concern the nature of structures and their places. Since a
structure is a one-over-many of sorts, it is something like a universal.
Structuralists have defended analogues of some of the traditional positions on
universals, such as realism and nominalism. Philosophical mathematics --
metamathematics, the study and establishment, by restricted (and, in
particular, finitary) means, of the consistency or reliability of the various
systems of classical mathematics. The term was apparently introduced, with
pejorative overtones relating it to ‘metaphysics’, in the 1870s in connection
with the discussion of non-Euclidean geometries. It was introduced in the sense
given here, shorn of negative connotations, by Hilbert (see his “Neubegründung
der Mathematik. Erste Mitteilung,” 1922), who also referred to it as
Beweistheorie or proof theory. A few years later (specifically, in the 1930
papers “Über einige fundamentale Begriffe der Metamathematik” and “Fundamentale
Begriffe der Methodologie der deduktiven Wissenschaften. I”) Tarski fitted it
with a somewhat broader, less restricted sense: broader in that the scope of
its concerns was increased to include not only questions of consistency, but also
a host of other questions (e.g. questions of independence, completeness and
axiomatizability) pertaining to what Tarski referred to as the “methodology of
the deductive sciences” (which was his synonym for ‘metamathematics’); less
restricted in that the standards of proof were relaxed so as to permit other
than finitary – indeed, other than constructive – means. On this broader
conception of Tarski’s, formalized deductive disciplines form the field of
research of metamathematics roughly in the same sense in which spatial entities
form the field of research in geometry or animals that of zoology. Disciplines,
he said, are to be regarded as sets of sentences to be investigated from the
point of view of their consistency, axiomatizability (of various types), completeness,
and categoricity or degree of categoricity, etc. Eventually (see the 1935 and
1936 papers “Grundzüge des Systemenkalkül, Erster Teil” and “Grundzüge der
Systemenkalkül, Zweiter Teil”) Tarski went on to include all manner of
semantical questions among the concerns of metamathematics, thus diverging
rather sharply from Hilbert’s original syntactical focus. Today, the terms
‘metatheory’ and ‘metalogic’ are used to signify that broad set of interests,
embracing both syntactical and semantical studies of formal languages and
systems, which Tarski came to include under the general heading of
metamathematics. Those having to do specifically with semantics belong to that
more specialized branch of modern logic known as model theory, while those
dealing with purely syntactical questions belong to what has come to be known
as proof theory (where this latter is now, however, permitted to employ other
than finitary methods in the proofs of its theorems).
Philosophical psychology
-- Eckhart, Johannes, called Meister Eckhart c.12601328, G. 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. Philosophical
psychology – “soul-to-soul transfer” – the problem of other minds, the question
of what rational basis a person can have for the belief that other persons are
similarly conscious and have minds. Every person, by virtue of being conscious,
is aware of her own state of consciousness and thus knows she has a mind; but
the mental states of others are not similarly apparent to her. An influential
attempt to solve this problem was made by philosophical behaviorists. According
to Ryle in The Concept of Mind 9, a mind is not a ghost in the physical machine
but roughly speaking an aggregate of dispositions to behave intelligently and
to respond overtly to sensory stimulation. Since the behavior distinctive of
these mentalistic dispositions is readily observable in other human beings, the
so-called problem of other minds is easily solved: it arose from mere confusion
about the concept of mind. Ryle’s opponents were generally willing to concede
that such dispositions provide proof that another person has a “mind” or is a
sentient being, but they were not willing to admit that those dispositions
provide proof that other people actually have feelings, thoughts, and sensory
experiences. Their convictions on this last matter generated a revised version
of the otherminds problem; it might be called the problem of other-person
experiences. Early efforts to solve the problem of other minds can be viewed as
attempts to solve the problem of other-person experiences. According to J. S.
Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy 1865, one can defend
one’s conviction that others have feelings and other subjective experiences by
employing an argument from analogy. To develop that analogy one first attends
to how one’s own experiences are related to overt or publicly observable
phenomena. One might observe that one feels pain when pricked by a pin and that
one responds to the pain by wincing and saying “ouch.” The next step is to
attend to the behavior and circumstances of others. Since other people are
physically very similar to oneself, it is reasonable to conclude that if they
are pricked by a pin and respond by wincing and saying “ouch,” they too have
felt pain. Analogous inferences involving other sorts of mental states and
other sorts of behavior and circumstances add strong support, Mill said, to
one’s belief in other-person experiences. Although arguments from analogy are
generally conceded to provide rationally acceptable evidence for unobserved
phenomena, the analogical argument for other-person experiences was vigorously
attacked in the 0s by philosophers influenced by Vitters’s Philosophical
Investigations 3. Their central contention was that anyone employing the
argument must assume that, solely from her own case, she knows what feelings
and thoughts are. This assumption was refuted, they thought, by Vitters’s
private language argument, which proved that we learn what feelings and
thoughts are only in the process of learning a publicly understandable language
containing an appropriate psychological vocabulary. To understand this latter
vocabulary, these critics said, one must be able to use its ingredient words
correctly in relation to others as well as to oneself; and this can be
ascertained only because words like ‘pain’ and ‘depression’ are associated with
behavioral criteria. When such criteria are satisfied by the behavior of
others, one knows that the words are correctly applied to them and that one is
justified in believing that they have the experiences in question. The supposed
problem of other-person experiences is thus “dissolved” by a just appreciation
of the preconditions for coherent thought about psychological states. Vitters’s
claim that, to be conceivable, “an inner process stands in need of external
criteria,” lost its hold on philosophers during the 0s. An important
consideration was this: if a feeling of pain is a genuine reality different
from the behavior that typically accompanies it, then so-called pain behavior
cannot be shown to provide adequate evidence for the presence of pain by a
purely linguistic argument; some empirical inductive evidence is needed. Since,
contrary to Vitters, one knows what the feeling of pain is like only by having
that feeling, one’s belief that other people occasionally have feelings that
are significantly like the pain one feels oneself apparently must be supported
by an argument in which analogy plays a central role. No other strategy seems
possible.
Philosophical theology:
Philosophical theology -- 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
16701722, Anthony Collins 16761729, Herbert of Cherbury 15831648, Matthew
Tindal 16571733, and Thomas Chubb 16791747. Continental deists included
Voltaire and Reimarus. Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer 17641806 were
prominent 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. Philosophical
theology -- de Maistre, Joseph-Marie, 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
Petersburg Evenings 1821 urges philosophy to surrender to religion and reason
to faith. Philosophical theology -- 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.
divine command ethics, an ethical theory according to which part or all
of morality divine attributes divine command ethics 240 240 depends upon the will of God as
promulgated by divine commands. This theory has an important place in the
history of Christian ethics. Divine command theories are prominent in the
Franciscan ethics developed by John Duns Scotus and 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 22:3740 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.
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. Philosophical theology --
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.
philosophism:
birrellism – general refelction on life. Grice defines a philosopher as someone
‘addicted to general reflections on life,’ like Birrell did. f. paraphilosophy
– philosophical hacks. “Austin’s expressed view -- the formulation of which no
doubt involves some irony -- is that we ‘philosophical hacks’ spend the week
making, for the benefit of our tutees, direct attacks on this or that
philosophical issue, and that we need to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some
suitably chosen ‘para-philosophy’ in which some non-philosophical conception is to be examined with the full rigour
of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable
never to be reached) in philosophical
currency.” His feeling of superiority as a philosopher is obvious in various
fields. He certaintly would not get involved in any ‘empirical’ survey (“We can
trust this, qua philosophers, as given.”) Grice held a MA (Lit. Hum.) – Literae
Humaniores (Philosophy). So he knew what he was talking about. The curriculum
was an easy one. He plays with the fact that empiricists don’t regard
philosophy as a sovereign monarch: philosophia regina scientiarum, provided
it’s queen consort. In “Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy,” he
plays with the idea that Philosophy is the Supreme Science. Grice was somewhat
obsessed as to what ‘philosohical’ stood for, which amused the members of his
play group! His play group once spends five weeks in an effort to explain why,
sometimes, ‘very’ allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution
of ‘highly’ (as in ‘very unusual’) and sometimes does not (as in ‘very
depressed’ or ‘very wicked’); and we reached no conclusion. This episode was
ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity. But that
response is as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question,
‘How many angels can dance on a needle’s point?’” A needless point?For much as
this medieval question is raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a
difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so The Play Group
discussion is directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examination,
in the first instance, of a conceptual question which is generally agreed among
us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical
importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a
distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant
enquiries. Grice is fortunate that the Lit. Hum. programme does not have much
philosophy! He feels free! In fact, the lack of a philosophical background is
felt as a badge of honour. It is ‘too clever’ and un-English to ‘know’ things.
A pint of philosophy is all Grice wanted. Figurative. This is Harvardite Gordon’s
attempt to formulate a philosophy of the minimum fundamental ideas that all
people on the earth should come to know. Reviewed by A. M. Honoré: Short
measure. Gordon, a Stanley Plummer scholar, e: Bowdoin and Harvard, in The
Eastern Gazette. Grice would exclaim: I always loved Alfred Brooks Gordon!
Grice was slightly disapppointed that Gordon had not included the fundamental
idea of implicature in his pint. Short measure, indeed. Grice gives seminars on
Ariskant (“the first part of this individual interested some of my tutees; the
second, others.” Ariskant philosophised in Grecian, but also in the pure
Teutonic, and Grice collaborated with Baker in this area. Curiously, Baker
majors in French and philosophy and does research at the Sorbonne. Grice would
sometimes define ‘philoosphy.’ Oddly, Grice gives a nice example of
‘philosopher’ meaning ‘addicted to general, usually stoic, reflections about
life.’ In the context where it occurs, the implicatum is Stevensonian. If
Stevenson says that an athlete is usually tall, a philosopher may occasionally
be inclined to reflect about life in general, as a birrelist would. Grice’s
gives an alternate meaning, intended to display circularity: ‘engaged in
philosophical studies.’ The idea of Grice of philosophy is the one the Lit.
Hum. instills. It is a unique
experience, unknown in the New World, our actually outside Oxford, or
post-Grice, where a classicist is not seen as a philosopher. Once a tutorial
fellow in philosophy (rather than classics) and later university lecturer in
philosophy (rather than classics) strengthens his attachment. Grice needs to
regarded by his tutee as a philosopher simpliciter, as oppoosed to a prof: the
Waynflete is a metaphysician; the White is a moralist, the Wykeham a logician,
and the Wilde a ‘mental’. For Grice’s “greatest living philosopher,” Heidegger,
‘philosophy’ is a misnomer. While philology merely discourses (logos) on love,
the philosopher claims to be a wizard (sophos) of love. Liddell and Scott have
“φιλοσοφία,” which they render as “love of knowledge, pursuit thereof,
speculation,” “ἡ φ. κτῆσις ἐπιστήμης.” Then there’s “ἡ πρώτη φ.,” with striking
originality, metaphysic, Arist. Metaph. 1026a24. Just one sense, but various
ambiguities remain in ‘philosopher,’ as per Grice’s two usages. As it happens, Grice is both addicted
to general, usually stoic, speculations about life, and he is a member of The
Oxford Philosophical Society.Refs.: The main sources in the Grice Papers are
under series III, of the doctrines. See also references under ‘lingusitic
botany,’ and Oxonianism. Grice liked to play with the adage of ‘philosophia’ as
‘regina scientiarum.’ A specific essay in his update of “post-war Oxford
philosophy,” in WoW on “Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy,”
BANC.
philosophia perennis, a
supposed body of truths that appear in the writings of the great philosophers,
or the truths common to opposed philosophical viewpoints. The term is derived
from the title of a book De perenni philosophia published by Agostino Steuco of
Gubbio in 1540. It suggests that the differences between philosophers are
inessential and superficial and that the common essential truth emerges,
however partially, in the major philosophical schools. Aldous Huxley employed
it as a title. L. Lavelle, N. Hartmann, and K. Jaspers also employ the phrase.
M. De Wulf and many others use the phrase to characterize Neo-Thomism as the
chosen vehicle of essential philosophical truths.
philosophical
anthropology, philosophical inquiry concerning human nature, often starting
with the question of what generally characterizes human beings in contrast to
other kinds of creatures and things. Thus broadly conceived, it is a kind of
inquiry as old as philosophy itself, occupying philosophers from Socrates to
Sartre; and it embraces philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind,
philosophy of action, and existentialism. Such inquiry presupposes no immutable
“essence of man,” but only the meaningfulness of distinguishing between what is
“human” and what is not, and the possibility that philosophy as well as other
disciplines may contribute to our self-comprehension. It leaves open the
question of whether other kinds of naturally occurring or artificially produced
entity may possess the hallmarks of our humanity, and countenances the
possibility of the biologically evolved, historically developed, and socially
and individually variable character of everything about our attained humanity.
More narrowly conceived, philosophical anthropology is a specific movement in
recent European philosophy associated initially with Scheler and Helmuth
Plessner, and subsequently with such figures as Arnold Gehlen, Cassirer, and
the later Sartre. It initially emerged in Germany simultaneously with the
existential philosophy of Heidegger and the critical social theory of the
Frankfurt School, with which it competed as G. philosophers turned their
attention to the comprehension of human life. This movement was distinguished
from the outset by its attempt to integrate the insights of phenomenological
analysis with the perspectives attainable through attention to human and
comparative biology, and subsequently to social inquiry as well. This turn to a
more naturalistic approach to the understanding of ourselves, as a particular
kind of living creature among others, is reflected in the titles of the two
works published in 8 that inaugurated the movement: Scheler’s Man’s Place in
Nature and Plessner’s The Levels of the Organic and Man. For both Scheler and Plessner,
however, as for those who followed them, our nature must be understood by
taking further account of the social, cultural, and intellectual dimensions of
human life. Even those like Gehlen, whose Der Mensch 0 exhibits a strongly
biological orientation, devoted much attention to these dimensions, which our
biological nature both constrains and makes possible. For all of them, the
relation between the biological and the social and cultural dimensions of human
life is a central concern and a key to comprehending our human nature. One of
the common themes of the later philosophical-anthropological literature e.g., Cassirer’s An Essay on Man 5 and
Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason 0 as well as Plessner’s Contitio Humana
5 and Gehlen’s Early Man and Late Culture 3
is the plasticity of human nature, made possible by our biological
constitution, and the resulting great differences in the ways human beings
live. Yet this is not taken to preclude saying anything meaningful about human
nature generally; rather, it merely requires attention to the kinds of general
features involved and reflected in human diversity and variability. Critics of
the very idea and possibility of a philosophical anthropology e.g., Althusser
and Foucault typically either deny that there are any such general features or
maintain that there are none outside the province of the biological sciences to
which philosophy can contribute nothing substantive. Both claims, however, are
open to dispute; and the enterprise of a philosophical anthropology remains a
viable and potentially significant one.
Philosophical biology –
vide: H. P. Grice, “Philosophical biology and philosophical psychology” -- the
philosophy of science applied to biology. On a conservative view of the
philosophy of science, the same principles apply throughout science. Biology
supplies additional examples but does not provide any special problems or
require new principles. For example, the reduction of Mendelian genetics to
molecular biology exemplifies the same sort of relation as the reduction of
thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, and the same general analysis of
reduction applies equally to both. More radical philosophers argue that the
subject matter of biology has certain unique features; hence, the philosophy of
biology is itself unique. The three features of biology most often cited by
those who maintain that philosophy of biology is unique are functional
organization, embryological development, and the nature of selection. Organisms
are functionally organized. They are capable of maintaining their overall
organization in the face of fairly extensive variation in their envisonments.
Organisms also undergo ontogenetic development resulting from extremely complex
interactions between the genetic makeup of the organism and its successive
environments. At each step, the course that an organism takes is determined by
an interplay between its genetic makeup, its current state of development, and
the environment it happens to confront. The complexity of these interactions
produces the naturenurture problem. Except for human artifacts, similar
organization does not occur in the non-living world. The species problem is
another classic issue in the philosophy of biology. Biological species have
been a paradigm example of natural kinds since Aristotle. According to nearly
all pre-Darwinian philosophers, species are part of the basic makeup of the
universe, like gravity and gold. They were held to be as eternal, immutable,
and discrete as these other examples of natural kinds. If Darwin was right,
species are not eternal. They come and go, and once gone can no more reemerge
than Aristotle can once again walk the streets of Athens. Nor are species
immutable. A sample of lead can be transmuted into a sample of gold, but these
elements as elements remain immutable in the face of such changes. However,
Darwin insisted that species themselves, not merely their instances, evolved.
Finally, because Darwin thought that species evolved gradually, the boundaries
between species are not sharp, casting doubt on the essentialist doctrines so
common in his day. In short, if species evolve, they have none of the
traditional characteristics of species. Philosophers and biologists to this day
are working out the consequences of this radical change in our worldview. The
topic that has received the greatest attention by philosophers of biology in
the recent literature is the nature of evolutionary theory, in particular
selection, adaptation, fitness, and the population structure of species. In order
for selection to operate, variation is necessary, successive generations must
be organized genealogically, and individuals must interact differentially with
their environments. In the simplest case, genes pass on their structure largely
intact. In addition, they provide the information necessary to produce
organisms. Certain of these organisms are better able to cope with their
environments and reproduce than are other organisms. As a result, genes are
perpetuated differentially through successive generations. Those
characteristics that help an organism cope with its environments are termed
adaptations. In a more restricted sense, only those characteristics that arose
through past selective advantage count as adaptations. Just as the notion of IQ
was devised as a single measure for a combination of the factors that influence
our mental abilities, fitness is a measure of relative reproductive success.
Claims about the tautological character of the principle philosophical
behaviorism philosophy of biology of the survival of the fittest stem from the
blunt assertion that fitness just is relative reproductive success, as if
intelligence just is what IQ tests measure. Philosophers of biology have
collaborated with biologists to analyze the notion of fitness. This literature
has concentrated on the role that causation plays in selection and, hence, must
play in any adequate explication of fitness. One important distinction that has
emerged is between replication and differential interaction with the
environment. Selection is a function of the interplay between these two
processes. Because of the essential role of variation in selection, all the
organisms that belong to the same species either at any one time or through
time cannot possibly be essentially the same. Nor can species be treated
adequately in terms of the statistical covariance of either characters or
genes. The populational structure of species is crucial. For example, species
that form numerous, partially isolated demes are much more likely to speciate
than those that do not. One especially controversial question is whether
species themselves can function in the evolutionary process rather than simply
resulting from it. Although philosophers of biology have played an increasingly
important role in biology itself, they have also addressed more traditional
philosophical questions, especially in connection with evolutionary
epistemology and ethics. Advocates of evolutionary epistemology argue that
knowledge can be understood in terms of the adaptive character of accurate
knowledge. Those organisms that hold false beliefs about their environment,
including other organisms, are less likely to reproduce themselves than those
with more accurate beliefs. To the extent that this argument has any force at
all, it applies only to humansized entities and events. One common response to
evolutionary epistemology is that sometimes people who hold manifestly false
beliefs flourish at the expense of those who hold more realistic views of the
world in which we live. On another version of evolutionary epistemology,
knowledge acquisition is viewed as just one more instance of a selection
process. The issue is not to justify our beliefs but to understand how they are
generated and proliferated. Advocates of evolutionary ethics attempt to justify
certain ethical principles in terms of their survival value. Any behavior that
increases the likelihood of survival and reproduction is “good,” and anything
that detracts from these ends is “bad.” The main objection to evolutionary ethics
is that it violates the isought distinction. According to most ethical systems,
we are asked to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others. If these others
were limited to our biological relatives, then the biological notion of
inclusive fitness might be adequate to account for such altruistic behavior,
but the scope of ethical systems extends past one’s biological relatives.
Advocates of evolutionary ethics are hard pressed to explain the full range of
behavior that is traditionally considered as virtuous. Either biological
evolution cannot provide an adequate justification for ethical behavior or else
ethical systems must be drastically reduced in their scope.
Philosophical economics,
the study of methodological issues facing positive economic theory and
normative problems on the intersection of welfare economics and political
philosophy. Methodological issues. Applying approaches and questions in the
philosophy of science specifically to economics, the philosophy of economics
explores epistemological and conceptual problems raised by the explanatory aims
and strategy of economic theory: Do its assumptions about individual choice
constitute laws, and do they explain its derived generalizations about markets
and economies? Are these generalizations laws, and if so, how are they tested
by observation of economic processes, and how are theories in the various
compartments of economics
microeconomics, macroeconomics
related to one another and to econometrics? How are the various
schools neoclassical, institutional,
Marxian, etc. related to one another,
and what sorts of tests might enable us to choose between their theories?
Historically, the chief issue of interest in the development of the philosophy
of economics has been the empirical adequacy of the assumptions of rational
“economic man”: that all agents have complete and transitive cardinal or
ordinal utility rankings or preference orders and that they always choose that
available option which maximizes their utility or preferences. Since the actual
behavior of agents appears to disconfirm these assumptions, the claim that they
constitute causal laws governing economic behavior is difficult to sustain. On
the other hand, the assumption of preference-maximizing behavior is
indispensable to twentieth-century economics. These two considerations jointly
undermine the claim that economic theory honors criteria on explanatory power
and evidential probity drawn philosophy of economics philosophy of economics
669 669 from physical science. Much
work by economists and philosophers has been devoted therefore to disputing the
claim that the assumptions of rational choice theory are false or to disputing
the inference from this claim to the conclusion that the cognitive status of
economic theory as empirical science is thereby undermined. Most frequently it
has been held that the assumptions of rational choice are as harmless and as
indispensable as idealizations are elsewhere in science. This view must deal
with the allegation that unlike theories embodying idealization elsewhere in
science, economic theory gains little more in predictive power from these
assumptions about agents’ calculations than it would secure without any
assumptions about individual choice. Normative issues. Both economists and
political philosophers are concerned with identifying principles that will
ensure just, fair, or equitable distributions of scarce goods. For this reason
neoclassical economic theory shares a history with utilitarianism in moral
philosophy. Contemporary welfare economics continues to explore the limits of
utilitarian prescriptions that optimal economic and political arrangements
should maximize and/or equalize utility, welfare, or some surrogate. It also
examines the adequacy of alternatives to such utilitarian principles. Thus,
economics shares an agenda of interests with political and moral philosophy.
Utilitarianism in economics and philosophy has been constrained by an early
realization that utilities are neither cardinally measurable nor
interpersonally comparable. Therefore the prescription to maximize and/or
equalize utility cannot be determinatively obeyed. Welfare theorists have
nevertheless attempted to establish principles that will enable us to determine
the equity, fairness, or justice of various economic arrangements, and that do
not rely on interpersonal comparisons required to measure whether a
distribution is maximal or equal in the utility it accords all agents. Inspired
by philosophers who have surrendered utilitarianism for other principles of
equality, fairness, or justice in distribution, welfare economists have
explored Kantian, social contractarian, and communitarian alternatives in a
research program that cuts clearly across both disciplines. Political
philosophy has also profited as much from innovations in economic theory as
welfare economics has benefited from moral philosophy. Theorems from welfare
economics that establish the efficiency of markets in securing distributions
that meet minimal conditions of optimality and fairness have led moral philosophers
to reexamine the moral status of free-market exchange. Moreover, philosophers
have come to appreciate that coercive social institutions are sometimes best
understood as devices for securing public goods
goods like police protection that cannot be provided to those who pay
for them without also providing them to free riders who decline to do so. The
recognition that everyone would be worse off, including free riders, were the
coercion required to pay for these goods not imposed, is due to welfare economics
and has led to a significant revival of interest in the work of Hobbes, who
appears to have prefigured such arguments.
philosophy of education,
a branch of philosophy concerned with virtually every aspect of the educational
enterprise. It significantly overlaps other, more mainstream branches
especially epistemology and ethics, but even logic and metaphysics. The field
might almost be construed as a “series of footnotes” to Plato’s Meno, wherein
are raised such fundamental issues as whether virtue can be taught; what virtue
is; what knowledge is; what the relation between knowledge of virtue and being
virtuous is; what the relation between knowledge and teaching is; and how and
whether teaching is possible. While few people would subscribe to Plato’s
doctrine or convenient fiction, perhaps in Meno that learning by being taught
is a process of recollection, the paradox of inquiry that prompts this doctrine
is at once the root text of the perennial debate between rationalism and
empiricism and a profoundly unsettling indication that teaching passeth
understanding. Mainstream philosophical topics considered within an educational
context tend to take on a decidedly genetic cast. So, e.g., epistemology, which
analytic philosophy has tended to view as a justificatory enterprise, becomes
concerned if not with the historical origins of knowledge claims then with
their genesis within the mental economy of persons generally in consequence of their educations. And even
when philosophers of education come to endorse something akin to Plato’s
classic account of knowledge as justified true belief, they are inclined to
suggest, then, that the conveyance of knowledge via instruction must somehow
provide the student with the justification along with the true philosophy of
education philosophy of education 670
670 belief thereby reintroducing
a genetic dimension to a topic long lacking one. Perhaps, indeed, analytic
philosophy’s general though not universal neglect of philosophy of education is
traceable in some measure to the latter’s almost inevitably genetic
perspective, which the former tended to decry as armchair science and as a
threat to the autonomy and integrity of proper philosophical inquiry. If this
has been a basis for neglect, then philosophy’s more recent, postanalytic turn
toward naturalized inquiries that reject any dichotomy between empirical and
philosophical investigations may make philosophy of education a more inviting
area. Alfred North Whitehead, himself a leading light in the philosophy of education,
once remarked that we are living in the period of educational thought subject
to the influence of Dewey, and there is still no denying the observation.
Dewey’s instrumentalism, his special brand of pragmatism, informs his
extraordinarily comprehensive progressive philosophy of education; and he once
went so far as to define all of philosophy as the general theory of education.
He identifies the educative process with the growth of experience, with growing
as developing where experience is to be
understood more in active terms, as involving doing things that change one’s
objective environment and internal conditions, than in the passive terms, say,
of Locke’s “impression” model of experience. Even traditionalistic philosophers
of education, most notably Maritain, have acknowledged the wisdom of Deweyan
educational means, and have, in the face of Dewey’s commanding philosophical
presence, reframed the debate with progressivists as one about appropriate
educational ends thereby insufficiently
acknowledging Dewey’s trenchant critique of the meansend distinction. And even
some recent analytic philosophers of education, such as R. S. Peters, can be
read as if translating Deweyan insights e.g., about the aim of education into
an analytic idiom. Analytic philosophy of education, as charted by Oxford
philosopher R. S. Peters, Israel Scheffler, and others in the Anglo-
philosophical tradition, has used the tools of linguistic analysis on a wide
variety of educational concepts learning, teaching, training, conditioning,
indoctrinating, etc. and investigated their interconnections: Does teaching
entail learning? Does teaching inevitably involve indoctrinating? etc. This
careful, subtle, and philosophically sophisticated work has made possible a
much-needed conceptual precision in educational debates, though the debaters
who most influence public opinion and policy have rarely availed themselves of
that precisification. Recent work in philosophy of education, however, has
taken up some major educational objectives
moral and other values, critical and creative thinking in a way that promises to have an impact on
the actual conduct of education. Philosophy of education, long isolated in
schools of education from the rest of the academic philosophical community, has
also been somewhat estranged from the professional educational mainstream.
Dewey would surely have approved of a change in this status quo.
philosophy of history,
the philosophical study of human history and of attempts to record and
interpret it. ‘History’ in English and its equivalent in most modern European
languages has two primary senses: 1 the temporal progression of large-scale
human events and actions, primarily but not exclusively in the past; and 2 the
discipline or inquiry in which knowledge of the human past is acquired or
sought. This has led to two senses of ‘philosophy of history’, depending on
which “history” has been the object of philosophers’ attentions. Philosophy of
history in the first sense is often called substantive or speculative, and
placed under metaphysics. Philosophy of history in the second sense is called
critical or analytic and can be placed in epistemology. Substantive philosophy
of history. In the West, substantive philosophy of history is thought to begin
only in the Christian era. In the City of God, Augustine wonders why Rome
flourished while pagan, yet fell into disgrace after its conversion to
Christiantity. Divine reward and punishment should apply to whole peoples, not
just to individuals. The unfolding of events in history should exhibit a plan
that is intelligible rationally, morally, and for Augustine theologically. As a
believer Augustine is convinced that there is such a plan, though it may not
always be evident. In the modern period, philosophers such as Vico and Herder
also sought such intelligibility in history. They also believed in a long-term
direction or purpose of history that is often opposed to and makes use of the
purposes of individuals. The most elaborate and best-known example of this
approach is found in Hegel, who thought that the gradual realization of human
freedom could be discerned in history even if much slavery, tyranny, and
suffering are necessary in the process. Marx, too, claimed to know the
laws in his case economic according to which history unfolds. Similar
searches for overall “meaning” in human history have been undertaken in the
twentieth century, notably by Arnold Toynbee 95, author of the twelve-volume
Study of History, and Oswald Spengler 06, author of Decline of the West. But the
whole enterprise was denounced by the positivists and neo-Kantians of the late
nineteenth century as irresponsible metaphysical speculation. This attitude was
shared by twentieth-century neopositivists and some of their heirs in the
analytic tradition. There is some irony in this, since positivism, explicitly
in thinkers like Comte and implicitly in others, involves belief in
progressively enlightened stages of human history crowned by the modern age of
science. Critical philosophy of history. The critical philosophy of history,
i.e., the epistemology of historical knowledge, can be traced to the late
nineteenth century and has been dominated by the paradigm of the natural
sciences. Those in the positivist, neopositivist, and postpositivist tradition,
in keeping with the idea of the unity of science, believe that to know the
historical past is to explain events causally, and all causal explanation is
ultimately of the same sort. To explain human events is to derive them from
laws, which may be social, psychological, and perhaps ultimately biological and
physical. Against this reductionism, the neo-Kantians and Dilthey argued that
history, like other humanistic disciplines Geisteswissenschaften, follows
irreducible rules of its own. It is concerned with particular events or
developments for their own sake, not as instances of general laws, and its aim
is to understand, rather than explain, human actions. This debate was
resurrected in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world.
Philosophers like Hempel and Morton White b.7 elaborated on the notion of
causal explanation in history, while Collingwood and William Dray b.1 described
the “understanding” of historical agents as grasping the thought behind an
action or discovering its reasons rather than its causes. The comparison with
natural science, and the debate between reductionists and antireductionists,
dominated other questions as well: Can or should history be objective and
valuefree, as science purportedly is? What is the significance of the fact that
historians can never perceive the events that interest them, since they are in
the past? Are they not limited by their point of view, their place in history,
in a way scientists are not? Some positivists were inclined to exclude history
from science, rather than make it into one, relegating it to “literature”
because it could never meet the standards of objectivity and genuine
explanation; it was often the anti-positivists who defended the cognitive
legitimacy of our knowledge of the past. In the non-reductionist tradition,
philosophers have increasingly stressed the narrative character of history: to
understand human actions generally, and past actions in particular, is to tell
a coherent story about them. History, according to W. B. Gallie b.2, is a species
of the genus Story. History does not thereby become fiction: narrative remains
a “cognitive instrument” Louis Mink, 183 just as appropriate to its domain as
theory construction is to science. Nevertheless, concepts previously associated
with fictional narratives, such as plot structure and beginning-middle-end, are
seen as applying to historical narratives as well. This tradition is carried
further by Hayden White b.8, who analyzes classical nineteenth-century
histories and even substantive philosophies of history such as Hegel’s as
instances of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. In White’s work this mode of
analysis leads him to some skepticism about history’s capacity to “represent”
the reality of the past: narratives seem to be imposed upon the data, often for
ideological reasons, rather than drawn from them. To some extent White’s view
joins that of some positivists who believe that history’s literary character
excludes it from the realm of science. But for White this is hardly a defect.
Some philosophers have criticized the emphasis on narrative in discussions of
history, since it neglects search and discovery, deciphering and evaluating
sources, etc., which is more important to historians than the way they “write
up” their results. Furthermore, not all history is presented in narrative form.
The debate between pro- and anti-narrativists among philosophers of history has
its parallel in a similar debate among historians themselves. Academic history
in recent times has seen a strong turn away from traditional political history
toward social, cultural, and economic analyses of the human past. Narrative is
associated with the supposedly outmoded focus on the doings of kings, popes,
and generals. These are considered e.g. by the
historian Fernand Braudel, 285 merely surface ripples compared to the
deeper-lying and slower-moving currents of social and economic change. It is
the methods and concepts of the social sciences, not the art of the
storyteller, on which the historian must draw. This debate has now lost some of
its steam and narrative history has made something of a comeback among
historians. Among philosophers Paul Ricoeur has tried to show that even
ostensibly non-narrative history retains narrative features. Historicity.
Historicity or historicality: Geschichtlichkeit is a term used in the
phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey and Husserl through
Heidegger and Gadamer to indicate an essential feature of human existence.
Persons are not merely in history; their past, including their social past,
figures in their conception of themselves and their future possibilities. Some
awareness of the past is thus constitutive of the self, prior to being formed
into a cognitive discipine. Modernism and the postmodern. It is possible to
view some of the debates over the modern and postmodern in recent Continental
philosophy as a new kind of philosophy of history. Philosophers like Lyotard
and Foucault see the modern as the period from the Enlightenment and
Romanticism to the present, characterized chiefly by belief in “grand
narratives” of historical progress, whether capitalist, Marxist, or positivist,
with “man” as the triumphant hero of the story. Such belief is now being or
should be abandoned, bringing modernism to an end. In one sense this is like
earlier attacks on the substantive philosophy of history, since it unmasks as
unjustified moralizing certain beliefs about large-scale patterns in history.
It goes even further than the earlier attack, since it finds these beliefs at
work even where they are not explicitly expressed. In another sense this is a
continuation of the substantive philosophy of history, since it makes its own
grand claims about largescale historical patterns. In this it joins hands with
other philosophers of our day in a general historicization of knowledge e.g.,
the philosophy of science merges with the history of science and even of
philosophy itself. Thus the later Heidegger
and more recently Richard Rorty
view philosophy itself as a large-scale episode in Western history that
is nearing or has reached its end. Philosophy thus merges with the history of
philosophy, but only thanks to a philosophical reflection on this history as
part of history as a whole.
philosophy of law, also
called general jurisprudence, the study of conceptual and theoretical problems
concerning the nature of law as such, or common to any legal system. Problems
in the philosophy of law fall roughly into two groups. The first contains
problems internal to law and legal systems as such. These include a the nature
of legal rules; the conditions under which they can be said to exist and to
influence practice; their normative character, as mandatory or advisory; and
the indeterminacy of their language; b the structure and logical character of
legal norms; the analysis of legal principles as a class of legal norms; and
the relation between the normative force of law and coercion; c the identity
conditions for legal systems; when a legal system exists; and when one legal
system ends and another begins; d the nature of the reasoning used by courts in
adjudicating cases; e the justification of legal decisions; whether legal
justification is through a chain of inferences or by the coherence of norms and
decisions; and the relation between intralegal and extralegal justification; f
the nature of legal validity and of what makes a norm a valid law; the relation
between validity and efficacy, the fact that the norms of a legal system are
obeyed by the norm-subjects; g properties of legal systems, including comprehensiveness
the claim to regulate any behavior and completeness the absence of gaps in the
law; h legal rights; under what conditions citizens possess them; and their
analytical structure as protected normative positions; i legal interpretation;
whether it is a pervasive feature of law or is found only in certain kinds of
adjudication; its rationality or otherwise; and its essentially ideological
character or otherwise. The second group of problems concerns the philosophy of
law philosophy of law 676 676 relation
between law as one particular social institution in a society and the wider
political and moral life of that society: a the nature of legal obligation;
whether there is an obligation, prima facie or final, to obey the law as such;
whether there is an obligation to obey the law only when certain standards are
met, and if so, what those standards might be; b the authority of law; and the
conditions under which a legal system has political or moral authority or
legitimacy; c the functions of law; whether there are functions performed by a
legal system in a society that are internal to the design of law; and analyses
from the perspective of political morality of the functioning of legal systems;
d the legal concept of responsibility; its analysis and its relation to moral
and political concepts of responsibility; in particular, the place of mental
elements and causal elements in the assignment of responsibility, and the
analysis of those elements; e the analysis and justification of legal
punishment; f legal liberty, and the proper limits or otherwise of the
intrusion of the legal system into individual liberty; the plausibility of
legal moralism; g the relation between law and justice, and the role of a legal
system in the maintenance of social justice; h the relation between legal
rights and political or moral rights; i the status of legal reasoning as a
species of practical reasoning; and the relation between law and practical
reason; j law and economics; whether legal decision making in fact tracks, or
otherwise ought to track, economic efficiency; k legal systems as sources of
and embodiments of political power; and law as essentially gendered, or imbued
with race or class biases, or otherwise. Theoretical positions in the
philosophy of law tend to group into three large kinds legal positivism, natural law, and legal
realism. Legal positivism concentrates on the first set of problems, and
typically gives formal or content-independent solutions to such problems. For
example, legal positivism tends to regard legal validity as a property of a
legal rule that the rule derives merely from its formal relation to other legal
rules; a morally iniquitous law is still for legal positivism a valid legal
rule if it satisfies the required formal existence conditions. Legal rights
exist as normative consequences of valid legal rules; no questions of the
status of the right from the point of view of political morality arise. Legal
positivism does not deny the importance of the second set of problems, but
assigns the task of treating them to other disciplines political philosophy, moral philosophy,
sociology, psychology, and so forth. Questions of how society should design its
legal institutions, for legal positivism, are not technically speaking problems
in the philosophy of law, although many legal positivists have presented their
theories about such questions. Natural law theory and legal realism, by
contrast, regard the sharp distinction between the two kinds of problem as an
artifact of legal positivism itself. Their answers to the first set of problems
tend to be substantive or content-dependent. Natural law theory, for example,
would regard the question of whether a law was consonant with practical reason,
or whether a legal system was morally and politically legitimate, as in whole
or in part determinative of the issue of legal validity, or of whether a legal
norm granted a legal right. The theory would regard the relation between a
legal system and liberty or justice as in whole or in part determinative of the
normative force and the justification for that system and its laws. Legal
realism, especially in its contemporary politicized form, sees the claimed role
of the law in legitimizing certain gender, race, or class interests as the
prime salient property of law for theoretical analysis, and questions of the
determinacy of legal rules or of legal interpretation or legal right as of
value only in the service of the project of explaining the political power of
law and legal systems.
philosophy of literature,
literary theory. However, while the literary theorist, who is often a literary
critic, is primarily interested in the conceptual foundations of practical
criticism, philosophy of literature, usually done by philosophers, is more
often concerned to place literature in the context of a philosophical system.
Plato’s dialogues have much to say about poetry, mostly by way of aligning it
with Plato’s metaphysical, epistemological, and ethico-political views.
Aristotle’s Poetics, the earliest example of literary theory in the West, is
also an attempt to accommodate the practice of Grecian poets to Aristotle’s
philosophical system as a whole. Drawing on the thought of philosophers like
Kant and Schelling, Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers in his Biographia Literaria
a philosophy of literature that is to Romantic poetics what Aristotle’s
treatise is to classical poetics: a literary theory that is confirmed both by
the poets whose work it legitimates and by the metaphysics that recommends it.
Many philosophers, among them Hume, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Sartre, have
tried to make room for literature in their philosophical edifices. Some
philosophers, e.g., the G. Romantics, have made literature and the other arts
the cornerstone of philosophy itself. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 8. Sometimes ‘philosophy of literature’ is
understood in a second sense: philosophy and literature; i.e., philosophy and
literature taken to be distinct and essentially autonomous activities that may
nonetheless sustain determinate relations to each other. Philosophy of
literature, understood in this way, is the attempt to identify the differentiae
that distinguish philosophy from literature and to specify their relationships
to each other. Sometimes the two are distinguished by their subject matter
e.g., philosophy deals with objective structures, literature with subjectivity,
sometimes by their methods philosophy is an act of reason, literature the
product of imagination, inspiration, or the unconscious, sometimes by their
effects philosophy produces knowledge, literature produces emotional
fulfillment or release, etc. Their relationships then tend to occupy the areas
in which they are not essentially distinct. If their subject matters are
distinct, their effects may be the same philosophy and literature both produce
understanding, the one of fact and the other of feeling; if their methods are
distinct, they may be approaching the same subject matter in different ways;
and so on. For Aquinas, e.g., philosophy and poetry may deal with the same
objects, the one communicating truth about the object in syllogistic form, the
other inspiring feelings about it through figurative language. For Heidegger,
the philosopher investigates the meaning of being while the poet names the
holy, but their preoccupations tend to converge at the deepest levels of
thinking. For Sartre, literature is philosophy engagé, existential-political
activity in the service of freedom. ’Philosophy of literature’ may also be
taken in a third sense: philosophy in literature, the attempt to discover
matters of philosophical interest and value in literary texts. The philosopher
may undertake to identify, examine, and evaluate the philosophical content of
literary texts that contain expressions of philosophical ideas and discussions
of philosophical problems e.g., the
debates on free will and theodicy in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers
Karamazov. Many if not most courses on
philosophy of literature are taught from this point of view. Much interesting
and important work has been done in this vein; e.g., Santayana’s Three
Philosophical Poets 0, Cavell’s essays on Emerson and Thoreau, and Nussbaum’s
Love’s Knowledge 9. It should be noted, however, that to approach the matter in
this way presupposes that literature and philosophy are simply different forms
of the same content: what philosophy expresses in the form of argument
literature expresses in lyric, dramatic, or narrative form. The philosopher’s
treatment of literature implies that he is uniquely positioned to explicate the
subject matter treated in both literary and philosophical texts, and that the
language of philosophy gives optimal expression to a content less adequately
expressed in the language of literature. The model for this approach may well
be Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which treats art along with religion as
imperfect adumbrations of a truth that is fully and properly articulated only
in the conceptual mode of philosophical dialectic. Dissatisfaction with this
presupposition and its implicit privileging of philosophy over literature has
led to a different view of the relation between philosophy and literature and
so to a different program for philosophy of literature. The self-consciously
literary form of Kierkegaard’s writing is an integral part of his polemic
against the philosophical imperialism of the Hegelians. In this century, the
work of philosophers like Derrida and the philosophers and critics who follow
his lead suggests that it is mistaken to regard philosophy and literature as
alternative expressions of an identical content, and seriously mistaken to
think of philosophy as the master discourse, the “proper” expression of a
content “improperly” expressed in literature. All texts, on this view, have a
“literary” form, the texts of philosophers as well as the texts of novelists
and poets, and their content is internally determined by their “means of
expression.” There is just as much “literature in philosophy” as there is
“philosophy in literature.” Consequently, the philosopher of literature may no
longer be able simply to extract philosophical matter from literary form.
Rather, the modes of literary expression confront the philosopher with problems
that bear on the presuppositions of his own enterprise. E.g., fictional mimesis
especially in the works of postmodern writers raises questions about the
possibility and the prephilosophy of literature philosophy of literature
678 678 philosophy of logic philosophy
of logic 679 sumed normativeness of factual representation, and in so doing
tends to undermine the traditional hierarchy that elevates “fact” over
“fiction.” Philosophers’ perplexity over the truth-value of fictional
statements is an example of the kind of problems the study of literature can
create for the practice of philosophy see Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 2,
ch. 7. Or again, the self-reflexivity of contemporary literary texts can lead
philosophers to reflect critically on their own undertaking and may seriously
unsettle traditional notions of self-referentiality. When it is not regarded as
another, attractive but perhaps inferior source of philosophical ideas,
literature presents the philosopher with epistemological, metaphysical, and
methodological problems not encountered in the course of “normal” philosophizing.
philosophy of logic – H.
P. Grice, “Logic and conversation” – “Meaning,” in P. F. Strawson,
“Philosophical Logic,” Oxford -- the arena of philosophy devoted to examining
the scope and nature of logic. Aristotle considered logic an organon, or foundation,
of knowledge. Certainly, inference is the source of much human knowledge. Logic
judges inferences good or bad and tries to justify those that are good. One
need not agree with Aristotle, therefore, to see logic as essential to
epistemology. Philosophers such as Vitters, additionally, have held that the
structure of language reflects the structure of the world. Because inferences
have elements that are themselves linguistic or are at least expressible in
language, logic reveals general features of the structure of language. This
makes it essential to linguistics, and, on a Vittersian view, to metaphysics.
Moreover, many philosophical battles have been fought with logical weaponry.
For all these reasons, philosophers have tried to understand what logic is,
what justifies it, and what it tells us about reason, language, and the world.
The nature of logic. Logic might be defined as the science of inference;
inference, in turn, as the drawing of a conclusion from premises. A simple
argument is a sequence, one element of which, the conclusion, the others are
thought to support. A complex argument is a series of simple arguments. Logic,
then, is primarily concerned with arguments. Already, however, several
questions arise. 1 Who thinks that the premises support the conclusion? The
speaker? The audience? Any competent speaker of the language? 2 What are the
elements of arguments? Thoughts? Propositions? Philosophers following Quine
have found these answers unappealing for lack of clear identity criteria. Sentences
are more concrete and more sharply individuated. But should we consider
sentence tokens or sentence types? Context often affects interpretation, so it
appears that we must consider tokens or types-in-context. Moreover, many
sentences, even with contextual information supplied, are ambiguous. Is a
sequence with an ambiguous sentence one argument which may be good on some
readings and bad on others or several? For reasons that will become clear, the
elements of arguments should be the primary bearers of truth and falsehood in
one’s general theory of language. 3 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what
does ‘support’ mean? Logic evaluates inferences by distinguishing good from bad
arguments. This raises issues about the status of logic, for many of its pronouncements
are explicitly normative. The philosophy of logic thus includes problems of the
nature and justification of norms akin to those arising in metaethics. The
solutions, moreover, may vary with the logical system at hand. Some logicians
attempt to characterize reasoning in natural language; others try to
systematize reasoning in mathematics or other sciences. Still others try to
devise an ideal system of reasoning that does not fully correspond to any of
these. Logicians concerned with inference in natural, mathematical, or
scientific languages tend to justify their norms by describing inferential
practices in that language as actually used by those competent in it. These
descriptions justify norms partly because the practices they describe include evaluations
of inferences as well as inferences themselves. The scope of logic. Logical
systems meant to account for natural language inference raise issues of the
scope of logic. How does logic differ from semantics, the science of meaning in
general? Logicians have often treated only inferences turning on certain
commonly used words, such as ‘not’, ‘if’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘all’, and ‘some’,
taking them, or items in a symbolic language that correspond to them, as
logical constants. They have neglected inferences that do not turn on them,
such as My brother is married. Therefore, I have a sister-in-law. Increasingly,
however, semanticists have used ‘logic’ more broadly, speaking of the logic of
belief, perception, abstraction, or even kinship. Such uses seem to treat logic and semantics
as coextensive. Philosophers who have sought to maintain a distinction between
the semantics and logic of natural language have tried to develop non-arbitrary
criteria of logical constancy. An argument is valid provided the truth of its
premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. This definition relies on the
notion of truth, which raises philosophical puzzles of its own. Furthermore, it
is natural to ask what kind of connection must hold between the premises and
conclusion. One answer specifies that an argument is valid provided replacing
its simple constituents with items of similar categories while leaving logical
constants intact could never produce true premises and a false conclusion. On
this view, validity is a matter of form: an argument is valid if it
instantiates a valid form. Logic thus becomes the theory of logical form. On
another view, an argument is valid if its conclusion is true in every possible
world or model in which its premises are true. This conception need not rely on
the notion of a logical constant and so is compatible with the view that logic
and semantics are coextensive. Many issues in the philosophy of logic arise
from the plethora of systems logicians have devised. Some of these are deviant
logics, i.e., logics that differ from classical or standard logic while seeming
to treat the same subject matter. Intuitionistic logic, for example, which
interprets the connectives and quantifiers non-classically, rejecting the law
of excluded middle and the interdefinability of the quantifiers, has been
supported with both semantic and ontological arguments. Brouwer, Heyting, and
others have defended it as the proper logic of the infinite; Dummett has
defended it as the correct logic of natural language. Free logic allows
non-denoting referring expressions but interprets the quantifiers as ranging
only over existing objects. Many-valued logics use at least three truthvalues,
rejecting the classical assumption of bivalence
that every formula is either true or false. Many logical systems attempt
to extend classical logic to incorporate tense, modality, abstraction,
higher-order quantification, propositional quantification, complement
constructions, or the truth predicate. These projects raise important
philosophical questions. Modal and tense logics. Tense is a pervasive feature
of natural language, and has become important to computer scientists interested
in concurrent programs. Modalities of several sorts alethic possibility, necessity and deontic
obligation, permission, for example
appear in natural language in various grammatical guises. Provability,
treated as a modality, allows for revealing formalizations of metamathematics.
Logicians have usually treated modalities and tenses as sentential operators.
C. I. Lewis and Langford pioneered such approaches for alethic modalities; von
Wright, for deontic modalities; and Prior, for tense. In each area, many
competing systems developed; by the late 0s, there were over two hundred axiom
systems in the literature for propositional alethic modal logic alone. How
might competing systems be evaluated? Kripke’s semantics for modal logic has
proved very helpful. Kripke semantics in effect treats modal operators as
quantifiers over possible worlds. Necessarily A, e.g., is true at a world if
and only if A is true in all worlds accessible from that world. Kripke showed
that certain popular axiom systems result from imposing simple conditions on
the accessibility relation. His work spawned a field, known as correspondence
theory, devoted to studying the relations between modal axioms and conditions
on models. It has helped philosophers and logicians to understand the issues at
stake in choosing a modal logic and has raised the question of whether there is
one true modal logic. Modal idioms may be ambiguous or indeterminate with
respect to some properties of the accessibility relation. Possible worlds raise
additional ontological and epistemological questions. Modalities and tenses
seem to be linked in natural language, but attempts to bring tense and modal
logic together remain young. The sensitivity of tense to intra- and
extralinguistic context has cast doubt on the project of using operators to
represent tenses. Kamp, e.g., has represented tense and aspect in terms of
event structure, building on earlier work by Reichenbach. Truth. Tarski’s
theory of truth shows that it is possible to define truth recursively for
certain languages. Languages that can refer to their own sentences, however,
permit no such definition given Tarski’s assumptions for they allow the formulation of the liar
and similar paradoxes. Tarski concluded that, in giving the semantics for such
a language, we must ascend to a more powerful metalanguage. Kripke and others,
however, have shown that it is possible for a language permitting
self-reference to contain its own truth
680 predicate by surrendering bivalence or taking the truth predicate
indexically. Higher-order logic. First-order predicate logic allows
quantification only over individuals. Higher-order logics also permit
quantification over predicate positions. Natural language seems to permit such
quantification: ‘Mary has every quality that John admires’. Mathematics,
moreover, may be expressed elegantly in higher-order logic. Peano arithmetic
and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, e.g., require infinite axiom sets in
firstorder logic but are finitely axiomatizable
and categorical, determining their models up to isomorphism in second-order logic. Because they quantify
over properties and relations, higher-order logics seem committed to Platonism.
Mathematics reduces to higher-order logic; Quine concludes that the latter is
not logic. Its most natural semantics seems to presuppose a prior understanding
of properties and relations. Also, on this semantics, it differs greatly from
first-order logic. Like set theory, it is incomplete; it is not compact. This
raises questions about the boundaries of logic. Must logic be axiomatizable?
Must it be possible, i.e., to develop a logical system powerful enough to prove
every valid argument valid? Could there be valid arguments with infinitely many
premises, any finite fragment of which would be invalid? With an operator for
forming abstract terms from predicates, higher-order logics easily allow the
formulation of paradoxes. Russell and Whitehead for this reason adopted type
theory, which, like Tarski’s theory of truth, uses an infinite hierarchy and
corresponding syntactic restrictions to avoid paradox. Type-free theories avoid
both the restrictions and the paradoxes, as with truth, by rejecting bivalence
or by understanding abstraction indexically. ,
philosophy of
mathematics, the study of ontological and epistemological problems raised by
the content and practice of mathematics. The present agenda in this field
evolved from critical developments, notably the collapse of Pythagoreanism, the
development of modern calculus, and an early twentieth-century foundational
crisis, which forced mathematicians and philosophers to examine mathematical
methods and presuppositions. Grecian mathematics. The Pythagoreans, who
represented the height of early demonstrative Grecian mathematics, believed
that all scientific relations were measureable by natural numbers 1, 2, 3, etc.
or ratios of natural numbers, and thus they assumed discrete, atomic units for
the measurement of space, time, and motion. The discovery of irrational
magnitudes scotched the first of these beliefs. Zeno’s paradoxes showed that
the second was incompatible with the natural assumption that space and time are
infinitely divisible. The Grecian reaction, ultimately codified in Euclid’s
Elements, included Plato’s separation of mathematics from empirical science
and, within mathematics, distinguished number theory a study of discretely ordered entities from geometry, which concerns continua.
Following Aristotle and employing methods perfected by Eudoxus, Euclid’s proofs
used only “potentially infinite” geometric and arithmetic procedures. The
Elements’ axiomatic form and its constructive proofs set a standard for future mathematics.
Moreover, its dependence on visual intuition whose consequent deductive gaps
were already noted by Archimedes, together with the challenge of Euclid’s
infamous fifth postulate about parallel lines, and the famous unsolved problems
of compass and straightedge construction, established an agenda for generations
of mathematicians. The calculus. The two millennia following Euclid saw new
analytical tools e.g., Descartes’s geometry that wedded arithmetic and
geometric considerations and toyed with infinitesimally small quantities.
These, together with the demands of physical application, tempted
mathematicians to abandon the pristine Grecian dichotomies. Matters came to a
head with Newton’s and Leibniz’s almost simultaneous discovery of the powerful computational
techniques of the calculus. While these unified physical science in an
unprecedented way, their dependence on unclear notions of infinitesimal spatial
and temporal increments emphasized their shaky philosophical foundation.
Berkeley, for instance, condemned the calculus for its unintuitability.
However, this time the power of the new methods inspired a decidedly
conservative response. Kant, in particular, tried to anchor the new mathematics
in intuition. Mathematicians, he claimed, construct their objects in the “pure
intuitions” of space and time. And these mathematical objects are the a priori
forms of transcendentally ideal empirical objects. For Kant this combination of
epistemic empiricism and ontological idealism explained the physical applicability
of mathematics and thus granted “objective validity” i.e., scientific
legitimacy to mathematical procedures. Two nineteenth-century developments
undercut this Kantian constructivism in favor of a more abstract conceptual
picture of mathematics. First, Jànos Bolyai, Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard Riemann,
Nikolai Lobachevsky, and others produced consistent non-Euclidean geometries,
which undid the Kantian picture of a single a priori science of space, and once
again opened a rift between pure mathematics and its physical applications.
Second, Cantor and Dedekind defined the real numbers i.e., the elements of the
continuum as infinite sets of rational and ultimately natural numbers. Thus
they founded mathematics on the concepts of infinite set and natural number.
Cantor’s set theory made the first concept rigorously mathematical; while Peano
and Frege both of whom advocated securing rigor by using formal languages did
that for the second. Peano axiomatized number theory, and Frege ontologically
reduced the natural numbers to sets indeed sets that are the extensions of
purely logical concepts. Frege’s Platonistic conception of numbers as
unintuitable objects and his claim that mathematical truths follow analytically
from purely logical definitions the
thesis of logicism are both highly
anti-Kantian. Foundational crisis and movements. But antiKantianism had its own
problems. For one thing, Leopold Kronecker, who following Peter Dirichlet
wanted mathematics reduced to arithmetic and no further, attacked Cantor’s
abstract set theory on doctrinal grounds. Worse yet, the discovery of internal
antinomies challenged the very consistency of abstract foundations. The most
famous of these, Russell’s paradox the set of all sets that are not members of
themselves both is and isn’t a member of itself, undermined Frege’s basic
assumption that every well-formed concept has an extension. This was a
full-scale crisis. To be sure, Russell himself together with Whitehead
preserved the logicist foundational approach by organizing the universe of sets
into a hierarchy of levels so that no set can be a member of itself. This is
type theory. However, the crisis encouraged two explicitly Kantian foundational
projects. The first, Hilbert’s Program, attempted to secure the “ideal” i.e.,
infinitary parts of mathematics by formalizing them and then proving the
resultant formal systems to be conservative and hence consistent extensions of
finitary theories. Since the proof itself was to use no reasoning more
complicated than simple numerical calculations
finitary reasoning the whole
metamathematical project belonged to the untainted “contentual” part of
mathematics. Finitary reasoning was supposed to update Kant’s intuition-based
epistemology, and Hilbert’s consistency proofs mimic Kant’s notion of objective
validity. The second project, Brouwer’s intuitionism, rejected formalization,
and was not only epistemologically Kantian resting mathematical reasoning on
the a priori intuition of time, but ontologically Kantian as well. For intuitionism
generated both the natural and the real numbers by temporally ordered conscious
acts. The reals, in particular, stem from choice sequences, which exploit
Brouwer’s epistemic assumptions about the open future. These foundational
movements ultimately failed. Type theory required ad hoc axioms to express the
real numbers; Hilbert’s Program foundered on Gödel’s theorems; and intuitionism
remained on the fringes because it rejected classical logic and standard
mathematics. Nevertheless the legacy of these movements their formal methods, indeed their
philosophical agenda still characterizes
modern research on the ontology and epistemology of mathematics. Set theory,
e.g. despite recent challenges from category theory, is the lingua franca of
modern mathematics. And formal languages with their precise semantics are
ubiquitous in technical and philosophical discussions. Indeed, even
intuitionistic mathematics has been formalized, and Michael Dummett has recast
its ontological idealism as a semantic antirealism that defines truth as
warranted assertability. In a similar semantic vein, Paul Benacerraf proposed
that the philosophical problem with Hilbert’s approach is inability to provide
a uniform realistic i.e., referential, non-epistemic semantics for the allegedly
ideal and contentual parts of mathematics; and the problem with Platonism is
that its semantics makes its objects unknowable. Ontological issues. From this
modern perspective, the simplest realism is the outright Platonism that
attributes a standard model consisting of “independent” objects to classical
theories expressed in a first-order language i.e., a language whose quantifiers
range over objects but not properties. But in fact realism admits variations on
each aspect. For one thing, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem shows that formalized
theories can have non-standard models. There are expansive non-standard models:
Abraham Robinson, e.g., used infinitary non-standard models of Peano’s axioms
to rigorously reintroduce infinitesimals. Roughly, an infinitesimal is the
reciprocal of an infinite element in such a model. And there are also
“constructive” models, whose objects must be explicitly definable. Predicative
theories inspired by Poincaré and Hermann Weyl, whose stage-by-stage
definitions refer only to previously defined objects, produce one variety of
such models. Gödel’s constructive universe, which uses less restricted
definitions to model apparently non-constructive axioms like the axiom of
choice, exemplifies another variety. But there are also views various forms of
structuralism which deny that formal theories have unique standard models at
all. These views inspired by the fact,
already sensed by Dedekind, that there are multiple equivalid realizations of formal
arithmetic allow a mathematical theory
to characterize only a broad family of models and deny unique reference to
mathematical terms. Finally, some realistic approaches advocate formalization
in secondorder languages, and some eschew ordinary semantics altogether in
favor of substitutional quantification. These latter are still realistic, for
they still distinguish truth from knowledge. Strict finitists inspired by Vitters’s more stringent
epistemic constraints reject even the
open-futured objects admitted by Brouwer, and countenance only finite or even
only “feasible” objects. In the other direction, A. A. Markov and his school in
Russia introduced a syntactic notion of algorithm from which they developed the
field of “constructive analysis.” And the
mathematician Errett Bishop, starting from a Brouwer-like disenchantment
with mathematical realism and with strictly formal approaches, recovered large
parts of classical analysis within a non-formal constructive framework. All of
these approaches assume abstract i.e., causally isolated mathematical objects,
and thus they have difficulty explaining the wide applicability of mathematics
constructive or otherwise within empirical science. One response, Quine’s
“indispensability” view, integrates mathematical theories into the general
network of empirical science. For Quine, mathematical objects just like ordinary physical objects exist simply in virtue of being referents for
terms in our best scientific theory. By contrast Hartry Field, who denies that
any abstract objects exist, also denies that any purely mathematical assertions
are literally true. Field attempts to recast physical science in a relational
language without mathematical terms and then use Hilbert-style conservative
extension results to explain the evident utility of abstract mathematics.
Hilary Putnam and Charles Parsons have each suggested views according to which
mathematics has no objects proper to itself, but rather concerns only the
possibilities of physical constructions. Recently, Geoffrey Hellman has
combined this modal approach with structuralism. Epistemological issues. The
equivalence proved in the 0s of several different representations of
computability to the reasoning representable in elementary formalized
arithmetic led Alonzo Church to suggest that the notion of finitary reasoning
had been precisely defined. Church’s thesis so named by Stephen Kleene inspired
Georg Kreisel’s investigations in the 0s and 70s of the general conditions for
rigorously analyzing other informal philosophical notions like semantic consequence,
Brouwerian choice sequences, and the very notion of a set. Solomon Feferman has
suggested more recently that this sort of piecemeal conceptual analysis is
already present in mathematics; and that this rather than any global foundation
is the true role of foundational research. In this spirit, the relative
consistency arguments of modern proof theory a continuation of Hilbert’s
Program provide information about the epistemic grounds of various mathematical
theories. Thus, on the one hand, proofs that a seemingly problematic
mathematical theory is a conservative extension of a more secure theory provide
some epistemic support for the former. In the other direction, the fact that
classical number theory is consistent relative to intuitionistic number theory
shows contra Hilbert that his view of constructive reasoning must differ from
that of the intuitionists. Gödel, who did not believe that mathematics required
any ties to empirical perception, suggested nevertheless that we have a special
nonsensory faculty of mathematical intuition that, when properly cultivated,
can help us decide among formally independent propositions of set theory and
other branches of mathematics. Charles Parsons, in contrast, has examined the
place of perception-like intuition in mathematical reasoning. Parsons himself
has investigated models of arithmetic and of set theory composed of
quasi-concrete objects e.g., numerals and other signs. Others consistent with
some of Parsons’s observations have given a Husserlstyle phenomenological
analysis of mathematical intuition. Frege’s influence encouraged the logical
positivists and other philosophers to view mathematical knowledge as analytic
or conventional. Poincaré responded that the principle of mathematical
induction could not be analytic, and Vitters also attacked this
conventionalism. In recent years, various formal independence results and
Quine’s attack on analyticity have encouraged philosophers and historians of
mathematics to focus on cases of mathematical knowledge that do not stem from
conceptual analysis or strict formal provability. Some writers notably Mark
Steiner and Philip Kitcher emphasize the analogies between empirical and
mathematical discovery. They stress such things as conceptual evolution in
mathematics and instances of mathematical generalizations supported by
individual cases. Kitcher, in particular, discusses the analogy between
axiomatization in mathematics and theoretical unification. Penelope Maddy has
investigated the intramathematical grounds underlying the acceptance of various
axioms of set theory. More generally, Imre Lakatos argued that most
mathematical progress stems from a concept-stretching process of conjecture,
refutation, and proof. This view has spawned a historical debate about whether
critical developments such as those mentioned above represent Kuhn-style
revolutions or even crises, or whether they are natural conceptual advances in
a uniformly growing science.
Philosophical psychology,
-- vide H. P. Grice: “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the
bizarre” – in “Conception of Value,” Oxford, Clarendon Press. -- philosophy of
mind, the branch of philosophy that includes the philosophy of psychology,
philosophical psychology, and the area of metaphysics concerned with the nature
of mental phenomena and how they fit into the causal structure of reality.
Philosophy of psychology, a branch of the philosophy of science, examines what
psychology says about the nature of psychological phenomena; examines aspects
of psychological theorizing such as the models used, explanations offered, and
laws invoked; and examines how psychology fits with the social sciences and
natural sciences. Philosophical psychology investigates folk psychology, a body
of commonsensical, protoscientific views about mental phenomena. Such
investigations attempt to articulate and refine views found in folk psychology
about conceptualization, memory, perception, sensation, consciousness, belief,
desire, intention, reasoning, action, and so on. The mindbody problem, a
central metaphysical one in the philosophy of mind, is the problem of whether
mental phenomena are physical and, if not, how they are related to physical
phenomena. Other metaphysical problems in the philosophy of mind include the
free will problem, the problem of personal identity, and the problem of how, if
at all, irrational phenomena such as akrasia and self-deception are possible.
Mindbody dualism Cartesian dualism. The doctrine that the soul is distinct from
the body is found in Plato and discussed throughout the history of philosophy,
but Descartes is considered the father of the modern mindbody problem. He
maintained that the essence of the physical is extension in space. Minds are
unextended substances and thus are distinct from any physical substances. The
essence of a mental substance is to think. This twofold view is called
Cartesian dualism. Descartes was well aware of an intimate relationship between
mind and the brain. There is no a priori reason to think that the mind is
intimately related to the brain; Aristotle, e.g., did not associate them.
Descartes mistakenly thought the seat of the relationship was in the pineal
gland. He maintained, however, that our minds are not our brains, lack spatial
location, and can continue to exist after the death and destruction of our
bodies. Cartesian dualism invites the question: What connects the mind and
brain? Causation is Descartes’s answer: states of our minds causally interact
with states of our brains. When bodily sensations such as aches, pains, itches,
and tickles cause us to moan, wince, scratch, or laugh, they do so by causing
brain states events, processes, which in turn cause bodily movements. In
deliberate action, we act on our desires, motives, and intentions to carry out
our purposes; and acting on these mental states involves their causing brain
states, which in turn cause our bodies to move, thereby causally influencing
the physical world. The physical world, in turn, influences our minds through
its influence on our brains. Perception of the physical world with five
senses sight, hearing, smell, taste, and
touch involves causal transactions from
the physical to the mental: what we perceive i.e., see, hear, etc. causes a
sense experience i.e., a visual experience, aural experience, etc.. Thus,
Descartes held that there is two-way psychophysical causal interaction: from
the mental to the physical as in action and from the physical to the mental as
in perception. The conjunction of Cartesian dualism and the doctrine of two-way
psychophysical causal interaction is called Cartesian interactionism.
philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 684
684 Perhaps the most widely discussed difficulty for this view is how
states of a non-spatial substance a mind can causally interact with states of a
substance that is in space a brain. Such interactions have seemed utterly
mysterious to many philosophers. Mystery would remain even if an unextended
mind is locatable at a point in space say, the center of the pineal gland. For
Cartesian interactionism would still have to maintain that causal transactions
between mental states and brain states are fundamental, i.e., unmediated by any
underlying mechanism. Brain states causally interact with mental states, but
there is no answer to the question of how they do so. The interactions are
brute facts. Many philosophers, including many of Descartes’s contemporaries,
have found that difficult to accept. Parallelism. Malebranche and Leibniz,
among others, rejected the possibility of psychophysical causal interaction.
They espoused versions of parallelism: the view that the mental and physical
realms run in parallel, in that types of mental phenomena co-occur with certain
types of physical phenomena, but these co-occurrences never involve causal
interactions. On all extant versions, the parallels hold because of God’s
creation. Leibniz’s parallelism is preestablished harmony: the explanation of
why mental types and certain physical types co-occur is that in the possible
world God actualized i.e., this world they co-occur. In discussing the relation
between the mental and physical realms, Leibniz used the analogy of two
synchronized but unconnected clocks. The analogy is, however, somewhat
misleading; suggesting causal mechanisms internal to each clock and intramental
and intraphysical causal transactions. But Leibniz’s monadology doctrine
excludes the possibility of such transactions: mental and physical phenomena
have no effects even within their own realms. Malebranche is associated with
occasionalism, according to which only God, through his continuous activities,
causes things to happen: non-divine phenomena never cause anything.
Occasionalism differs from preestablished harmony in holding that God is
continually engaged in acts of creation; each moment creating the world anew,
in such a way that the correlations hold. Both brands of parallelism face
formidable difficulties. First, both rest on highly contentious, obscure
theological hypotheses. The contention that God exists and the creation stories
in question require extensive defense and explanation. God’s relationship to
the world can seem at least as mysterious as the relationship Descartes posits
between minds and brains. Second, since parallelism denies the possibility of
psychophysical interaction, its proponents must offer alternatives to the
causal theory of perception and the causal theory of action or else deny that
we can perceive and that we can act intentionally. Third, since parallelism
rejects intramental causation, it must either deny that reasoning is possible
or explain how it is possible without causal connections between thoughts.
Fourth, since parallelism rejects physical transactions, it is hard to see how
it can allow, e.g., that one physical thing ever moves another; for that would
require causing a change in location. Perhaps none of these weighty
difficulties is ultimately insuperable; in any case, parallelism has been
abandoned. Epiphenomenalism. Empirical research gives every indication that the
occurrence of any brain state can, in principle, be causally explained by
appeal solely to other physical states. To accommodate this, some philosophers
espoused epiphenomenalism, the doctrine that physical states cause mental
states, but mental states do not cause anything. This thesis was discussed
under the name ‘conscious automatism’ by Huxley and Hogeson in the late
nineteenth century. William James was the first to use the term ‘epiphenomena’
to mean phenomena that lack causal efficacy. And James Ward coined the term
‘epiphenomenalism’ in 3. Epiphenomenalism implies that there is only one-way
psychophysical action from the physical
to the mental. Since epiphenomenalism allows such causal action, it can embrace
the causal theory of perception. However, when combined with Cartesian dualism,
epiphenomenalism, like Cartesian interactionism, implies the problematic thesis
that states of an extended substance can affect states of an unextended
substance. An epiphenomenalist can avoid this problem by rejecting the view
that the mind is an unextended substance while maintaining that mental states
and events are nonetheless distinct from physical states and events. Still,
formidable problems would remain. It is hard to see how epiphenomenalism can
allow that we are ever intentional agents. For intentional agency requires
acting on reasons, which, according to the causal theory of action, requires a
causal connection between reasons and actions. Since epiphenomenalism denies
that such causal connections are possible, it must either maintain that our
sense of agency is illusory or offer an alternative to the causal theory of
action. Similarly, it must explain how thinking is possible given that there
are no causal connections between thoughts. Monism The dual-aspect theory. Many
philosophers reject Descartes’s bifurcation of reality into mental and physical
substances. Spinoza held a dualattribute theory
also called the dual-aspect theory
according to which the mental and the physical are distinct modes of a
single substance, God. The mental and the physical are only two of infinitely
many modes of this one substance. Many philosophers opted for a thoroughgoing
monism, according to which all of reality is really of one kind. Materialism,
idealism, and neutral monism are three brands of monism. Hobbes, a contemporary
of Descartes, espoused materialism, the brand of monism according to which
everything is material or physical. Berkeley is associated with idealism, the
brand of monism according to which everything is mental. He held that both
mental and physical phenomena are perceptions in the mind of God. For Hegel’s
idealism, everything is part of the World Spirit. The early twentieth-century
British philosophers Bradley and McTaggart also held a version of idealism.
Neutral monism is the doctrine that all of reality is ultimately of one kind,
which is neither mental nor physical. Hume was a neutral monist, maintaining
that mental and physical substances are really just bundles of the neutral
entities. Versions of neutral monism were later held by Mach and, for a short time,
Russell. Russell called his neutral entities sensibilia and claimed that minds
and physical objects are logical constructions out of them. Phenomenalism. This
view, espoused in the twentieth century by, among others, Ayer, argues that all
empirical statements are synonymous with statements solely about phenomenal
appearances. While the doctrine is about statements, phenomenalism is either a
neutral monism or an idealism, depending on whether phenomenal appearances are
claimed to be neither mental nor physical or, instead, mental. The required
translations of physical statements into phenomenal ones proved not to be
forthcoming, however. Chisholm offered a reason why they would not be: what
appearances a physical state of affairs e.g., objects arrayed in a room has
depends both on physical conditions of observation e.g., lighting and physical
conditions of the perceiver e.g., of the nervous system. At best, a statement
solely about phenomenal appearances is equivalent to one about a physical state
of affairs, only when certain physical conditions of observation and certain
physical conditions of the perceiver obtain. Materialism. Two problems face any
monism: it must characterize the phenomena it takes as basic, and it must
explain how the fundamental phenomena make up non-basic phenomena. The idealist
and neutral monist theories proposed thus far have faltered on one or both
counts. Largely because of scientific successes of the twentieth century, such
as the rebirth of the atomic theory of matter, and the successes of quantum
mechanics in explaining chemistry and of chemistry in turn in explaining much
of biology, many philosophers today hold that materialism will ultimately
succeed where idealism and neutral monism apparently failed. Materialism,
however, comes in many different varieties and each faces formidable
difficulties. Logical behaviorism. Ryle ridiculed Cartesianism as the view that
there is a ghost in the machine the body. He claimed that the view that the
mind is a substance rests on a category mistake: ‘mind’ is a noun, but does not
name an object. Cartesianism confuses the logic of discourse about minds with
the logic of discourse about bodies. To have a mind is not to possess a special
sort of entity; it is simply to have certain capacities and dispositions.
Compare the thesis that to be alive is to possess not a certain entity, an
entelechy or élan vital, but rather certain capacities and dispositions. Ryle
maintained, moreover, that it was a mistake to regard mental states such as
belief, desire, and intention as internal causes of behavior. These states, he
claimed, are dispositions to behave in overt ways. In part in response to the
dualist point that one can understand our ordinary psychological vocabulary
‘belief’, ‘desire’, ‘pain’, etc. and know nothing about the physical states and
events in the brain, logical behaviorism has been proposed as a materialist
doctrine that explains this fact. On this view, talk of mental phenomena is
shorthand for talk of actual and potential overt bodily behavior i.e.,
dispositions to overt bodily behavior. Logical behaviorism was much discussed
from roughly the 0s until the early 0s. While Ryle is sometimes counted as a
logical behaviorist, he was not committed to the thesis that all mental talk
can be tr. into behavioral talk. The translations promised by logical
behaviorism appear unachievable. As Putnam and others pointed out, one can fake
being in pain and one can be in pain and yet not behave or be disposed to
behave as if one were in pain e.g., one might be paralyzed or might be a
“super-spartan”. Logical behaviorism faces similar difficulties in translating
sentences about what Russell called propositional attitudes i.e., beliefs that
p, desires that p, hopes that p, intentions that p, and the like. Consider the
following sample proposal similar to one offered by Carnap: one believes that
the cat is on the mat if and only if one is disposed to assent to ‘The cat is
on the mat’. First, the proposed translation meets the condition of being
purely behavioral only if assenting is understandable in purely behavioral
terms. That is doubtful. The proposal also fails to provide a sufficient or a
necessary condition: someone may assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’ and yet not
believe the cat is on the mat for the person may be trying to deceive; and a
belief that the cat is on the mat will dispose one to assent to ‘The cat is on
the mat’ only if one understands what is being asked, wants to indicate that
one believes the cat is on the mat, and so on. But none of these conditions is
required for believing that the cat is on the mat. Moreover, to invoke any of
these mentalistic conditions defeats the attempt to provide a purely behavioral
translation of the belief sentence. Although the project of translation has been
abandoned, in recent years Dennett has defended a view in the spirit of logical
behaviorism, intentional systems theory: belief-desire talk functions to
characterize overall patterns of dispositions to overt behavior in an
environmental context for the purposes of predicting overt behavior. The theory
is sometimes characterized as supervenient behaviorism since it implies that
whether an individual has beliefs, desires, intentions and the like supervenes
on his dispositions to overt behavior: if two individuals are exactly alike in
respect of their dispositions to overt behavior, the one has intentional states
if and only if the other does. This view allows, however, that the contents of
an individual’s intentional states what
the individual believes, desires, etc.
may depend on environmental factors. So it is not committed to the
supervenience of the contents of intentional states on dispositions to overt
behavior.the discussion of content externalism below. One objection to this
view, due to Ned Block, is that it would mistakenly count as an intentional
agent a giant look-up table “a
Blockhead” that has the same
dispositions to peripheral behavior as a genuine intentional agent. A look-up
table is a simple mechanical device that looks up preprogrammed responses.
Identity theories. In the early 0s, Herbert Feigl claimed that mental states
are brain states. He pointed out that if mental properties or state types are
merely nomologically correlated with physical properties or state types, the
connecting laws would be “nomological danglers”: irreducible to physical laws,
and thus additional fundamental laws. According to the identity theory, the
connecting laws are not fundamental laws and so not nomological danglers since
they can be explained by identifying the mental and physical properties in
question. In the late 0s and the early 0s, the philosopher Smart and the
psychologist U. T. Place defended the materialist view that sensations are
identical with brain processes. Smart claimed that while mental terms differ in
meaning from physical terms, scientific investigation reveals that they have
the same referents as certain physical terms. Compare the fact that while ‘the
Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ differ in meaning empirical investigation
reveals the same referent: Venus. Smart and Place claimed that feeling pain,
e.g., is some brain process, exactly which one to be determined by scientific
investigation. Smart claimed that sensation talk is paraphraseable in
topic-neutral terms; i.e., in terms that leave open whether sensational
properties are mental or physical. ‘I have an orange afterimage’ is
paraphraseable roughly as: ‘There is something going on like what is going on
when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good
light in front of me, i.e., when I really see an orange’. The description is
topic-neutral since it leaves open whether what is going on is mental or
physical. Smart maintained that scientific investigation reveals that what in
fact meets the topic-neutral description is a brain process. He held that
psychophysical identity statements such as ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’ are
contingent, likening these to, e.g., ‘Lightning is electrical discharge’, which
is contingent and knowable only through empirical investigation. Central state
materialism. This brand of materialism was defended in the late 0s and the
early 0s by Armstrong and others. On this view, mental states are states that
are apt to produce a certain range of behavior. Central state materialists
maintain that scientific investigation reveals that such states are states of
the central nervous system, and thus that mental states are contingently
identical with states of the central nervous system. Unlike logical
behaviorism, central state materialism does not imply that mental sentences can
be tr. into physical sentences. Unlike both logical behaviorism and philosophy
of mind philosophy of mind 687 687
intentional systems theory, central state materialism implies that mental
states are actual internal states with causal effects. And unlike Cartesian
interactionism, it holds that psychophysical interaction is just physical
causal interaction. Some central state materialists held in addition that the
mind is the brain. However, if the mind were the brain, every change in the
brain would be a change in the mind; and that seems false: not every little
brain change amounts to a change of mind. Indeed, the mind ceases to exist when
brain death occurs, while the brain continues to exist. The moral that most
materialists nowadays draw from such considerations is that the mind is not any
physical substance, since it is not a substance of any sort. To have a mind is
not to possess a special substance, but rather to have certain capacities to think, feel, etc. To that extent, Ryle was
right. However, central state materialists insist that the properly functioning
brain is the material seat of mental capacities, that the exercise of mental
capacities consists of brain processes, and that mental states are brain states
that can produce behavior. Epistemological objections have been raised to
identity theories. As self-conscious beings, we have a kind of privileged
access to our own mental states. The exact avenue of privileged access, whether
it is introspection or not, is controversial. But it has seemed to many
philosophers that our access to our own mental states is privileged in being
open only to us, whereas we lack any privileged access to the states of our
central nervous systems. We come to know about central nervous system states in
the same way we come to know about the central nervous system states of others.
So, against central state materialism and the identity theory, it is claimed
that mental states cannot be states of our central nervous systems. Taking privileged
access to imply that we have incorrigible knowledge of our conscious mental
states, and despairing of squaring privileged access so understood with
materialism, Rorty advocated eliminative materialism, the thesis that there
actually are no mental phenomena. A more common materialist response, however,
is to deny that privileged access entails incorrigibility and to maintain that
privileged access is compatible with materialism. Some materialists maintain
that while certain types of mental states e.g., sensations are types of
neurological states, it will be knowable only by empirical investigation that
they are. Suppose pain is a neural state N. It will be only a posteriori
knowable that pain is N. Via the avenue of privileged access, one comes to believe
that one is in a pain state, but not that one is in an N-state. One can believe
one is in a pain state without believing that one is in an N-state because the
concept of pain is different from the concept of N. Nevertheless, pain is N.
Compare the fact that while water is H2O, the concept of water is different
from that of H2O. Thus, while water is H2O, one can believe there is water in
the glass without believing that there is H2O in it. The avenue of privileged
access presents N conceptualized as pain, but never as neurological state N.
The avenue of privileged access involves the exercise of mental, but not
neurophysiological, concepts. However, our mental concepts answer to apply in virtue of the same properties state types as do certain
of our neurophysiological concepts. The identity theory and central state
materialism both hold that there are contingent psychophysical property and
type identities. Some theorists in this tradition tried to distinguish a notion
of theoretical identity from the notion of strict identity. They held that
mental states are theoretically, but not strictly, identical with brain states.
Against any such distinction, Kripke argued that identities are metaphysically
necessary, i.e., hold in every possible world. If A % B, then necessarily A %
B. Kripke acknowledged that there can be contingent statements of identity. But
such statements, he argued, will employ at least one term that is not a rigid
designator, i.e., a term that designates the same thing in every world in which
it designates anything. Thus, since ‘the inventor of bifocals’ is a non-rigid
designator, ‘Benjamin Franklin is the inventor of bifocals’ is contingent.
While Franklin is the inventor of bifocals, he might not have been. However,
statements of identity in which the identity sign is flanked by rigid
designators are, if true, metaphysically necessary. Kripke held that proper
names are rigid designators, and hence, the true identity statement ‘Cicero is
Tully’ is metaphysically necessary. Nonetheless, a metaphysically necessary
identity statement can be knowable only a posteriori. Indeed, ‘Cicero is Tully’
is knowable only a posteriori. Both ‘water’ and ‘H2O’, he maintained, are rigid
designators: each designates the same kind of stuff in every possible world.
And he thus maintained that it is metaphysically necessary that water is H2O,
despite its not being a priori knowable that water is H2O. On Kripke’s view,
any psychophysical identity statement that employs mental terms and physical
terms that are rigid designators will also be metaphysically necessary, if
true. Central state materialists maintain that mental concepts are equivalent
to concepts whose descriptive content is the state that is apt to produce
such-and-such behavior in such-and-such circumstances. These defining
descriptions for mental concepts are intended to be meaning-giving, not
contingent reference-fixing descriptions; they are, moreover, not rigid
designators. Thus, the central state materialists can concede that all
identities are necessary, but maintain that psychophysical claims of identity
are contingent claims of identity since the mental terms that figure in those
statements are not rigid designators. However, Kripke maintained that our
concepts of sensations and other qualitative states are not equivalent to the
sorts of descriptions in question. The term ‘pain’, he maintained, is a rigid
designator. This position might be refuted by a successful functional analysis
of the concept of pain in physical and/or topic-neutral terms. However, no
successful analysis of this sort has yet been produced. See the section on
consciousness below. A materialist can grant Kripke that ‘pain’ is a rigid
designator and claim that a statement such as ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’ will be
metaphysically necessary if true, but only a posteriori knowable. However,
Kripke raised a formidable problem for this materialism. He pointed out that if
a statement is metaphysically necessary but only a posteriori knowable, its
appearance of contingency calls for explanation. Despite being metaphysically
necessary, ‘Water is H2O’ appears contingent. According to Kripke, we explain
this appearance by noting that one can coherently imagine a world in which
something has all the phenomenal properties of water, and so is an “epistemic
counterpart” of it, yet is not H2O. The fact that we can coherently imagine
such epistemic counterparts explains why ‘Water is H2O’ appears contingent. But
no such explanation is available for e.g. ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’. For an
epistemic counterpart of pain, something with the phenomenal properties of
pain the feel of pain is pain. Something can look, smell, taste,
and feel like water yet not be water. But whatever feels like pain is pain:
pain is a feeling. In contrast, we can explain the apparent contingency of
claims like ‘Water is H2O’ because water is not constituted by its phenomenal
properties; our concept of water allows that it may have a “hidden essence,”
i.e., an essential microstructure. If Kripke is right, then anyone who
maintains that a statement of identity concerning a type of bodily sensation
and a type of physical state is metaphysically necessary yet a posteriori, must
explain the appearance of contingency in a way that differs from the way Kripke
explains the appearance of contingency of ‘Water is H2O’. This is a formidable
challenge. The final section, on consciousness, sketches some materialist
responses to it. The general issue of property and state type identity is
controversial. The claim that water is H2O despite the fact that the concept of
water is distinct from the concept of H2O seems plausible. However, property or
state type identity is more controversial than the identity of types of
substances. For properties or state types, there are no generally accepted
“non-duplication principles” to use a
phrase of David Lewis’s. A nonduplication principle for A’s will say that no
two A’s can be exactly alike in a certain respect; e.g., no two sets can have
exactly the same members. It is widely denied, for instance, that no two
properties can be possessed by exactly the same things. Two properties, it is
claimed, can be possessed by the same things; likewise, two state types can
occur in the same space-time regions. Even assuming that mental concepts are
distinct from physical concepts, the issue of whether mental state types are
physical state types raises the controversial issue of the non-duplication
principle for state types. Token and type physicalisms. Token physicalism is
the thesis that every particular is physical. Type physicalism is the thesis
that every type or kind of entity is physical; thus, the identity thesis and
central state materialism are type physicalist theses since they imply that
types of mental states are types of physical states. Type physicalism implies
token physicalism: given the former, every token falls under some physical
type, and therefore is token-token identical with some token of a physical
type. But token physicalism does not imply type physicalism; the former leaves
open whether physical tokens fall under non-physical types. Some doctrines
billed as materialist or physicalist embrace token epiphenomenalism, but reject
type physicalism. Non-reductive materialism. This form of materialism implies
token physicalism, but denies type physicalism and, as well, that mental types
properties, etc. are reducible to physical types. This doctrine has been
discussed since at least the late nineteenth century and was widely discussed
in the first third of the twentieth century. The British philosophers George
Henry Lewes, Samuel Alexander, Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad all held or
thought plausible a certain version of non-reductive materialism. They held or
sympathized with the view that every substance philosophy of mind philosophy of
mind 689 689 either is or is wholly
made up of physical particles, that the well-functioning brain is the material
seat of mental capacities, and that token mental states events, processes, etc.
are token neurophysiological states events, processes, etc.. However, they either
held or thought plausible the view that mental capacities, properties, etc.,
emerge from, and thus do not reduce to, physical capacities, properties, etc.
Lewes coined the term ‘emergence’; and Broad later labeled the doctrine
emergent materialism. Emergent materialists maintain that laws correlating
mental and physical properties are irreducible. These laws would be what Feigl
called nomological danglers. Emergentists maintain that, despite their
untidiness, such laws must be accepted with natural piety. Davidson’s doctrine
of anomalous monism is a current brand of non-reductive materialism. He
explicitly formulates this materialist thesis for events; and his
irreducibility thesis is restricted to intentional mental types e.g., believings, desirings, and intendings.
Anomalous monism says that every event token is physical, but that intentional
mental predicates and concepts ones expressing propositional attitudes do not
reduce, by law or definition, to physical predicates or concepts. Davidson
offers an original argument for this irreducibility thesis. Mental predicates
and concepts are, he claims, governed by constitutive principles of
rationality, but physical predicates and concepts are not. This difference, he
contends, excludes the possibility of reduction of mental predicates and
concepts to physical ones. Davidson denies, moreover, that there are strict
psychological or psychophysical laws. He calls the conjunction of this thesis
and his irreducibility thesis the principle of the anomalism of the mental. His
argument for token physicalism for events appeals to the principle of the
anomalism of the mental and to the principle of the nomological character of
causality: when two events are causally related, they are subsumed by a strict
law. He maintains that all strict laws are physical. Given that claim, and
given the principle of the nomological character of causality, it follows that
every event that is a cause or effect is a physical event. On this view,
psychophysical causation is just causation between physical events. Stephen
Schiffer has also maintained a non-reductive materialism, one he calls
ontological physicalism and sentential dualism: every particular is physical,
but mental truths are irreducible to physical truths. Non-reductive materialism
presupposes that mental state event tokens can fall under physical state types
and, thereby, count as physical state tokens. This presupposition is
controversial; no uncontroversial non-duplication principle for state tokens
settles the issue. Suppose, however, that mental state tokens are physical
state tokens, despite mental state types not being physical state types. The
issue of how mental state types and physical state types are related remains.
Suppose that some physical token x is of a mental type M say, a belief that the
cat is on the mat and some other physical token y is not of type M. There must,
it seems, be some difference between x and y in virtue of which x is, and y is
not, of type M. Otherwise, it is simply a brute fact that x is and y is not of
type M. That, however, seems implausible. The claim that certain physical state
tokens fall under mental state types simply as a matter of brute fact would
leave the difference in question utterly mysterious. But if it is not a brute
fact, then there is some explanation of why a certain physical state is a
mental state of a certain sort. The non-reductive materialist owes us an
explanation that does not imply psychophysical reduction. Moreover, even though
the non-reductive materialist can claim that mental states are causes because
they are physical states with physical effects, there is some question whether
mental state types are relevant to causal relations. Suppose every state is a
physical state. Given that physical states causally interact in virtue of
falling under physical types, it follows that whenever states causally interact
they do so in virtue of falling under physical types. That raises the issue of
whether states are ever causes in virtue of falling under mental types. Type
epiphenomenalism is the thesis that no state can cause anything in virtue of
falling under a mental type. Token epiphenomenalism, the thesis that no mental
state can cause anything, implies type epiphenomenalism, but not conversely.
Nonreductive materialists are not committed to token physicalism. However,
token epiphenomenalism may be false but type epiphenomenalism true since mental
states may be causes only in virtue of falling under physical types, never in
virtue of falling under mental types. Broad raised the issue of type
epiphenomenalism and discussed whether emergent materialism is committed to it.
Ted Honderich, Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa, and others have in recent years raised
the issue of whether non-reductive materialism is committed to type epiphenomenalism.
Brian McLaughlin has argued that the claim that an event acts as a cause in
virtue of falling under a certain physical type is consistent with the claim
that it also acts as a cause in virtue of falling under a certain mental type,
even when the mental type is not identical with the physical type. But even if
this is so, the relationship between mental types and physical types must be
addressed. Ernest LePore and Barry Loewer, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit,
Stephen Yablo, and others have attempted to characterize a relation between
mental types and physical types that allows for the causal relevance of mental
types. But whether there is a relation between mental and physical properties
that is both adequate to secure the causal relevance of mental properties and
available to non-reductive materialists remains an open question. Davidson’s
anomalous monism may appear to be a kind of dual-aspect theory: there are
events and they can have two sorts of autonomous aspects, mental and physical.
However, while Davidson holds that mental properties or types do not reduce to
physical ones, he also holds that the mental properties of an event depend on
its physical properties in that the former supervene on the latter in this
sense: no two events can be exactly alike in every physical respect and yet
differ in some mental respect. This proposal introduced the notion of
supervenience into contem- porary philosophy of mind. Often nonreductive
materialists argue that mental properties types supervene on physical properties
types. Kim, however, has distinguished various supervenience relations, and
argues that some are too weak to count as versions of materialism as opposed
to, say, dual-aspect theory, while other supervenience relations are too strong
to use to formulate non-reductive materialism since they imply reducibility.
According to Kim, non-reductive materialism is an unstable position.
Materialism as a supervenience thesis. Several philosophers have in recent
years attempted to define the thesis of materialism using a global
supervenience thesis. Their aim is not to formulate a brand of non-reductive
materialism; they maintain that their supervenience thesis may well imply
reducibility. Their aim is, rather, to formulate a thesis to which anyone who
counts as a genuine materialist must subscribe. David Lewis has maintained that
materialism is true if and only if any non-alien possible worlds that are
physically indiscernible are mentally indiscernible as well. Non-alien possible
worlds are worlds that have exactly the same perfectly natural properties as
the actual world. Frank Jackson has offered this proposal: materialism is true
if and only if any minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a
duplicate simpliciter of the actual world. A world is a physical duplicate of
the actual world if and only if it is exactly like the actual world in every
physical respect physical particular for physical particular, physical property
for physical property, physical relation for physical relation, etc.; and a
world is a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world if and only if it is
exactly like the actual world in every respect. A minimal physical duplicate of
the actual world is a physical duplicate that contains nothing else by way of
particulars, kinds, properties, etc. than it must in order to be a physical
duplicate of the actual world. Two questions arise for any formulation of the
thesis of materialism. Is it adequate to materialism? And, if it is, is it
true? Functionalism. The nineteenth-century British philosopher George Henry
Lewes maintained that while not every neurological event is mental, every
mental event is neurological. He claimed that what makes certain neurological
events mental events is their causal role in the organism. This is a very early
version of functionalism, nowadays a leading approach to the mindbody problem.
Functionalism implies an answer to the question of what makes a state token a
mental state of a certain kind M: namely, that it is an instance of some
functional state type identical with M. There are two versions of this
proposal. On one, a mental state type M of a system will be identical with the
state type that plays a certain causal role R in the system. The description
‘the state type that plays R in the system’ will be a nonrigid designator;
moreover, different state types may play R in different organisms, in which
case the mental state is multiply realizable. On the second version, a mental
state type M is identical with a second-order state type, the state of being in
some first-order state that plays causal role R. More than one first-order
state may play role R, and thus M may be multiply realizable. On either
version, if the relevant causal roles are specifiable in physical or
topic-neutral terms, then the functional definitions of mental state types will
be, in principle, physically reductive. Since the roles would be specified
partly in topic-neutral terms, there may well be possible worlds in which the
mental states are realized by non-physical states; thus, functionalism does not
imply token physicalism. However, functionalists typically maintain that, on
the empirical evidence, mental states are realized in our world only by
physical states. Functionalism comes in many varieties. philosophy of mind
philosophy of mind 691 691 Smart’s
topic-neutral analysis of our talk of sensations is in the spirit of
functionalism. And Armstrong’s central state materialism counts as a kind of
functionalism since it maintains that mental states are states apt to produce a
certain range of behavior, and thus identifies states as mental states by their
performing this causal role. However, functionalists today typically hold that
the defining causal roles include causal roles vis-à-vis input state types, as
well as output state types, and also vis-à-vis other internal state types of
the system in question. In the 0s David Lewis proposed a functionalist theory,
analytical functionalism, according to which definitions of mental predicates
such as ‘belief’, ‘desire’, and the like though not predicates such as
‘believes that p’ or ‘desires that q’ can be obtained by conjoining the
platitudes of commonsense psychology and formulating the Ramsey sentence for
the conjunction. The relevant Ramsey sentence is a second-order
quantificational sentence that quantifies over the mental predicates in the
conjunction of commonsense psychological platitudes, and from it one can derive
definitions of the mental predicates. On this view, it will be analytic that a
certain mental state e.g., belief is the state that plays a certain causal role
vis-à-vis other states; and it is a matter of empirical investigation what
state plays the role. Lewis claimed that such investigation reveals that the
state types that play the roles in question are physical states. In the early
0s, Putnam proposed a version of scientific functionalism, machine state
functionalism: according to this view, mental states are types of Turing
machine table states. Turing machines are mechanical devices consisting of a
tape with squares on it that either are blank or contain symbols, and an
executive that can move one square to the left, or one square to the right, or
stay where it is. And it can either write a symbol on a square, erase a symbol
on a square, or leave the square as it is. According to the Church-Turing
thesis, every computable function can be computed by a Turing machine. Now
there are two functions specifying such a machine: one from input states to
output states, the other from input states to input states. And these functions
are expressible by counterfactuals e.g., ‘If the machine is in state s 1 and
receives input I, it will emit output O and enter state s2’. Machine tables are
specified by the counterfactuals that express the functions in question. So the
main idea of machine state functionalism is that any given mental type is
definable as the state type that participates in certain counterfactual
relationships specified in terms of purely formal, and so not semantically
interpreted, state types. Any system whose inputs, outputs, and internal states
are counterfactually related in the way characterized by a machine table is a
realization of that table. This version of machine state functionalism has been
abandoned: no one maintains that the mind has the architecture of a Turing machine.
However, computational psychology, a branch of cognitive psychology,
presupposes a scientific functionalist view of cognitive states: it takes the
mind to have a computational architecture. See the section on cognitive
psychology below. Functionalism the view
that what makes a state a realization of a mental state is its playing a
certain causal role remains a leading
theory of mind. But functionalism faces formidable difficulties. Block has
pinpointed one. On the one hand, if the input and output states that figure in
the causal role alleged to define a certain mental state are specified in
insufficient detail, the functional definition will be too liberal: it will
mistakenly classify certain states as of that mental type. On the other hand,
if the input and output states are specified in too much detail, the functional
definition will be chauvinistic: it will fail to count certain states as
instances of the mental state that are in fact such instances. Moreover, it has
also been argued that functionalism cannot capture conscious states since types
of conscious states do not admit of functional definitions. Cognitive
psychology, content, and consciousness Cognitive psychology. Many claim that
one aim of cognitive psychology is to provide explanations of intentional
capacities, capacities to be in intentional states e.g., believing and to
engage in intentional activities e.g., reasoning. Fodor has argued that
classical cognitive psychology postulates a cognitive architecture that
includes a language of thought: a system of mental representation with a
combinatorial syntax and semantics, and computational processes defined over
these mental representations in virtue of their syntactic structures. On this
view, cognition is rule-governed symbol manipulation. Mental symbols have
meanings, but they participate in computational processes solely in virtue of
their syntactic or formal properties. The mind is, so to speak, a syntactic
engine. The view implies a kind of content parallelism: syntaxsensitive causal
transitions between symbols will preserve semantic coherence. Fodor has
mainphilosophy of mind philosophy of mind 692
692 tained that, on this language-of-thought view of cognition the
classical view, being in a beliefthat-p state can be understood as consisting
in bearing a computational relation one that is constitutive of belief to a
sentence in the language of thought that means that p; and similarly for
desire, intention, and the like. The explanation of intentional capacities will
be provided by a computational theory for mental sentences in conjunction with
a psychosemantic theory, a theory of meaning for mental sentences. A research
program in cognitive science called connectionism postulates networks of
neuron-like units. The units can be either on or off, or can have continuous
levels of activation. Units are connected, the connections have various degrees
of strength, and the connections can be either inhibitory or excitatory.
Connectionism has provided fruitful models for studying how neural networks
compute information. Moreover, connectionists have had much success in modeling
pattern recognition tasks e.g., facial recognition and tasks consisting of
learning categories from examples. Some connectionists maintain that
connectionism will yield an alternative to the classical language-of-thought
account of intentional states and capacities. However, some favor a
mixed-models approach to cognition: some cognitive capacities are symbolic,
some connectionist. And some hold that connectionism will yield an
implementational architecture for a symbolic cognitive architecture, one that
will help explain how a symbolic cognitive architecture is realized in the
nervous system. Content externalism. Many today hold that Twin-Earth thought
experiments by Putnam and Tyler Burge show that the contents of a subject’s
mental states do not supervene on intrinsic properties of the subject: two
individuals can be exactly alike in every intrinsic respect, yet be in mental
states with different contents. In response to Twin-Earth thought experiments,
some philosophers have, however, attempted to characterize a notion of narrow
content, a kind of content that supervenes on intrinsic properties of thinkers.
Content, externalists claim, depends on extrinsic-contextual factors. If
externalism is correct, then a psychosemantic theory must examine the relation
between mental symbols and the extrinsic, contextual factors that determine
contents. Stephen Stich has argued that psychology should eschew
psychosemantics and concern itself only with the syntactic properties of mental
sentences. Such a psychology could not explain intentional capacities. But
Stich urges that computational psychology also eschew that explanatory goal.
If, however, psychology is to explain intentional capacities, a psychosemantic
theory is needed. Dretske, Fodor, Ruth Millikan, and David Papineau have each
independently attempted to provide, in physicalistically respectable terms,
foundations for a naturalized externalist theory of the content of mental
sentences or internal physical states. Perhaps the leading problem for these
theories of content is to explain how the physical and functional facts about a
state determine a unique content for it. Appealing to work by Quine and by
Kripke, some philosophers argue that such facts will not determine unique
contents. Both causal and epistemic concerns have been raised about externalist
theories of content. Such theories invite the question whether the property of
having a certain content is ever causally relevant. If content is a contextual
property of a state that has it, can states have effects in virtue of their
having a certain content? This is an important issue because intentional states
figure in explanations not only in virtue of their intentional mode whether
they are beliefs, or desires, etc. but also in virtue of their contents.
Consider an everyday belief-desire explanation. The fact that the subject’s
belief was that there was milk in the refrigerator and the fact that the
subject’s desire was for milk are both essential to the belief and desire
explaining why the subject went to the refrigerator. Dretske, who maintains
that content depends on a causal-historical context, has attempted to explain
how the property of having a certain content can be causally relevant even
though the possession of the property depends on causal-historical factors. And
various other philosophers have attempted to explain how the causal relevance
of content can be squared with the fact that it fails to supervene on intrinsic
properties of the subject. A further controversial question is whether
externalism is consistent with our having privileged access to what we are
thinking. Consciousness. Conscious states such as pain states, visual
experiences, and so on, are such that it is “like” something for the subject of
the state to be in them. Such states have a qualitative aspect, a
phenomenological character. The what-it-is-like aspects of experiences are
called qualia. Qualia pose a serious difficulty for physicalism. Broad argued
that one can know all the physical properties of a chemical and how it causally
interacts with other physical phenomena and yet not know what it is like to
smell it. He concluded that the smell of the chemical is philosophy of mind
philosophy of mind 693 693 not itself
a physical property, but rather an irreducible emergent property. Frank Jackson
has recently defended a version of the argument, which has been dubbed the
knowledge argument. Jackson argues that a super-scientist, Mary, who knows all
the physical and functional facts about color vision, light, and matter, but
has never experienced redness since she has spent her entire life in a black
and white room, would not know what it is like to visually experience red. He
concludes that the physical and functional topic-neutral facts do not entail
all the facts, and thus materialism is false. In response, Lawrence Nemirow,
David Lewis, and others have argued that knowing what it is like to be in a
certain conscious state is, in part, a matter of know-how e.g., to be able to
imagine oneself in the state rather than factual knowledge, and that the
failure of knowledge of the physical and functional facts to yield such
know-how does not imply the falsity of materialism. Functionalism seems unable
to solve the problem of qualia since qualia seem not to be functionally
definable. In the 0s, Fodor and Ned Block argued that two states can have the
same causal role, thereby realizing the same functional state, yet the qualia
associated with each can be inverted. This is called the problem of inverted
qualia. The color spectrum, e.g., might be inverted for two individuals a
possibility raised by Locke, despite their being in the same functional states.
They further argued that two states might realize the same functional state,
yet the one might have qualia associated with it and the other not. This is
called the problem of absent qualia. Sydney Shoemaker has argued that the
possibility of absent qualia can be ruled out on functionalist grounds.
However, he has also refined the inverted qualia scenario and further
articulated the problem it poses for functionalism. Whether functionalism or
physicalism can avoid the problems of absent and inverted qualia remains an
open question. Thomas Nagel claims that conscious states are subjective: to
fully understand them, one must understand what it is like to be in them, but
one can do that only by taking up the experiential point of view of a subject
in them. Physical states, in contrast, are objective. Physical science attempts
to characterize the world in abstraction from the experiential point of view of
any subject. According to Nagel, whether phenomenal mental states reduce to
physical states turns on whether subjective states reduce to objective states;
and, at present, he claims, we have no understanding of how they could. Nagel
has suggested that consciousness may be explainable only by appeal to as yet
undiscovered basic nonmental, non-physical properties “proto-mental properties” the idea being that experiential points of
view might be constituted by protomental properties together with physical
properties. He thus claims that panphysicism is worthy of serious
consideration. Frank Jackson, James Van Cleve, and David Chalmers have argued
that conscious properties are emergent, i.e., fundamental, irreducible
macro-properties; and Chalmers sympathizes with a brand of panphysicism. Colin
McGinn claims that while conscious properties are likely reductively
explainable by brain properties, our minds seem conceptually closed to the
explaining properties: we are unable to conceptualize them, just as a cat is
unable to conceptualize a square root. Dennett attempts to explain
consciousness in supervenient behaviorist terms. David Rosenthal argues that
consciousness is a special case of intentionality more specifically, that conscious states are
just states we can come in a certain direct way to believe we are in. Dretske,
William Lycan, and Michael Tye argue that conscious properties are intentional
properties and physicalistically reducible. Patricia Churchland argues that
conscious phenomena are reducible to neurological phenomena. Brian Loar
contends that qualia are identical with either functional or neurological
states of the brain; and Christopher Hill argues specifically that qualia are
identical with neurological states. Loar and Hill attempt to explain away the
appearance of contingency of psychophysical identity claims, but in a way
different from the way Kripke attempts to explain the appearance of contingency
of ‘Water is H2O’, since they concede that that mode of explanation is
unavailable. They appeal to differences in the conceptual roles of neurological
and functional concepts by contrast with phenomenal concepts. They argue that
while such concepts are different, they answer to the same properties. The
nature of consciousness thus remains a matter of dispute. .
philosophy of psychology,
the philosophical study of psychology. Psychology began to separate from
philosophy with the work of the nineteenth-century G. experimentalists,
especially Fechner 180187, Helmholtz 1821 94, and Wundt 18320. In the first
half of the twentieth century, the separation was completed in this country
insofar as separate psychology departments were set up in most universities, psychologists
established their own journals and professional associations, and experimental
methods were widely employed, although not in every area of psychology the
first experimental study of the effectiveness of a psychological therapy did
not occur until 3. Despite this achievement of autonomy, however, issues have
remained about the nature of the connections, if any, that should continue
between psychology and philosophy. One radical view, that virtually all such
connections should be severed, was defended by the behaviorist John Watson in
his seminal 3 paper “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Watson criticizes
psychologists, even the experimentalists, for relying on introspective methods
and for making consciousness the subject matter of their discipline. He
recommends that psychology be a purely objective experimental branch of natural
science, that its theoretical goal be to predict and control behavior, and that
it discard all reference to consciousness. In making behavior the sole subject
of psychological inquiry, we avoid taking sides on “those time-honored relics
of philosophical speculation,” namely competing theories about the mindbody
problem, such as interactionism and parallelism. In a later work, published in
5, Watson claimed that the success of behaviorism threatened the very existence
of philosophy: “With the behavioristic point of view now becoming dominant, it
is hard to find a place for what has been called philosophy. Philosophy is
passing has all but passed, and unless
new issues arise which will give a foundation for a new philosophy, the world
has seen its last great philosopher.” One new issue was the credibility of
behaviorism. Watson gave no argument for his view that prediction and control
of behavior should be the only theoretical goals of psychology. If the attempt
to explain behavior is also legitimate, as some anti-behaviorists argue, then
it would seem to be an empirical question whether that goal can be met without
appealing to mentalistic causes. Watson and his successors, such as B. F.
Skinner, cited no credible empirical evidence that it could, but instead relied
primarily on philosophical arguments for banning postulation of mentalistic
causes. As a consequence, behaviorists virtually guaranteed that philosophers of
psychology would have at least one additional task beyond wrestling with
traditional mind body issues: the analysis and criticism of behaviorism itself.
Although behaviorism and the mindbody problem were never the sole subjects of
philosophy of psychology, a much richer set of topics developed after 0 when
the so-called cognitive revolution occurred in
psychology. These topics include innate knowledge and the acquisition of
transformational grammars, intentionality, the nature of mental representation,
functionalism, mental imagery, the language of thought, and, more recently,
connectionism. Such topics are of interest to many cognitive psychologists and
those in other disciplines, such as linguistics and artificial intelligence,
who contributed to the emerging discipline known as cognitive science. Thus,
after the decline of various forms of behaviorism and the consequent rise of
cognitivism, many philosophers of psychology collaborated more closely with
psychologists. This increased cooperation was probably due not only to a
broadening of the issues, but also to a methodological change in philosophy. In
the period roughly between 5 and 5, conceptual analysis dominated both and English philosophy of psychology and the
closely related discipline, the philosophy of mind. Many philosophers took the
position that philosophy was essentially an a priori discipline. These
philosophers rarely cited the empirical studies of psychologists. In recent
decades, however, philosophy of psychology has become more empirical, at least
in the sense that more attention is being paid to the details of the empirical
studies of psychologists. The result is more interchanges between philosophers
and psychologists. Although interest in cognitive psychology appears to
predominate in recent philosophy of
psychology, the new emphasis on empirical studies is also reflected in
philosophic work on topics not directly related to cognitive psychology. For
example, philosophers of psychology have written books in recent years on the
clinical foundations of psychoanalysis, the foundations of behavior therapy and
behavior modification, and self-deception. The emphasis on empirical data has
been taken one step further by naturalists, who argue that in epistemology, at
least, and perhaps in all areas of philosophy, philosophical questions should
either be replaced by questions from empirical psychology or be answered by
appeal to empirical studies in psychology and related disciplines. It is
philosophy of psychology philosophy of psychology 695 695
still too early to predict the fruitfulness of the naturalist approach, but
this new trend might well have pleased Watson. Taken to an extreme, naturalism
would make philosophy dependent on psychology instead of the reverse and thus
would further enhance the autonomy of psychology that Watson desired.
philosophy of religion,
the subfield of philosophy devoted to the study of religious phenomena.
Although religions are typically complex systems of theory and practice,
including both myths and rituals, philosophers tend to concentrate on
evaluating religious truth claims. In the major theistic traditions, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, the most important of these claims concern the
existence, nature, and activities of God. Such traditions commonly understand
God to be something like a person who is disembodied, eternal, free,
all-powerful, all-knowing, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and the
proper object of human obedience and worship. One important question is whether
this conception of the object of human religious activity is coherent; another
is whether such a being actually exists. Philosophers of religion have sought
rational answers to both questions. The major theistic traditions draw a
distinction between religious truths that can be discovered and even known by
unaided human reason and those to which humans have access only through a
special divine disclosure or revelation. According to Aquinas, e.g., the
existence of God and some things about the divine nature can be proved by unaided
human reason, but such distinctively Christian doctrines as the Trinity and
Incarnation cannot be thus proved and are known to humans only because God has
revealed them. Theists disagree about how such divine disclosures occur; the
main candidates for vehicles of revelation include religious experience, the
teachings of an inspired religious leader, the sacred scriptures of a religious
community, and the traditions of a particular church. The religious doctrines
Christian traditions take to be the content of revelation are often described
as matters of faith. To be sure, such traditions typically affirm that faith
goes beyond mere doctrinal belief to include an attitude of profound trust in
God. On most accounts, however, faith involves doctrinal belief, and so there
is a contrast within the religious domain itself between faith and reason. One
way to spell out the contrast though not
the only way is to imagine that the
content of revelation is divided into two parts. On the one hand, there are
those doctrines, if any, that can be known by human reason but are also part of
revelation; the existence of God is such a doctrine if it can be proved by
human reason alone. Such doctrines might be accepted by some people on the
basis of rational argument, while others, who lack rational proof, accept them
on the authority of revelation. On the other hand, there are those doctrines
that cannot be known by human reason and for which the authority of revelation
is the sole basis. They are objects of faith rather than reason and are often
described as mysteries of faith. Theists disagree about how such exclusive
objects of faith are related to reason. One prominent view is that, although
they go beyond reason, they are in harmony with it; another is that they are contrary
to reason. Those who urge that such doctrines should be accepted despite the
fact that, or even precisely because, they are contrary to reason are known as
fideists; the famous slogan credo quia absurdum ‘I believe because it is
absurd’ captures the flavor of extreme fideism. Many scholars regard
Kierkegaard as a fideist on account of his emphasis on the paradoxical nature
of the Christian doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate. Modern
philosophers of religion have, for the most part, confined their attention to
topics treatable without presupposing the truth of any particular tradition’s
claims about revelation and have left the exploration of mysteries of faith to
the theologians of various traditions. A great deal of philosophical work clarifying
the concept of God has been prompted by puzzles that suggest some incoherence
in the traditional concept. One kind of puzzle concerns the coherence of
individual claims about the nature of God. Consider the traditional affirmation
that God is allpowerful omnipotent. Reflection on this doctrine raises a famous
question: Can God make a stone so heavy that even God cannot lift it? No matter
how this is answered, it seems that there is at least one thing that even God
cannot do, i.e., make such a stone or lift such a stone, and so it appears that
even God cannot be all-powerful. Such puzzles stimulate attempts by
philosophers to analyze the concept of omnipotence in a way that specifies more
precisely the scope of the powers coherently attributable to an omnipotent
being. To the extent that such attempts succeed, they foster a deeper
understanding of the concept of God and, if God exists, of the divine nature.
Another sort of puzzle concerns the consistency of attributing two or more
properties to philosophy of religion philosophy of religion 696 696 God. Consider the claim that God is
both immutable and omniscient. An immutable being is one that cannot undergo
internal change, and an omniscient being knows all truths, and believes no
falsehoods. If God is omniscient, it seems that God must first know and hence
believe that it is now Tuesday and not believe that it is now Wednesday and
later know and hence believe that it is now Wednesday and not believe that it
is now Tuesday. If so, God’s beliefs change, and since change of belief is an
internal change, God is not immutable. So it appears that God is not immutable
if God is omniscient. A resolution of this puzzle would further contribute to
enriching the philosophical understanding of the concept of God. It is, of
course, one thing to elaborate a coherent concept of God; it is quite another
to know, apart from revelation, that such a being actually exists. A proof of
the existence of God would yield such knowledge, and it is the task of natural
theology to evaluate arguments that purport to be such proofs. As opposed to
revealed theology, natural theology restricts the assumptions fit to serve as
premises in its arguments to things naturally knowable by humans, i.e.,
knowable without special revelation from supernatural sources. Many people have
hoped that such natural religious knowledge could be universally communicated
and would justify a form of religious practice that would appeal to all
humankind because of its rationality. Such a religion would be a natural
religion. The history of natural theology has produced a bewildering variety of
arguments for the existence of God. The four main types are these: ontological
arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, and moral arguments.
The earliest and most famous version of the ontological argument was set forth
by Anselm of Canterbury in chapter 2 of his Proslogion. It is a bold attempt to
deduce the existence of God from the concept of God: we understand God to be a
perfect being, something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Because
we have this concept, God at least exists in our minds as an object of the
understanding. Either God exists in the mind alone, or God exists both in the
mind and as an extramental reality. But if God existed in the mind alone, then
we could conceive of a being greater than that than which nothing greater can
be conceived, namely, one that also existed in extramental reality. Since the
concept of a being greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived
is incoherent, God cannot exist in the mind alone. Hence God exists not only in
the mind but also in extramental reality. The most celebrated criticism of this
form of the argument was Kant’s, who claimed that existence is not a real
predicate. For Kant, a real predicate contributes to determining the content of
a concept and so serves as a part of its definition. But to say that something
falling under a concept exists does not add to the content of a concept; there
is, Kant said, no difference in conceptual content between a hundred real
dollars and a hundred imaginary dollars. Hence whether or not there exists
something that corresponds to a concept cannot be settled by definition. The
existence of God cannot be deduced from the concept of a perfect being because
existence is not contained in the concept or the definition of a perfect being.
Contemporary philosophical discussion has focused on a slightly different
version of the ontological argument. In chapter 3 of Proslogion Anselm
suggested that something than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot be
conceived not to exist and so exists necessarily. Following this lead, such
philosophers as Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga have
contended that God cannot be a contingent being who exists in some possible
worlds but not in others. The existence of a perfect being is either necessary,
in which case God exists in every possible world, or impossible, in which case
God exists in no possible worlds. On this view, if it is so much as possible
that a perfect being exists, God exists in every possible world and hence in
the actual world. The crucial premise in this form of the argument is the
assumption that the existence of a perfect being is possible; it is not
obviously true and could be rejected without irrationality. For this reason,
Plantinga concedes that the argument does not prove or establish its
conclusion, but maintains that it does make it rational to accept the existence
of God. The key premises of various cosmological arguments are statements of
obvious facts of a general sort about the world. Thus, the argument to a first
cause begins with the observation that there are now things undergoing change
and things causing change. If something is a cause of such change only if it is
itself caused to change by something else, then there is an infinitely long
chain of causes of change. But, it is alleged, there cannot be a causal chain
of infinite length. Therefore there is something that causes change, but is not
caused to change by anything else, i.e., a first cause. Many critics of this
form of the argument deny its assumption that there cannot be an infinite
causal regress or chain of causes. This argument also fails to show that there
is only one first cause and does not prove that a first cause must have such
divine attributes as omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness. A version
of the cosmological argument that has attracted more attention from
contemporary philosophers is the argument from contingency to necessity. It
starts with the observation that there are contingent beings beings that could have failed to exist. Since
contingent beings do not exist of logical necessity, a contingent being must be
caused to exist by some other being, for otherwise there would be no
explanation of why it exists rather than not doing so. Either the causal chain
of contingent beings has a first member, a contingent being not caused by
another contingent being, or it is infinitely long. If, on the one hand, the
chain has a first member, then a necessary being exists and causes it. After
all, being contingent, the first member must have a cause, but its cause cannot
be another contingent being. Hence its cause has to be non-contingent, i.e., a
being that could not fail to exist and so is necessary. If, on the other hand,
the chain is infinitely long, then a necessary being exists and causes the
chain as a whole. This is because the chain as a whole, being itself
contingent, requires a cause that must be noncontingent since it is not part of
the chain. In either case, if there are contingent beings, a necessary being
exists. So, since contingent beings do exist, there is a necessary being that
causes their existence. Critics of this argument attack its assumption that
there must be an explanation for the existence of every contingent being.
Rejecting the principle that there is a sufficient reason for the existence of
each contingent thing, they argue that the existence of at least some
contingent beings is an inexplicable brute fact. And even if the principle of
sufficient reason is true, its truth is not obvious and so it would not be
irrational to deny it. Accordingly, William Rowe b.1 concludes that this
version of the cosmological argument does not prove the existence of God, but
he leaves open the question of whether it shows that theistic belief is
reasonable. The starting point of teleological arguments is the phenomenon of
goal-directedness in nature. Aquinas, e.g., begins with the claim that we see
that things which lack intelligence act for an end so as to achieve the best
result. Modern science has discredited this universal metaphysical teleology,
but many biological systems do seem to display remarkable adaptations of means
to ends. Thus, as William Paley 17431805 insisted, the eye is adapted to seeing
and its parts cooperate in complex ways to produce sight. This suggests an
analogy between such biological systems and human artifacts, which are known to
be products of intelligent design. Spelled out in mechanical terms, the analogy
grounds the claim that the world as a whole is like a vast machine composed of
many smaller machines. Machines are contrived by intelligent human designers.
Since like effects have like causes, the world as a whole and many of its parts
are therefore probably products of design by an intelligence resembling the
human but greater in proportion to the magnitude of its effects. Because this
form of the argument rests on an analogy, it is known as the analogical
argument for the existence of God; it is also known as the design argument
since it concludes the existence of an intelligent designer of the world. Hume
subjected the design argument to sustained criticism in his Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion. If, as most scholars suppose, the character Philo
speaks for Hume, Hume does not actually reject the argument. He does, however,
think that it warrants only the very weak conclusion that the cause or causes
of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human
intelligence. As this way of putting it indicates, the argument does not rule
out polytheism; perhaps different minor deities designed lions and tigers.
Moreover, the analogy with human artificers suggests that the designer or
designers of the universe did not create it from nothing but merely imposed
order on already existing matter. And on account of the mixture of good and
evil in the universe, the argument does not show that the designer or designers
are morally admirable enough to deserve obedience or worship. Since the time of
Hume, the design argument has been further undermined by the emergence of
Darwinian explanations of biological adaptations in terms of natural selection
that give explanations of such adaptations in terms of intelligent design stiff
competition. Some moral arguments for the existence of God conform to the
pattern of inference to the best explanation. It has been argued that the
hypothesis that morality depends upon the will of God provides the best
explanation of the objectivity of moral obligations. Kant’s moral argument,
which is probably the best-known specimen of this type, takes a different tack.
According to Kant, the complete good consists of perfect virtue rewarded with
perfect happiness, and virtue deserves to be rewarded with proportional happiness
because it makes one worthy to be happy. If morality is to command the
allegiance of reason, the complete good must be a real possibility, and so
practical reason is entitled to postulate that the conditions necessary to
guarantee its possibility obtain. As far as anyone can tell, nature and its
laws do not furnish such a guarantee; in this world, apparently, the virtuous
often suffer while the vicious flourish. And even if the operation of natural
laws were to produce happiness in proportion to virtue, this would be merely
coincidental, and hence finite moral agents would not have been made happy just
because they had by their virtue made themselves worthy of happiness. So
practical reason is justified in postulating a supernatural agent with sufficient
goodness, knowledge, and power to ensure that finite agents receive the
happiness they deserve as a reward for their virtue, though theoretical reason
can know nothing of such a being. Critics of this argument have denied that we
must postulate a systematic connection between virtue and happiness in order to
have good reasons to be moral. Indeed, making such an assumption might actually
tempt one to cultivate virtue for the sake of securing happiness rather than
for its own sake. It seems therefore that none of these arguments by itself
conclusively proves the existence of God. However, some of them might
contribute to a cumulative case for the existence of God. According to Richard
Swinburne, cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments individually increase
the probability of God’s existence even though none of them makes it more
probable than not. But when other evidence such as that deriving from
providential occurrences and religious experiences is added to the balance,
Swinburne concludes that theism becomes more probable than its negation.
Whether or not he is right, it does appear to be entirely correct to judge the
rationality of theistic belief in the light of our total evidence. But there is
a case to be made against theism too. Philosophers of religion are interested
in arguments against the existence of God, and fairness does seem to require
admitting that our total evidence contains much that bears negatively on the
rationality of belief in God. The problem of evil is generally regarded as the
strongest objection to theism. Two kinds of evil can be distinguished. Moral
evil inheres in the wicked actions of moral agents and the bad consequences
they produce. An example is torturing the innocent. When evil actions are
considered theologically as offenses against God, they are regarded as sins.
Natural evils are bad consequences that apparently derive entirely from the
operations of impersonal natural forces, e.g. the human and animal suffering
produced by natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and epidemics. Both kinds
of evil raise the question of what reasons an omniscient, omnipotent, and
perfectly good being could have for permitting or allowing their existence.
Theodicy is the enterprise of trying to answer this question and thereby to justify
the ways of God to humans. It is, of course, possible to deny the
presuppositions of the question. Some thinkers have held that evil is unreal;
others have maintained that the deity is limited and so lacks the power or
knowledge to prevent the evils that occur. If one accepts the presuppositions
of the question, the most promising strategy for theodicy seems to be to claim
that each evil God permits is necessary for some greater good or to avoid some
alternative to it that is at least as bad if not worse. The strongest form of
this doctrine is the claim made by Leibniz that this is the best of all
possible worlds. It is unlikely that humans, with their cognitive limitations,
could ever understand all the details of the greater goods for which evils are
necessary, assuming that such goods exist; however, we can understand how some
evils contribute to achieving goods. According to the soul-making theodicy of
John Hick b.2, which is rooted in a tradition going back to Irenaeus, admirable
human qualities such as compassion could not exist except as responses to
suffering, and so evil plays a necessary part in the formation of moral
character. But this line of thought does not seem to provide a complete
theodicy because much animal suffering occurs unnoticed by humans and child
abuse often destroys rather than strengthens the moral character of its
victims. Recent philosophical discussion has often focused on the claim that
the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being is
logically inconsistent with the existence of evil or of a certain quantity of
evil. This is the logical problem of evil, and the most successful response to
it has been the free will defense. Unlike a theodicy, this defense does not
speculate about God’s reasons for permitting evil but merely argues that God’s
existence is consistent with the existence of evil. Its key idea is that moral
good cannot exist apart from libertarian free actions that are not causally
determined. If God aims to produce moral good, God must create free creatures
upon whose cooperation he must depend, and so divine omnipotence is limited by
the freedom God confers on creatures. Since such creatures are also free to do
evil, it is possible that God could not have created a world containing moral
good but no moral evil. Plantinga extends the defense from moral to natural
evil by suggesting that it is also possible that all natural evil is due to the
free actions of non-human persons such as Satan and his cohorts. Plantinga and
Swinburne have also addressed the probabilistic problem of evil, which is the
claim that the existence of evil disconfirms or renders improbable the
hypothesis that God exists. Both of them argue for the conclusion that this is
not the case. Finally, it is worth mentioning three other topics on which
contemporary philosophers of religion have worked to good effect. Important
studies of the meaning and use of religious language were stimulated by the
challenge of logical positivism’s claim that theological language is
cognitively meaningless. Defenses of such Christian doctrines as the Trinity,
Incarnation, and Atonement against various philosophical objections have
recently been offered by people committed to elaborating an explicitly
Christian philosophy. And a growing appreciation of religious pluralism has
both sharpened interest in questions about the cultural relativity of religious
rationality and begun to encourage progress toward a comparative philosophy of
religions. Such work helps to make philosophy of religion a lively and diverse
field of inquiry.
philosophy of science,
the branch of philosophy that is centered on a critical examination of the
sciences: their methods and their results. One branch of the philosophy of
science, methodology, is closely related to the theory of knowledge. It
explores the methods by which science arrives at its posited truths concerning
the world and critically explores alleged rationales for these methods. Issues
concerning the sense in which theories are accepted in science, the nature of the
confirmation relation between evidence and hypothesis, the degree to which
scientific claims can be falsified by observational data, and the like, are the
concern of methodology. Other branches of the philosophy of science are
concerned with the meaning and content of the posited scientific results and
are closely related to metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Typical
problems examined are the nature of scientific laws, the cognitive content of
scientific theories referring to unobservables, and the structure of scientific
explanations. Finally, philosophy of science explores specific foundational
questions arising out of the specific results of the sciences. Typical
questions explored might be metaphysical presuppositions of space-time theories,
the role of probability in statistical physics, the interpretation of
measurement in quantum theory, the structure of explanations in evolutionary
biology, and the like. Concepts of the credibility of hypotheses. Some crucial
concepts that arise when issues of the credibility of scientific hypotheses are
in question are the following: Inductivism is the view that hypotheses can
receive evidential support from their predictive success with respect to
particular cases falling under them. If one takes the principle of inductive
inference to be that the future will be like the past, one is subject to the
skeptical objection that this rule is empty of content, and even
self-contradictory, if any kind of “similarity” of cases is permitted. To
restore content and consistency to the rule, and for other methodological
purposes as well, it is frequently alleged that only natural kinds, a delimited
set of “genuine” properties, should be allowed in the formulation of scientific
hypotheses. The view that theories are first arrived at as creative hypotheses
of the scientist’s imagination and only then confronted, for justificatory
purposes, with the observational predictions deduced from them, is called the
hypotheticodeductive model of science. This model is contrasted with the view
that the very discovery of hypotheses is somehow “generated” out of accumulated
observational data. The view that hypotheses are confirmed to the degree that
they provide the “best explanatory account” of the data is often called
abduction and sometimes called inference to the best explanation. The alleged
relation that evidence bears to hypothesis, warranting its truth but not,
generally, guaranteeing that truth, is called confirmation. Methodological
accounts such as inductivism countenance such evidential warrant, frequently
speaking of evidence as making a hypothesis probable but not establishing it
with certainty. Probability in the confirmational context is supposed to be a
relationship holding between propositions that is quantitative and is described
by the formal theory of probability. It is supposed to measure the “degree of
support” that one proposition gives to another, e.g. the degree of support
evidential statements give to a hypothesis allegedly supported by them.
Scientific methodologists often claim that science is characterized by
convergence. This is the claim that scientific theories in their historical
order are converging to an ultimate, final, and ideal theory. Sometimes this
final theory is said to be true because it corresponds to the “real world,” as
in realist accounts of convergence. In pragmatist versions this ultimate theory
is the defining standard of truth. It is sometimes alleged that one ground for
choosing the most plausible theory, over and above conformity of the theory
with the observational data, is the simplicity of the theory. Many versions of
this thesis exist, some emphasizing formal elements of the theory and others,
e.g., emphasizing paucity of ontological commitment by the theory as the
measure of simplicity. It is sometimes alleged that in choosing which theory to
believe, the scientific community opts for theories compatible with the data
that make minimal changes in scientific belief necessary from those demanded by
previously held theory. The believer in methodological conservatism may also
try to defend such epistemic conservatism as normatively rational. An
experiment that can decisively show a scientific hypothesis to be false is
called a crucial experiment for the hypothesis. It is a thesis of many philosophers
that for hypotheses that function in theories and can only confront
observational data when conjoined with other theoretical hypotheses, no
absolutely decisive crucial experiment can exist. Concepts of the structure of
hypotheses. Here are some of the essential concepts encountered when it is the
structure of scientific hypotheses that is being explored: In its explanatory
account of the world, science posits novel entities and properties. Frequently
these are alleged to be not accessible to direct observation. A theory is a set
of hypotheses positing such entities and properties. Some philosophers of
science divide the logical consequences of a theory into those referring only
to observable things and features and those referring to the unobservables as
well. Various reductionist, eliminationist, and instrumentalist approaches to
theory agree that the full cognitive content of a theory is exhausted by its
observational consequences reported by its observation sentences, a claim
denied by those who espouse realist accounts of theories. The view that the
parts of a theory that do not directly relate observational consequences ought
not to be taken as genuinely referential at all, but, rather, as a “mere
linguistic instrument” allowing one to derive observational results from
observationally specifiable posits, is called instrumentalism. From this point
of view terms putatively referring to unobservables fail to have genuine
reference and individual non-observational sentences containing such terms are
not individually genuinely true or false. Verificationism is the general name
for the doctrine that, in one way or another, the semantic content of an
assertion is exhausted by the conditions that count as warranting the
acceptance or rejection of the assertion. There are many versions of
verificationist doctrines that try to do justice both to the empiricist claim
that the content of an assertion is its totality of empirical consequences and
also to a wide variety of anti-reductionist intuitions about meaning. The
doctrine that theoretical sentences must be strictly translatable into
sentences expressed solely in observational terms in order that the theoretical
assertions have genuine cognitive content is sometimes called operationalism.
The “operation” by which a magnitude is determined to have a specified value,
characterized observationally, is taken to give the very meaning of attributing
that magnitude to an object. The doctrine that the meanings of terms in
theories are fixed by the role the terms play in the theory as a whole is often
called semantic holism. According to the semantic holist, definitions of
theoretical terms by appeal to observational terms cannot be given, but all of
the theoretical terms have their meaning given “as a group” by the structure of
the theory as a whole. A related doctrine in confirmation theory is that
confirmation accrues to whole theories, and not to their individual assertions
one at a time. This is confirmational holism. To see another conception of
cognitive content, conjoin all the sentences of a theory together. Then replace
each theoretical term in the sentence so obtained with a predicate variable and
existentially quantify over all the predicate variables so introduced. This is
the Ramsey sentence for a finitely axiomatized theory. This sentence has the
same logical consequences framable in the observational vocabulary alone as did
the original theory. It is often claimed that the Ramsey sentence for a theory
exhausts the cognitive content of the theory. The Ramsey sentence is supposed
to “define” the meaning of the theoretical terms of the original theory as well
as have empirical consequences; yet by asserting the existence of the
theoretical properties, it is sometimes alleged to remain a realist construal of
the theory. The latter claim is made doubtful, however, by the existence of
“merely representational” interpretations of the Ramsey sentence. Theories are
often said to be so related that one theory is reducible to another. The study
of the relation theories bear to one another in this context is said to be the
study of intertheoretic reduction. Such reductive claims can have philosophical
origins, as in the alleged reduction of material objects to sense-data or of
spatiotemporal relations to causal relations, or they can be scientific
discoveries, as in the reduction of the theory of light waves to the theory of
electromagnetic radiation. Numerous “models” of the reductive relation exist,
appropriate for distinct kinds and cases of reduction. The term scientific
realism has many and varied uses. Among other things that have been asserted by
those who describe themselves as scientific realists are the claims that
“mature” scientific theories typically refer to real features of the world,
that the history of past falsifications of accepted scientific theories does
not provide good reason for persistent skepticism as to the truth claims of
contemporary theories, and that the terms of theories that putatively refer to
unobservables ought to be taken at their referential face value and not
reinterpreted in some instrumentalistic manner. Internal realism denies
irrealist claims founded on the past falsification of accepted theories.
Internal realists are, however, skeptical of “metaphysical” claims of
“correspondence of true theories to the real world” or of any notion of truth
that can be construed in radically non-epistemic terms. While theories may
converge to some ultimate “true” theory, the notion of truth here must be
understood in some version of a Peircian idea of truth as “ultimate warranted
assertability.” The claim that any theory that makes reference to posited
unobservable features of the world in its explanatory apparatus will always
encounter rival theories incompatible with the original theory but equally
compatible with all possible observational data that might be taken as
confirmatory of the original theory is the claim of the underdetermination
thesis. A generalization taken to have “lawlike force” is called a law of
nature. Some suggested criteria for generalizations having lawlike force are
the ability of the generalization to back up the truth of claims expressed as
counterfactual conditions; the ability of the generalization to be confirmed
inductively on the basis of evidence that is only a proper subset of all the
particular instances falling under the generality; and the generalization
having an appropriate place in the simple, systematic hierarchy of
generalizations important for fundamental scientific theories of the world. The
application of a scientific law to a given actual situation is usually hedged
with the proviso that for the law’s predictions to hold, “all other,
unspecified, features of the situation are normal.” Such a qualifying clause is
called a ceteris paribus clause. Such “everything else being normal” claims
cannot usually be “filled out,” revealing important problems concerning the
“open texture” of scientific claims. The claim that the full specification of
the state of the world at one time is sufficient, along with the laws of
nature, to fix the full state of the world at any other time, is the claim of
determinism. This is not to be confused with claims of total predictability,
since even if determinism were true the full state of the world at a time might
be, in principle, unavailable for knowledge. Concepts of the foundations of
physical theories. Here, finally, are a few concepts that are crucial in
discussing the foundations of physical theories, in particular theories of
space and time and quantum theory: The doctrine that space and time must be
thought of as a family of spatial and temporal relations holding among the
material constituents of the universe is called relationism. Relationists deny
that “space itself” should be considered an additional constituent of the world
over and above the world’s material contents. The doctrine that “space itself”
must be posited as an additional constituent of the world over and above
ordinary material things of the world is substantivalism. Mach’s principle is
the demand that all physical phenomena, including the existence of inertial
forces used by Newton to argue for a substantivalist position, be explainable
in purely relationist terms. Mach speculated that Newton’s explanation for the
forces in terms of acceleration with respect to “space itself” could be
replaced with an explanation resorting to the acceleration of the test object
with respect to the remaining matter of the universe the “fixed stars”. In
quantum theory the claim that certain “conjugate” quantities, such as position
and momentum, cannot be simultaneously “determined” to arbitrary degrees of
accuracy is the uncertainty principle. The issue of whether such a lack of
simultaneous exact “determination” is merely a limitation on our knowledge of
the system or is, instead, a limitation on the system’s having simultaneous
exact values of the conjugate quantities, is a fundamental one in the
interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bell’s theorem is a mathematical result
aimed at showing that the explanation of the statistical correlations that hold
between causally noninteractive systems cannot always rely on the positing that
when the systems did causally interact in the past independent values were
fixed for some feature of each of the two systems that determined their future
observational behavior. The existence of such “local hidden variables” would
contradict the correlational predictions of quantum mechanics. The result shows
that quantum mechanics has a profoundly “non-local” nature. Can quantum
probabilities and correlations be obtained as averages over variables at some
deeper level than those specifying the quantum state of a system? If such
quantities exist they are called hidden variables. Many different types of
hidden variables have been proposed: deterministic, stochastic, local,
non-local, etc. A number of proofs exist to the effect that positing certain
types of hidden variables would force probabilistic results at the quantum
level that contradict the predictions of quantum theory. Complementarity was
the term used by Niels Bohr to describe what he took to be a fundamental
structure of the world revealed by quantum theory. Sometimes it is used to
indicate the fact that magnitudes occur in conjugate pairs subject to the
uncertainty relations. Sometimes it is used more broadly to describe such
aspects as the ability to encompass some phenomena in a wave picture of the
world and other phenomena in a particle picture, but implying that no one
picture will do justice to all the experimental results. The orthodox formalization
of quantum theory posits two distinct ways in which the quantum state can
evolve. When the system is “unobserved,” the state evolves according to the
deterministic Schrödinger equation. When “measured,” however, the system
suffers a discontinuous “collapse of the wave packet” into a new quantum state
determined by the outcome of the measurement process. Understanding how to
reconcile the measurement process with the laws of dynamic evolution of the
system is the measurement problem. Conservation and symmetry. A number of
important physical principles stipulate that some physical quantity is
conserved, i.e. that the quantity of it remains invariant over time. Early
conservation principles were those of matter mass, of energy, and of momentum.
These became assimilated together in the relativistic principle of the
conservation of momentum-energy. Other conservation laws such as the
conservation of baryon number arose in the theory of elementary particles. A
symmetry in physical theory expressed the invariance of some structural feature
of the world under some transformation. Examples are translation and rotation
invariance in space and the invariance under transformation from one uniformly
moving reference frame to another. Such symmetries express the fact that
systems related by symmetry transformations behave alike in their physical
evolution. Some symmetries are connected with space-time, such as those noted
above, whereas others such as the symmetry of electromagnetism under socalled
gauge transformations are not. A very important result of the mathematician
Emma Noether shows that each conservation law is derivable from the existence
of an associated underlying symmetry. Chaos theory and chaotic systems. In the
history of the scientific study of deterministic systems, the paradigm of
explanation has been the prediction of the future states of a system from a
specification of its initial state. In order for such a prediction to be
useful, however, nearby initial states must lead to future states that are
close to one another. This is now known to hold only in exceptional cases. In
general deterministic systems are chaotic systems, i.e., even initial states
very close to one another will lead in short intervals of time to future states
that diverge quickly from one another. Chaos theory has been developed to
provide a wide range of concepts useful for describing the structure of the
dynamics of such chaotic systems. The theory studies the features of a system
that will determine if its evolution is chaotic or non-chaotic and provides the
necessary descriptive categories for characterizing types of chaotic motion.
Randomness. The intuitive distinction between a sequence that is random and one
that is orderly plays a role in the foundations of probability theory and in
the scientific study of dynamical systems. But what is a random sequence?
Subjectivist definitions of randomness focus on the inability of an agent to
determine, on the basis of his knowledge, the future occurrences in the
sequence. Objectivist definitions of randomness seek to characterize it without
reference to the knowledge of any agent. Some approaches to defining objective
randomness are those that require probability to be the same in the original
sequence and in subsequences “mechanically” selectable from it, and those that
define a sequence as random if it passes every “effectively constructible”
statistical test for randomness. Another important attempt to characterize
objective randomness compares the length of a sequence to the length of a
computer program used to generate the sequence. The basic idea is that a
sequence is random if the computer programs needed to generate the sequence are
as long as the sequence itself.
philosophy of the social
sciences, the study of the logic and methods of the social sciences. Central
questions include: What are the criteria of a good social explanation? How if
at all are the social sciences distinct from the natural sciences? Is there a
distinctive method for social research? Through what empirical procedures are
social science assertions to be evaluated? Are there irreducible social laws?
Are there causal relations among social phenomena? Do social facts and
regularities require some form of reduction to facts about individuals? What is
the role of theory in social explanation? The philosophy of social science aims
to provide an interpretation of the social sciences that answers these
questions. The philosophy of social science, like that of natural science, has
both a descriptive and a prescriptive side. On the one hand, the field is about
the social sciences the explanations,
methods, empirical arguments, theories, hypotheses, etc., that actually occur
in the social science literature. This means that the philosopher needs
extensive knowledge of several areas of social science research in order to be
able to formulate an analysis of the social sciences that corresponds
appropriately to scientists’ practice. On the other hand, the field is
epistemic: it is concerned with the idea that scientific theories and
hypotheses are put forward as true or probable, and are justified on rational
grounds empirical and theoretical. The philosopher aims to provide a critical
evaluation of existing social science methods and practices insofar as these
methods are found to be less truth-enhancing than they might be. These two
aspects of the philosophical enterprise suggest that philosophy of social
science should be construed as a rational reconstruction of existing social
science practice a reconstruction guided
by existing practice but extending beyond that practice by identifying faulty
assumptions, forms of reasoning, and explanatory frameworks. Philosophers have
disagreed over the relation between the social and natural sciences. One
position is naturalism, according to which the methods of the social sciences
should correspond closely to those of the natural sciences. This position is
closely related to physicalism, the doctrine that all higher-level phenomena
and regularities including social
phenomena are ultimately reducible to
physical entities and the laws that govern them. On the other side is the view
that the social sciences are inherently distinct from the natural sciences.
This perspective holds that social phenomena are metaphysically distinguishable
from natural phenomena because they are intentional they depend on the meaningful actions of
individuals. On this view, natural phenomena admit of causal explanation,
whereas social phenomena require intentional explanation. The anti-naturalist
position also maintains that there is a corresponding difference between the
methods appropriate to natural and social science. Advocates of the Verstehen
method hold that there is a method of intuitive interpretation of human action
that is radically distinct from methods of inquiry in the natural sciences. One
important school within the philosophy of social science takes its origin in
this fact of the meaningfulness of human action. Interpretive sociology
maintains that the goal of social inquiry is to provide interpretations of
human conduct within the context of culturally specific meaningful
arrangements. This approach draws an analogy between literary texts and social
phenomena: both are complex systems of meaningful elements, and the goal of the
interpreter is to provide an interpretation of the elements that makes sense of
them. In this respect social science involves a hermeneutic inquiry: it
requires that the interpreter should tease out the meanings underlying a
particular complex of social behavior, much as a literary critic pieces
together an interpretation of the meaning of a complex philosophy of the social
sciences philosophy of the social sciences 704 704 literary text. An example of this
approach is Weber’s treatment of the relation between capitalism and the
Protestant ethic. Weber attempts to identify the elements of western European
culture that shaped human action in this environment in such a way as to
produce capitalism. On this account, both Calvinism and capitalism are
historically specific complexes of values and meanings, and we can better
understand the emergence of capitalism by seeing how it corresponds to the
meaningful structures of Calvinism. Interpretive sociologists often take the
meaningfulness of social phenomena to imply that social phenomena do not admit
of causal explanation. However, it is possible to accept the idea that social
phenomena derive from the purposive actions of individuals without
relinquishing the goal of providing causal explanations of social phenomena.
For it is necessary to distinguish between the general idea of a causal
relation between two events or conditions and the more specific idea of “causal
determination through strict laws of nature.” It is true that social phenomena
rarely derive from strict laws of nature; wars do not result from antecedent
political tensions in the way that earthquakes result from antecedent
conditions in plate tectonics. However, since non-deterministic causal
relations can derive from the choices of individual persons, it is evident that
social phenomena admit of causal explanation, and in fact much social
explanation depends on asserting causal relations between social events and
processes e.g., the claim that the
administrative competence of the state is a crucial causal factor in
determining the success or failure of a revolutionary movement. A central goal
of causal explanation is to discover the conditions existing prior to the event
that, given the law-governed regularities among phenomena of this sort, were
sufficient to produce this event. To say that C is a cause of E is to assert
that the occurrence of C, in the context of a field of social processes and
mechanisms F, brought about E or increased the likelihood of the occurrence of
E. Central to causal arguments in the social sciences is the idea of a causal
mechanism a series of events or actions
leading from cause to effect. Suppose it is held that the extension of a
trolley line from the central city to the periphery caused the deterioration of
public schools in the central city. In order to make out such a claim it is
necessary to provide some account of the social and political mechanisms that
join the antecedent condition to the consequent. An important variety of causal
explanation in social science is materialist explanation. This type of
explanation attempts to explain a social feature in terms of features of the
material environment in the context of which the social phenomenon occurs.
Features of the environment that often appear in materialist explanations include
topography and climate; thus it is sometimes maintained that banditry thrives
in remote regions because the rugged terrain makes it more difficult for the
state to repress bandits. But materialist explanations may also refer to the
material needs of society e.g., the need
to produce food and other consumption goods to support the population. Thus
Marx holds that it is the development of the “productive forces” technology
that drives the development of property relations and political systems. In
each case the materialist explanation must refer to the fact of human
agency the fact that human beings are
capable of making deliberative choices on the basis of their wants and
beliefs in order to carry out the
explanation; in the banditry example, the explanation depends on the fact that
bandits are prudent enough to realize that their prospects for survival are
better in the periphery than in the core. So materialist explanations too
accept the point that social phenomena depend on the purposive actions of
individuals. A central issue in the philosophy of social science involves the
relation between social regularities and facts about individuals.
Methodological individualism is the position that asserts the primacy of facts
about individuals over facts about social entities. This doctrine takes three
forms: a claim about social entities, a claim about social concepts, and a
claim about social regularities. The first version maintains that social
entities are reducible to ensembles of individuals as an insurance company might be reduced to
the ensemble of employees, supervisors, managers, and owners whose actions
constitute the company. Likewise, it is sometimes held that social concepts
must be reducible to concepts involving only individuals e.g., the concept of a social class might be
defined in terms of concepts pertaining only to individuals and their behavior.
Finally, it is sometimes held that social regularities must be derivable from
regularities of individual behavior. There are several positions opposed to
methodological individualism. At the extreme there is methodological
holism the doctrine that social
entities, facts, and laws are autonomous and irreducible; for example, that
social structures such as the state have dynamic properties independent of the
beliefs and purposes of the particular persons who occupy positions within the
structure. A third position intermediate between these two holds that every
social explanation requires microfoundations
an account of the circumstances at the individual level that led
individuals to behave in such ways as to bring about the observed social
regularities. If we observe that an industrial strike is successful over an
extended period of time, it is not sufficient to explain this circumstance by
referring to the common interest that members of the union have in winning
their demands. Rather, we need information about the circumstances of the
individual union member that induce him or her to contribute to this public
good. The microfoundations dictum does not require, however, that social
explanations be couched in non-social concepts; instead, the circumstances of
individual agents may be characterized in social terms. Central to most
theories of explanation is the idea that explanation depends on general laws
governing the phenomena in question. Thus the discovery of the laws of
electrodynamics permitted the explanation of a variety of electromagnetic
phenomena. But social phenomena derive from the actions of purposive men and
women; so what kinds of regularities are available on the basis of which to
provide social explanations? A fruitful research framework in the social
sciences is the idea that men and women are rational, so it is possible to
explain their behavior as the outcome of a deliberation about means of
achieving their individual ends. This fact in turn gives rise to a set of
regularities about individual behavior that may be used as a ground for social
explanation. We may explain some complex social phenomenon as the aggregate
result of the actions of a large number of individual agents with a
hypothesized set of goals within a structured environment of choice. Social
scientists have often been inclined to offer functional explanations of social
phenomena. A functional explanation of a social feature is one that explains
the presence and persistence of the feature in terms of the beneficial
consequences the feature has for the ongoing working of the social system as a
whole. It might be held, e.g., that sports clubs in working-class Britain exist
because they give working-class people a way of expending energy that would
otherwise go into struggles against an exploitative system, thus undermining
social stability. Sports clubs are explained, then, in terms of their
contribution to social stability. This type of explanation is based on an
analogy between biology and sociology. Biologists explain species traits in
terms of their contribution to reproductive fitness, and sociologists sometimes
explain social traits in terms of their contribution to “social” fitness.
However, the analogy is misleading, because there is a general mechanism
establishing functionality in the biological realm that is not present in the
social realm. This is the mechanism of natural selection, through which a
species arrives at a set of traits that are locally optimal. There is no
analogous process at work in the social realm, however; so it is groundless to
suppose that social traits exist because of their beneficial consequences for
the good of society as a whole or important subsystems within society. So
functional explanations of social phenomena must be buttressed by specific
accounts of the causal processes that underlie the postulated functional
relationships.
phrastic: It is convenient to take
Grice mocking Hare in Prolegomena. “To say ‘x is good’ is to recommend x.’ An
implicatum: annullable: “x is good but I
don’t recommend it.” Hare was well aware of the implicatum. Loving Grice’s
account of ‘or,’ Hare gives the example: “Post the letter: therefore; post the
letter or burn it.” Grice mainly quotes Hare’s duet, the phrastic and the
neustic, and spends some time exploring what the phrastic actually is. He seems
to prefer ‘radix.’ But then Hare also has then the ‘neustic,’ that Grice is not
so concerned with since he has his own terminology for it. And for Urmson’s
festschrift, Hare comes up with the tropic and the clistic. So each has a
Griceian correlate.
Physicalism: One of the
twelve labours of H. P. Grice. -- Churchland, p. s., philosopher and advocate
of neurophilosophy. She received her B.Phil. from Oxford in 9 and held
positions at the Unichün-tzu Churchland, Patricia Smith 140 140 versity of Manitoba and the Institute
for Advanced Studies at Princeton, settling at the ofCalifornia,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
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” 8 and “A Perspective on Mind-Brain Research” 0, 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 6 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 2;
with neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas in The Mind-Brain Continuum 6; and with
philosopher and husband Paul Churchland in On the Contrary 8 she and Paul
Churchland are jointly appraised in R. McCauley, The Churchlands and Their
Critics, 6. From the viewpoint of neurophilosophy, interdisciplinary
cooperation is essential for advancing knowledge, for the truth lies in the
intertheoretic details. Churchland: Paul M. b.2, -born philosopher, leading proponent of eliminative
materialism. He received his Ph.D. from the
of Pittsburgh in 9 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 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 9 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” 1. 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 9, 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 6 and, with his wife Patricia Churchland, by the
essays in On the Contrary 8. 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.
physicalism: one of the
twelve labours of Grice. in the widest sense of the term, materialism applied
to the question of the nature of mind. So construed, physicalism is the
thesis call it ontological
physicalism that whatever exists or
occurs is ultimately constituted out of physical entities. But sometimes
‘physicalism’ is used to refer to the thesis that whatever exists or occurs can
be completely described in the vocabulary of physics. Such a view goes with
either reductionism or eliminativism about the mental. Here reductionism is the
view that psychological explanations, including explanations in terms of “folk-psychological”
concepts such as those of belief and desire, are reducible to explanations
formulable in a physical vocabulary, which in turn would imply that entities
referred to in psychological explanations can be fully described in physical
terms; and elminativism is the view that nothing corresponds to the terms in
psychological explanations, and that the only correct explanations are in
physical terms. The term ‘physicalism’ appears to have originated in the Vienna
Circle, and the reductionist version initially favored there was a version of
behaviorism: psychological statements were held to be translatable into
behavioral statements, mainly hypothetical conditionals, expressible in a
physical vocabulary. The psychophysical identity theory held by Herbert Feigl,
Smart, and others, sometimes called type physicalism, is reductionist in a
somewhat different sense. This holds that mental states and events are
identical with neurophysiological states and events. While it denies that there
can be analytic, meaning-preserving translations of mental statements into
physicalistic ones, it holds that by means of synthetic “bridge laws,”
identifying mental types with physical ones, mental statements can in principle
be tr. into physicalistic ones with which they are at least nomologically
equivalent if the terms in the bridge laws are rigid designators, the
equivalence will be necessary. The possibility of such a translation is
typically denied by functionalist accounts of mind, on the grounds that the
same mental state may have indefinitely many different physical realizations,
and sometimes on the grounds that it is logically possible, even if it never
happens, that mental states should be realized non-physically. In his classic
paper “The ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’ “ 8, Feigl distinguishes two senses of
‘physical’: ‘physical1’ and ‘physical2’. ‘Physical1’ is practically synonymous
with ‘scientific’, applying to whatever is “an essential part of the coherent
and adequate descriptive and explanatory account of the spatiotemporal world.”
‘Physical2’ refers to “the type of concepts and laws which suffice in principle
for the explanation and prediction of inorganic processes.” It would seem that
if Cartesian dualism were true, supposing that possible, then once an integrated
science of the interaction of immaterial souls and material bodies had been
developed, concepts for describing the former would count as physical1.
Construed as an ontological doctrine, physicalism says that whatever exists or
occurs is entirely constituted out of those entities that constitute inorganic
things and processes. Construed as a reductionist or elminativist thesis about
description and explanation, it is the claim that a vocabulary adequate for
describing and explaining inorganic things and processes is adequate for
describing and explaining whatever exists. While the second of these theses
seems to imply the first, the first does not imply the second. It can be
questioned whether the notion of a “full” description of what exists makes sense.
And many ontological physicalists materialists hold that a reduction to
explanations couched in the terminology of physics is impossible, not only in
the case of psychological explanations but also in the case of explanations
couched in the terminology of such special sciences as biology. Their objection
to such reduction is not merely that a purely physical description of e.g.
biological or psychological phenomena would be unwieldy; it is that such
descriptions necessarily miss important laws and generalizations, ones that can
only be formulated in terms of biological, psychological, etc., concepts. If
ontological physicalists materialists are not committed to the reducibility of
psychology to physics, neither are they committed to any sort of identity
theory claiming that entities picked out by mental or psychological
descriptions are identical to entities fully characterizable by physical
descriptions. As already noted, materialists who are functionalists deny that
there are typetype identities between mental entities and physical ones. And
some deny that materialists are even committed to token-token identities,
claiming that any psychological event could have had a different physical
composition and so is not identical to any event individuated in terms of a
purely physical taxonomy.
physis, Grecian term for
nature, primarily used to refer to the nature or essence of a living thing
Aristotle, Metaphysics V.4. Physis is defined by Aristotle in Physics II.1 as a
source of movement and rest that belongs to something in virtue of itself, and
identified by him primarily with the form, rather than the matter, of the
thing. The term is also used to refer to the natural world as a whole. Physis
is often contrasted with techne, art; in ethics it is also contrasted with
nomos, convention, e.g. by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias 482e ff., who
distinguishes natural from conventional justice.
physiologicum: Oddly, among the twelve isms that attack Grice on his
ascent to the city of eternal truth, there is Naturalism and Physicalism – but
Roman natura is Grecian physis. In “Some remarks about the senses,” Grice
distinguishes a physicalist identification of the senses (in terms of the
different stimuli and the mechanisms that connects the organs to the brain)
versus other criteria, notably one involving introspection and the nature of
‘experience’ – “providing,” he adds, that ‘seeing’ is an experience! Grice
would use ‘natural,’ relying on the idea that it’s Grecian ‘physis.’ Liddell and Scott
have “φύσις,” from “φύω,” and which they render as “origin.” the natural form
or constitution of a person or thing as the result of growth, and hence nature,
constitution, and nature as an originating power, “φ. λέγεται . . ὅθεν ἡ
κίνησις ἡ πρώτη ἐν ἑκάστῳ τῶν φύσει ὄντων” Arist.Metaph.1014b16; concrete, the
creation, 'Nature.’ Grice is casual in his use of ‘natural’ versus
‘non-natural’ in 1948 for the Oxford Philosophical Society. In later works,
there’s a reference to naturalism, which is more serious. Refs.: The keyword
should be ‘naturalism,’ but also Grice’s diatribes against ‘physicalism,’ and
of course the ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural,’ BANC.
lapis
philosophorum: alchemy: a quasi-scientific practice and mystical
art, mainly ancient and medieval, that had two broad aims: to change baser
metals into gold and to develop the elixir of life, the means to immortality.
Classical Western alchemy probably originated in Egypt in the first three
centuries A.D. with earlier Chin. and later Islamic and variants and was practiced in earnest in
Europe by such figures as Paracelsus and Newton until the eighteenth century.
Western alchemy addressed concerns of practical metallurgy, but its
philosophical significance derived from an early Grecian theory of the
relations among the basic elements and from a religious-allegorical
understanding of the alchemical transmutation of ores into gold, an
understanding that treats this process as a spiritual ascent from human toward
divine perfection. The purification of crude ores worldly matter into gold
material perfection was thought to require a transmuting agent, the
philosopher’s stone, a mystical substance that, when mixed with alcohol and
swallowed, was believed to produce immortality spiritual perfection. The
alchemical search for the philosopher’s stone, though abortive, resulted in the
development of ultimately useful experimental tools e.g., the steam pump and
methods e.g., distillation.
Piaget, Jean 60, Swiss
psychologist and epistemologist who profoundly influenced questions, theories,
and methods in the study of cognitive development. The philosophical
interpretation and implications of his work, however, remain controversial.
Piaget regarded himself as engaged in genetic epistemology, the study of what
knowledge is through an empirical investigation of how our epistemic relations
to objects are improved. Piaget hypothesized that our epistemic relations are
constructed through the progressive organization of increasingly complex
behavioral interactions with physical objects. The cognitive system of the
adult is neither learned, in the Skinnerian sense, nor genetically
preprogrammed. Rather, it results from the organization of specific
interactions whose character is shaped both by the features of the objects
interacted with a process called accommodation and by the current cognitive
system of the child a process called assimilation. The tendency toward
equilibrium results in a change in the nature of the interaction as well as in
the cognitive system. Of particular importance for the field of cognitive
development were Piaget’s detailed descriptions and categorizations of changes
in the organization of the cognitive system from birth through adolescence.
That work focused on changes in the child’s understanding of such things as
space, time, cause, number, length, weight, and morality. Among his major works
are The Child’s Conception of Number 1, Biology and Knowledge 7, Genetic
Epistemology 0, and Psychology and Epistemology 0.
Pico della Mirandola, G.,
philosopher who, in 1486, wrote a series of 900 theses which he hoped to
dispute publicly in Rome. Thirteen of these were criticized by a papal
commission. When Pico defended himself in his Apology, the pope condemned all
900 theses. Pico fled to France, but was briefly imprisoned there in 1488. On
his release, he returned to Florence and devoted himself to private study. He
hoped to write a Concord of Plato and Aristotle, but the only part he was able
to complete was On Being and the One 1492, in which he uses Aquinas and
Christianity to reconcile Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about God’s being and
unity. He is often described as a syncretist, but in fact he made it clear that
the truth of Christianity has priority over the prisca theologia or ancient
wisdom found in the hermetic corpus and the cabala. Though he was interested in
magic and astrology, he adopts a guarded attitude toward them in his Heptaplus
1489, which contains a mystical interpretation of Genesis; and in his
Disputations Against Astrology, published posthumously, he rejects them both.
The treatise is largely technical, and the question of human freedom is set
aside as not directly relevant. This fact casts some doubt on the popular
thesis that Pico’s philosophy was a celebration of man’s freedom and dignity.
Great weight has been placed on Pico’s most famous work, On the Dignity of Man
1486. This is a short oration intended as an introduction to the disputation of
his 900 theses, and the title was invented after his death. Pico has been
interpreted as saying that man is set apart from the rest of creation, and is
completely free to form his own nature. In fact, as the Heptaplus shows, Pico
saw man as a microcosm containing elements of the angelic, celestial, and
elemental worlds. Man is thus firmly within the hierarchy of nature, and is a
bond and link between the worlds. In the oration, the emphasis on freedom is a
moral one: man is free to choose between good and evil.
pilgrimage: Grice’s
pilgrimage. In his pilgrimage towards what he calls the city of Eternal Truth
he finds twelve perils – which he lists. The first is Extensionalism (as
opposed to Intensionalism – vide intentum -- consequentes
rem intellectam: intendere est essentialiter ipsum esse intentio ...
quam a concepto sibi adequato: Odint 226; esse intentum est esse non reale: The
second is Nominalism (opposite Realism and Conceptualism – Universalism,
Abstractionism). It is funny that Grice was criticised for representing each of
the perils!The third is Positivism. Opposite to Negativism. Just kidding. Opposite to anything Sir Freddie Ayer was
opposite to!The fourth is Naturalism. Opposite Non-Naturalism. Just joking! But
that’s the hateful word brought by G. E. Moore, whom Grice liked (“Some like
Witters, but Moore’s MY man.”) The fifth is Mechanism. Opposite Libertarianism,
or Finalism, But I guess one likes Libertarianism.The sixth is Phenomenalism.
You cannot oppose it to Physicalism, beause that comes next. So this is G. A.
Paul (“Is there a problem about sense data?). And the opposite is anything this
Scots philosopher was against!The seventh is Reductionism. Opposite
Reductivism. Grice was proud to teach J. M. Rountree the distinction between a
benevolent reductionist and a malignant eliminationist reductionist. The eighth
is physicalism.Opposite metaphysicalism. The ninth is materialism. Hyleism. Opposite
Formalism. Or Immaterialism. The tenth is Empiricism. Opposite Rationalism. The
eleventh is Scepticism.Opposite Dogmatism.and the twelfth is functionalism.
Opposite Grice! So now let’s order the twelve perils alphabetically.
Empiricism. Extensionalism. Functionalism. MaterialismMechanism. Naturalism.
Nominalism. Phenomenalism. Positivism. Physicalism. Reductionism. Scepticism.
Now let us see how they apply to the theory of the conversational implicatum
and conversation as rational cooperation. Empiricism – Grice is an avowed
rationalist.Extensionalism – His main concern is that the predicate in the
proposition which is communicated is void, we yield the counterintuitive result
that an emissor who communicates that the S is V, where V is vacuous
communicates the same thing he would be communicating for any other vacuous
predicate V’Functionalism – There is a purely experiential qualia in some
emissor communicating that p that is not covered by the common-or-garden variety
of functionalism. E.g. “I love myself.” Materialism – rationalism means dealing
with a realm of noumena which goes beyond materialismMechanism – rationalism
entails end-setting unweighed finality and freedom. Naturalism – communication
involves optimality which is beyond naturalism Nominalism – a predicate is an
abstractum. Phenomenalism – there is realism which gives priority to the
material thing, not the sense datum. A sense datum of an apple does not nourish
us. Positivism – an emissor may communicate a value, which is not
positivistically reduced to something verifiable. Physicalism – there must be
multiple realization, and many things physicalists say sound ‘harsh’ to Grice’s
ears (“Smith’s brain being in state C doesn’t have adequate evidence”).
Reductionism – We are not eliminating anything. Scepticism – there are dogmas
which are derived from paradigm cases, even sophisticated ones.How to introduce
the twelve entriesEmpiricism – from Greek empereia – cf. etymology for English
‘experience.’Extensionalism -- extensumFunctionalism – functum.
Materialism -- Mechanism Naturalism
Nominalism Phenomenalism Positivism Physicalism Reductionism Scepticism. this section events are reviewed according to
principal scenes of action. Place names appear in the order in which major
incidents occur. City of Destruction. The
city stands as a symbol of the entire world as it is, with all of its sins,
corruptions, and sorrows. No one living there can have any hope of salvation.
Convinced that the city is about to be blasted by the wrath of God, Christian
flees and sets out alone on a pilgrimage which he hopes will lead him to Mount
Zion, to the Celestial City, where he can enjoy eternal life in the happy
company of God and the Heavenly Host. Slough
of Despond. A swamp, a bog, a quagmire, the first obstacle in
Christian's course. Pilgrims are apt to get mired down here by their doubts and
fears. After much difficulty and with some providential help, Christian finally
manages to flounder across the treacherous bog and is on his way again. Village of Morality. Near the village
Christian meets Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who, though not religiously inclined, is a
friendly and well-disposed person. He tells Christian that it would be foolish
of him to continue his pilgrimage, the end of which could only be hunger, pain,
and death. Christian should be a sensible fellow and settle down in the Village
of Morality. It would be a good place to raise a family, for living was cheap
there and they would have honest, well-behaved people as neighbors — people who
lived by the Ten Commandments. More than a little tempted by this, Christian
decides that he should at least have a look at Morality. But along the way he
is stopped by his friend Evangelist, who berates him sharply for having listened
to anything Mr. Worldly Wiseman might have to say. If Christian is seriously
interested in saving his soul, he would be well advised to get back as quickly
as possible on the path to the Wicket Gate which Evangelist had pointed out to
him before. Wicket Gate. Arriving
almost out of breath, Christian reads the sign on the gate: "Knock and it
shall be opened unto you." He knocks a number of times before arousing the
gatekeeper, a "grave person" named Good-will, who comes out to ask
what Christian wants. After the latter has explained his mission, he is let
through the gate, which opens on the Holy Way, a straight and narrow path
leading toward the Celestial City. Christian asks if he can now be relieved of
the heavy burden — a sack filled with his sins and woes — that he has been
carrying on his back for so long. Good-will replies that he cannot help him,
but that if all goes well, Christian will be freed of his burden in due course.
Interpreter's House. On
Good-will's advice, Christian makes his first stop at the large house of
Interpreter, a character symbolizing the Holy Spirit. Interpreter shows his
guest a number of "excellent things." These include a portrait of the
ideal pastor with the Bible in his hand and a crown of gold on his head; a dusty
parlor which is like the human heart before it is cleansed with the Gospel; a
sinner in an iron cage, an apostate doomed to suffer the torments of Hell
through all eternity; a wall with a fire burning against it. A figure (the
Devil himself) is busily throwing water on the fire to put it out. But he would
never succeed, Interpreter explains, because the fire represents the divine
spirit in the human heart and a figure on the far side of the wall keeps the
fire burning brightly by secretly pouring oil on it — "the oil of Christ's
Grace." The Cross. Beyond
Interpreter's House, Christian comes to the Cross, which stands on higher
ground beside the Holy Way. Below it, at the foot of the gentle slope, is an
open sepulcher. When Christian stops by the Cross, the burden on his back
suddenly slips from his shoulders, rolls down the slope, and falls into the
open sepulcher, to be seen no more. As Christian stands weeping with joy, three
Shining Ones (angels) appear. They tell him all his sins are now forgiven, give
him bright new raiment to replace his old ragged clothes, and hand him a
parchment, "a Roll with a seal upon it." For his edification and
instruction, Christian is to read the Roll as he goes along, and when he
reaches the Pearly Gates, he is to present it as his credentials a sort of
passport to Heaven, as it were. Difficulty
Hill. The Holy Way beyond the Cross is fenced in with a high wall on
either side. The walls have been erected to force all aspiring Pilgrims to
enter the Holy Way in the proper manner, through the Wicket Gate. As Christian
is passing along, two men — Formalist and Hypocrisy — climb over the wall and
drop down beside him. Christian finds fault with this and gives the
wall-jumpers a lecture on the dangers of trying shortcuts. They have been successfully
taking shortcuts all their lives, the intruders reply, and all will go well
this time. Not too pleased with his company, Christian proceeds with Hypocrisy
and Formalist to the foot of Difficulty Hill, where three paths join and they
must make a choice. One path goes straight ahead up the steep slope of the
hill; another goes around the base of the hill to the right; the third, around
the hill to the left. Christian argues that the right path is the one leading
straight ahead up Difficulty Hill. Not liking the prospect of much exertion,
Formalist and Hypocrisy decide to take the easier way on the level paths going
around the hill. Both get lost and perish. Halfway up Difficulty Hill, so steep
in places that he has to inch forward on hands and knees, Christian comes to a
pleasant arbor provided for the comfort of weary Pilgrims. Sitting down to
rest, Christian reaches into his blouse and takes out his precious Roll. While
reading it, he drops off to sleep, being awakened when he hears a voice saying sternly:
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise."
Jumping up, Christian makes with all speed to the top of the hill, where he
meets two Pilgrims coming toward him — Timorous and Mistrust. They have been up
ahead, they say, and there are lions there. They are giving up their pilgrimage
and returning home, and unsuccessfully try to persuade Christian to come with
them. Their report about the lions disturbs Christian, who reaches into his
blouse to get his Roll so that he may read it and be comforted. To his
consternation, the Roll is not there. Carefully searching along the way,
Christian retraces his steps to the arbor, where, as he recalls, he had been
reading the Roll when he allowed himself to doze off in "sinful
sleep." Not finding his treasure immediately, he sits down and weeps,
considering himself utterly undone by his carelessness in losing "his pass
into the Celestial City." When in deepest despair, he chances to see
something lying half-covered in the grass. It is his precious Roll, which he
tucks away securely in his blouse. Having offered a prayer of thanks "to
God for directing his eye to the place where it lay," Christian wearily
climbs back to the top of Difficulty Hill. From there he sees a stately
building and as it is getting on toward dark, hastens there. Palace Beautiful. A narrow path leads
off the Holy Way to the lodge in front of Palace Beautiful. Starting up the
path, Christian sees two lions, stops, and turns around as if to retreat. The
porter at the lodge, Watchful, who has been observing him, calls out that there
is nothing to be afraid of if one has faith. The lions are chained, one on
either side of the path, and anyone with faith can pass safely between them if
he keeps carefully to the middle of the path, which Christian does. Arriving at
the lodge, he asks if he can get lodging for the night. The porter, Watchful,
replies that he will find out from those in charge of Palace Beautiful. Soon,
four virgins come out to the lodge, all of them "grave and beautiful damsels":
Discretion, Prudence, Piety, and Charity. Satisfied with Christian's answers to
their questions, they invite him in, introduce him to the rest of the family,
serve him supper, and assign him to a beautiful bedroom — Peace — for the
night. Next morning, the virgins show him the "rarities" of the
place: First, the library, filled with ancient documents dating back to the
beginning of time; next, the armory, packed with swords, shields, helmets,
breastplates, and other things sufficient to equip all servants of the Lord,
even if they were as numerous as the stars in the sky. Leading their guest to
the roof of the palace, the virgins point to mountains in the distance — the
Delectable Mountains, which lie on the way to the Celestial City. Before allowing
Christian to depart, the virgins give him arms and armor to protect himself
during the next stretch of his journey, which they warn will be dangerous. Valley of Humiliation. Here Christian
is attacked and almost overcome by a "foul fiend" named Apollyon — a
hideous monster with scales like a fish, wings like a dragon, mouth like a
lion, and feet like a bear; flames and smoke belch out of a hole in his belly.
Christian, after a painful struggle, wounds the fiend with his sword and drives
him off. Valley of the Shadow of Death.
This is a wilderness, a land of deserts and pits, inhabited only by
yowling hobgoblins and other dreadful creatures. The path here is very narrow,
edged on one side by a deep, water-filled ditch in which many have drowned; on
the other side, by a treacherous bog. Walking carefully, Christian goes on and
soon finds himself close to the open mouth of Hell, the Burning Pit, out of
which comes a cloud of noxious fumes, long fingers of fire, showers of sparks,
and hideous noises. With flames flickering all around and smoke almost choking
him, Christian manages to get through by use of "All-prayer." Nearing
the end of the valley, he hears a shout raised by someone up ahead:
"Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear none
ill, for Thou art with me." As only a Pilgrim could have raised that cry,
Christian hastens forward to see who it might be. To his surprise and delight
he finds that it is an old friend, Faithful, one of his neighbors in the City
of Destruction. Vanity Fair. Happily
journeying together, exchanging stories about their adventures and
misadventures, the two Pilgrims come to the town of Vanity Fair, through which
they must pass. Interested only in commerce and money-making, the town holds a
year-round fair at which all kinds of things are bought and sold —
"houses, lands, trades, titles, . . . lusts, pleasures, . . . bodies,
souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." Christian and
Faithful infuriate the merchandisers by turning up their noses at the wares
offered them, saying that they would buy nothing but the Truth. Their presence
and their attitude cause a hubbub in the town, which leads the authorities to
jail them for disturbing the peace. The prisoners conduct themselves so well
that they win the sympathy of many townspeople, producing more strife and
commotion in the streets, and the prisoners are held responsible for this, too,
though they have done nothing. It is decided to indict them on the charge of
disrupting trade, creating dissension, and treating with contempt the customs
and laws laid down for the town by its prince, old Beelzebub himself. Brought
to trial first, Faithful is convicted and sentenced to be executed in the
manner prescribed by the presiding judge, Lord Hate-good. The hapless Faithful
is scourged, brutally beaten, lanced with knives, stoned, and then burned to
ashes at the stake. Thus, he becomes another of the Christian martyrs assured
of enjoying eternal bliss up on high. Doubting
Castle and Giant Despair. In a manner only vaguely explained, Christian
gets free and goes on his way — but not alone, for he has been joined by
Hopeful, a native of Vanity Fair who is fleeing in search of better things.
After a few minor adventures, the two reach a sparkling stream, the River of
the Water of Life, which meanders through beautiful meadows bright with
flowers. For a time the Holy Way follows the river bank but then veers off into
rougher ground which is hard on the sore tired feet of the travelers. Wishing
there were an easier way, they plod along until they come to another meadow
behind a high fence. Having climbed the fence to have a look, Christian
persuades Hopeful that they should move over into By-path Meadow, where there
is a soft grassy path paralleling theirs. Moving along, they catch up with
Vain-confidence, who says that he is bound for the Celestial City and knows the
way perfectly. Night comes on, but he continues to push ahead briskly, with
Christian and Hopeful following. Suddenly, the latter hear a frightened cry and
a loud thud. Vain-confidence has been dashed to pieces by falling into a deep
pit dug by the owner of the meadow. Christian and Hopeful retreat, but as they
can see nothing in the dark, they decide to lie down in the meadow to pass the
night. Next morning, they are surprised and seized by the prince of By-path
Meadow, a giant named Despair. Charging them with malicious trespassing, he
hauls them to his stronghold, Doubting Castle, and throws them into a deep dark
dungeon, where they lie for days without food or drink. At length, Giant
Despair appears, beats them almost senseless, and advises them to take their
own lives so that he will not have to come back to finish them off himself.
When all seems hopeless, Christian suddenly brightens up, "as one half
amazed," and exclaims: "What a fool am I, thus to lie in a stinking
dungeon when I may as well walk at liberty. I have a key in my bosom called
Promise which will (I am persuaded) open any lock in Doubting Castle."
Finding that the magic key works, the prisoners are soon out in the open and
running as fast as they can to get back onto the Holy Way, where they erect a
sign warning other Pilgrims against being tempted by the apparent ease of
traveling by way of By-path Meadow. Delectable
Mountains. Christian and Hopeful next come to the Delectable Mountains,
where they find gardens, orchards, vineyards, and fountains of water. Four
shepherds — Experience, Knowledge, Watchful, and Sincere — come to greet them,
telling them that the mountains are the Lord's, as are the flocks of sheep
grazing there. Having been escorted around the mountains and shown the sights
there, the two Pilgrims on the eve of their departure receive from the
shepherds a paper instructing them on what to do and what to avoid on the journey
ahead. For one thing, they should not lie down and sleep in the Enchanted
Ground, for that would be fatal. Country
of Beulah. This is a happy land where the sun shines day and night,
flowers bloom continuously, and the sweet and pleasant air is filled with
bird-song. There is no lack of grain and wine. Christian and Hopeful stop to
rest and enjoy themselves here, pleased that the Celestial City is now within
sight, which leads them to assume that the way there is now clear. Dark River. Proceeding, they are
amazed when they come to the Dark River, a wide, swift-flowing stream. They
look around for a bridge or boat on which to cross. A Shining One appears and
tells them that they must make their way across as best they can, that fording
the river is a test of faith, that those with faith have nothing to fear.
Wading into the river, Hopeful finds firm footing, but Christian does not He is
soon floundering in water over his head, fearing that he will be drowned, that
he will never see "the land that flows with milk and honey." Hopeful
helps Christian by holding his head above water, and the two finally achieve
the crossing. Celestial City. On
the far side of the river, two Shining Ones are waiting for the Pilgrims and
take them by the arm to assist them in climbing the steep slope to the
Celestial City, which stands on a "mighty hill . . . higher than the
clouds." Coming to the gate of the city, built all of precious stones,
Christian and Hopeful present their credentials, which are taken to the King
(God). He orders the gate to be opened, and the two weary but elated Pilgrims
go in, to find that the streets are paved with gold and that along them walk
many men with crowns on their heads and golden harps in their hands.
Plantinga, Alvin b.2, one
of the most important twentieth-century
philosophers of religion. His ideas have determined the direction of
debate in many aspects of the discipline. He has also contributed substantially
to analytic epistemology and the metaphysics of modality. Plantinga is currently
director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion and John O’Brien Professor of
Philosophy at the of Notre Dame.
Plantinga’s philosophy of religion has centered on the epistemology of
religious belief. His God and Other Minds 7 introduced a defining claim of his
career that belief in God may be
rational even if it is not supported by successful arguments from natural
theology. This claim was fully developed in a series of articles published in
the 0s, in which he argued for the position he calls “Reformed Epistemology.”
Borrowing from the work of theologians such as Calvin, Bavinck, and Barth,
Plantinga reasoned that theistic belief is “properly basic,” justified not by
other beliefs but by immediate experience. This position was most thoroughly
treated in his article “Reason and Belief in God” Plantinga and Wolterstorff,
eds., Faith and Rationality, 3. In early work Plantinga assumed an internalist
view of epistemic justification. Later he moved to externalism, arguing that
basic theistic belief would count as knowledge if true and appropriately
produced. He developed this approach in “Justification and Theism” Faith and
Philosophy, 7. These ideas led to the development of a full-scale externalist
epistemological theory, first presented in his 9 Gifford Lectures and later
published in the two-volume set Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and
Proper Function 3. This theory has become the focal point of much contemporary
debate in analytic epistemology. Plantinga is also a leading theorist in the
metaphysics of modality. The Nature of Necessity 4 developed a possible worlds
semantics that has become standard in the literature. His analysis of possible
worlds as maximally consistent states of affairs offers a realist compromise
between nominalist and extreme reificationist conceptions. In the last two
chapters, Plantinga brings his modal metaphysics to bear on two classical
topics in the philosophy of religion. He presented what many consider the
definitive version of the free will defense against the argument from evil and
a modal version of the ontological argument that may have produced more
response than any version since Anselm’s original offering.
Platonic
-- H. P. Grice as a Platonian commentator – vide his “Metaphysics,
Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato’s Republic” -- 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 35a36d. The Latin commentary of Calcidius fourth century A.D. is
also basically Middle Platonic. In the Neoplatonic period after Plotinus, who
did not indulge in formal commentary, though many of his essays are in fact
informal commentaries, we have evidence of much more comprehensive exegetic
activity. Porphyry initiated the tradition with commentaries on the Phaedo,
commentaries on Plato commentaries on Plato 160 160 Cratylus, Sophist, Philebus, Parmenides
of which the surviving anonymous fragment of commentary is probably a part, and
the Timaeus. He also commented on the myth of Er in the Republic. It seems to
have been Porphyry who is responsible for introducing the allegorical
interpretation of the introductory portions of the dialogues, though it was
only his follower 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 Grecian
philosophy, where it is not originality but rather faithfulness to an inspired
master and a great tradition that is being striven for.
Platonism Platonism --
Damascius c.462c.550, Grecian 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.
Platonism -- Eudoxus, Grecian 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 291 291 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. Plato: preeminent Grecian
philosopher whose chief contribution consists in his conception of the
observable world as an imperfect image of a realm of unobservable and
unchanging “Forms,” and his conception of the best life as one centered on the
love of these divine objects. Life and influences. Born in Athens to a
politically powerful and aristocratic family, Plato came under the influence of
Socrates during his youth and set aside his ambitions for a political career
after Socrates was executed for impiety. His travels in southern Italy and
Sicily brought him into closer contact with the followers of Pythagoras, whose
research in mathematics played an important role in his intellectual
development. He was also acquainted with Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus,
and was influenced by their doctrine that the world is in constant flux. He
wrote in opposition to the relativism of Protagoras and the purely
materialistic mode of explanation adopted by Democritus. At the urging of a
devoted follower, Dion, he became involved in the politics of Syracuse, the
wealthiest city of the Grecian world, but his efforts to mold the ideas of its
tyrant, Dionysius II, were unmitigated failures. These painful events are
described in Plato’s Letters Epistles, the longest and most important of which
is the Seventh Letter, and although the authenticity of the Letters is a matter
of controversy, there is little doubt that the author was well acquainted with
Plato’s life. After returning from his first visit to Sicily in 387, Plato
established the Academy, a fraternal association devoted to research and
teaching, and named after the sacred site on the outskirts of Athens where it
was located. As a center for political training, it rivaled the school of
Isocrates, which concentrated entirely on rhetoric. The bestknown student of
the Academy was Aristotle, who joined at the age of seventeen when Plato was
sixty and remained for twenty years. Chronology of the works. Plato’s works,
many of which take the form of dialogues between Socrates and several other
speakers, were composed over a period of about fifty years, and this has led
scholars to seek some pattern of philosophical development in them.
Increasingly sophisticated stylometric tests have been devised to calculate the
linguistic similarities among the dialogues. Ancient sources indicate that the
Laws was Plato’s last work, and there is now consensus that many affinities
exist between the style of this work and several others, which can therefore
also be safely regarded as late works; these include the Sophist, Statesman,
and Philebus perhaps written in that order. Stylometric tests also support a
rough division of Plato’s other works into early and middle periods. For
example, the Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches,
and Protagoras listed alphabetically are widely thought to be early; while the
Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus perhaps written in that order are
agreed to belong to his middle period. But in some cases it is difficult or
impossible to tell which of two works belonging to the same general period
preceded the other; this is especially true of the early dialogues. The most
controversial chronological question concerns the Timaeus: stylometric tests
often place it with the later dialogues, though some scholars think that its
philosophical doctrines are discarded in the later dialogues, and they
therefore assign it to Plato’s middle period. The underlying issue is whether
he abandoned some of the main doctrines of this middle period. Early and middle
dialogues. The early dialogues typically portray an encounter between Socrates
and an interlocutor who complacently assumes that he understands a common
evaluative concept like courage, piety, or beauty. For example, Euthyphro, in
the dialogue that bears his name, denies that there is any impiety in
prosecuting his father, but repeated questioning by Socrates shows that he
cannot say what single thing all pious acts have in common by virtue of which
they are rightly called pious. Socrates professes to have no answer to these
“What is X?” questions, and this fits well with the claim he makes in the
Apology that his peculiarly human form of wisdom consists in realizing how
little he knows. In these early dialogues, Socrates seeks but fails to find a
philosophically defensible theory that would ground our use of normative terms.
The Meno is similar to these early dialogues
it asks what virtue is, and fails to find an answer but it goes beyond them and marks a
transition in Plato’s thinking. It raises for the first time a question about
methodology: if one does not have knowledge, how is it possible to acquire it
simply by raising the questions Socrates poses in the early dialogues? To show
that it is possible, Plato demonstrates that even a slave ignorant of geometry
can begin to learn the subject through questioning. The dialogue then proposes
an explanation of our ability to learn in this way: the soul acquired knowledge
before it entered the body, and when we learn we are really recollecting what
we once knew and forgot. This bold speculation about the soul and our ability
to learn contrasts with the noncommittal position Socrates takes in the
Apology, where he is undecided whether the dead lose all consciousness or
continue their activities in Hades. The confidence in immortality evident in
the Meno is bolstered by arguments given in the Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus.
In these dialogues, Plato uses metaphysical considerations about the nature of
the soul and its ability to learn to support a conception of what the good
human life is. Whereas the Socrates of the early dialogues focuses almost
exclusively on ethical questions and is pessimistic about the extent to which
we can answer them, Plato, beginning with the Meno and continuing throughout
the rest of his career, confidently asserts that we can answer Socratic
questions if we pursue ethical and metaphysical inquiries together. The Forms.
The Phaedo is the first dialogue in which Plato decisively posits the existence
of the abstract objects that he often called “Forms” or “Ideas.” The latter
term should be used with caution, since these objects are not creations of a
mind, but exist independently of thought; the singular Grecian terms Plato
often uses to name these abstract objects are eidos and idea. These Forms are
eternal, changeless, and incorporeal; since they are imperceptible, we can come
to have knowledge of them only through thought. Plato insists that it would be
an error to identify two equal sticks with what Equality itself is, or
beautiful bodies with what Beauty itself is; after all, he says, we might
mistakenly take two equal sticks to be unequal, but we would never suffer from
the delusion that Equality itself is unequal. The unchanging and incorporeal
Form is the sort of object that is presupposed by Socratic inquiry; what every
pious act has in common with every other is that it bears a certain
relationship called “participation” to one and the same thing, the Form of Piety.
In this sense, what makes a pious act pious and a pair of equal sticks equal
are the Forms Piety and Equality. When we call sticks equal or acts pious, we
are implicitly appealing to a standard of equality or piety, just as someone
appeals to a standard when she says that a painted portrait of someone is a
man. Of course, the pigment on the canvas is not a man; rather, it is properly
called a man because it bears a certain relationship to a very different sort
of object. In precisely this way, Plato claims that the Forms are what many of
our words refer to, even though they are radically different sorts of objects
from the ones revealed to the senses. For Plato the Forms are not merely an
unusual item to be added to our list of existing objects. Rather, they are a
source of moral and religious inspiration, and their discovery is therefore a
decisive turning point in one’s life. This process is described by a fictional
priestess named Diotima in the Symposium, a dialogue containing a series of
speeches in praise of love and concluding with a remarkable description of the
passionate response Socrates inspired in Alcibiades, his most notorious
admirer. According to Diotima’s account, those who are in love are searching
for something they do not yet understand; whether they realize it or not, they
seek the eternal possession of the good, and they can obtain it only through
productive activity of some sort. Physical love perpetuates the species and
achieves a lower form of immortality, but a more beautiful kind of offspring is
produced by those who govern cities and shape the moral characteristics of
future generations. Best of all is the kind of love that eventually attaches
itself to the Form of Beauty, since this is the most beautiful of all objects
and provides the greatest happiness to the lover. One develops a love for this
Form by ascending through various stages of emotional attachment and
understanding. Beginning with an attraction to the beauty of one person’s body,
one gradually develops an appreciation for the beauty present in all other
beautiful bodies; then one’s recognition of the beauty in people’s souls takes
on increasing strength, and leads to a deeper attachment to the beauty of
customs, laws, and systems of knowledge; and this process of emotional growth
and deepening insight eventually culminates in the discovery of the eternal and
changeless beauty of Beauty itself. Plato’s theory of erotic passion does not
endorse “Platonic love,” if that phrase designates a purely spiritual
relationship completely devoid of physical attraction or expression. What he
insists on is that desires for physical contact be restrained so that they do
not subvert the greater good that can be accomplished in human relationships.
His sexual orientation like that of many of his Athenian contemporaries is
clearly homosexual, and he values the moral growth that can occur when one man
is physically attracted to another, but in Book I of the Laws he condemns
genital activity when it is homosexual, on the ground that such activity should
serve a purely procreative purpose. Plato’s thoughts about love are further
developed in the Phaedrus. The lover’s longing for and physical attraction to
another make him disregard the norms of commonplace and dispassionate human
relationships: love of the right sort is therefore one of four kinds of divine
madness. This fourfold classificatory scheme is then used as a model of proper
methodology. Starting with the Phaedrus, classification what Plato calls the “collection and division
of kinds” becomes the principal method
to be used by philosophers, and this approach is most fully employed in such
late works as the Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus. Presumably it contributed
to Aristotle’s interest in categories and biological classification. The
Republic. The moral and metaphysical theory centered on the Forms is most fully
developed in the Republic, a dialogue that tries to determine whether it is in
one’s own best interests to be a just person. It is commonly assumed that
injustice pays if one can get away with it, and that just behavior merely
serves the interests of others. Plato attempts to show that on the contrary
justice, properly understood, is so great a good that it is worth any
sacrifice. To support this astonishing thesis, he portrays an ideal political
community: there we will see justice writ large, and so we will be better able
to find justice in the individual soul. An ideal city, he argues, must make
radical innovations. It should be ruled by specially trained philosophers,
since their understanding of the Form of the Good will give them greater
insight into everyday affairs. Their education is compared to that of a
prisoner who, having once gazed upon nothing but shadows in the artificial
light of a cave, is released from bondage, leaves the cave, eventually learns
to see the sun, and is thereby equipped to return to the cave and see the images
there for what they are. Everything in the rulers’ lives is designed to promote
their allegiance to the community: they are forbidden private possessions,
their sexual lives are regulated by eugenic considerations, and they are not to
know who their children are. Positions of political power are open to women,
since the physical differences between them and men do not in all cases deprive
them of the intellectual or moral capacities needed for political office. The
works of poets are to be carefully regulated, for the false moral notions of
the traditional poets have had a powerful and deleterious impact on the general
public. Philosophical reflection is to replace popular poetry as the force that
guides moral education. What makes this city ideally just, according to Plato,
is the dedication of each of its components to one task for which it is
naturally suited and specially trained. The rulers are ideally equipped to
rule; the soldiers are best able to enforce their commands; and the economic
class, composed of farmers, craftsmen, builders, and so on, are content to do
their work and to leave the tasks of making and enforcing the laws to others.
Accordingly what makes the soul of a human being just is the same principle:
each of its components must properly perform its own task. The part of us that
is capable of understanding and reasoning is the part that must rule; the
assertive part that makes us capable of anger and competitive spirit must give
our understanding the force it needs; and our appetites for food and sex must
be trained so that they seek only those objects that reason approves. It is not
enough to educate someone’s reason, for unless the emotions and appetites are
properly trained they will overpower it. Just individuals are those who have
fully integrated these elements of the soul. They do not unthinkingly follow a
list of rules; rather, their just treatment of others flows from their own
balanced psychological condition. And the paradigm of a just person is a
philosopher, for reason rules when it becomes passionately attached to the most
intelligible objects there are: the Forms. It emerges that justice pays because
attachment to these supremely valuable objects is part of what true justice of
the soul is. The worth of our lives depends on the worth of the objects to
which we devote ourselves. Those who think that injustice pays assume that
wealth, domination, or the pleasures of physical appetite are supremely
valuable; their mistake lies in their limited conception of what sorts of objects
are worth loving. Late dialogues. The Republic does not contain Plato’s last
thoughts on moral or metaphysical matters. For example, although he continues
to hold in his final work, the Laws, that the family and private wealth should
ideally be abolished, he describes in great detail a second-best community that
retains these and many other institutions of ordinary political life. The
sovereignty of law in such a state is stressed continually; political offices
are to be filled by elections and lots, and magistrates are subject to careful
scrutiny and prosecution. Power is divided among several councils and offices,
and philosophical training is not a prerequisite for political participation.
This second-best state is still worlds apart from a modern liberal
democracy poetic works and many features
of private life are carefully regulated, and atheism is punished with
death but it is remarkable that Plato,
after having made no concessions to popular participation in the Republic,
devoted so much energy to finding a proper place for it in his final work.
Plato’s thoughts about metaphysics also continued to evolve, and perhaps the
most serious problem in interpreting his work as a whole is the problem of
grasping the direction of these further developments. One notorious obstacle to
understanding his later metaphysics is presented by the Parmenides, for here we
find an unanswered series of criticisms of the theory of Forms. For example, it
is said that if there is reason to posit one Form of Largeness to select an
arbitrary example then there is an equally good reason to posit an unlimited
number of Forms of this type. The “first” Form of Largeness must exist because
according to Plato whenever a number of things are large, there is a Form of
Largeness that makes them large; but now, the argument continues, if we
consider this Form together with the other large things, we should recognize
still another Form, which makes the large things and Largeness itself large.
The argument can be pursued indefinitely, but it seems absurd that there should
be an unlimited number of Forms of this one type. In antiquity the argument was
named the Third Man, because it claims that in addition to a second type of
object called “man” the Form of Man there is even a third. What is Plato’s
response to this and other objections to his theory? He says in the Parmenides
that we must continue to affirm the existence of such objects, for language and
thought require them; but instead of responding directly to the criticisms, he
embarks on a prolonged examination of the concept of unity, reaching apparently
conflicting conclusions about it. Whether these contradictions are merely
apparent and whether this treatment of unity contains a response to the earlier
critique of the Forms are difficult matters of interpretation. But in any case
it is clear that Plato continues to uphold the existence of unchanging
realities; the real difficulty is whether and how he modifies his earlier views
about them. In the Timaeus, there seem to be no modifications at all a fact that has led some scholars to believe,
in spite of some stylometric evidence to the contrary, that this work was
written before Plato composed the critique of the Forms in the Parmenides. This
dialogue presents an account of how a divine but not omnipotent craftsman
transformed the disorderly materials of the universe into a harmonious cosmos
by looking to the unchanging Forms as paradigms and creating, to the best of
his limited abilities, constantly fluctuating images of those paradigms. The
created cosmos is viewed as a single living organism governed by its own
divinely intelligent soul; time itself came into existence with the cosmos,
being an image of the timeless nature of the Forms; space, however, is not
created by the divine craftsman but is the characterless receptacle in which
all change takes place. The basic ingredients of the universe are not earth,
air, fire, and water, as some thinkers held; rather, these elements are
composed of planes, which are in turn made out of elementary triangular shapes.
The Timaeus is an attempt to show that although many other types of objects
besides the Forms must be invoked in order to understand the orderly nature of
the changing universe souls, triangles,
space the best scientific explanations
will portray the physical world as a purposeful and very good approximation to
a perfect pattern inherent in these unchanging and eternal objects. But Forms
do not play as important a role in the Philebus, a late dialogue that contains
Plato’s fullest answer to the question, What is the good? He argues that
neither pleasure not intelligence can by itself be identified with the good,
since no one would be satisfied with a life that contained just one of these
but totally lacked the other. Instead, goodness is identified with proportion,
beauty, and truth; and intelligence is ranked a superior good to pleasure
because of its greater kinship to these three. Here, as in the middle
dialogues, Plato insists that a proper understanding of goodness requires a
metaphysical grounding. To evaluate the role of pleasure in human life, we need
a methodology that applies to all other areas of understanding. More
specifically, we must recognize that everything can be placed in one of four
categories: the limited, the unlimited, the mixture of these two, and the
intelligent creation of this mixture. Where Forms are to be located in this
scheme is unclear. Although metaphysics is invoked to answer practical
questions, as in the Republic, it is not precisely the same metaphysics as
before. Though we naturally think of Plato primarily as a writer of
philosophical works, he regards the written word as inferior to spoken
interchange as an instrument for learning and teaching. The drawbacks inherent
in written composition are most fully set forth in the Phaedrus. There is no
doubt that in the Academy he participated fully in philosophical debate, and on
at least one occasion he lectured to a general audience. We are told by
Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, that many in Plato’s audience were baffled
and disappointed by a lecture in which he maintained that Good is one. We can
safely assume that in conversation Plato put forward important philosophical
ideas that nonetheless did not find their way into his writings. Aristotle refers
in Physics IV.2 to one of Plato’s doctrines as unwritten, and the enigmatic
positions he ascribes to Plato in Metaphysics I.6 that the Forms are to be explained in terms
of number, which are in turn generated from the One and the dyad of great and small seem to have been expounded solely in
discussion. Some scholars have put great weight on the statement in the Seventh
Letter that the most fundamental philosophical matters must remain unwritten,
and, using later testimony about Plato’s unwritten doctrines, they read the
dialogues as signs of a more profound but hidden truth. The authenticity of the
Seventh Letter is a disputed question, however. In any case, since Aristotle
himself treats the middle and late dialogues as undissembling accounts of Plato’s
philosophy, we are on firm ground in adopting the same approach.
playgroup: The
motivation for the three playgroups were different. Austin’s first playgroup
was for fun. Grice never attended. Austin’s new playgroup, or ‘second’
playgroup, if you must, was a sobriquet Grice gave because it was ANYTHING BUT.
Grice’s playgroup upon Austin’s death was for fun, like the ‘first’ playgroup.
Since Grice participated in the second and third, he expanded. The second
playgroup was for ‘philosophical hacks’ who needed ‘para-philosophy.’ The third
playgroup was for fun fun. While Austin belonged to the first and the second
playgroups, there were notorious differences. In the first playgroup, he was
not the master, and his resentment towards Ayer can be seen in “Sense and
Sensibilia.” The second playgroup had Austin as the master. It is said that the
playgroup survived Austin’s demise with Grice’s leadership – But Grice’s
playgroup was still a different thing – some complained about the disorderly
and rambling nature – Austin had kept a very tidy organisation and power
structure. Since Grice does NOT mention his own playgroup, it is best to
restrict playgroup as an ironic sobriquet by Grice to anything but a playgroup,
conducted after the war by Austin, by invitation only, to full-time university
lecturers in philosophy. Austin would hold a central position, and Austin’s
motivation was to ‘reach’ agreement. Usually, when agreement was not reached,
Austin could be pretty impolite. Grice found himself IN THE PLAYGROUP. He
obviously preferred a friendlier atmosphere, as his own group later testified.
But he was also involved in philosophical activity OTHER than the play group.
Notably his joint endeavours with Strawson, Warnock, Pears, and Thomson. For
some reason he chose each for a specific area: Warnock for the philosophy of
perception (Grice’s implicature is that he would not explore meta-ethics with
Warnock – he wouldn’t feel like, nor Warnock would). Philosophy of action of
all things, with J. F. Thomson. Philosophical psychology with D. F. Pears – so
this brings Pears’s observations on intending, deciding, predicting, to the
fore. And ontology with P. F. Strawson. Certainlty he would not involve with
Strawson on endless disagreements about the alleged divergence or lack thereof
between truth-functional devices and their vernacular counterparts! Grice also
mentions collaboration with Austin in teaching – “an altogether flintier
experience,” as Warnock knows and “Grice can testify.” – There was joint
seminars with A. M. Quinton, and a few others. One may add the tutorials. Some
of his tutees left Griceian traces: A. G. N. Flew, David Bostock, J. L.
Ackrill, T. C. Potts. The term was meant
ironically. The playgroup activities smack of military or civil service! while this can be safely called Grice’s
playgroup, it was founded by Austin at All Souls, where it had only seven
members. After the war, Grice joined in. The full list is found elsewhere. With
Austin’s death, Grice felt the responsibility to continue with it, and plus, he
enjoyed it! In alphabetical order. It is this group that made history. J. L. Austin, A. G. N. Flew, P. L. Gardiner,
H. P. Grice, S. N. Hampshire, R. M. Hare, H. L. A. Hart, P. H. Nowell-Smith, G. A. Paul, D. F. Pears,
P. F. Strawson, J. F. Thomson, J. O. Urmson, G. J. Warnock, A. D. Woozley.
Grice distinguishes it very well from Ryle’s group, and the group of
neo-Wittgensteinians. And those three groups were those only involved with
‘ordinary language.’
Plekhanov, Georgy
Valentinovich 18568, a leading theoretician of the Russian revolutionary
movement and the father of Russian Marxism. Exiled from his native Russia for
most of his adult life, in 3 he founded in Switzerland the first Russian
Marxist association the Emancipation of
Labor, a forerunner of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party. In
philosophy he sought to systematize and disseminate the outlook of Marx and
Engels, for which he popularized the name ‘dialectical materialism’. For the
most part an orthodox Marxist in his understanding of history, Plekhanov argued
that historical developments cannot be diverted or accelerated at will; he
believed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution in the first
decades of the twentieth century, and consequently he opposed the Bolshevik
faction in the Plato, commentaries on Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich 713 713 split 3 of the Social Democratic party.
At the same time he was not a simplistic economic determinist: he accepted the
role of geographical, psychological, and other non-economic factors in
historical change. In epistemology, Plekhanov agreed with Kant that we cannot
know things in themselves, but he argued that our sensations may be conceived
as “hieroglyphs,” corresponding point by point to the elements of reality without
resembling them. In ethics, too, Plekhanov sought to supplement Marx with Kant,
tempering the class analysis of morality with the view that there are
universally binding ethical principles, such as the principle that human beings
should be treated as ends rather than means. Because in these and other
respects Plekhanov’s version of Marxism conflicted with Lenin’s, his philosophy
was scornfully rejected by doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists during the Stalin
era.
Plotinus, Greco-Roman
Neoplatonist philosopher. Born in Egypt, though doubtless of Grecian ancestry,
he studied Platonic philosophy in Alexandria with Ammonius Saccas 23243; then,
after a brief adventure on the staff of the Emperor Gordian III on an
unsuccessful expedition against the Persians, he came to Rome in 244 and
continued teaching philosophy there until his death. He enjoyed the support of
many prominent people, including even the Emperor Gallienus and his wife. His
chief pupils were Amelius and Porphyry, the latter of whom collected and edited
his philosophical essays, the Enneads so called because arranged by Porphyry in
six groups of nine. The first three groups concern the physical world and our
relation to it, the fourth concerns Soul, the fifth Intelligence, and the sixth
the One. Porphyry’s arrangement is generally followed today, though a
chronological sequence of tractates, which he also provides in his introductory
Life of Plotinus, is perhaps preferable. The most important treatises are I.1;
I.2; I.6; II.4; II.8; III.23; III.6; III.7; IV.34; V.1; V.3; VI.45; VI.7; VI.8;
VI.9; and the group III.8, V.8, V.5, and II.9 a single treatise, split up by
Porphyry, that is a wide-ranging account of Plotinus’s philosophical position,
culminating in an attack on gnosticism. Plotinus saw himself as a faithful
exponent of Plato see especially Enneads V.1, but he is far more than that.
Platonism had developed considerably in the five centuries that separate Plato
from Plotinus, taking on much from both Aristotelianism and Stoicism, and
Plotinus is the heir to this process. He also adds much himself.
pluralism, a
philosophical perspective on the world that emphasizes diversity rather than
homogeneity, multiplicity rather than unity, difference rather than sameness.
The philosophical consequences of pluralism were addressed by Grecian antiquity
in its preoccupation with the problem of the one and the many. The proponents
of pluralism, represented principally by Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the
Atomists Leucippus and Democritus, maintained that reality was made up of a
multiplicity of entities. Adherence to this doctrine set them in opposition to
the monism of the Eleatic School Parmenides, which taught that reality was an
impermeable unity and an unbroken solidarity. It was thus that pluralism came
to be defined as a philosophical alternative to monism. In the development of
Occidental thought, pluralism came to be contrasted not only with monism but
also with dualism, the philosophical doctrine that there are two, and only two,
kinds of existents. Descartes, with his doctrine of two distinct
substances extended non-thinking
substance versus non-extended thinking substance is commonly regarded as having provided the
clearest example of philosophical dualism. Pluralism thus needs to be
understood as marking out philosophical alternatives to both monism and
dualism. Pluralism as a metaphysical doctrine requires that we distinguish
substantival from attributive pluralism. Substantival pluralism views the world
as containing a multiplicity of substances that remain irreducible to each
other. Attributive pluralism finds the multiplicity of kinds not among the
furniture of substances that make up the world but rather among a diversity of
attributes and distinguishing properties. However, pluralism came to be defined
not only as a metaphysical doctrine but also as a regulative principle of
explanation that calls upon differing explanatory principles and conceptual
schemes to account for the manifold events of nature and the varieties of human
experience. Recent philosophical thought has witnessed a resurgence of interest
in pluralism. This was evident in the development of pragmatism, where pluralism received piquant
expression in James’s A Pluralistic Universe 9. More recently pluralism was
given a voice in the thought of the later Vitters, with its heavy accent on the
plurality of language games displayed in our ordinary discourse. Also, in the
current developments of philosophical postmodernism Jean-François Lyotard, one
finds an explicit pluralistic orientation. Here the emphasis falls on the
multiplicity of signifiers, phrase regimens, genres of discourse, and
narrational strategies. The alleged unities and totalities of thought,
discourse, and action are subverted in the interests of reclaiming the
diversified and heterogeneous world of human experience. Pluralism in
contemporary thought initiates a move into a postmetaphysical age. It is less
concerned with traditional metaphysical and epistemological issues, seeking
answers to questions about the nature and kinds of substances and attributes;
and it is more attuned to the diversity of social practices and the multiple
roles of language, discourse, and narrative in the panoply of human
affairs.
pluralitive logic, also
called pleonetetic logic, the logic of ‘many’, ‘most’, ‘few’, and similar terms
including ‘four out of five’, ‘over 45 percent’ and so on. Consider 1 ‘Almost
all F are G’ 2 ‘Almost all F are not G’ 3 ‘Most F are G’ 4 ‘Most F are not G’ 5
‘Many F are G’ 6 ‘Many F are not G’ 1 i.e., ‘Few F are not G’ and 6 are
contradictory, as are 2 and 5 and 3 and 4. 1 and 2 cannot be true together
i.e., they are contraries, nor can 3 and 4, while 5 and 6 cannot be false
together i.e., they are subcontraries. Moreover, 1 entails 3 which entails 5,
and 2 entails 4 which entails 6. Thus 16 form a generalized “square of
opposition” fitting inside the standard one. Sometimes 3 is said to be true if
more than half the F’s are G, but this makes ‘most’ unnecessarily precise, for
‘most’ does not literally mean ‘more than half’. Although many pluralitive
terms are vague, their interrelations are logically precise. Again, one might
define ‘many’ as ‘There are at least n’, for some fixed n, at least relative to
context. But this not only erodes the vagueness, it also fails to work for
arbitrarily large and infinite domains. ‘Few’, ‘most’, and ‘many’ are binary
quantifiers, a type of generalized quantifier. A unary quantifier, such as the
standard quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘all’, connotes a second-level property, e.g.,
‘Something is F’ means ‘F has an instance’, and ‘All F’s are G’ means ‘F and
not G has no instance’. A generalized quantifier connotes a second-level
relation. ‘Most F’s are G’ connotes a binary relation between F and G, one that
cannot be reduced to any property of a truth-functional compound of F and G. In
fact, none of the standard pluralitive terms can be defined in first-order
logic.
plurality of causes, as
used by J. S. Mill, more than one cause of a single effect; i.e., tokens of
different event types causing different tokens of the same event type.
Plurality of causes is distinct from overdetermination of an event by more than
one actual or potential token cause. For example, an animal’s death has a
plurality of causes: it may die of starvation, of bleeding, of a blow to the
head, and so on. Mill thought these cases were important because he saw that
the existence of a plurality of causes creates problems for his four methods
for determining causes. Mill’s method of agreement is specifically vulnerable
to the problem: the method fails to reveal the cause of an event when the event
has more than one type of cause, because the method presumes that causes are
necessary for their effects. Actually, plurality of causes is a commonplace
fact about the world because very few causes are necessary for their effects.
Unless the background conditions are specified in great detail, or the identity
of the effect type is defined very narrowly, almost all cases involve a
plurality of causes. For example, flipping the light switch is a necessary
cause of the light’s going on, only if one assumes that there will be no short
circuit across the switch, that the wiring will remain as it is, and so on, or
if one assumes that by ‘the light’s going on’ one means the light’s going on in
the normal way.
Po-hu tung “White Tiger
Hall Consultations”, an important Chin. Confucian work of the later Han
dynasty, resulting from discussions at the imperial palace in A.D. 79 on the
classics and their commentaries. Divided into forty-three headings, the text
sums up the dominant teachings of Confucianism by affirming the absolute
position of the monarch, a cosmology and moral psychology based on the yinyang
theory, and a comprehensive social and political philosophy. While emphasizing
benevolent government, it legitimizes the right of the ruler to use force to
quell disorder. A system of “three bonds and six relationships” defines the
hierarchical structure of society. Human nature, identified with the yang
cosmic force, must be cultivated, while feelings yin are to be controlled
especially by rituals and education. The Confucian orthodoxy affirmed also
marks an end to the debate between the Old Text school and the New Text school
that divided earlier Han scholars.
poiesis Grecian,
‘production’, behavior aimed at an external end. In Aristotle, poiesis is
opposed to praxis action. It is characteristic of crafts e.g. building, the end of which is houses. It
is thus a kinesis process. For Aristotle, exercising the virtues, since it must
be undertaken for its own sake, cannot be poiesis. The knowledge involved in
virtue is therefore not the same as that involved in crafts. R.C.
Poincaré: j. h.,
philosopher of science. Born into a prominent family in Nancy, he showed
extraordinary talent in mathematics from an early age. He studied at the École
des Mines and worked as a mining engineer while completing his doctorate in
mathematics 1879. In 1, he was appointed professor at the of Paris, where he lectured on mathematics,
physics, and astronomy until his death. His original contributions to the
theory of differential equations, algebraic topology, and number theory made
him the leading mathematician of his day. He published almost five hundred
technical papers as well as three widely read books on the philosophy of
science: Science and Hypothesis 2, The Value of Science 5, and Science and
Method 8. Poincaré’s philosophy of science was shaped by his approach to
mathematics. Geometric axioms are neither synthetic a priori nor empirical;
they are more properly understood as definitions. Thus, when one set of axioms
is preferred over another for use in physics, the choice is a matter of
“convention”; it is governed by criteria of simplicity and economy of
expression rather than by which geometry is “correct.” Though Euclidean
geometry is used to describe the motions of bodies in space, it makes no sense
to ask whether physical space “really” is Euclidean. Discovery in mathematics
resembles discovery in the physical sciences, but whereas the former is a
construction of the human mind, the latter has to be fitted to an order of
nature that is ultimately independent of mind. Science provides an economic and
fruitful way of expressing the relationships between classes of sensations,
enabling reliable predictions to be made. These sensations reflect the world
that causes them; the limited objectivity of science derives from this fact,
but science does not purport to determine the nature of that underlying world.
Conventions, choices that are not determinable by rule, enter into the physical
sciences at all levels. Such principles as that of the conservation of energy
may appear to be empirical, but are in fact postulates that scientists have
chosen to treat as implicit definitions. The decision between alternative hypotheses
also involves an element of convention: the choice of a particular curve to
represent a finite set of data points, e.g., requires a judgment as to which is
simpler. Two kinds of hypotheses, in particular, must be distinguished.
Inductive generalizations from observation “real generalizations” are
hypothetical in the limited sense that they are always capable of further
precision. Then there are theories “indifferent hypotheses” that postulate
underlying entities or structures. These entities may seem explanatory, but
strictly speaking are no more than devices useful in calculation. For atomic
theory to explain, atoms would have to exist. But this cannot be established in
the only way permissible for a scientific claim, i.e. directly by experiment.
Shortly before he died, Poincaré finally allowed that Perrin’s experimental
verification of Einstein’s predictions regarding Brownian motion, plus his
careful marshaling of twelve other distinct experimental methods of calculating
Avogadro’s number, constituted the equivalent of an experimental proof of the
existence of atoms: “One can say that we see them because we can count them. .
. . The atom of the chemist is now a reality.”
polarity, the relation between distinct
phenomena, terms, or concepts such that each inextricably requires, though it
is opposed to, the other, as in the relation between the north and south poles
of a magnet. In application to terms or concepts, polarity entails that the
meaning of one involves the meaning of the other. This is conceptual polarity.
Terms are existentially polar provided an instance of one cannot exist unless
there exists an instance of the other. The second sense implies the first.
Supply and demand and good and evil are instances of conceptual polarity. North
and south and buying and selling are instances of existential polarity. Some
polar concepts are opposites, such as truth and falsity. Some are correlative,
such as question and answer: an answer is always an answer to a question; a
question calls for an answer, but a question can be an answer, and an answer
can be a question. The concept is not restricted to pairs and can be extended
to generate mutual interdependence, multipolarity.
Polish logic, logic as
researched, elucidated, and taught in Poland, 939. Between the two wars
colleagues Jan Lukasiewicz, Tadeusz Kotarbigki, and Stanislaw Lesniewski,
assisted by students-become-collaborators such as Alfred Tarski, Jerzy
Slupecki, Stanislaw Jaskowski, and Boleslaw Sobocigski, together with
mathematicians in Warsaw and philosophical colleagues elsewhere, like Kasimir
Ajdukiewicz and Tadeusz Czezowski, made Warsaw an internationally known center
of research in logic, metalogic, semantics, and foundations of mathematics. The
Warsaw “school” also dominated Polish philosophy, and made Poland the country
that introduced modern logic even in secondary schools. All three founders took
their doctorates in Lvov under Kasimir Twardowski 18668, mentor of leading
thinkers of independent Poland between the wars. Arriving from Vienna to take
the chair of philosophy at twenty-nine, Twardowski had to choose between
concentrating on his own research and organizing the study of philosophy in
Poland. Dedicating his life primarily to the community task, he became the
founder of modern Polish philosophy. Twardowski’s informal distinction between
distributive and collective conceptions influenced classification of philosophy
and the sciences, and anticipated Lesniewski’s formal axiomatizations in
ontology and mereology, respectively. Another common inheritance important in
Polish logic was Twardowski’s stress on the processproduct ambiguity. He
applied this distinction to disambiguate ‘meaning’ and refine his teacher
Brentano’s account of mental acts as meaningful “intentional” events, by differentiating
1 what is meant or “intended” by the act, its objective noema or noematic
“intentional object,” from 2 its corresponding noetic meaning or subjective
“content,” the correlated characteristic or structure by which it “intends” its
“object” or “objective” i.e., means
that: suchand-such is so. Twardowski’s teaching
especially this careful analysis of “contents” and “objects” of mental
acts contributed to Meinong’s theory of
objects, and linked it, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Anton Marty’s “philosophical
grammar” with the “descriptive psychology” of their common teacher, the
Aristotelian and Scholastic empiricist Brentano, and thus with sources of the
analytic movements in Vienna and Cambridge. Twardowski’s lectures on the
philosophical logic of content and judgment prepared the ground for scientific
semantics; his references to Boolean algebra opened the door to mathematical
logic; and his phenomenological idea of a general theory of objects pointed
toward Lesniewski’s ontology. Twardowski’s maieutic character, integrity,
grounding in philosophical traditions, and arduous training lectures began at
six a.m., together with his realist defense of the classical Aristotelian
correspondence theory of truth against “irrationalism,” dogmatism, skepticism,
and psychologism, influenced his many pupils, who became leaders of Polish
thought in diverse fields. But more influential than any doctrine was his
rigorist ideal of philosophy as a strict scientific discipline of criticism and
logical analysis, precise definition, and conceptual clarification. His was a
school not of doctrine but of method. Maintaining this common methodological
inheritance in their divergent ways, and encouraged to learn more mathematical
logic than Twardowski himself knew, his students in logic were early influenced
by Frege’s and Husserl’s critique of psychologism in logic, Husserl’s logical
investigations, and the logical reconstruction of classical mathematics by
Frege, Schröder, Whitehead, and Russell. As lecturer in Lvov from 8 until his
appointment to Warsaw in 5, Lukasiewicz introduced mathematical logic into
Poland. To Lesniewski, newly arrived from studies in G.y as an enthusiast for
Marty’s philosophy of language, Lukasiewicz’s influential 0 Critique of
Aristotle’s principle of contradiction was a “revelation” in 1. Among other
things it revealed paradoxes like Russell’s, which preoccupied him for the next
eleven years as, logically refuting Twardowski’s Platonist theory of
abstraction, he worked out his own solutions and, influenced also by Leon
Chwistek, outgrew the influence of Hans Cornelius and Leon Petraz´ycki, and
developed his own “constructively nominalist” foundations. In 9 Kotarbisski and
Lesniewski joined Lukasiewicz in Warsaw, where they attracted students like Tarski,
Sobocigski, and Slupecki in the first generation, and Andrzej Mostowski and
Czeslaw Lejewski in the next. When the war came, the survivors were scattered
and the metalogicians Morchaj Wajsberg, Moritz Presburger, and Adolf Lindenbaum
were killed or “disappeared” by the Gestapo. Lukasiewicz concentrated
increasingly on history of logic especially in reconstructing the logic of
Aristotle and the Stoics and deductive problems concerning syllogistic and
propositional logic. His idea of logical probability and development of three-
or manyvalued and modal calculi reflected his indeterminist sympathies in
prewar exchanges with Kotarbigski and Lesniewski on the status of truths
eternal, sempiternal, or both?, especially as concerns future contingencies.
Lesniewski concentrated on developing his logical systems. He left elaboration
of many of his seminal metalogical and semantic insights to Tarski, who,
despite a divergent inclination to simplify metamathematical deductions by
expedient postulation, shared with Lesniewski, Lukasiewicz, and Ajdukiewicz the
conviction that only formalized languages can be made logically consistent
subjects and instruments of rigorous scientific investigation. Kotarbigski drew
on Lesniewski’s logic of predication to defend his “reism” as one possible
application of Lesniewski’s ontology, to facilitate his “concretist” program
for translating abstractions into more concrete terms, and to rationalize his
“imitationist” account of mental acts or dispositions. Inheriting Twardowski’s
role as cultural leader and educator, Kotarbigski popularized the logical
achievements of his colleagues in e.g. his substantial 9 treatise on the theory
of knowledge, formal logic, and scientific methodology; this work became
required reading for serious students and, together with the lucid textbooks by
Lukasiewicz and Ajdukiewicz, raised the level of philosophical discussion in
Poland. Jaskowski published a system of “natural deduction” by the
suppositional method practiced by Lesniewski since 6. Ajdukiewicz based his
syntax on Lesniewski’s logical grammar, and by his searching critiques
influenced Kotarbigski’s “reist” and “concretist” formulations. Closest in
Poland to the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, Ajdukiewicz brought new
sophistication to the philosophy of language and of science by his examination
of the role of conventions and meaning postulates in scientific theory and
language, distinguishing axiomatic, deductive, and empirical rules of meaning.
His evolving and refined conventionalist analyses of theories, languages,
“world perspectives,” synonymy, translation, and analyticity, and his
philosophical clarification by paraphrase anticipated views of Carnap, Feigl,
and Quine. But the Polish thinkers, beyond their common methodological inheritance
and general adherence to extensional logic, subscribed to little common
doctrine, and in their exchanges with the Vienna positivists remained “too
sober” said Lukasiewicz to join in sweeping antimetaphysical manifestos. Like
Twardowski, they were critics of traditional formulations, who sought not to
proscribe but to reform metaphysics, by reformulating issues clearly enough to
advance understanding. Indeed, except for Chwistek, the mathematician Jan
Slezygski, and the historians I. M. Bochegski, Z. A. Jordan, and Jan Salamucha,
in addition to the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, the key figures in Polish
logic were all philosophical descendants of Twardowski.
political philosophy, the
study of the nature and justification of coercive institutions. Coercive
institutions range in size from the family to the nation-state and world
organizations like the United Nations. They are institutions that at least
sometimes employ force or the threat of force to control the behavior of their
members. Justifying such coercive institutions requires showing that the
authorities within them have a right to be obeyed and that their members have a
corresponding obligation to obey them, i.e., that these institutions have
legitimate political authority over their members. Classical political
philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, were primarily interested in providing
a justification for city-states like Athens or Sparta. But historically, as
larger coercive institutions became possible and desirable, political philosophers
sought to justify them. After the seventeenth century, most political
philosophers focused on providing a justification for nationstates whose claim
to legitimate authority is restricted by both geography and nationality. But
from time to time, and more frequently in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, some political philosophers have sought to provide a justification
for various forms of world government with even more extensive powers than
those presently exercised by the United Nations. And quite recently, feminist
political philosophers have raised important challenges to the authority of the
family as it is presently constituted. Anarchism from Grecian an archos, ‘no
government’ rejects this central task of political philosophy. It maintains that
no coercive institutions are justified. Proudhon, the first self-described
anarchist, believed that coercive institutions should be replaced by social and
economic organizations based on voluntary contractual agreement, and he
advocated peaceful change toward anarchism. Others, notably Blanqui and
Bakunin, advocated the use of violence to destroy the power of coercive
institutions. Anarchism inspired the anarcho-syndicalist movement, Makhno and
his followers during the Russian Civil War, the
anarchists during the Civil War,
and the anarchist gauchistes during the 8 “May Events” in France. Most
political philosophers, however, have sought to justify coercive institutions;
they have simply disagreed over what sort of coercive institutions are
justified. Liberalism, which derives from the work of Locke, is the view that
coercive institutions are justified when they promote liberty. For Locke,
liberty requires a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary government. Over
time, however, the ideal of liberty became subject to at least two
interpretations. The view that seems closest to Locke’s is classical
liberalism, which is now more frequently called political libertarianism. This
form of liberalism interprets constraints on liberty as positive acts i.e., acts
of commission that prevent people from doing what they otherwise could do.
According to this view, failing to help people in need does not restrict their
liberty. Libertarians maintain that when liberty is so interpreted only a
minimal or night-watchman state that protects against force, theft, and fraud
can be justified. In contrast, in welfare liberalism, a form of liberalism that
derives from the work of T. H. Green, constraints on liberty are interpreted to
include, in addition, negative acts i.e., acts of omission that prevent people
from doing what they otherwise could do. According to this view, failing to
help people in need does restrict their liberty. Welfare liberals maintain that
when liberty is interpreted in this fashion, coercive institutions of a welfare
state requiring a guaranteed social minimum and equal opportunity are
justified. While no one denies that when liberty is given a welfare liberal
interpretation some form of welfare state is required, there is considerable
debate over whether a minimal state is required when liberty is given a
libertarian interpretation. At issue is whether the liberty of the poor is
constrained when they are prevented from taking from the surplus possessions of
the rich what they need for survival. If such prevention does constrain the
liberty of the poor, it could be argued that their liberty should have priority
over the liberty of the rich not to be interfered with when using their surplus
possessions for luxury purposes. In this way, it could be shown that even when
the ideal of liberty is given a libertarian interpretation, a welfare state,
rather than a minimal state, is justified. Both libertarianism and welfare
liberalism are committed to individualism. This view takes the rights of
individuals to be basic and justifies the actions of coercive institutions as
promoting those rights. Communitarianism, which derives from the writings of
Hegel, rejects individualism. It maintains that rights of individuals are not
basic and that the collective can have rights that are independent of and even
opposed to what liberals claim are the rights of individuals. According to
communitarians, individuals are constituted by the institutions and practices
of which they are a part, and their rights and obligations derive from those
same institutions and practices. Fascism is an extreme form of communitarianism
that advocates an authoritarian state with limited rights for individuals. In
its National Socialism Nazi variety, fascism was also antiSemitic and
militarist. In contrast to liberalism and communitarianism, socialism takes
equality to be the basic ideal and justifies coercive institutions insofar as
they promote equality. In capitalist societies where the means of production
are owned and controlled by a relatively small number of people and used
primarily for their benefit, socialists favor taking control of the means of
production and redirecting their use to the general welfare. According to Marx,
the principle of distribution for a socialist society is: from each according
to ability, to each according to needs. Socialists disagree among themselves,
however, over who should control the means of production in a socialist
society. In the version of socialism favored by Lenin, those who control the
means of production are to be an elite seemingly differing only in their ends
from the capitalist elite they replaced. In other forms of socialism, the means
of production are to be controlled democratically. In advanced capitalist
societies, national defense, police and fire protection, income redistribution,
and environmental protection are already under democratic control. Democracy or
“government by the people” is thought to apply in these areas, and to require
some form of representation. Socialists simply propose to extend the domain of
democratic control to include control of the means of production, on the ground
that the very same arguments that support democratic control in these
recognized areas also support democratic control of the means of production. In
addition, according to Marx, socialism will transform itself into communism
when most of the work that people perform in society becomes its own reward,
making differential monetary reward generally unnecessary. Then distribution in
society can proceed according to the principle, from each according to ability,
to each according to needs. It so happens that all of the above political views
have been interpreted in ways that deny that women have the same basic rights
as men. By contrast, feminism, almost by definition, is the political view that
women and men have the same basic rights. In recent years, most political
philosophers have come to endorse equal basic rights for women and men, but
rarely do they address questions that feminists consider of the utmost importance,
e.g., how responsibilities and duties are to be assigned in family structures.
Each of these political views must be evaluated both internally and externally
by comparison with the other views. Once this is done, their practical
recommendations may not be so different. For example, if welfare liberals
recognize that the basic rights of their view extend to distant peoples and
future generations, they may end up endorsing the same degree of equality
socialists defend. Whatever their practical requirements, each of these
political views justifies civil disobedience, even revolution, when certain of
those requirements have not been met. Civil disobedience is an illegal action
undertaken to draw attention to a failure by the relevant authorities to meet basic
moral requirements, e.g., the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat in a
bus to a white man in accord with the local ordinance in Montgomery, Alabama,
in 5. Civil disobedience is justified when illegal action of this sort is the
best way to get the relevant authorities to bring the law into better
correspondence with basic moral requirements. By contrast, revolutionary action
is justified when it is the only way to correct a radical failure of the
relevant authorities to meet basic moral requirements. When revolutionary
action is justified, people no longer have a political obligation to obey the
relevant authorities; that is, they are no longer morally required to obey
them, although they may still continue to do so, e.g. out of habit or fear. Recent
contemporary political philosophy has focused on the communitarianliberal
debate. In defense of the communitarian view, Alasdair MacIntyre has argued
that virtually all forms of liberalism attempt to separate rules defining right
action from conceptions of the human good. On this account, he contends, these
forms of liberalism must fail because the rules defining right action cannot be
adequately grounded apart from a conception of the good. Responding to this
type of criticism, some liberals have openly conceded that their view is not
grounded independently of some conception of the good. Rawls, e.g., has
recently made clear that his liberalism requires a conception of the political
good, although not a comprehensive conception of the good. It would seem,
therefore, that the debate between communitarians and liberals must turn on a
comparative evaluation of their competing conceptions of the good.
Unfortunately, contemporary communitarians have not yet been very forthcoming
about what particular conception of the good their view requires.
political theory,
reflection concerning the empirical, normative, and conceptual dimensions of
political life. There are no topics that all political theorists do or ought to
address, no required procedures, no doctrines acknowledged to be authoritative.
The meaning of ‘political theory’ resides in its fluctuating uses, not in any
essential property. It is nevertheless possible to identify concerted
tendencies among those who have practiced this activity over twenty-five centuries.
Since approximately the seventeenth century, a primary question has been how
best to justify the political rule of some people over others. This question
subordinated the issue that had directed and organized most previous political
theory, namely, what constitutes the best form of political regime. Assuming
political association to be a divinely ordained or naturally necessary feature
of the human estate, earlier thinkers had asked what mode of political
association contributes most to realizing the good for humankind. Signaling the
variable but intimate relationship between political theory and political
practice, the change in question reflected and helped to consolidate acceptance
of the postulate of natural human equality, the denial of divinely or naturally
given authority of some human beings over others. Only a small minority of
postseventeenth-century thinkers have entertained the possibility, perhaps
suggested by this postulate, that no form of rule can be justified, but the
shift in question altered the political theory agenda. Issues concerning
consent, individual liberties and rights, various forms of equality as integral
to justice, democratic and other controls on the authority and power of
government none of which were among the
first concerns of ancient or medieval political thinkers moved to the center of political theory.
Recurrent tendencies and tensions in political theory may also be discerned
along dimensions that cross-cut historical divisions. In its most celebrated
representations, political theory is integral to philosophy. Systematic
thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hobbes and Hegel,
present their political thoughts as supporting and supported by their ethics
and theology, metaphysics and epistemology. Political argumentation must
satisfy the same criteria of logic, truth, and justification as any other; a
political doctrine must be grounded in the nature of reality. Other political
theorists align themselves with empirical science rather than philosophy. Often
focusing on questions of power, they aim to give accurate accounts and
factually grounded assessments of government and politics in particular times
and places. Books IVVI of Aristotle’s Politics inaugurate this conception of
political theory; it is represented by Montesquieu, Marx, and much of
utilitarianism, and it is the numerically predominant form of academic
political theorizing in the twentieth century. Yet others, e.g., Socrates,
Machiavelli, Rousseau, and twentieth-century thinkers such as Rawls, mix the
previously mentioned modes but understand themselves as primarily pursuing the
practical objective of improving their own political societies.
polysyllogism, a series
of syllogisms connected by the fact that the conclusion of one syllogism
becomes a premise of another. The syllogism whose conclusion is used as a
premise in another syllogism within the chain is called the prosyllogism; the
syllogism is which the conclusion of another syllogism within the chain is used
as a premise is called the episyllogism. To illustrate, take the standard form
of the simplest polysyllogism: a 1 Every B is A 2 Every C is B 3 , Every C is A
b 4 Every C is A 5 Every D is C 6 , Every D is A. The first member a of this
polysyllogism is the prosyllogism, since its conclusion, 3, occurs as a
premise, 4, in the second argument. This second member, b, is the episyllogism,
since it employs as one of its premises 4 the conclusion 3 of the first
syllogism. It should be noted that the terms ‘prosyllogism’ and ‘episyllogism’
are correlative terms. Moreover, a polysyllogism may have more than two
members.
Pomponazzi, Pietro
14621525, philosopher, an Aristotelian
who taught at the universities of Padua and Bologna. In De incantationibus “On
Incantations,” 1556, he regards the world as a system of natural causes that
can explain apparently miraculous phenomena. Human beings are subject to the
natural order of the world, yet divine predestination and human freedom are
compatible De fato, “On Fate,” 1567. Furthermore, he distinguishes between what
is proved by natural reason and what is accepted by faith, and claims that,
since there are arguments for and against the immortality of the human
individual soul, this belief is to be accepted solely on the basis of faith De
immortalitate animae, “On the Immortality of the Soul,” He defended his view of
immortality in the Apologia 1518 and in the Defensorium 1519. These three works
were reprinted as Tractatus acutissimi 1525. Pomponazzi’s work was influential
until the seventeenth century, when Aristotelianism ceased to be the main
philosophy taught at the universities. The eighteenth-century freethinkers
showed new interest in his distinction between natural reason and faith. P.Gar.
pons asinorum Latin, ‘asses’ bridge’, a methodological device based upon
Aristotle’s description of the ways in which one finds a suitable middle term
to demonstrate categorical propositions. Thus, to prove the universal
affirmative, one should consider the characters that entail the predicate P and
the characters entailed by the subject S. If we find in the two groups of
characters a common member, we can use it as a middle term in the syllogistic
proof of say ‘All S are P’. Take ‘All men are mortal’ as the contemplated
conclusion. We find that ‘organism’ is among the characters entailing the
predicate ‘mortal’ and is also found in the group of characters entailed by the
subject ‘men’, and thus it may be used in a syllogistic proof of ‘All men are
mortal’. To prove negative propositions we must, in addition, consider
characters incompatible with the predicate, or incompatible with the subject.
Finally, proofs of particular propositions require considering characters that
entail the subject.
Popper, Karl Raimund,
Austrian-born British philosopher best known for contributions to philosophy of
science and to social and political philosophy. Educated at the of Vienna Ph.D., 8, he taught philosophy in
New Zealand for a decade before becoming a reader and then professor in logic
and scientific method at the London School of Economics 669. He was knighted in
5, elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 6, and appointed Companion of
Honour in 2 see his autobiography, Unended Quest, 6. In opposition to logical
positivism’s verifiability criterion of cognitive significance, Popper proposes
that science be characterized by its method: the criterion of demarcation of
empirical science from pseudo-science and metaphysics is falsifiability Logik
der Forschung, 4, tr. as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 9. According to
falsificationism, science grows, and may even approach the truth, not by
amassing supporting evidence, but through an unending cycle of problems,
tentative solutions unjustifiable
conjectures and error elimination; i.e.,
the vigorous testing of deductive consequences and the refutation of
conjectures that fail Conjectures and Refutations, 3. Since conjectures are not
inferences and refutations are not inductive, there is no inductive inference
or inductive logic. More generally, criticism is installed as the hallmark of
rationality, and the traditional justificationist insistence on proof,
conclusive or inconclusive, on confirmation, and on positive argument, is
repudiated. Popper brings to the central problems of Kant’s philosophy an
uncompromising realism and objectivism, the tools of modern logic, and a
Darwinian perspective on knowledge, thereby solving Hume’s problem of induction
without lapsing into irrationalism Objective Knowledge, 2. He made
contributions of permanent importance also to the axiomatization of probability
theory The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 9; to its interpretation, especially
the propensity interpretation Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery,
3 vols. 283; and to many other problems The Self and Its Brain, with John C.
Eccles, 7. Popper’s social philosophy, like his epistemology, is
anti-authoritarian. Since it is a historicist error to suppose that we can
predict the future of mankind The Poverty of Historicism, 7, the prime task of
social institutions in an open society
one that encourages criticism and allows rulers to be replaced without
violence must be not large-scale utopian
planning but the minimization, through piecemeal reform, of avoidable
suffering. This way alone permits proper assessment of success or failure, and
thus of learning from experience The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5.
Porphyry, Grecian
Neoplatonist philosopher, second to Plotinus in influence. He was born in Tyre,
and is thus sometimes called Porphyry the Phoenician. As a young man he went to
Athens, where he absorbed the Platonism of Cassius Longinus, who had in turn
been influenced by Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. Porphyry went to Rome in 263,
where he became a disciple of Plotinus, who had also been influenced by
Ammonius. Porphyry lived in Rome until 269, when, urged by Plotinus to pons
asinorum Porphyry 722 722 travel as a
cure for severe depression, he traveled to Sicily. He remained there for
several years before returning to Rome to take over Plotinus’s school. He
apparently died in Rome. Porphyry is not noted for original thought. He seems
to have dedicated himself to explicating Aristotle’s logic and defending
Plotinus’s version of Neoplatonism. During his years in Sicily, Porphyry wrote
his two most famous works, the lengthy Against the Christians, of which only
fragments survive, and the Isagoge, or “Introduction.” The Isagoge, which
purports to give an elementary exposition of the concepts necessary to
understand Aristotle’s Categories, was tr. into Latin by Boethius and routinely
published in the Middle Ages with Latin editions of Aristotle’s Organon, or
logical treatises. Its inclusion in that format arguably precipitated the
discussion of the so-called problem of universals in the twelfth century.
During his later years in Rome, Porphyry collected Plotinus’s writings, editing
and organizing them into a scheme of his own
not Plotinus’s design, six groups
of nine treatises, thus called the Enneads. Porphyry prefaced his edition with
an informative biography of Plotinus, written shortly before Porphyry’s own
death.
Port-Royal Logic,
originally entitled “La logique, ou L’art de penser,” a treatise on logic,
language, and method composed by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole 162595,
possibly with the help of Pascal, all of whom were solitaires associated with
the convent at Port-Royal-des-Champs, the spiritual and intellectual center
of Jansenism. Originally written as an
instruction manual for the son of the Duc de Luynes, the Logic was soon
expanded and published the first edition appeared in 1662, but it was
constantly being modified, augmented, and rewritten by its authors; by 1685 six
editions in had appeared. The work
develops the linguistic theories presented by Arnauld and Claude Lancelot in
the Grammaire générale et raisonnée 1660, and reflects the pedagogical
principles embodied in the curriculum of the “little schools” run by PortRoyal.
Its content is also permeated by the Cartesianism to which Arnauld was devoted.
The Logic’s influence grew beyond Jansenist circles, and it soon became in
seventeenth-century France a standard manual for rigorous thinking. Eventually,
it was adopted as a textbook in schools.
The authors declare their goal to be to make thought more precise for better
distinguishing truth from error
philosophical and theological and
to develop sound judgment. They are especially concerned to dispel the errors
and confusions of the Scholastics. Logic is “the art of directing reason to a
knowledge of things for the instruction of ourselves and others.” This art
consists in reflecting on the mind’s four principal operations: conceiving,
judging, reasoning, and ordering. Accordingly, the Logic is divided into four
sections: on ideas and conception, on judgments, on reasoning, and on method..
positive and negative
freedom, respectively, the area within which the individual is self-determining
and the area within which the individual is left free from interference by
others. More specifically, one is free in the positive sense to the extent that
one has control over one’s life, or rules oneself. In this sense the term is
very close to that of ‘autonomy’. The forces that can prevent this
self-determination are usually thought of as internal, as desires or passions.
This conception of freedom can be said to have originated with Plato, according
to whom a person is free when the parts of the soul are rightly related to each
other, i.e. the rational part of the soul rules the other parts. Other
advocates of positive freedom include Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. One
is free in the negative sense if one is not prevented from doing something by
another person. One is prevented from doing something if another person makes
it impossible for one to do something or uses coercion to prevent one from
doing something. Hence persons are free in the negative sense if they are not
made unfree in the negative sense. The term ‘negative liberty’ was coined by
Bentham to mean the absence of coercion. Advocates of negative freedom include
Hobbes, Locke, and Hume.
possible worlds,
alternative worlds in terms of which one may think of possibility. The idea of
thinking about possibility in terms of such worlds has played an important
part, both in Leibnizian philosophical theology and in the development of modal
logic and philosophical reflection about it in recent decades. But there are
important differences in the forms the idea has taken, and the uses to which it
has been put, in the two contexts. Leibniz used it in his account of creation.
In his view God’s mind necessarily and eternally contains the ideas of
infinitely many worlds that God could have created, and God has chosen the best
of these and made it actual, thus creating it. Similar views are found in the
thought of Leibniz’s contemporary, Malebranche. The possible worlds are thus
the complete alternatives among which God chose. They are possible at least in
the sense that they are logically consistent; whether something more is
required in order for them to be coherent as worlds is a difficult question in
Leibniz interpretation. They are complete in that they are possible totalities
of creatures; each includes a whole possible universe, in its whole spatial
extent and its whole temporal history if it is spatially and temporally
ordered. The temporal completeness deserves emphasis. If “the world of
tomorrow” is “a better world” than “the world of today,” it will still be part
of the same “possible world” the actual one; for the actual “world,” in the
relevant sense, includes whatever actually has happened or will happen
throughout all time. The completeness extends to every detail, so that a
milligram’s difference in the weight of the smallest bird would make a
different possible world. The completeness of possible worlds may be limited in
one way, however. Leibniz speaks of worlds as aggregates of finite things. As
alternatives for God’s creation, they may well not be thought of as including
God, or at any rate, not every fact about God. For this and other reasons it is
not clear that in Leibniz’s thought the possible can be identified with what is
true in some possible world, or the necessary with what is true in all possible
worlds. That identification is regularly assumed, however, in the recent
development of what has become known as possible worlds semantics for modal
logic the logic of possibility and necessity, and of other conceptions, e.g.
those pertaining to time and to morality, that have turned out to be formally
analogous. The basic idea here is that such notions as those of validity,
soundness, and completeness can be defined for modal logic in terms of models
constructed from sets of alternative “worlds.” Since the late 0s many important
results have been obtained by this method, whose best-known exponent is Saul
Kripke. Some of the most interesting proofs depend on the idea of a relation of
accessibility between worlds in the set. Intuitively, one world is accessible
from another if and only if the former is possible in or from the point of view
of the latter. Different systems of modal logic are appropriate depending on
the properties of this relation e.g., on whether it is or is not reflexive
and/or transitive and/or symmetrical. The purely formal results of these
methods are well established. The application of possible worlds semantics to
conceptions occurring in metaphysically richer discourse is more controversial,
however. Some of the controversy is related to debates over the metaphysical
reality of various sorts of possibility and necessity. Particularly
controversial, and also a focus of much interest, have been attempts to
understand modal claims de re, about particular individuals as such e.g., that
I could not have been a musical performance, in terms of the identity and
nonidentity of individuals in different possible worlds. Similarly, there is debate
over the applicability of a related treatment of subjunctive conditionals,
developed by Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis, though it is clear that it
yields interesting formal results. What is required, on this approach, for the
truth of ‘If it were the case that A, then it would be the case that B’, is
that, among those possible worlds in which A is true, some world in which B is
true be more similar, in the relevant respects, to the actual world than any
world in which B is false. One of the most controversial topics is the nature
of possible worlds themselves. Mathematical logicians need not be concerned
with this; a wide variety of sets of objects, real or fictitious, can be viewed
as having the properties required of sets of “worlds” for their purposes. But
if metaphysically robust issues of modality e.g., whether there are more
possible colors than we ever see are to be understood in terms of possible
worlds, the question of the nature of the worlds must be taken seriously. Some
philosophers would deny any serious metaphysical role to the notion of possible
worlds. At the other extreme, David Lewis has defended a view of possible
worlds as concrete totalities, things of the same sort as the whole actual
universe, made up of entities like planets, persons, and so forth. On his view,
the actuality of the actual world consists only in its being this one, the one
that we are in; apart from its relation to us or our linguistic acts, the
actual is not metaphysically distinguished from the merely possible. Many
philosophers find this result counterintuitive, and the infinity of concrete
possible worlds an extravagant ontology; but Lewis argues that his view makes
possible attractive reductions of modality both logical and causal, and of such
notions as that of a proposition, to more concrete notions. Other philosophers
are prepared to say there are non-actual possible worlds, but that they are
entities of a quite different sort from the actual concrete universe sets of propositions, perhaps, or some other
type of “abstract” object. Leibniz himself held a view of this kind, thinking
of possible worlds as having their being only in God’s mind, as intentional
objects of God’s thought.
post-modern – H. P. Grice
plays with the ‘modernists,’ versus the ‘neo-traditionalists.’ Since he sees a
neotraditionalist like Strawson (neotraditionalist, like neocon, is a joke) and
a modernist like Whitehead as BOTH making the same mistake, it is fair to see
Grice as a ‘post-modernist’ -- of or relating to a complex set of reactions to
modern philosophy and its presuppositions, as opposed to the kind of agreement
on substantive doctrines or philosophical questions that often characterizes a
philosophical movement. Although there is little agreement on precisely what
the presuppositions of modern philosophy are, and disagreement on which
philosophers exemplify these presuppositions, postmodern philosophy typically
opposes foundationalism, essentialism, and realism. For Rorty, e.g., the
presuppositions to be set aside are foundationalist assumptions shared by the
leading sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century philosophers. For
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, the contested presuppositions to
be set aside are as old as metaphysics itself, and are perhaps best exemplified
by Plato. Postmodern philosophy has even been characterized, by Lyotard, as
preceding modern philosophy, in the sense that the presuppositions of
philosophical modernism emerge out of a disposition whose antecedent,
unarticulated beliefs are already postmodern. Postmodern philosophy is
therefore usefully regarded as a complex cluster concept that includes the
following elements: an anti- or post- epistemological standpoint;
anti-essentialism; anti-realism; anti-foundationalism; opposition to transcendental
arguments and transcendental standpoints; rejection of the picture of knowledge
as accurate representation; rejection of truth as correspondence to reality;
rejection of the very idea of canonical descriptions; rejection of final
vocabularies, i.e., rejection of principles, distinctions, and descriptions
that are thought to be unconditionally binding for all times, persons, and
places; and a suspicion of grand narratives, metanarratives of the sort perhaps
best illustrated by dialectical materialism. In addition to these things
postmodern philosophy is “against,” it also opposes characterizing this menu of
oppositions as relativism, skepticism, or nihilism, and it rejects as “the
metaphysics of presence” the traditional, putatively impossible dream of a
complete, unique, and closed explanatory system, an explanatory system
typically fueled by binary oppositions. On the positive side, one often finds
the following themes: its critique of the notion of the neutrality and
sovereignty of reason including
insistence on its pervasively gendered, historical, and ethnocentric character;
its conception of the social construction of wordworld mappings; its tendency
to embrace historicism; its critique of the ultimate status of a contrast
between epistemology, on the one hand, and the sociology of knowledge, on the
other hand; its dissolution of the notion of the autonomous, rational subject;
its insistence on the artifactual status of divisions of labor in knowledge
acquisition and production; and its ambivalence about the Enlightenment and its
ideology. Many of these elements or elective affinities were already surfacing
in the growing opposition to the spectator theory of knowledge, in Europe and
in the English-speaking world, long before the term ‘postmodern’ became a
commonplace. In Anglophone philosophy this took the early form of Dewey’s and
pragmatism’s opposition to positivism, early Kuhn’s redescription of scientific
practice, and Vitters’s insistence on the language-game character of
representation; critiques of “the myth of the given” from Sellars to Davidson
and Quine; the emergence of epistemology naturalized; and the putative
description-dependent character of data, tethered to the theory dependence of
descriptions in Kuhn, Sellars, Quine, and Arthur Fine perhaps in all constructivists in the
philosophy of science. In Europe, many of these elective affinities surfaced
explicitly in and were identified with poststructuralism, although traces are
clearly evident in Heidegger’s and later in Derrida’s attacks on Husserl’s
residual Cartesianism; the rejection of essential descriptions
Wesensanschauungen in Husserl’s sense; Saussure’s and structuralism’s attack on
the autonomy and coherence of a transcendental signified standing over against
a selftransparent subject; Derrida’s deconstructing the metaphysics of
presence; Foucault’s redescriptions of epistemes; the convergence between - and
English-speaking social constructivists; attacks on the language of enabling
conditions as reflected in worries about the purchase of necessary and
sufficient conditions talk on both sides of the Atlantic; and Lyotard’s many
interventions, particularly those against grand narratives. Many of these
elective affinities that characterize postmodern philosophy can also be seen in
the virtually universal challenges to moral philosophy as it has been
understood traditionally in the West, not only in G. and philosophy, but in the reevaluation of “the
morality of principles” in the work of MacIntyre, Williams, Nussbaum, John McDowell,
and others. The force of postmodern critiques can perhaps best be seen in some
of the challenges of feminist theory, as in the work of Judith Butler and
Hélène Cixous, and gender theory generally. For it is in gender theory that the
conception of “reason” itself as it has functioned in the shared philosophical
tradition is redescribed as a conception that, it is often argued, is
engendered, patriarchal, homophobic, and deeply optional. The term ‘postmodern’
is less clear in philosophy, its application more uncertain and divided than in
some other fields, e.g., postmodern architecture. In architecture the concept
is relatively clear. It displaces modernism in assignable ways, emerges as an
oppositional force against architectural modernism, a rejection of the work and
tradition inaugurated by Walter Gropius, Henri Le Corbusier, and Mies van der
Rohe, especially the International Style. In postmodern architecture, the
modernist principle of abstraction, of geometric purity and simplicity, is
displaced by multivocity and pluralism, by renewed interest in buildings as
signs and signifiers, interest in their referential potential and resources.
The modernist’s aspiration to buildings that are timeless in an important sense
is itself read by postmodernists as an iconography that privileges the brave
new world of science and technology, an aspiration that glorifies uncritically
the industrial revolution of which it is itself a quintessential expression.
This aspiration to timelessness is displaced in postmodern architecture by a
direct and self-conscious openness to and engagement with history. It is this
relative specificity of the concept postmodern architecture that enabled
Charles Jencks to write that “Modern Architecture died in St. Louis Missouri on
July 15, 2 at 3:32 P.M.” Unfortunately, no remotely similar sentence can be
written about postmodern philosophy.
Potentia -- dunamis, also
dynamis Grecian, ‘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.
Potentia -- 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 0s 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 ‹aA 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 Ra, 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 VP, where P is an atomic formula, Xx[a]A if
and only if, for all y, if x is Ra- related to y then Xy A, Xx ‹a if and only
if, for some y, x is Ra-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: Ra ! b % Ra 4 Rb, Ra;b % Ra _ Rb, Ra*
% Ra*, 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 Rp is a relation, not necessarily a function, and also
in the definitions of Ra + b and Ra*. 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 250 250 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.
potency, for Aristotle, a
kind of capacity that is a correlative of action. We require no instruction to
grasp the difference between ‘X can do Y’ and ‘X is doing Y’, the latter
meaning that the deed is actually being done. That an agent has a potency to do
something is not a pure prediction so much as a generalization from past
performance of individual or kind. Aristotle uses the example of a builder,
meaning someone able to build, and then confronts the Megaric objection that
the builder can be called a builder only when he actually builds. Clearly one
who is doing something can do it, but Aristotle insists that the napping
carpenter has the potency to hammer and saw. A potency based on an acquired
skill like carpentry derives from the potency shared by those who acquire and
those who do not acquire the skill. An unskilled worker can be said to be a
builder “in potency,” not in the sense that he has the skill and can employ it,
but in the sense that he can acquire the skill. In both acquisition and employment,
‘potency’ refers to the actual either
the actual acquisition of the skill or its actual use. These post-structuralism
potency 726 726 potentiality, first
practical attitude 727 correlatives emerged from Aristotle’s analysis of change
and becoming. That which, from not having the skill, comes to have it is said
to be “in potency” to that skill. From not having a certain shape, wood comes
to have a certain shape. In the shaped wood, a potency is actualized. Potency
must not be identified with the unshaped, with what Aristotle calls privation.
Privation is the negation of P in a subject capable of P. Parmenides’
identification of privation and potency, according to Aristotle, led him to
deny change. How can not-P become P? It is the subject of not-P to which the
change is attributed and which survives the change that is in potency to
X.
poverty of the stimulus,
a psychological phenomenon exhibited when behavior is stimulusunbound, and
hence the immediate stimulus characterized in straightforward physical terms
does not completely control behavior. Human beings sort stimuli in various ways
and hosts of influences seem to affect when, why, and how we respond our background beliefs, facility with
language, hypotheses about stimuli, etc. Suppose a person visiting a museum
notices a painting she has never before seen. Pondering the unfamiliar
painting, she says, “an ambitious visual synthesis of the music of Mahler and
the poetry of Keats.” If stimulus painting controls response, then her
utterance is a product of earlier responses to similar stimuli. Given poverty
of the stimulus, no such control is exerted by the stimulus the painting. Of
course, some influence of response must be conceded to the painting, for
without it there would be no utterance. However, the utterance may well
outstrip the visitor’s conditioning and learning history. Perhaps she had never
before talked of painting in terms of music and poetry. The linguist Noam
Chomsky made poverty of the stimulus central to his criticism of B. F.
Skinner’s Verbal Behavior 7. Chomsky argued that there is no predicting, and
certainly no critical stimulus control of, much human behavior.
power, a disposition; an ability or capacity
to yield some outcome. One tradition which includes Locke distinguishes active
and passive powers. A knife has the active power to slice an apple, which has
the passive power to be sliced by the knife. The distinction seems largely
grammatical, however. Powers act in concert: the power of a grain of salt to
dissolve in water and the water’s power to dissolve the salt are reciprocal and
their manifestations mutual. Powers or dispositions are sometimes thought to be
relational properties of objects, properties possessed only in virtue of
objects standing in appropriate relations to other objects. However, if we
distinguish, as we must, between a power and its manifestation, and if we allow
that an object could possess a power that it never manifested a grain of salt
remains soluble even if it never dissolves, it would seem that an object could
possess a power even if appropriate reciprocal partners for its manifestation
were altogether non-existent. This appears to have been Locke’s view An Essay
concerning Human Understanding, 1690 of “secondary qualities” colors, sounds, and
the like, which he regarded as powers of objects to produce certain sorts of
sensory experience in observers. Philosophers who take powers seriously
disagree over whether powers are intrinsic, “built into” properties this view,
defended by C. B. Martin, seems to have been Locke’s, or whether the connection
between properties and the powers they bestow is contingent, dependent perhaps
upon contingent laws of nature a position endorsed by Armstrong. Is the
solubility of salt a characteristic built into the salt, or is it a
“second-order” property possessed by the salt in virtue of i the salt’s
possession of some “firstorder” property and ii the laws of nature? Reductive
analyses of powers, though influential, have not fared well. Suppose a grain of
salt is soluble in water. Does this mean that if the salt were placed in water,
it would dissolve? No. Imagine that were the salt placed in water, a technician
would intervene, imposing an electromagnetic field, thereby preventing the salt
from dissolving. Attempts to exclude “blocking” conditions by appending “other things equal” clauses
perhaps face charges of circularity: in
nailing down what other things must be equal we find ourselves appealing to
powers. Powers evidently are fundamental features of our world.
practical reason, the
capacity for argument or demonstrative inference, considered in its application
to the task of prescribing or selecting behavior. Some philosophical concerns
in this area pertain to the actual thought processes by which plans of action
are formulated and carried out in practical situations. A second major issue is
what role, if any, practical reason plays in determining norms of conduct. Here
there are two fundamental positions. Instrumentalism is typified by Hume’s
claim that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.
According to instrumentalism, reason by itself is incapable of influencing
action directly. It may do so indirectly, by disclosing facts that arouse
motivational impulses. And it fulfills an indispensable function in discerning
meansend relations by which our objectives may be attained. But none of those
objectives is set by reason. All are set by the passions the desiderative and aversive impulses
aroused in us by what our cognitive faculties apprehend. It does not follow
from this alone that ethical motivation reduces to mere desire and aversion,
based on the pleasure and pain different courses of action might afford. There
might yet be a specifically ethical passion, or it might be that independently
based moral injunctions have in themselves a special capacity to provoke
ordinary desire and aversion. Nevertheless, instrumentalism is often associated
with the view that pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, are the sole
objects of value and disvalue, and hence the only possible motivators of
conduct. Hence, it is claimed, moral injunctions must be grounded in these
motives, and practical reason is of interest only as subordinated to
inclination. The alternative to instrumentalism is the view championed by Kant,
that practical reason is an autonomous source of normative principles, capable
of motivating behavior independently of ordinary desire and aversion. On this
view it is the passions that lack intrinsic moral import, and the function of
practical reason is to limit their motivational role by formulating normative
principles binding for all rational agents and founded in the operation of
practical reason itself. Theories of this kind usually view moral principles as
grounded in consistency, and an impartial respect for the autonomy of all
rational agents. To be morally acceptable, principles of conduct must be
universalizable, so that all rational agents could behave in the same way
without their conduct either destroying itself or being inconsistently
motivated. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these views.
Instrumentalism offers a simpler account of both the function of practical
reason and the sources of human motivation. But it introduces a strong
subjective element by giving primacy to desire, thereby posing a problem of how
moral principles can be universally binding. The Kantian approach offers more
promise here, since it makes universalizability essential to any type of
behavior being moral. But it is more complex, and the claim that the
deliverances of practical reason carry intrinsic motivational force is open to
challenge.
practical reasoning, the
inferential process by which considerations for or against envisioned courses
of action are brought to bear on the formation and execution of intention. The
content of a piece of practical reasoning is a practical argument. Practical
arguments can be complex, but they are often summarized in syllogistic form.
Important issues concerning practical reasoning include how it relates to
theoretical reasoning, whether it is a causal process, and how it can be
evaluated. Theories of practical reasoning tend to divide into two basic
categories. On one sort of view, the intrinsic features of practical reasoning
exhibit little or no difference from those of theoretical reasoning. What makes
practical reasoning practical is its subject matter and motivation. Hence the
following could be a bona fide practical syllogism: Exercise would be good for
me. Jogging is exercise. Therefore, jogging would be good for me. This argument
has practical subject matter, and if made with a view toward intention
formation it would be practical in motivation also. But it consists entirely of
propositions, which are appropriate contents for belief-states. In principle,
therefore, an agent could accept its conclusion without intending or even
desiring to jog. Intention formation requires a further step. But if the
content of an intention cannot be a proposition, that step could not count in
itself as practical reasoning unless such reasoning can employ the contents of
strictly practical mental states. Hence many philosophers call for practical
syllogisms such as: Would that I exercise. Jogging is exercise. Therefore, I
shall go jogging. Here the first premise is optative and understood to
represent the content of a desire, and the conclusion is the content of a
decision or act of intention formation. These contents are not true or false,
and so are not propositions. Theories that restrict the contents of practical
reasoning to propositions have the advantage that they allow such reasoning to
be evaluated in terms of familiar logical principles. Those that permit the
inclusion of optative content entail a need for more complex modes of
evaluation. However, they bring more of the process of intention formation
under the aegis of reason; also, they can be extended to cover the execution of
intentions, in terms of syllogisms that terminate in volition. Both accounts
must deal with cases of self-deception, in which the considerations an agent
cites to justify a decision are not those from which it sprang, and cases of
akrasia, where the agent views one course of action as superior, yet carries
out another. Because mental content is always abstract, it cannot in itself be a
nomic cause of behavior. But the states and events to which it belongs desires, beliefs, etc. can count as causes, and are so treated in
deterministic explanations of action. Opponents of determinism reject this
step, and seek to explain action solely through the teleological or justifying
force carried by mental content. Practical syllogisms often summarize very
complex thought processes, in which multiple options are considered, each with
its own positive and negative aspects. Some philosophers hold that when
successfully concluded, this process issues in a judgment of what action would
be best all things considered i.e., in
light of all relevant considerations. Practical reasoning can be evaluated in
numerous ways. Some concern the reasoning process itself: whether it is timely
and duly considers the relevant alternatives, as well as whether it is well
structured logically. Other concerns have to do with the products of practical
reasoning. Decisions may be deemed irrational if they result in incompatible
intentions, or conflict with the agent’s beliefs regarding what is possible.
They may also be criticized if they conflict with the agent’s best interests.
Finally, an agent’s intentions can fail to accord with standards of morality.
The relationship among these ways of evaluating intentions is important to the
foundations of ethics.
practition, Castaneda’s
term for the characteristic content of practical thinking. Each practition
represents an action as something to be done, say, as intended, commanded,
recommended, etc., and not as an accomplishment or prediction. Thus, unlike
propositions, practitions are not truth-valued, but they can be components of
valid arguments and so possess values akin to truth; e.g., the command ‘James,
extinguish your cigar!’ seems legitimate given that James is smoking a cigar in
a crowded bus. Acknowledging practitions is directly relevant to many other
fields.
praedicamenta singular:
praedicamentum, in medieval philosophy, the ten Aristotelian categories:
substance, quantity, quality, relation, where, when, position i.e.,
orientation e.g., “upright”, having,
action, and passivity. These were the ten most general of all genera. All of
them except substance were regarded as accidental. It was disputed whether this
tenfold classification was intended as a linguistic division among
categorematic terms or as an ontological division among extralinguistic
realities. Some authors held that the division was primarily linguistic, and
that extralinguistic realities were divided according to some but not all the
praedicamenta. Most authors held that everything in any way real belonged to
one praedicamentum or another, although some made an exception for God. But
authors who believed in complexe significabile usually regarded them as not
belonging to any praedicamentum.
pragmatic contradiction,
a contradiction that is generated by pragmatic rather than logical implication.
A logically implies B if it is impossible for B to be false if A is true,
whereas A pragmatically implies B if in most but not necessarily all contexts,
saying ‘A’ can reasonably be taken as indicating that B is true. Thus, if I
say, “It’s raining,” what I say does not logically imply that I believe that it
is raining, since it is possible for it to be raining without my believing it
is. Nor does my saying that it is raining logically imply that I believe that
it is, since it is possible for me to say this without believing it. But my
saying this does pragmatically imply that I believe that it is raining, since normally
my saying this can reasonably be taken to indicate that I believe it.
Accordingly, if I were to say, “It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s
raining,” the result would be a pragmatic contradiction. The first part “It’s
raining” does not logically imply the negation of the second part “I don’t
believe that it’s raining” but my saying the first part does pragmatically
imply the negation of the second part.
pragmatism, a philosophy
that stresses the relation of theory to praxis and takes the continuity of
experience and nature as revealed through the outcome of directed action as the
starting point for reflection. Experience is the ongoing transaction of
organism and environment, i.e., both subject and object are constituted in the
process. When intelligently ordered, initial conditions are deliberately
transformed according to ends-inview, i.e., intentionally, into a subsequent
state of affairs thought to be more desirable. Knowledge is therefore guided by
interests or values. Since the reality of objects cannot be known prior to
experience, truth claims can be justified only as the fulfillment of conditions
that are experimentally determined, i.e., the outcome of inquiry. As a
philosophic movement, pragmatism was first formulated by Peirce in the early
1870s in the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts; it was announced as
a distinctive position in James’s 8 address to the Philosophical Union at
the of California at Berkeley, and
further elaborated according to the Chicago School, especially by Dewey, Mead,
and Jane Addams 18605. Emphasis on the reciprocity of theory and praxis,
knowledge and action, facts and values, follows from its postDarwinian
understanding of human experience, including cognition, as a developmental,
historically contingent, process. C. I. Lewis’s pragmatic a priori and Quine’s
rejection of the analytic synthetic distinction develop these insights further.
Knowledge is instrumental a tool for
organizing experience satisfactorily. Concepts are habits of belief or rules of
action. Truth cannot be determined solely by epistemological criteria because
the adequacy of these criteria cannot be determined apart from the goals sought
and values instantiated. Values, which arise in historically specific cultural
situations, are intelligently appropriated only to the extent that they
satisfactorily resolve problems and are judged worth retaining. According to
pragmatic theories of truth, truths are beliefs that are confirmed in the
course of experience and are therefore fallible, subject to further revision.
True beliefs for Peirce represent real objects as successively confirmed until
they converge on a final determination; for James, leadings that are
worthwhile; and according to Dewey’s theory of inquiry, the transformation of an
indeterminate situation into a determinate one that leads to warranted
assertions. Pragmatic ethics is naturalistic, pluralistic, developmental, and
experimental. It reflects on the motivations influencing ethical systems,
examines the individual developmental process wherein an individual’s values
are gradually distinguished from those of society, situates moral judgments
within problematic situations irreducibly individual and social, and proposes
as ultimate criteria for decision making the value for life as growth,
determined by all those affected by the actual or projected outcomes. The
original interdisciplinary development of pragmatism continues in its influence
on the humanities. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., member of the Metaphysical Club,
later justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, developed a pragmatic theory of law.
Peirce’s Principle of Pragmatism, by which meaning resides in conceivable
practical effects, and his triadic theory of signs developed into the field of
semiotics. James’s Principles of Psychology 0 not only established experimental
psychology in North America, but shifted philosophical attention away from
abstract analyses of rationality to the continuity of the biological and the
mental. The reflex arc theory was reconstructed into an interactive loop of
perception, feeling, thinking, and behavior, and joined with the selective
interest of consciousness to become the basis of radical empiricism. Mead’s
theory of the emergence of self and mind in social acts and Dewey’s analyses of
the individual and society influenced the human sciences. Dewey’s theory of
education as community-oriented, based on the psychological developmental
stages of growth, and directed toward full participation in a democratic
society, was the philosophical basis of progressive education.
praxis from Grecian
prasso, ‘doing’, ‘acting’, in Aristotle, the sphere of thought and action that
comprises the ethical and political life of man, contrasted with the
theoretical designs of logic and epistemology theoria. It was thus that
‘praxis’ acquired its general definition of ‘practice’ through a contrastive
comparison with ‘theory’. Throughout the history of Western philosophy the
concept of praxis found a place in a variety of philosophical vocabularies.
Marx and the neoMarxists linked the concept with a production paradigm in the
interests of historical explanation. Within such a scheme of things the
activities constituting the relations of production and exchange are seen as
the dominant features of the socioeconomic history of humankind. Significations
of ‘praxis’ are also discernible in the root meaning of pragma deed, affair,
which informed the development of
pragmatism. In more recent times the notion of praxis has played a prominent
role in the formation of the school of critical theory, in which the
performatives of praxis are seen to be more directly associated with the
entwined phenomena of discourse, communication, and social practices. The
central philosophical issues addressed in the current literature on praxis have
to do with the theorypractice relationship and the problems associated with a
value-free science. The general thrust is that of undermining or subverting the
traditional bifurcation of theory and practice via a recognition of
praxis-oriented endeavors that antedate both theory construction and the
construal of practice as a mere application of theory. Both the project of
“pure theory,” which makes claims for a value-neutral standpoint, and the
purely instrumentalist understanding of practice, as itself shorn of
discernment and insight, are jettisoned. The consequent philosophical task
becomes that of understanding human thought and action against the backdrop of
the everyday communicative endeavors, habits, and skills, and social practices
that make up our inheritance in the world.
Praxis school, a school
of philosophy originating in Zagreb and Belgrade which, from 4 to 4, published
the international edition of the leading postwar Marxist journal Praxis. During
the same period, it organized the Korcula Summer School, which attracted
scholars from around the Western world. In a reduced form the school continues
each spring with the Social Philosophy Course in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The
founders of praxis philosophy include Gajo Petrovic Zagreb, Milan Kangrga
Zagreb, and Mihailo Markovic Belgrade. Another wellknown member of the group is
Svetozar Stojanovic Belgrade, and a second-generation leader is Gvozden Flego
Zagreb. The Praxis school emphasized the writings of the young Marx while
subjecting dogmatic Marxism to one of its strongest criticisms. Distinguishing
between Marx’s and Engels’s writings and emphasizing alienation and a dynamic
concept of the human being, it contributed to a greater understanding of the
interrelationship between the individual and society. Through its insistence on
Marx’s call for a “ruthless critique,” the school stressed open inquiry and
freedom of speech in both East and West. Quite possibly the most important and
original philosopher of the group, and certainly Croatia’s leading
twentieth-century philosopher, was Gajo Petrovic 793. He called for 1
understanding philosophy as a radical critique of all existing things, and 2
understanding human beings as beings of praxis and creativity. This later led
to a view of human beings as revolutionary by nature. At present he is probably
best remembered for his Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century and Philosophie und
Revolution. Milan Kangrga b.3 also emphasizes human creativity while insisting
that one should understand human beings as producers who humanize nature. An
ethical problematic of humanity can pragmatism, ethical Praxis school 731 731 be realized through a variety of
disciplines that include aesthetics, philosophical anthropolgy, theory of
knowledge, ontology, and social thought. Mihailo Markovic b.3, a member of the
Belgrade Eight, is best known for his theory of meaning, which leads him to a
theory of socialist humanism. His most widely read work in the West is From
Affluence to Praxis: Philosophy and Social Criticism.
Pre-analytic, considered
but naive; commonsensical; not tainted by prior explicit theorizing; said of
judgments and, derivatively, of beliefs or intuitions underlying such
judgments. Preanalytic judgments are often used to test philosophical theses.
All things considered, we prefer theories that accord with preanalytic
judgments to those that do not, although most theorists exhibit a willingness
to revise preanalytic assessments in light of subsequent inquiry. Thus, a
preanalytic judgment might be thought to constitute a starting point for the
philosophical consideration of a given topic. Is justice giving every man his
due? It may seem so, preanalytically. Attention to concrete examples, however,
may lead us to a different view. It is doubtful, even in such cases, that we
altogether abandon preanalytic judgments. Rather, we endeavor to reconcile
apparently competing judgments, making adjustments in a way that optimizes
overall coherence.
Principle of economy of
rational effort -- 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. Principle of economy of rational effort:
Coase theorem, a non-formal insight by R. Coase: 1: 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.
principium. Grice. Principle
of conversational helpfulness. “I call it ‘principle,’ echoing Boethius.”Mention should also he made of Boethius’ conception, that
there are certain principles, sentences which have no demonstration — probatio
— which he calls principales propositiones or probationis principia. Here is
the fragment from his Commentary on Topics treating of principles; El iliac
quidem (propositiones) quarum nulla probatio est, maximae ac principales
vocantur, quod his illas necesse est approbari, quae ut demonstrari valeant,
non recusant/ est auteni maxima proposiiio ut liaec « si de aequalibus aequalia
demas, quae derelinquitur aequalia sunt », ita enim hoc per se notion est, ut
aliud notius quo approbari valeat esse non possit; quae proposi- tiones cum
(idem sui natura propria gerant, non solum alieno ad (idem non egent argumento,
oerum ceteris quoque probationis sclent esse principium; igitur per se notae
propositiones, quibus nihil est notius, indemonstrabiles ac maxime et
principales vocantur (“Indeed those sentences that have no demonstration are
called maximum or principal [sentences], because they are not rejected since
they are necessary to those that have to be demonstrated and which are valid
for making a demonstration ; but a maximum sentence such as « if from equal
[quantifies], equal [quantities] are taken, what is left are equal
[quantities]*, is self- evident, and there is nothing which can be better known
self-evidently valid, and self- demonstrating, therefore they are sentences
containing their certitude in their very nature and not only do they need no
additional argument to demonstrate their certitude, but are also the principles
of demonstration of the other [sentences]; so they are, self-evident sen-
tences, nothing being better known than they are, and are called undemonstrable
or maxi- mum and principal”). Boethius’ idea coincides with Aristotle’s;
deduction must start from somewhere, we must begin with something unproved. The
Stagirite, how- ever, gave an explanation of the existence of principles and
the possibility of their being grasjied by the active intellect, whereas with
Boethius princi- ples appear as severed from the sentences demonstrated in a
more formal manner: there are two kinds of sentences: some which are
demonstrable and others which need no demonstration
praedicabile: As in qualia being the plural of quale and universalia
being the plural of universale, predicabilia is Boethius’s plural for the
‘predicabile’ -- something Grice knew by heart from giving seminars at Oxfrod
on Aristotle’s categories with Austin and Strawson. He found the topic boring
enough to give the seminar ALONE!
prædicatum: vide Is there a praedicatum in Blackburn’s one-off
predicament. He draws a skull and communicates that there is danger. The
drawsing of the skull is not syntactically structured. So it is difficult to
isolate the ‘praedicatum.’ That’s why Grice leaves matters of the praedicatum’
to reductive analyses at a second stage of his programme, where one wants to
apply, metabolically, ‘communicate’ to what an emissum does. The emissum of the
form, The S is P, predicates P of S.
Vide subjectification, and subjectum. Of especial interest to Grice and
Strawson. Lewis and Short have “praedīco,” which they render as “to say or
mention before or beforehand, to premise.” Grice as a modista is interested in
parts of speech: nomen (onoma) versus verbum (rhema) being the classical, since
Plato. The mediaeval modistae like Alcuin adapted Aristotle, and Grice follows
suit. Of particular relevance are the ‘syncategoremata,’ since Grice was
obsessed with particles, and we cannot say that ‘and’ is a predicate! This
relates to the ‘categorema.’ Liddell and Scott have “κατηγόρ-ημα,” which they
render as “accusation, charge,” Gorg.Pal.22; but in philosophy, as “predicate,”
as per Arist.Int.20b32, Metaph.1053b19, etc.; -- “οὐκ εὔοδον τὸ ἁπλοῖν
ἐστι κ.” Epicur.Fr.18. – and as “head of predicables,” in
Arist.Metaph.1028a33,Ph.201a1, Zeno Stoic.1.25, etc.; περὶ κατηγορημάτων
Sphaer.ib.140. The term syncategorema comes from a passage of Priscian in
his Institutiones grammatice II , 15. “coniunctae
plenam faciunt orationem, alias autem partes, κατηγορήματα, hoc est consignificantia, appellabant.”
A distinction is made between two types of word classes ("partes
orationis," singular, "pars orationis") distinguished by
philosophers since Plato, viz. nouns (nomen, onoma) and verbs (verbum, rhema)
on the one hand, and a 'syncategorema or consignificantium. A
consignificantium, just as the unary functor "non," and any of the
three dyadic functors, "et," "vel" (or "aut") and
"si," does not have a definitive meaning on its own -- cf. praepositio,
cited by Grice, -- "the meaning of 'to,' the meaning of 'of,'" --
rather, they acquire meaning in combination or when con-joined to one or more
categorema. It is one thing to say that we employ a certain part of speech when
certain conditions are fulfilled and quite another to claim that the role in
the language of that part of speech is to say, even in an extended sense, that
those conditions are fulfilled. In Logic, the verb 'kategoreo' is 'predicate of
a person or thing,' “τί τινος” Arist.Cat.3a19,al., Epicur.Fr.250; κυρίως,
καταχρηστικῶς κ., Phld.Po.5.15; “ἐναντίως ὑπὲρ τῶν αὐτῶν” Id.Oec.p.60 J.: —more
freq. in Pass., to be predicated of . . , τινος Arist.Cat.2a21, APr. 26b9, al.;
“κατά τινος” Id.Cat.2a37; “κατὰ παντὸς ἢ μηδενός” Id.APr.24a15: less freq. “ἐπί
τινος” Id.Metaph.998b16, 999a15; so later “ἐφ᾽ ἑνὸς οἴονται θεοῦ ἑκάτερον τῶν
ὀνομάτων -εῖσθαι” D.H.2.48; “περί τινος” Arist. Top.140b37; “τὸ κοινῇ -ούμενον
ἐπὶ πᾶσιν” Id.SE179a8: abs., τὸ κατηγορούμενον the
predicate, opp. τὸ ὑποκείμενον (the subject), Id.Cat.1b11,
cf.Metaph.1043a6, al.; κατηγορεῖν καὶ -εῖσθαι to be subject and predicate,
Id.APr.47b1. BANC.
prejudices:
the life and opinions of H. P. Grice, by H. P. Grice! PGRICE had been in the
works for a while. Knowing this, Grice is able to start his auto-biography, or
memoir, to which he later adds a specific reply to this or that objection by
the editors. The reply is divided in neat sections. After a preamble displaying
his gratitude for the volume in his honour, Grice turns to his prejudices
and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice. The
third section is a reply to the editorss overview of his work. This reply
itself is itself subdivided into questions of meaning and rationality, and
questions of Met. , philosophical psychology, and value. As the latter is repr.
in “Conception” it is possible to cite this sub-section from the Reply as a
separate piece. Grice originally entitles his essay in a brilliant manner,
echoing the style of an English non-conformist, almost: Prejudices and
predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice. With his
Richards, a nice Welsh surNames, Grice is punning on the first Names of both
Grandy and Warner. Grice is especially concerned with what Richards see as
an ontological commitment on Grices part to the abstract, yet poorly
individuated entity of a proposition. Grice also deals with the alleged
insufficiency in his conceptual analysis of reasoning. He brings for good
measure a point about a potential regressus ad infinitum in his account of a
chain of intentions involved in meaning that p and communicating that p. Even
if one of the drafts is titled festschrift, not by himself, this is not
strictly a festschrift in that Grices Names is hidden behind the acronym:
PGRICE. Notably on the philosophy of perception. Also in “Conception,”
especially that tricky third lecture on a metaphysical foundation for objective
value. Grice is supposed to reply to the individual contributors, who
include Strawson, but does not. I cancelled the implicatum! However, we may
identify in his oeuvre points of contacts of his own views with the
philosophers who contributed, notably Strawson. Most of this material is
reproduced verbatim, indeed, as the second part of his Reply to Richards, and
it is a philosophical memoir of which Grice is rightly proud. The life and
opinions are, almost in a joke on Witters, distinctly separated. Under Life,
Grice convers his conservative, irreverent rationalism making his early initial
appearance at Harborne under the influence of his non-conformist father, and
fermented at his tutorials with Hardie at Corpus, and his associations with
Austins play group on Saturday mornings, and some of whose members he lists
alphabetically: Austin, Gardiner, Grice, Hampshire, Hare, Hart, Nowell-Smith,
Paul, Pears, Strawson, Thomson, Urmson, and Warnock. Also, his joint
philosophising with Austin, Pears, Strawson, Thomson, and Warnock. Under
Opinions, Grice expands mainly on ordinary-language philosophy and his
Bunyanesque way to the City of Eternal Truth. Met. , Philosophical
Psychology, and Value, in “Conception,” is thus part of his Prejudices and
predilections. The philosophers Grice quotes are many and varied, such as
Bosanquet and Kneale, and from the other place, Keynes. Grice spends some
delightful time criticising the critics of ordinary-language philosophy such as
Bergmann (who needs an English futilitarian?) and Gellner. He also quotes from
Jespersen, who was "not a philosopher but wrote a philosophy of
grammar!" And Grice includes a reminiscence of the bombshells brought from
Vienna by the enfant terrible of Oxford philosophy Freddie Ayer, after being
sent to the Continent by Ryle. He recalls an air marshal at a dinner with
Strawson at Magdalen relishing on Cook Wilsons adage, What we know we know. And
more besides! After reminiscing for Clarendon, Grice will go on to reminisce
for Harvard University Press in the closing section of the Retrospective
epilogue. Refs.: The main source is “Reply to Richards,” and references to
Oxonianism, and linguistic botanising, BANC.
prelatum
-- anaphora: a device of reference or cross-reference in which a
term called an anaphor, typically a pronoun, has its semantic properties
determined by a term or noun phrase called the anaphor’s antecedent that occurs
earlier. Sometimes the antecedent is a proper name or other independently
referring expression, as in ‘Jill went up the hill and then she came down
again’. In such cases, the anaphor refers to the same object as its antecedent.
In other cases, the anaphor seems to function as a variable bound by an
antecedent quantifier, as in ‘If any miner bought a donkey, he is penniless’.
But anaphora is puzzling because not every example falls neatly into one of
these two groups. Thus, in ‘John owns some sheep and Harry vaccinates them’ an
example due to Gareth Evans the anaphor is arguably not bound by its antecedent
‘some sheep’. And in ‘Every miner who owns a donkey beats it’ a famous type of
case discovered by Geach, the anaphor is arguably neither bound by ‘a donkey’
nor a uniquely referring expression.
predicables, also
praedicabilia, sometimes called the quinque voces five words, in medieval
philosophy, genus, species, difference, proprium, and accident, the five main
ways general predicates can be predicated. The list comes from Porphyry’s
Isagoge. It was debated whether it applies to linguistic predicates only or
also to extralinguistic universals. Things that have accidents can exist
without them; other predicables belong necessarily to whatever has them. The
Aristotelian/Porphyrian notion of “inseparable accident” blurs this picture.
Genus and species are natural kinds; other predicables are not. A natural kind
that is not a narrowest natural kind is a genus; one that is not a broadest
natural kind is a species. Some genera are also species. A proprium is not a
species, but is coextensive with one. A difference belongs necessarily to
whatever has it, but is neither a natural kind nor coextensive with one.
Pre-existence, existence
of the individual soul or psyche prior to its current embodiment, when the soul
or psyche is taken to be separable and capable of existing independently from
its embodiment. The current embodiment is then often described as a
reincarnation of the soul. Plato’s Socrates refers to such a doctrine several
times in the dialogues, notably in the myth of Er in Book X of the Republic.
The doctrine is distinguished from two other teachings about the soul:
creationism, which holds that the individual human soul is directly created by
God, and traducianism, which held that just as body begets body in biological
generation, so the soul of the new human being is begotten by the parental
soul. In Hinduism, the cycle of reincarnations represents the period of
estrangement and trial for the soul or Atman before it achieves release moksha.
prescriptivism, the
theory that evaluative judgments necessarily have prescriptive meaning.
Associated with noncognitivism and moral antirealism, prescriptivism holds that
moral language is such that, if you say that you think one ought to do a
certain kind of act, and yet you are not committed to doing that kind of act in
the relevant circumstances, then you either spoke insincerely or are using the
word ‘ought’ in a less than full-blooded sense. Prescriptivism owes its stature
to Hare. One of his innovations is the distinction between “secondarily
evaluative” and “primarily evaluative” words. The prescriptive meaning of
secondarily evaluative words, such as ‘soft-hearted’ or ‘chaste’, may vary
significantly while their descriptive meanings stay relatively constant. Hare
argues the reverse for the primarily evaluative words ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’,
‘wrong’, ‘ought’, and ‘must’. For example, some people assign to ‘wrong’ the
descriptive meaning ‘forbidden by God’, others assign it the descriptive
meaning ‘causes social conflict’, and others give it different descriptive
meanings; but since all use ‘wrong’ with the same prescriptive meaning, they
are using the same concept. In part to show how moral judgments can be
prescriptive and yet have the same logical relations as indicative sentences,
Hare distinguished between phrastics and neustics. The phrastic, or content,
can be the same in indicative and prescriptive sentences; e.g., ‘Sam’s leaving’
is the phrastic not only of the indicative ‘Sam will leave’ but also of the
prescription ‘Sam ought to leave’. Hare’s Language of Morals 2 specified that
the neustic indicates mood, i.e., whether the sentence is indicative,
imperative, interrogative, etc. However, in an article in Mind 9 and in Sorting
Out Ethics 7, he used ‘neustic’ to refer to the sign of subscription, and
‘tropic’ to refer to the sign of mood. Prescriptivity is especially important
if moral judgments are universalizable. For then we can employ golden rulestyle
moral reasoning.
pre-Socratics: cf.
pre-Griceians. the early Grecian philosophers who were not influenced by
Socrates. Generally they lived before Socrates, but some are contemporary with
him or even younger. The classification though not the term goes back to
Aristotle, who saw Socrates’ humanism and emphasis on ethical issues as a
watershed in the history of philosophy. Aristotle rightly noted that
philosophers prior to Socrates had stressed natural philosophy and cosmology
rather than ethics. He credited them with discovering material principles and
moving causes of natural events, but he criticized them for failing to stress
structural elements of things formal causes and values or purposes final
causes. Unfortunately, no writing of any pre-Socratic survives in more than a
fragmentary form, and evidence of their views is thus often indirect, based on
reports or criticisms of later writers. In order to reconstruct pre-Socratic
thought, scholars have sought to collect testimonies of ancient sources and to
identify quotations from the preSocratics in those sources. As modern research
has revealed flaws in the interpretations of ancient witnesses, it has become a
principle of exegesis to base reconstructions of their views on the actual
words of the pre-Socratics themselves wherever possible. Because of the
fragmentary and derivative nature of our evidence, even basic principles of a
philosopher’s system sometimes remain controversial; nevertheless, we can say
that thanks to modern methods of historiography, there are many points we
understand better than ancient witnesses who are our secondary sources. Our
best ancient secondary source is Aristotle, who lived soon after the
pre-Socratics and had access to most of their writings. He interprets his
predecessors from the standpoint of his own theory; but any historian must
interpret philosophers in light of some theoretical background. Since we have extensive
writings of Aristotle, we understand his
system and can filter out his own prejudices. His colleague Theophrastus was
the first professional historian of philosophy. Adopting Aristotle’s general
framework, he systematically discussed pre-Socratic theories. Unfortunately his
work itself is lost, but many fragments and summaries of parts of it remain.
Indeed, virtually all ancient witnesses writing after Theophrastus depend on
him for their general understanding of the early philosophers, sometimes by way
of digests of his work. When biography became an important genre in later
antiquity, biographers collected facts, anecdotes, slanders, chronologies often
based on crude a priori assumptions, lists of book titles, and successions of
school directors, which provide potentially valuable information. By
reconstructing ancient theories, we can trace the broad outlines of
pre-Socratic development with some confidence. The first philosophers were the
Milesians, philosophers of Miletus on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, who in
the sixth century B.C. broke away from mythological modes of explanation by
accounting for all phenomena, even apparent prodigies of nature, by means of
simple physical hypotheses. Aristotle saw the Milesians as material monists,
positing a physical substrate of water,
or the apeiron, or air; but their material source was probably not a continuing
substance that underlies all changes as Aristotle thought, but rather an
original stuff that was transformed into different stuffs. Pythagoras migrated
from Ionia to southern Italy, founding a school of Pythagoreans who believed
that souls transmigrated and that number was the basis of all reality. Because
Pythagoras and his early followers did not publish anything, it is difficult to
trace their development and influence in detail. Back in Ionia, Heraclitus
criticized Milesian principles because he saw that if substances changed into
one another, the process of transformation was more important than the
substances that appeared in the cycle of changes. He thus chose the unstable
substance fire as his material principle and stressed the unity of opposites.
Parmenides and the Eleatic School criticized the notion of notbeing that
theories of physical transformations seemed to presuppose. One cannot even
conceive of or talk of not-being; hence any conception that presupposes
not-being must be ruled out. But the basic notions of coming-to-be,
differentiation, and indeed change in general presuppose not-being, and thus
must be rejected. Eleatic analysis leads to the further conclusion, implicit in
Parmenides, explicit in Melissus, that there is only one substance, what-is.
Since this substance does not come into being or change in any way, nor does it
have any internal differentiations, the world is just a single changeless,
homogeneous individual. Parmenides’ argument seems to undermine the foundations
of natural philosophy. After Parmenides philosophers who wished to continue
natural philosophy felt compelled to grant that coming-to-be and internal differentiation
of a given substance were impossible. But in order to accommodate natural
processes, they posited a plurality of unchanging, homogeneous elements the four elements of Empedocles, the
elemental stuffs of Anaxagoras, the atoms of Democritus that by arrangement and rearrangement could
produce the cosmos and the things in it. There is no real coming-to-be and
perishing in the world since the ultimate substances are everlasting; but some
limited kind of change such as chemical combination or mixture or locomotion
could account for changing phenomena in the world of experience. Thus the
“pluralists” incorporated Eleatic principles into their systems while rejecting
the more radical implications of the Eleatic critique. Pre-Socratic
philosophers developed more complex systems as a response to theoretical
criticisms. They focused on cosmology and natural philosophy in general,
championing reason and nature against mythological traditions. Yet the
pre-Socratics have been criticized both for being too narrowly scientific in
interest and for not being scientific experimental enough. While there is some
justice in both criticisms, their interests showed breadth as well as
narrowness, and they at least made significant conceptual progress in providing
a framework for scientific and philosophical ideas. While they never developed
sophisticated theories of ethics, logic, epistemology, or metaphysics, nor
invented experimental methods of confirmation, they did introduce the concepts
that ultimately became fundamental in modern theories of cosmic, biological,
and cultural evolution, as well as in atomism, genetics, and social contract
theory. Because the Socratic revolution turned philosophy in different
directions, the pre-Socratic line died out. But the first philosophers supplied
much inspiration for the sophisticated fourthcentury systems of Plato and
Aristotle as well as the basic principles of the great Hellenistic schools,
Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism.
presupposition, 1 a
relation between sentences or statements, related to but distinct from
entailment and assertion; 2 what a speaker takes to be understood in making an
assertion. The first notion is semantic, the second pragmatic. The semantic
notion was introduced by Strawson in his attack on Russell’s theory of
descriptions, and perhaps anticipated by Frege. Strawson argued that ‘The
present king of France is bald’ does not entail ‘There is a present king of
France’ as Russell held, but instead presupposes it. Semantic presupposition
can be defined thus: a sentence or statement S presupposes a sentence or
statement SH provided S entails SH and the negation of S also entails SH . SH
is a condition of the truth or falsity of S. Thus, since ‘There is a present
king of France’ is false, ‘The present king of France is bald’ is argued to be
neither true nor false. So construed, presupposition is defined in terms of,
but is distinct from, entailment. It is also distinct from assertion, since it
is viewed as a precondition of the truth or falsity of what is asserted. The
pragmatic conception does not appeal to truth conditions, but instead contrasts
what a speaker presupposes and what that speaker asserts in making an
utterance. Thus, someone who utters ‘The present king of France is bald’
presupposes believes and believes that
the audience believes that there is a
present king of France, and asserts that this king is bald. So conceived,
presuppositions are beliefs that the speaker takes for granted; if these
beliefs are false, the utterance will be inappropriate in some way, but it does
not follow that the sentence uttered lacks a truth-value. These two notions of
presupposition are logically independent. On the semantic characterization,
presupposition is a relation between sentences or statements requiring that
there be truth-value gaps. On the pragmatic characterization, it is speakers
rather than sentences or statements that have presuppositions; no truth-value
gaps are required. Many philosophers and linguists have argued for treating
what have been taken to be cases of semantic presupposition, including the one
discussed above, as pragmatic phenomena. Some have denied that semantic
presuppositions exist. If not, intuitions about presupposition do not support
the claims that natural languages have truth-value gaps and that we need a
three-valued logic to represent the semantics of natural language adequately.
Presupposition is also distinct from implicature. If someone reports that he
has just torn his coat and you say, “There’s a tailor shop around the corner,”
you conversationally implicate that the shop is open. This is not a semantic
presupposition because if it is false that the shop is open, there is no
inclination to say that your assertion was neither true nor false. It is not a
pragmatic presupposition because it is not something you believe the hearer
believes.
pretheoretical,
independent of theory. More specifically, a proposition is pretheoretical,
according to some philosophers, if and only if it does not depend for its
plausibility or implausibility on theoretical considerations or considerations
of theoretical analysis. The term ‘preanalytic’ is often used synonymously with
‘pretheoretical’, but the former is more properly paired with analysis rather
than with theory. Some philosophers characterize pretheoretical propositions as
“intuitively” plausible or implausible. Such propositions, they hold, can
regulate philosophical theorizing as follows: in general, an adequate
philosophical theory should not conflict with intuitively plausible propositions
by implying intuitively implausible propositions, and should imply intuitively
plausible propositions. Some philosophers grant that theoretical considerations
can override “intuitions” in the sense
of intuitively plausible propositions
when overall theoretical coherence or reflective equilibrium is thereby
enhanced.
prescriptum: prescriptivism. According to Grice’s prescriptive
meta-ethics, by uttering ‘p,’ the emissor may intend his recipient to entertain
a desiderative state of content ‘p.’ In which case, the emissor is
‘prescribing’ a course of conduct. As opposed to the ‘descriptum,’ which just
depicts a ‘state’ of affairs that the emissor wants to inform his recipient
about. Surely there are for Grice at
least two different modes, the buletic, which tends towards the prescriptive,
and the doxastic, which is mostly ‘descriptive.’ One has to be careful because
Grice thinks that what a philosopher like Strawson does with ‘descriptive’
expression (like ‘true,’ ‘know’ and ‘good’) and talk of pseudo-descriptive. What
is that gives the buletic a ‘prescritive’ or deontic ring to it? This is Kant’s
question. Grice kept a copy of Foots on morality as a system of hypothetical
imperatives. “So Somervillian Oxonian it hurts!”. Grice took virtue ethics more
seriously than the early Hare. Hare will end up a virtue ethicist, since he
changed from a meta-ethicist to a moralist embracing a hedonistic version of
eudaemonist utilitarianism. Grice was more Aristotelianly conservative! Unlike
Hares and Grices meta-ethical sensitivities (as members of the Oxonian school
of ordinary-language philosophy), Foot suggests a different approach to ethics.
Grice admired Foots ability to make the right conceptual distinction. Foot
is following a very Oxonian tradition best represented by the work of
Warnock. Of course, Grice was over-familiar with the virtue vs. vice
distinction, since Hardie had instilled it on him at Corpus! For Grice,
virtue and vice (and the mesotes), display an interesting logical grammar, though.
Grice would say that rationality is a virtue; fallacious reasoning is a
vice. Some things Grice takes more of a moral standpoint about. To cheat
is neither irrational nor unreasonble: just plain repulsive. As
such, it would be a vice ‒ mind not getting caught in its grip! Grice is
concerned with vice in his account of akrasia or incontinentia. If agent A
KNOWS that doing x is virtuous, yet decides to do ~x, which is vicious, A is
being akratic. For Grice, akratic behaviour applies both in the buletic or
boulomaic realm and in the doxastic realm. And it is part of the
philosopher’s job to elucidate the conceptual intricacies attached to
it. 1. prima-facie (p⊃!q) V probably (p⊃q). 2.
prima-facie ((A and B) ⊃!p) V probably ( (A and B) ⊃p). 3. prima-facie ((A and B and C) ⊃!p) V probably ( (A and B and C,) ⊃p). 4. prima-facie ((all things before P V!p) V
probably ((all things before P) ⊃ p). 5.
prima-facie ((all things are considered ⊃ !p)
V probably (all things are considered, ⊃ p). 6.
!q V .q 7. Acc. Reasoning P wills that !q V Acc. Reasoning P that judges
q. Refs.: The main sources under ‘meta-ethics,’ above, BANC.
Price, Richard 172391,
Welsh Dissenting minister, actuary, and moral philosopher. His main work, A
Review of the Principal Question in Morals 1758, is a defense of rationalism in
ethics. He argued that the understanding immediately perceives simple,
objective, moral qualities of actions. The resulting intuitive knowledge of
moral truths is accompanied by feelings of approval and disapproval responsible
for moral motivation. He also wrote influential papers on life expectancy,
public finance, and annuities; communicated to the Royal Society the paper by
his deceased friend Thomas Bayes containing Bayes’s theorem; and defended
the and
revolutions. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is a response
to one of Price’s sermons.
Prichard: h. a. – H. P.
Grice called himself a neo-Prichardian, but then “I used to be a neo-Stoutian
before that!” -- English philosopher and founder of the Oxford school of
intuitionism. An Oxford fellow and professor, he published Kant’s Theory of
Knowledge 9 and numerous essays, collected in Moral Obligation 9, 8 and in
Knowledge and Perception 0. Prichard was a realist in his theory of knowledge,
following Cook Wilson. He held that through direct perception in concrete cases
we obtain knowledge of universals and of necessary connections between them,
and he elaborated a theory about our knowledge of material objects. In “Does
Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” 2 he argued powerfully that it is wrong to
think that a general theory of obligation is possible. No single principle
captures the various reasons why obligatory acts are obligatory. Only by direct
perception in particular cases can we see what we ought to do. With this essay
Prichard founded the Oxford school of intuitionism, carried on by, among
others, Ross.
Priestley, J.: British
philosopher. In 1774 he prepared oxygen by heating mercuric oxide. Although he
continued to favor the phlogiston hypothesis, his work did much to discredit
that idea. He discovered many gases, including ammonia, sulfur dioxide, carbon
monoxide, and hydrochloric acid. While studying the layer of carbon dioxide
over a brewing vat, he conceived the idea of dissolving it under pressure. The
resulting “soda water” was famous throughout Europe. His Essay on Government
1768 influenced Jefferson’s ideas in the
Declaration of Independence. The essay also contributed to the
utilitarianism of Bentham, supplying the phrase “the greatest happiness of the
greatest number.” Priestley modified the associationism of Locke, Hume, and
Hartley, holding that a sharp distinction must be drawn between the results of
association in forming natural propensities and its effects on the development
of moral ideas. On the basis of this distinction, he argued, against Hume, that
differences in individual moral sentiments are results of education, through
the association of ideas, a view anticipated by Helvétius. Priestley served as
minister to anti-Establishment congregations. His unpopular stress on
individual freedom resulted in his move to Pennsylvania, where he spent his
last years.
prime mover, the original
source and cause of motion change in the universe an idea that was developed by Aristotle and
became important in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic thought about God. According
to Aristotle, something that is in motion a process of change is moving from a state
of potentiality to a state of actuality. For example, water that is being
heated is potentially hot and in the process of becoming actually hot. If a
cause of change must itself actually be in the state that it is bringing about,
then nothing can produce motion in itself; whatever is in motion is being moved
by another. For otherwise something would be both potentially and actually in
the same state. Thus, the water that is potentially hot can become hot only by
being changed by something else the fire that is actually hot. The prime mover,
the original cause of motion, must itself, therefore, not be in motion; it is
an unmoved mover. Aquinas and other theologians viewed God as the prime mover,
the ultimate cause of all motion. Indeed, for these theologians the argument to
establish the existence of a first mover, itself unmoved, was a principal
argument used in their efforts to prove the existence of God on the basis of
reason. Many modern thinkers question the argument for a first mover on the
ground that it does not seem to be logically impossible that the motion of one
thing be caused by a second thing whose motion in turn is caused by a third
thing, and so on without end. Defenders of the argument claim that it
presupposes a distinction between two different causal series, one temporal and
one simultaneous, and argue that the objection succeeds only against a temporal
causal series.
PRIMA PHILOSOPHIA --
first philosophy, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the study of being qua being,
including the study of theology as understood by him, since the divine is being
par excellence. Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy was concerned
chiefly with the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the nature
of matter and of the mind.
Prince Maurice’s parrot: The ascription of ‘that’-clause in the report of a
communicatum by a pirot of stage n-1 may be a problem by a priot in stage n. Do
we want to say that the parrot communicates that he finds Prince Maurice an
idiot? While some may not be correct that Griciean principles can be explained
on practical, utilitarian grounds, Grice’s main motivation is indeed to capture
the ‘rational’ capacity. Since I think I may be confident, that, whoever should
see a creature of his own shape or make, though it had no more reason all its
life than a cat or a parrot, would call him still a man; or whoever should hear
a cat or a parrot discourse, reason, and philosophize, would call or think it
nothing but a cat or a parrot; and say, the one was a dull irrational man, and
the other a very intelligent rational parrot. A relation we have in an author
of great note, is sufficient to countenance the supposition of a rational
parrot. His words are: "I had a mind to know, from Prince Maurice's own
mouth, the account of a common, but much credited story, that I had heard so
often from many others, of an old parrot he had in Brazil, during his
government there, that spoke, and asked, and answered common questions, like a
reasonable creature: so that those of his train there generally concluded it to
be witchery or possession; and one of his chaplains, who lived long afterwards
in Holland, would never from that time endure a parrot, but said they all had a
devil in them. I had heard many particulars of this story, and as severed by
people hard to be discredited, which made me ask Prince Maurice what there was
of it. He said, with his usual plainness and dryness in talk, there was
something true, but a great deal false of what had been reported. I desired to
know of him what there was of the first. He told me short and coldly, that he
had heard of such an old parrot when he had been at Brazil; and though he
believed nothing of it, and it was a good way off, yet he had so much curiosity
as to send for it: that it was a very great and a very old one; and when it
came first into the room where the prince was, with a great many Dutchmen about
him, it said presently, What a company of white men are here! They asked it,
what it thought that man was, pointing to the prince. It answered, Some General
or other. When they brought it close to him, he asked it, D'ou venez-vous? It
answered, De Marinnan. The Prince, A qui estes-vous? The Parrot, A un
Portugais. The Prince, Que fais-tu la? Parrot, Je garde les poulles. The Prince
laughed, and said, Vous gardez les poulles? The Parrot answered, Oui, moi; et
je scai bien faire; and made the chuck four or five times that people use to
make to chickens when they call them. I set down the words of this worthy
dialogue in French, just as Prince Maurice said them to me. I asked him in what
language the parrot spoke, and he said in Brazilian. I asked whether he
understood Brazilian; he said No, but he had taken care to have two
interpreters by him, the one a Dutchman that spoke Brazilian, and the other a Brazilian
that spoke Dutch; that he asked them separately and privately, and both of them
agreed in telling him just the same thing that the parrot had said. I could not
but tell this odd story, because it is so much out of the way, and from the
first hand, and what may pass for a good one; for I dare say this Prince at
least believed himself in all he told me, having ever passed for a very honest
and pious man: I leave it to naturalists to reason, and to other men to
believe, as they please upon it; however, it is not, perhaps, amiss to relieve
or enliven a busy scene sometimes with such digressions, whether to the purpose
or no." I have taken care that the reader should have the story at large
in the author's own words, because he seems to me not to have thought it
incredible; for it cannot be imagined that so able a man as he, who had
sufficiency enough to warrant all the testimonies he gives of himself, should
take so much pains, in a place where it had nothing to do, to pin so close, not
only on a man whom he mentions as his friend, but on a Prince in whom he
acknowledges very great honesty and piety, a story which, if he himself thought
incredible, he could not but also think ridiculous. The Prince, it is plain,
who vouches this story, and our author, who relates it from him, both of them
call this talker a parrot: and I ask any one else who thinks such a story fit
to be told, whether, if this parrot, and all of its kind, had always talked, as
we have a prince's word for it this one did,- whether, I say, they would not
have passed for a race of rational animals; but yet, whether, for all that,
they would have been allowed to be men, and not parrots? For I presume it is
not the idea of a thinking or rational being alone that makes the idea of a man
in most people's sense: but of a body, so and so shaped, joined to it: and if
that be the idea of a man, the same successive body not shifted all at once,
must, as well as the same immaterial spirit, go to the making of the same man.
principle of economy of rational
effort: (principium oeconomiae effortis
rationalis). Cf. his metaphor of the hamburger. Grice knew that ‘economy’ is
vague. It relates to the ‘open house.’ But is a crucial concept. It is not the
principle of parsimony of rational effort. It is not the principle of
‘minimisaation’ of rational effort. It is the principle of the ‘economy’ of
rational effort. ‘Economy’ is already a value-oriented word, since it is a
branch of politics and meta-ethics. oecŏnŏmĭcus , a, um, adj., = οἰκονομικός.
I. Of or relating to domestic economy; subst.: oecŏnŏmĭcus , i, m., a work of
Xenophon on domestic economy. in eo libro, qui Oeconomicus inscribitur, Cic.
Off. 2, 24, 87; Gell. 15, 5, 8.— II. Of or belonging to a proper (oratorical)
division or arrangement; orderly, methodical: “oeconomica totius causae
dispositio,” Quint. 7, 10, 11. οἰκονομ-ικός , ή, όν, A.practised in the management of a household or
family, opp. πολιτικός, Pl.Alc.1.133e, Phdr.248d, X.Oec.1.3, Arist.Pol.1252a8,
etc. : Sup., [κτημάτων] τὸ βέλτιστον καὶ-ώτατον, of man, Phld.Oec.p.30 J. :
hence, thrifty, frugal, economical, X.Mem.4.2.39, Phylarch.65 J. (Comp.) : ὁ οἰ.
title of treatise on the duties of domestic life, by Xenophon ; and τὰ οἰ.
title of treatise on public finance, ascribed to Aristotle, cf. X.Cyr.8.1.14 : ἡ
-κή (sc. τέχνη) domestic economy, husbandry, Pl.Plt.259c, X.Mem. 3.4.11, etc. ;
οἰ. ἀρχή defined as ἡ τέκνων ἀρχὴ καὶ γυναικὸς καὶ τῆς οἰκίας πάσης,
Arist.Pol.1278b38 ; applied to patriarchal rule, ib.1285b32. Adv.“-κῶς”
Ph.2.426, Plu.2.1126a ; also in literary sense, in a well ordered manner,
Sch.Th.1.63. Grice’s conversational maximin. Blackburn
draws a skull to communicate that there is danger. The skull complete with the
rest of the body will not do. So abiding by this principle has nothing to do
with an arbitrary convention. Vide principle of least conversational effort.
Principle of conversational least effort. No undue effort (candour), no
unnecessary trouble (self-love) if doing A involves too much conversational
effort, never worry: you will be DEEMED to have made the effort. Invoked by
Grice in “Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of
H. P. Grice.” When Grice qualifies this as ‘rational’ effort, what other
efforts are there? Note that the lexeme ‘effort’ does NOT feature in the
formulation of the principle itself. Grice confesses to be strongly inclined to
assent to the principle of economy of rational conversational effort or the
principle of economy of conversational effort, or the principle of economy of
conversational expenditure, or the principle of minimisation of rational expenditure,
or the principle of minimization of conversational expenditure, or the principle
of minimisation of rational cost, or the conversational maximin. The principle
of least cost. The principle of economy of rational expenditure states that,
where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain
outcome, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, involves an
expenditure of time and energy, if there is a NON-ratiocinative, and so more
economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same
outcome as the ratiocinative procedure, provided the stakes are not too high,
it is rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable
non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination. Grice thinks
this principle would meet with genitorial approval, in which case the genitor
would install it for use should opportunity arise. This applies to the charge
of overcomplexity and ‘psychological irreality’ of the reasoning involved in
the production and design of the maximally efficient conversational move and
the reasoning involved in the recognition of the implicatum by the addressee.
In “Epilogue” he goes by yet another motto, Do not multiply rationalities
beyond necessity: The principle of conversational rationality, as he calls it
in the Epilogue, is a sub-principle of a principle of rationality simpiciter,
not applying to a pursuit related to ‘communication,’ as he puts it.
principium
individuationis, the cause or basis of individuality in individuals; what makes
something individual as opposed to universal, e.g., what makes the cat Minina
individual and thus different from the universal, cat. Questions regarding the
principle of individuation were first raised explicitly in the early Middle
Ages. Classical authors largely ignored individuation; their ontological focus
was on the problem of universals. The key texts that originated the discussion
of the principle of individuation are found in Boethius. Between Boethius and
1150, individuation was always discussed in the context of more pressing
issues, particularly the problem of universals. After 1150, individuation
slowly emerged as a focus of attention, so that by the end of the thirteenth
century it had become an independent subject of discussion, especially in
Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Most early modern philosophers conceived the problem
of individuation epistemically rather than metaphysically; they focused on the
discernibility of individuals rather than the cause of individuation, as in
Descartes. With few exceptions, such as Karl Popper, the twentieth century has
followed this epistemic approach e. g. P. F. Strawson.
principle of bivalence,
the principle that any significant statement is either true or false. It is
often confused with the principle of excluded middle. Letting ‘Tp’ stand for ‘p
is true’ and ‘Tp’ for ‘p is false’ and otherwise using standard logical notation,
bivalence is ‘Tp 7 T-p’ and excluded middle is ‘T p 7 -p’. That they are
different principles is shown by the fact that in probability theory, where
‘Tp’ can be expressed as ‘Prp % 1’, bivalence ‘Pr p % 1 7 Pr ~p % 1’ is not
true for all values of p e.g. it is not
true where ‘p’ stands for ‘given a fair toss of a fair die, the result will be
a six’ a statement with a probability of 1 /6, where -p has a probability of 5
/6 but excluded middle ‘Prp 7 -p % 1’ is
true for all definite values of p, including the probability case just given.
If we allow that some significant statements have no truth-value or probability
and distinguish external negation ‘Tp’ from internal negation ‘T-p’, we can
distinguish bivalence and excluded middle from the principle of
non-contradiction, namely, ‘-Tp • T-p’, which is equivalent to ‘-Tp 7 -T-p’.
Standard truth-functional logic sees no difference between ‘p’ and ‘Tp’, or
‘-Tp’ and ‘T-p’, and thus is unable to distinguish the three principles. Some
philosophers of logic deny there is such a difference.
principle of
contradiction, also called principle of non-contradiction, the principle that a
statement and its negation cannot both be true. It can be distinguished from
the principle of bivalence, and given certain controversial assumptions, from
the principle of excluded middle; but in truth-functional logic all three are
regarded as equivalent. Outside of formal logic the principle of
non-contradiction is best expressed as Aristotle expresses it: “Nothing can
both be and not be at the same time in the same respect.”
principle of double
effect, the view that there is a morally relevant difference between those
consequences of our actions we intend and those we do not intend but do still
foresee. According to the principle, if increased literacy means a higher
suicide rate, those who work for education are not guilty of driving people to
kill themselves. A physician may give a patient painkillers foreseeing that
they will shorten his life, even though the use of outright poisons is
forbidden and the physician does not intend to shorten the patient’s life. An
army attacking a legitimate military target may accept as inevitable, without
intending to bring about, the deaths of a number of civilians. Traditional
moral theologians affirmed the existence of exceptionless prohibitions such as
that against taking an innocent human life, while using the principle of double
effect to resolve hard cases and avoid moral blind alleys. They held that one
may produce a forbidden effect, provided 1 one’s action also had a good effect,
2 one did not seek the bad effect as an end or as a means, 3 one did not
produce the good effect through the bad effect, and 4 the good effect was
important enough to outweigh the bad one. Some contemporary philosophers and
Roman Catholic theologians hold that a modified version of the principle of
double effect is the sole justification of deadly deeds, even when the person
killed is not innocent. They drop any restriction on the causal sequence, so
that e.g. it is legitimate to cut off the head of an unborn child to save the
mother’s life. But they oppose capital punishment on the ground that those who
inflict it require the death of the convict as part of their plan. They also
play down the fourth requirement, on the ground that the weighing of
incommensurable goods it requires is impossible. Consequentialists deny the
principle of double effect, as do those for whom the crucial distinction is
between what we cause by our actions and what just happens. In the most
plausible view, the principle does not presuppose exceptionless moral
prohibitions, only something stronger than prima facie duties. It is easier to
justify an oblique evasion of a moral requirement than a direct violation, even
if direct violations are sometimes permissible. So understood, the principle is
a guide to prudence rather than a substitute for it.
principle of excluded
middle, the principle that the disjunction of any significant statement with
its negation is always true; e.g., ‘Either there is a tree over 500 feet tall
or it is not the case that there is such a tree’. The principle is often
confused with the principle of bivalence.
principle of
indifference, a rule for assigning a probability to an event based on “parity
of reasons.” According to the principle, when the “weight of reasons” favoring
one event is equal to the “weight of reasons” favoring another, the two events
should be assigned the same probability. When there are n mutually exclusive
and collectively exhaustive events, and there is no reason to favor one over
another, then we should be “indifferent” and the n events should each be
assigned probability 1/n the events are equiprobable, according to the
principle. This principle is usually associated with the names Bernoulli Ars
Conjectandi, 1713 and Laplace Théorie analytique des probabilités, 1812, and
was so called by J. M. Keynes A Treatise on Probability, 1. The principle gives
probability both a subjective “degree of belief” and a logical “partial logical
entailment” interpretation. One rationale for the principle says that in
ignorance, when no reasons favor one event over another, we should assign equal
probabilities. It has been countered that any assignment of probabilities at
all is a claim to some knowledge. Also, several seemingly natural applications
of the principle, involving non-linearly related variables, have led to some
mathematical contradictions, known as Bertrand’s paradox, and pointed out by
Keynes.
principle of insufficient
reason, the principle that if there is no sufficient reason or explanation for
something’s being the case, then it will not be the case. Since the rise of
modern probability theory, many have identified the principle of insufficient
reason with the principle of indifference a rule for assigning a probability to
an event based on “parity of reasons”. The two principles are closely related,
but it is illuminating historically and logically to view the principle of
insufficient reason as the general principle stated above which is related to
the principle of sufficient reason and to view the principle of indifference as
a special case of the principle of insufficient reason applying to
probabilities. As Mach noted, the principle of insufficient reason, thus
conceived, was used by Archimedes to argue that a lever with equal weights at
equal distances from a central fulcrum would not move, since if there is no
sufficient reason why it should move one way or the other, it would not move
one way or the other. Philosophers from Anaximander to Leibniz used the same
principle to argue for various metaphysical theses. The principle of
indifference can be seen to be a special case of this principle of insufficient
reason applying to probabilities, if one reads the principle of indifference as
follows: when there are N mutually exclusive and exhaustive events and there is
no sufficient reason to believe that any one of them is more probable than any
other, then no one of them is more probable than any other they are
equiprobable. The idea of “parity of reasons” associated with the principle of
indifference is, in such manner, related to the idea that there is no
sufficient reason for favoring one outcome over another. This is significant
because the principle of insufficient reason is logically equivalent to the
more familiar principle of sufficient reason if something is [the case], then
there is a sufficient reason for its being [the case] which means that the principle of
indifference is a logical consequence of the principle of sufficient reason. If
this is so, we can understand why so many were inclined to believe the
principle of indifference was an a priori truth about probabilities, since it
was an application to probabilities of that most fundamental of all alleged a
priori principles of reasoning, the principle of sufficient reason. Nor should
it surprise us that the alleged a priori truth of the principle of indifference
was as controversial in probability theory as was the alleged a priori truth of
the principle of sufficient reason in philosophy generally.
principle of plenitude,
the principle that every genuine possibility is realized or actualized. This
principle of the “fullness of being” was named by A. O. Lovejoy, who showed
that it was commonly assumed throughout the history of Western science and
philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus who associated it with inexhaustible divine
productivity, through Augustine and other medieval philosophers, to the modern
rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz and the Enlightenment. Lovejoy connected
plenitude to the great chain of being, the idea that the universe is a
hierarchy of beings in which every possible form is actualized. In the
eighteenth century, the principle was “temporalized”: every possible form of
creature would be realized not
necessarily at all times but at some
stage “in the fullness of time.” A clue about the significance of plenitude
lies in its connection to the principle of sufficient reason everything has a
sufficient reason [cause or explanation] for being or not being. Plenitude says
that if there is no sufficient reason for something’s not being i.e., if it is
genuinely possible, then it exists which
is logically equivalent to the negative version of sufficient reason: if
something does not exist, then there is a sufficient reason for its not being.
principle of
verifiability, a claim about what meaningfulness is: at its simplest, a
sentence is meaningful provided there is a method for verifying it. Therefore,
if a sentence has no such method, i.e., if it does not have associated with it
a way of telling whether it is conclusively true or conclusively false, then it
is meaningless. The purpose for which this verificationist principle was
originally introduced was to demarcate sentences that are “apt to make a
significant statement of fact” from “nonsensical” or “pseudo-” sentences. It is
part of the emotive theory of content, e.g., that moral discourse is not
literally, cognitively meaningful, and therefore, not factual. And, with the
verifiability principle, the central European logical positivists of the 0s
hoped to strip “metaphysical discourse” of its pretensions of factuality. For
them, whether there is a reality external to the mind, as the realists claim,
or whether all reality is made up of “ideas” or “appearances,” as idealists
claim, is a “meaningless pseudo-problem.” The verifiability principle proved
impossible to frame in a form that did not admit all metaphysical sentences as
meaningful. Further, it casts doubt on its own status. How was it to be
verified? So, e.g., in the first edition of Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer
proposed that a sentence is verifiable, and consequently meaningful, if some
observation sentence can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other
premises, without being deducible from those other premises alone. It follows
that any metaphysical sentence M is meaningful since ‘if M, then O’ always is
an appropriate premise, where O is an observation sentence. In the preface to
the second edition, Ayer offered a more sophisticated account: M is directly
verifiable provided it is an observation sentence or it entails, in conjunction
with certain observation sentences, some observation sentence that does not
follow from them alone. And M is indirectly verifiable provided it entails, in
conjunction with certain other premises, some directly verifiable sentence that
does not follow from those other premises alone and these additional premises
are either analytic or directly verifiable or are independently indirectly
verifiable. The new verifiability principle is then that all and only sentences
directly or indirectly verifiable are “literally meaningful.” Unfortunately,
Ayer’s emendation admits every nonanalytic sentence. Let M be any metaphysical
sentence and O1 and O2 any pair of observation sentences logically independent
of each other. Consider sentence A: ‘either O1 or not-M and not-O2’. Conjoined
with O2, A entails O1. But O2 alone does not entail O1. So A is directly
verifiable. Therefore, since M conjoined with A entails O1, which is not
entailed by A alone, M is indirectly verifiable. Various repairs have been
attempted; none has succeeded.
prisoner’s dilemma, a
problem in game theory, and more broadly the theory of rational choice, that
takes its name from a familiar sort of pleabargaining situation: Two prisoners
Robin and Carol are interrogated separately and offered the same deal: If one
of them confesses “defects” and the other does not, the defector will be given
immunity from prosecution and the other will get a stiff prison sentence. If both
confess, both will get moderate prison terms. If both remain silent cooperate
with each other, both will get light prison terms for a lesser offense. There
are thus four possible outcomes: 1 Robin confesses and gets immunity, while
Carol is silent and gets a stiff sentence. 2 Both are silent and get light
sentences. 3 Both confess and get moderate sentences. 4 Robin is silent and
gets a stiff sentence, while Carol confesses and gets immunity. Assume that for
Robin, 1 would be the best outcome, followed by 2, 3, and 4, in that order.
Assume that for Carol, the best outcome is 4, followed by 2, 3, and 1. Each
prisoner then reasons as follows: “My confederate will either confess or remain
silent. If she confesses, I must do likewise, in order to avoid the ‘sucker’s
payoff’ immunity for her, a stiff sentence for me. If she remains silent, then
I must confess in order to get immunity
the best outcome for me. Thus, no matter what my confederate does, I
must confess.” Under those conditions, both will confess, effectively
preventing each other from achieving anything better than the option they both
rank as only third-best, even though they agree that option 2 is second-best.
This illustrative story attributed to A. W. Tucker must not be allowed to
obscure the fact that many sorts of social interactions have the same
structure. In general, whenever any two parties must make simultaneous or
independent choices over a range of options that has the ordinal payoff
structure described in the plea bargaining story, they are in a prisoner’s
dilemma. Diplomats, negotiators, buyers, and sellers regularly find themselves
in such situations. They are called iterated prisoner’s dilemmas if the same
parties repeatedly face the same choices with each other. Moreover, there are analogous
problems of cooperation and conflict at the level of manyperson interactions:
so-called n-person prisoner’s diemmas or free rider problems. The provision of
public goods provides an example. Suppose there is a public good, such as clean
air, national defense, or public radio, which we all want. Suppose that is can
be provided only by collective action, at some cost to each of the
contributors, but that we do not have to have a contribution from everyone in
order to get it. Assume that we all prefer having the good to not having it,
and that the best outcome for each of us would be to have it without cost to
ourselves. So each of us reasons as follows: “Other people will either
contribute enough to produce the good by themselves, or they will not. If they
do, then I can have it cost-free the best option for me and thus I should not
contribute. But if others do not contribute enough to produce the good by
themselves, and if the probability is very low that my costly contribution
would make the difference between success and failure, once again I should not
contribute.” Obviously, if we all reason in this way, we will not get the
public good we want. Such problems of collective action have been noticed by
philosophers since Plato. Their current nomenclature, rigorous game-theoretic
formulation, empirical study, and systematic philosophical development,
however, has occurred since 0.
private language
argument, an argument designed to show that there cannot be a language that
only one person can speak a language
that is essentially private, that no one else can in principle understand. In
addition to its intrinsic interest, the private language argument is relevant
to discussions of linguistic rules and linguistic meaning, behaviorism,
solipsism, and phenomenalism. The argument is closely associated with Vitters’s
Philosophical Investigations 8. The exact structure of the argument is
controversial; this account should be regarded as a standard one, but not
beyond dispute. The argument begins with the supposition that a person assigns
signs to sensations, where these are taken to be private to the person who has
them, and attempts to show that this supposition cannot be sustained because no
standards for the correct or incorrect application of the same sign to a
recurrence of the same sensation are possible. Thus Vitters supposes that he
undertakes to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation; he
associates it with the sign ‘S’, and marks ‘S’ on a calendar every day he has
that sensation. Vitters finds the nature of the association of the sign and
sensation obscure, on the ground that ‘S’ cannot be given an ordinary
definition this would make its meaning publicly accessible or even an ostensive
definition. He further argues that there is no difference between correct and
incorrect entries of ‘S’ on subsequent days. The initial sensation with which
the sign ‘S’ was associated is no longer present, and so it cannot be compared
with a subsequent sensation taken to be of the same kind. He could at best
claim to remember the nature of the initial sensation, and judge that it is of
the same kind as today’s. But since the memory cannot confirm its own accuracy,
there is no possible test of whether he remembers the initial association of
sign and sensation right today. Consequently there is no criterion for the
correct reapplication of the sign ‘S’. Thus we cannot make sense of the notion
of correctly reapplying ‘S’, and cannot make sense of the notion of a private
language. The argument described appears to question only the claim that one
could have terms for private mental occurrences, and may not seem to impugn a
broader notion of a private language whose expressions are not restricted to
signs for sensations. Advocates of Vitters’s argument would generalize it and
claim that the focus on sensations simply highlights the absence of a
distinction between correct and incorrect reapplications of words. A language
with terms for publicly accessible objects would, if private to its user, still
be claimed to lack criteria for the correct reapplication of such terms. This
broader notion of a private language would thus be argued to be equally
incoherent.
privation: H. P. Grice,
“Negation and privation,” a lack of something that it is natural or good to
possess. The term is closely associated with the idea that evil is itself only
a lack of good, privatio boni. In traditional theistic religions everything
other than God is created by God out of nothing, creation ex nihilo. Since,
being perfect, God would create only what is good, the entire original creation
and every creature from the most complex to the simplest are created entirely
good. The original creation contains no evil whatever. What then is evil and
how does it enter the world? The idea that evil is a privation of good does not
mean, e.g., that a rock has some degree of evil because it lacks such good
qualities as consciousness and courage. A thing has some degree of evil only if
it lacks some good that is 741 privileged
access privileged access 742 proper for that thing to possess. In the original
creation each created thing possessed the goods proper to the sort of thing it
was. According to Augustine, evil enters the world when creatures with free
will abandon the good above themselves for some lower, inferior good. Human
beings, e.g., become evil to the extent that they freely turn from the highest
good God to their own private goods, becoming proud, selfish, and wicked, thus
deserving the further evils of pain and punishment. One of the problems for
this explanation of the origin of evil is to account for why an entirely good
creature would use its freedom to turn from the highest good to a lesser
good.
privileged access: H. P.
Grice, “Privileged access and incorrigibility,” special first-person awareness
of the contents of one’s own mind. Since Descartes, many philosophers have held
that persons are aware of the occurrent states of their own minds in a way
distinct from both their mode of awareness of physical objects and their mode
of awareness of the mental states of others. Cartesians view such apprehension
as privileged in several ways. First, it is held to be immediate, both causally
and epistemically. While knowledge of physical objects and their properties is
acquired via spatially intermediate causes, knowledge of one’s own mental
states involves no such causal chains. And while beliefs about physical
properties are justified by appeal to ways objects appear in sense experience,
beliefs about the properties of one’s own mental states are not justified by
appeal to properties of a different sort. I justify my belief that the paper on
which I write is white by pointing out that it appears white in apparently
normal light. By contrast, my belief that white appears in my visual experience
seems to be self-justifying. Second, Cartesians hold that first-person
apprehension of occurrent mental contents is epistemically privileged in being
absolutely certain. Absolute certainty includes infallibility, incorrigibility,
and indubitability. That a judgment is infallible means that it cannot be
mistaken; its being believed entails its being true even though judgments
regarding occurrent mental contents are not necessary truths. That it is
incorrigible means that it cannot be overridden or corrected by others or by
the subject himself at a later time. That it is indubitable means that a
subject can never have grounds for doubting it. Philosophers sometimes claim
also that a subject is omniscient with regard to her own occurrent mental
states: if a property appears within her experience, then she knows this.
Subjects’ privileged access to the immediate contents of their own minds can be
held to be necessary or contingent. Regarding corrigibility, for example,
proponents of the stronger view hold that first-person reports of occurrent
mental states could never be overridden by conflicting evidence, such as
conflicting readings of brain states presumed to be correlated with the mental
states in question. They point out that knowledge of such correlations would itself
depend on first-person reports of mental states. If a reading of my brain
indicates that I am in pain, and I sincerely claim not to be, then the law
linking brain states of that type with pains must be mistaken. Proponents of
the weaker view hold that, while persons are currently the best authorities as
to the occurrent contents of their own minds, evidence such as conflicting
readings of brain states could eventually override such authority, despite the
dependence of the evidence on earlier firstperson reports. Weaker views on
privileged access may also deny infallibility on more general grounds. In
judging anything, including an occurrent mental state, to have a particular
property P, it seems that I must remember which property P is, and memory appears
to be always fallible. Even if such judgments are always fallible, however,
they may be more immediately justified than other sorts of judgments. Hence
there may still be privileged access, but of a weaker sort. In the twentieth
century, Ryle attacked the idea of privileged access by analyzing
introspection, awareness of what one is thinking or doing, in terms of
behavioral dispositions, e.g. dispositions to give memory reports of one’s
mental states when asked to do so. But while behaviorist or functional analyses
of some states of mind may be plausible, for instance analyses of cognitive
states such as beliefs, accounts in these terms of occurrent states such as
sensations or images are far less plausible. A more influential attack on
stronger versions of privileged access was mounted by Wilfrid Sellars.
According to him, we must be trained to report non-inferentially on properties
of our sense experience by first learning to respond with whole systems of
concepts to public, physical objects. Before I can learn to report a red sense
impression, I must learn the system of color concepts and the logical relations
among them by learning to respond to colored objects. Hence, knowledge of my
own mental states cannot be the firm basis from which I progress to other
knowledge. Even if this order of concept
acquisition is determined necessarily, it still may be that persons’ access to
their own mental states is privileged in some of the ways indicated, once the
requisite concepts have been acquired. Beliefs about one’s own occurrent states
of mind may still be more immediately justified than beliefs about physical
properties, for example.
pro attitude, a favorable
disposition toward an object or state of affairs. Although some philosophers
equate pro attitudes with desires, the expression is more often intended to
cover a wide range of conative states of mind including wants, feelings,
wishes, values, and principles. My regarding a certain course of action open to
me as morally required and my regarding it as a source of selfish satisfaction
equally qualify as pro attitudes toward the object of that action. It is widely
held that intentional action, or, more generally, acting for reasons, is
necessarily based, in part, on one or more pro attitudes. If I go to the store
in order to buy some turnips, then, in addition to my regarding my store-going
as conducive to turnip buying, I must have some pro attitude toward turnip
buying.
Probability -- doomsday
argument, an argument examined by Grice -- 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
6. 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. probability, a numerical value that can
attach to items of various kinds e.g., propositions, events, and kinds of
events that is a measure of the degree to which they may or should be
expected or the degree to which they
have “their own disposition,” i.e., independently of our psychological
expectations to be true, to occur, or to
be exemplified depending on the kind of item the value attaches to. There are
both multiple interpretations of probability and two main kinds of theories of
probability: abstract formal calculi and interpretations of the calculi. An
abstract formal calculus axiomatically characterizes formal properties of
probability functions, where the arguments of the function are often thought of
as sets, or as elements of a Boolean algebra. In application, the nature of the
arguments of a probability function, as well as the meaning of probability, are
given by interpretations of probability. The most famous axiomatization is
Kolmogorov’s Foundations of the Theory of Probability, 3. The three axioms for
probability functions Pr are: 1 PrX M 0 for all X; 2 PrX % 1 if X is necessary
e.g., a tautology if a proposition, a necessary event if an event, and a
“universal set” if a set; and 3 PrX 7 Y % PrX ! PrY where ‘7’ can mean, e.g.,
logical disjunction, or set-theoretical union if X and Y are mutually exclusive
X & Y is a contradiction if they are propositions, they can’t both happen
if they are events, and their set-theoretical intersection is empty if they are
sets. Axiom 3 is called finite additivity, which is sometimes generalized to
countable additivity, involving infinite disjunctions of propositions, or
infinite unions of sets. Conditional probability, PrX/Y the probability of X
“given” or “conditional on” Y, is defined as the quotient PrX & Y/PrY. An
item X is said to be positively or negatively statistically or
probabilistically correlated with an item Y according to whether PrX/Y is greater
than or less than PrX/-Y where -Y is the negation of a proposition Y, or the
non-occurrence of an event Y, or the set-theoretical complement of a set Y; in
the case of equality, X is said to be statistically or probabilistically
independent of Y. All three of these probabilistic relations are symmetric, and
sometimes the term ‘probabilistic relevance’ is used instead of ‘correlation’.
From the axioms, familiar theorems can be proved: e.g., 4 Pr-X % 1 PrX; 5 PrX 7 Y % PrX ! PrY PrX & Y for all X and Y; and 6 a simple
version of Bayes’s theorem PrX/Y % PrY/XPrX/PrY. Thus, an abstract formal
calculus of probability allows for calculation of the probabilities of some
items from the probabilities of others. The main interpretations of probability
include the classical, relative frequency, propensity, logical, and subjective
interpretations. According to the classical interpretation, the probability of
an event, e.g. of heads on a coin toss, is equal to the ratio of the number of
“equipossibilities” or equiprobable events favorable to the event in question
to the total number of relevant equipossibilities. On the relative frequency
interpretation, developed by Venn The Logic of Chance, 1866 and Reichenbach The
Theory of Probability, probability attaches to sets of events within a
“reference class.” Where W is the reference class, and n is the number of
events in W, and m is the number of events in or of kind X, within W, then the
probability of X, relative to W, is m/n. For various conceptual and technical reasons,
this kind of “actual finite relative frequency” interpretation has been refined
into various infinite and hypothetical infinite relative frequency accounts,
where probability is defined in terms of limits of series of relative
frequencies in finite nested populations of increasing sizes, sometimes
involving hypothetical infinite extensions of an actual population. The reasons
for these developments involve, e.g.: the artificial restriction, for finite
populations, of probabilities to values of the form i/n, where n is the size of
the reference class; the possibility of “mere coincidence” in the actual world,
where these may not reflect the true physical dispositions involved in the
relevant events; and the fact that probability is often thought to attach to
possibilities involving single events, while probabilities on the relative
frequency account attach to sets of events this is the “problem of the single
case,” also called the “problem of the reference class”. These problems also
have inspired “propensity” accounts of probability, according to which
probability is a more or less primitive idea that measures the physical
propensity or disposition of a given kind of physical situation to yield an
outcome of a given type, or to yield a “long-run” relative frequency of an
outcome of a given type. A theorem of probability proved by Jacob Bernoulli Ars
Conjectandi, 1713 and sometimes called Bernoulli’s theorem or the weak law of
large numbers, and also known as the first limit theorem, is important for appreciating
the frequency interpretation. The theorem states, roughly, that in the long
run, frequency settles down to probability. For example, suppose the
probability of a certain coin’s landing heads on any given toss is 0.5, and let
e be any number greater than 0. Then the theorem implies that as the number of
tosses grows without bound, the probability approaches 1 that the frequency of
heads will be within e of 0.5. More generally, let p be the probability of an
outcome O on a trial of an experiment, and assume that this probability remains
constant as the experiment is repeated. After n trials, there will be a
frequency, f n, of trials yielding outcome O. The theorem says that for any
numbers d and e greater than 0, there is an n such that the probability P that
_pf n_ ‹ e is within d of 1 P 1d.
Bernoulli also showed how to calculate such n for given values of d, e, and p.
It is important to notice that the theorem concerns probabilities, and not
certainty, for a long-run frequency. Notice also the assumption that the
probability p of O remains constant as the experiment is repeated, so that the
outcomes on trials are probabilistically independent of earlier outcomes. The
kinds of interpretations of probability just described are sometimes called
“objective” or “statistical” or “empirical” since the value of a probability,
on these accounts, depends on what actually happens, or on what actual given
physical situations are disposed to produce
as opposed to depending only on logical relations between the relevant
events or propositions, or on what we should rationally expect to happen or
what we should rationally believe. In contrast to these accounts, there are the
“logical” and the “subjective” interpretations of probability. Carnap “The Two
Concepts of Probability,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5 has
marked this kind of distinction by calling the second concept probability1 and
the first probability2. According to the logical interpretation, associated
with Carnap Logical Foundations of Probability,
0; and Continuum of Inductive Methods, 2, the probability of a proposition X
given a proposition Y is the “degree to which Y logically entails X.” Carnap
developed an ingenious and elaborate set of systems of logical probability,
including, e.g., separate systems depending on the degree to which one happens
to be, logically and rationally, sensitive to new information in the
reevaluation of probabilities. There is, of course, a connection between the
ideas of logical probability, rationality, belief, and belief revision. It is
natural to explicate the “logical-probabilistic” idea of the probability of X
given Y as the degree to which a rational person would believe X having come to
learn Y taking account of background knowledge. Here, the idea of belief
suggests a subjective sometimes called epistemic or partial belief or degree of
belief interpretation of probability; and the idea of probability revision
suggests the concept of induction: both the logical and the subjective
interpretations of probability have been called “inductive probability” a formal apparatus to characterize rational
learning from experience. The subjective interpretation of probability,
according to which the probability of a proposition is a measure of one’s
degree of belief in it, was developed by, e.g., Ramsey “Truth and Probability,”
in his Foundations of Mathematics and Other Essays, 6; Definetti “Foresight:
Its Logical Laws, Its Subjective Sources,” 7, translated by H. Kyburg, Jr., in
H. E. Smokler, Studies in Subjective Probability, 4; and Savage The Foundations
of Statistics, 4. Of course, subjective probability varies from person to
person. Also, in order for this to be an interpretation of probability, so that
the relevant axioms are satisfied, not all persons can count only rational, or “coherent” persons should
count. Some theorists have drawn a connection between rationality and
probabilistic degrees of belief in terms of dispositions to set coherent
betting odds those that do not allow a “Dutch book” an arrangement that forces the agent to lose
come what may, while others have described the connection in more general
decision-theoretic terms.
problem of induction.
First stated by Hume, this problem concerns the logical basis of inferences
from observed matters of fact to unobserved matters of fact. Although
discussion often focuses upon predictions of future events e.g., a solar
eclipse, the question applies also to inferences to past facts e.g., the
extinction of dinosaurs and to present occurrences beyond the range of direct
observation e.g., the motions of planets during daylight hours. Long before
Hume the ancient Skeptics had recognized that such inferences cannot be made
with certainty; they realized there can be no demonstrative deductive
inference, say, from the past and present to the future. Hume, however, posed a
more profound difficulty: Are we justified in placing any degree of confidence
in the conclusions of such inferences? His question is whether there is any
type of non-demonstrative or inductive inference in which we can be justified
in placing any confidence at all. According to Hume, our inferences from the
observed to the unobserved are based on regularities found in nature. We
believe, e.g., that the earth, sun, and moon move in regular patterns according
to Newtonian mechanics, and on that basis astronomers predict solar and lunar
eclipses. Hume notes, however, that all of our evidence for such uniformities
consists of past and present experience; in applying these uniformities to the
future behavior of these bodies we are making an inference from the observed to
the unobserved. This point holds in general. Whenever we make inferences from
the observed to the unobserved we rely on the uniformity of nature. The basis
for our belief that nature is reasonably uniform is our experience of such
uniformity in the past. If we infer that nature will continue to be uniform in
the future, we are making an inference from the observed to the unobserved precisely the kind of inference for which we
are seeking a justification. We are thus caught up in a circular argument.
Since, as Hume emphasized, much of our reasoning from the observed to the
unobserved is based on causal relations, he analyzed causality to ascertain
whether it could furnish a necessary connection between distinct events that
could serve as a basis for such inferences. His conclusion was negative. We
cannot establish any such connection a priori, for it is impossible to deduce
the nature of an effect from its cause
e.g., we cannot deduce from the appearance of falling snow that it will
cause a sensation of cold rather than heat. Likewise, we cannot deduce the
nature of a cause from its effect e.g.,
looking at a diamond, we cannot deduce that it was produced by great heat and
pressure. All such knowledge is based on past experience. If we infer that
future snow will feel cold or that future diamonds will be produced by great
heat and pressure, we are again making inferences from the observed to the
unobserved. Furthermore, if we carefully observe cases in which we believe a
causeeffect relation holds, we cannot perceive any necessary connection between
cause and effect, or any power in the cause that brings about the effect. We
observe only that an event of one type e.g., drinking water occurs prior to and
contiguously with an event of another type quenching thirst. Moreover, we
notice that events of the two types have exhibited a constant conjunction;
i.e., whenever an event of the first type has occurred in the past it has been
followed by one of the second type. We cannot discover any necessary connection
or causal power a posteriori; we can only establish priority, contiguity, and
constant conjunction up to the present. If we infer that this constant
conjunction will persist in future cases, we are making another inference from
observed to unobserved cases. To use causality as a basis for justifying
inference from the observed to the unobserved would again invovle a circular
argument. Hume concludes skeptically that there can be no rational or logical
justification of inferences from the observed to the unobserved i.e., inductive or non-demonstrative
inference. Such inferences are based on custom and habit. Nature has endowed us
with a proclivity to extrapolate from past cases to future cases of a similar
kind. Having observed that events of one type have been regularly followed by
events of another type, we experience, upon encountering a case of the first
type, a psychological expectation that one of the second type will follow. Such
an expectation does not constitute a rational justification. Although Hume
posed his problem in terms of homely examples, the issues he raises go to the
heart of even the most sophisticated empirical sciences, for all of them
involve inference from observed phenomena to unobserved facts. Although complex
theories are often employed, Hume’s problem still applies. Its force is by no
means confined to induction by simple enumeration. Philosophers have responded
to the problem of induction in many different ways. Kant invoked synthetic a
priori principles. Many twentieth-century philosophers have treated it as a
pseudo-problem, based on linguistic confusion, that requires dissolution rather
than solution. Carnap maintained that inductive intuition is indispensable. Reichenbach
offered a pragmatic vindication. Goodman has recommended replacing Hume’s “old
riddle” with a new riddle of induction that he has posed. Popper, taking Hume’s
skeptical arguments as conclusive, advocates deductivism. He argues that
induction is unjustifiable and dispensable. None of the many suggestions is
widely accepted as correct.
problem of the criterion,
a problem of epistemology, arising in the attempt both to formulate the
criteria and to determine the extent of knowledge. Skeptical and non-skeptical
philosophers disagree as to what, or how much, we know. Do we have knowledge of
the external world, other minds, the past, and the future? Any answer depends
on what the correct criteria of knowledge are. The problem is generated by the
seeming plausibility of the following two propositions: 1 In order to recognize
instances, and thus to determine the extent, of knowledge, we must know the
criteria for it. 2 In order to know the criteria for knowledge i.e., to
distinguish between correct and incorrect criteria, we must already be able to
recognize its instances. According to an argument of ancient Grecian
Skepticism, we can know neither the extent nor the criteria of knowledge
because 1 and 2 are both true. There are, however, three further possibilities.
First, it might be that 2 is true but 1 false: we can recognize instances of
knowledge even if we do not know the criteria of knowledge. Second, it might be
that 1 is true but 2 false: we can identify the criteria of knowledge without
prior recognition of its instances. Finally, it might be that both 1 and 2 are
false. We can know the extent of knowledge without knowing criteria, and vice
versa. Chisholm, who has devoted particular attention to this problem, calls
the first of these options particularism, and the second methodism. Hume, a
skeptic about the extent of empirical knowledge, was a methodist. Reid and
Moore were particularists; they rejected Hume’s skepticism on the ground that
it turns obvious cases of knowledge into cases of ignorance. Chisholm advocates
particularism because he believes that, unless one knows to begin with what
ought to count as an instance of knowledge, any choice of a criterion is
ungrounded and thus arbitrary. Methodists turn this argument around: they
reject as dogmatic any identification of instances of knowledge not based on a
criterion.
problem of the speckled
hen: a problem propounded by Ryle as an objection to Ayer’s analysis of
perception in terms of sense-data. It is implied by this analysis that, if I
see a speckled hen in a good light and so on, I do so by means of apprehending
a speckled sense-datum. The analysis implies further that the sense-datum
actually has just the number of speckles that I seem to see as I look at the
hen, and that it is immediately evident to me just how many speckles this is.
Thus, if I seem to see many speckles as I look at the hen, the sense-datum I
apprehend must actually contain many speckles, and it must be immediately
evident to me how many it does contain. Now suppose it seems to me that I see
more than 100 speckles. Then the datum I am apprehending must contain more than
100 speckles. Perhaps it contains 132 of them. The analysis would then imply,
absurdly, that it must be immediately evident to me that the number of speckles
is exactly 132. One way to avoid this implication would be to deny that a
sense-datum of mine could contain exactly 132 speckles or any other large, determinate number of
them precisely on the ground that it
could never seem to me that I was seeing exactly that many speckles. A possible
drawback of this approach is that it involves committing oneself to the claim,
which some philosophers have found problem of the criterion problem of the
speckled hen 747 747 self-contradictory,
that a sense-datum may contain many speckles even if there is no large number n
such that it contains n speckles.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment