prolatum – participle for ‘proferre,’ to utter. A much better choice than
Austin’s pig-latin “utteratum”! Grice prefferd Latinate when going serious. While
the verb is ‘profero – the participle corresponds to the ‘implicatum’: what the
emissor profers. profer (v.)c. 1300, "to
utter, express," from Old French proferer (13c.)
"utter, present verbally, pronounce," from Latin proferre "to
bring forth, produce," figuratively "make known, publish, quote,
utter." Sense confused with proffer. Related: Profered; profering.
process-product
ambiguity, an ambiguity that occurs when a noun can refer either to a process
or activity or to the product of that process or activity. E.g., ‘The
definition was difficult’ could mean either that the activity of defining was a
difficult one to perform, or that the definiens the form of words proposed as
equivalent to the term being defined that the definer produced was difficult to
understand. Again, ‘The writing absorbed her attention’ leaves it unclear
whether it was the activity of writing or a product of that activity that she
found engrossing. Philosophically significant terms that might be held to
exhibit processproduct ambiguity include: ‘analysis’, ‘explanation’,
‘inference’, ‘thought’. P.Mac. process theology, any theology strongly
influenced by the theistic metaphysics of Whitehead or Hartshorne; more
generally, any theology that takes process or change as basic characteristics
of all actual beings, including God. Those versions most influenced by
Whitehead and Hartshorne share a core of convictions that constitute the most
distinctive theses of process theology: God is constantly growing, though
certain abstract features of God e.g., being loving remain constant; God is
related to every other actual being and is affected by what happens to it;
every actual being has some self-determination, and God’s power is reconceived
as the power to lure attempt to persuade each actual being to be what God
wishes it to be. These theses represent significant differences from ideas of
God common in the tradition of Western theism, according to which God is
unchanging, is not really related to creatures because God is not affected by
what happens to them, and has the power to do whatever it is logically possible
for God to do omnipotence. Process theologians also disagree with the idea that
God knows the future in all its details, holding that God knows only those
details of the future that are causally necessitated by past events. They claim
these are only certain abstract features of a small class of events in the near
future and of an even smaller class in the more distant future. Because of
their understanding of divine power and their affirmation of creaturely
self-determination, they claim that they provide a more adequate theodicy.
Their critics claim that their idea of God’s power, if correct, would render
God unworthy of worship; some also make this claim about their idea of God’s
knowledge, preferring a more traditional idea of omniscience. Although
Whitehead and Hartshorne were both philosophers rather than theologians,
process theology has been more influential among theologians. It is a major
current in contemporary Protestant
theology and has attracted the attention of some Roman Catholic theologians as
well. It also has influenced some biblical scholars who are attempting to develop
a distinctive process hermeneutics.
production theory, the
economic theory dealing with the conversion of factors of production into
consumer goods. In capitalistic theories that assume ideal markets, firms
produce goods from three kinds of factors: capital, labor, and raw materials.
Production is subject to the constraint that profit the difference between
revenues and costs be maximized. The firm is thereby faced with the following
decisions: how much to produce, what price to charge for the product, what
proportions to combine the three kinds of factors in, and what price to pay for
the factors. In markets close to perfect competition, the firm will have little
control over prices so the decision problem tends to reduce to the amounts of
factors to use. The range of feasible factor combinations depends on the
technologies available to firms. Interesting complications arise if not all
firms have access to the same technologies, or if not all firms make accurate
responses concerning technological changes. Also, if the scale of production
affects the feasible technologies, the firms’ decision process must be subtle.
In each of these cases, imperfect competition will result. Marxian economists
think that the concepts used in this kind of production theory have a normative
component. In reality, a large firm’s capital tends to be owned by a rather
small, privileged class of non-laborers and labor is treated as a commodity
like any other factor. This might lead to the perception that profit results
primarily from capital and, therefore, belongs to its owners. Marxians contend
that labor is primarily responsible for profit and, consequently, that labor is
entitled to more than the market wage.
professional ethics, a
term designating one or more of 1 the justified moral values that should govern
the work of professionals; 2 the moral values that actually do guide groups of
professionals, whether those values are identified as a principles in codes of
ethics promulgated by professional societies or b actual beliefs and conduct of
professionals; and 3 the study of professional ethics in the preceding senses,
either i normative philosophical inquiries into the values desirable for
professionals to embrace, or ii descriptive scientific studies of the actual beliefs
and conduct of groups of professionals. Professional values include principles
of obligation and rights, as well as virtues and personal moral ideals such as
those manifested in the lives of Jane Addams, Albert Schweitzer, and Thurgood
Marshall. Professions are defined by advanced expertise, social organizations,
society-granted monopolies over services, and especially by shared commitments
to promote a distinctive public good such as health medicine, justice law, or
learning education. These shared commitments imply special duties to make
services available, maintain confidentiality, secure informed consent for
services, and be loyal to clients, employers, and others with whom one has
fiduciary relationships. Both theoretical and practical issues surround these
duties. The central theoretical issue is to understand how the justified moral
values governing professionals are linked to wider values, such as human
rights. Most practical dilemmas concern how to balance conflicting duties. For
example, what should attorneys do when confidentiality requires keeping
information secret that might save the life of an innocent third party? Other
practical issues are problems of vagueness and uncertainty surrounding how to
apply duties in particular contexts. For example, does respect for patients’
autonomy forbid, permit, or require a physician to assist a terminally ill
patient desiring suicide? Equally important is how to resolve conflicts of
interest in which self-seeking places moral values at risk.
proof by recursion, also
called proof by mathematical induction, a method for conclusively demonstrating
the truth of universal propositions about the natural numbers. The system of
natural numbers is construed as an infinite sequence of elements beginning with
the number 1 and such that each subsequent element is the immediate successor
of the preceding element. The immediate successor of a number is the sum of
that number with 1. In order to apply this method to show that every number has
a certain chosen property it is necessary to demonstrate two subsidiary
propositions often called respectively the basis step and the inductive step.
The basis step is that the number 1 has the chosen property; the inductive step
is that the successor of any number having the chosen property is also a number
having the chosen property in other words, for every number n, if n has the
chosen property then the successor of n also has the chosen property. The
inductive step is itself a universal proposition that may have been proved by recursion.
The most commonly used example of a theorem proved by recursion is the
remarkable fact, known before the time of Plato, that the sum of the first n
odd numbers is the square of n. This proposition, mentioned prominently by
Leibniz as requiring and having demonstrative proof, is expressed in universal
form as follows: for every number n, the sum of the first n odd numbers is n2.
1 % 12, 1 ! 3 % 22, 1 ! 3 ! 5 % 32, and so on. Rigorous formulation of a proof
by recursion often uses as a premise the proposition called, since the time of
De Morgan, the principle of mathematical induction: every property belonging to
1 and belonging to the successor of every number to which it belongs is a
property that belongs without exception to every number. Peano took the
principle of mathematical induction as an axiom in his 9 axiomatization of
arithmetic or the theory of natural numbers. The first acceptable formulation
of this principle is attributed to Pascal.
proof theory, a branch of
mathematical logic founded by David Hilbert in the 0s to pursue Hilbert’s
Program. The foundational problems underlying that program had been formulated
around the turn of the century, e.g., in Hilbert’s famous address to the
International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris 0. They were closely
connected with investigations on the foundations of analysis carried out by
Cantor and Dedekind; but they were also related to their conflict with
Kronecker on the nature of mathematics and to the difficulties of a completely
unrestricted notion of set or multiplicity. At that time, the central issue for
Hilbert was the consistency of sets in Cantor’s sense. He suggested that the
existence of consistent sets multiplicities, e.g., that of real numbers, could
be secured by proving the consistency of a suitable, characterizing axiomatic
system; but there were only the vaguest indications on how to do that. In a
radical departure from standard practice and his earlier hints, Hilbert
proposed four years later a novel way of attacking the consistency problem for
theories in Über die Grundlagen der Logik und der Arithmetik 4. This approach
would require, first, a strict formalization of logic together with
mathematics, then consideration of the finite syntactic configurations
constituting the joint formalism as mathematical objects, and showing by
mathematical arguments that contradictory formulas cannot be derived. Though
Hilbert lectured on issues concerning the foundations of mathematics during the
subsequent years, the technical development and philosophical clarification of
proof theory and its aims began only around 0. That involved, first of all, a
detailed description of logical calculi and the careful development of parts of
mathematics in suitable systems. A record of the former is found in Hilbert and
Ackermann, Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik 8; and of the latter in Supplement
IV of Hilbert and Bernays, Grundlagen der Mathematik II 9. This presupposes the
clear distinction between metamathematics and mathematics introduced by
Hilbert. For the purposes of the consistency program metamathematics was now
taken to be a very weak part of arithmetic, so-called finitist mathematics,
believed to correspond to the part of mathematics that was accepted by
constructivists like Kronecker and Brouwer. Additional metamathematical issues
concerned the completeness and decidability of theories. The crucial technical
tool for the pursuit of the consistency problem was Hilbert’s e-calculus. The
metamathematical problems attracted the collaboration of young and quite
brilliant mathematicians with philosophical interests; among them were Paul
Bernays, Wilhelm Ackermann, John von Neumann, Jacques Herbrand, Gerhard
Gentzen, and Kurt Schütte. The results obtained in the 0s were disappointing
when measured against the hopes and ambitions: Ackermann, von Neumann, and
Herbrand established essentially the consistency of arithmetic with a very
restricted principle of induction. That limits of finitist considerations for
consistency proofs had been reached became clear in 1 through Gödel’s
incompleteness theorems. Also, special cases of the decision problem for
predicate logic Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem had been solved; its general
solvability was made rather implausible by some of Gödel’s results in his 1
paper. The actual proof of unsolvability had to wait until 6 for a conceptual
clarification of ‘mechanical procedure’ or ‘algorithm’; that was achieved
through the work of Church and Turing. The further development of proof theory
is roughly characterized by two complementary tendencies: 1 the extension of
the metamathematical frame relative to which “constructive” consistency proofs
can be obtained, and 2 the refined formalization of parts of mathematics in
theories much weaker than set theory or even full second-order arithmetic. The
former tendency started with the work of Gödel and Gentzen in 3 establishing
the consistency of full classical arithmetic relative to intuitionistic
arithmetic; it led in the 0s and 0s to consistency proofs of strong subsystems
of secondorder arithmetic relative to intuitionistic theories of constructive
ordinals. The latter tendency reaches back to Weyl’s book Das Kontinuum 8 and
culminated in the 0s by showing that the classical results of mathematical
analysis can be formally obtained in conservative extensions of first-order
arithmetic. For the metamathematical work Gentzen’s introduction of sequent
calculi and the use of transfinite induction along constructive ordinals turned
out to be very important, as well as Gödel’s primitive recursive functionals of
finite type. The methods and results of proof theory are playing, not
surprisingly, a significant role in computer science. Work in proof theory has
been motivated by issues in the foundations of mathematics, with the explicit
goal of achieving epistemological reductions of strong theories for
mathematical practice like set theory or second-order arithmetic to weak,
philosophically distinguished theories like primitive recursive arithmetic. As
the formalization of mathematics in strong theories is crucial for the
metamathematical approach, and as the programmatic goal can be seen as a way of
circumventing the philosophical issues surrounding strong theories, e.g., the
nature of infinite sets in the case of set theory, Hilbert’s philosophical
position is often equated with formalism
in the sense of Frege in his Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie 306 and
also of Brouwer’s inaugural address Intuitionism and Formalism 2. Though such a
view is not completely unsupported by some of Hilbert’s polemical remarks
during the 0s, on balance, his philosophical views developed into a
sophisticated instrumentalism, if that label is taken in Ernest Nagel’s
judicious sense The Structure of Science, 1. Hilbert’s is an instrumentalism
emphasizing the contentual motivation of mathematical theories; that is clearly
expressed in the first chapter of Hilbert and Bernays’s Grundlagen der
Mathematik I 4. A sustained philosophical analysis of proof-theoretic research
in the context of broader issues in the philosophy of mathematics was provided
by Bernays; his penetrating essays stretch over five decades and have been
collected in Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der Mathematik 6.
propensity, an irregular
or non-necessitating causal disposition of an object or system to produce some
result or effect. Propensities are usually conceived as essentially
probabilistic in nature. A die may be said to have a propensity of “strength”
or magnitude 1 /6 to turn up a 3 if thrown from a dice box, of strength 1 /3 to
turn up, say, a 3 or 4, etc. But propensity talk is arguably appropriate only
when determinism fails. Strength is often taken to vary from 0 to 1. Popper
regarded the propensity notion as a new physical or metaphysical hypothesis,
akin to that of forces. Like Peirce, he deployed it to interpret probability
claims about single cases: e.g., the probability of this radium atom’s decaying
in 1,600 years is 1 /2. On relative frequency interpretations, probability
claims are about properties of large classes such as relative frequencies of
outcomes in them, rather than about single cases. But single-case claims appear
to be common in quantum theory. Popper advocated a propensity interpretation of
quantum theory. Propensities also feature in theories of indeterministic or
probabilistic causation. Competing theories about propensities attribute them
variously to complex systems such as chance or experimental set-ups or
arrangements a coin and tossing device, to entities within such set-ups the
coin itself, and to particular trials of such set-ups. Long-run theories
construe propensities as dispositions to give rise to certain relative
frequencies of, or probability distributions over, outcomes in long runs of
trials, which are sometimes said to “manifest” or “display” the propensities.
Here a propensity’s strength is identical to some such frequency. By contrast,
single-case theories construe propensities as dispositions of singular trials
to bring about particular outcomes. Their existence, not their strength, is
displayed by such an outcome. Here frequencies provide evidence about
propensity strength. But the two can always differ; they converge with a
limiting probability of 1 in an appropriate long run.
property, roughly, an
attribute, characteristic, feature, trait, or aspect. propensity property
751 751 Intensionality. There are two
salient ways of talking about properties. First, as predicables or
instantiables. For example, the property red is predicable of red objects; they
are instances of it. Properties are said to be intensional entities in the
sense that distinct properties can be truly predicated of i.e., have as
instances exactly the same things: the property of being a creature with a
kidney & the property of being a creature with a heart, though these two
sets have the same members. Properties thus differ from sets collections,
classes; for the latter satisfy a principle of extensionality: they are
identical if they have the same elements. The second salient way of talking
about properties is by means of property abstracts such as ‘the property of
being F’. Such linguistic expressions are said to be intensional in the
following semantical vs. ontological sense: ‘the property of being F’ and ‘the
property of being G’ can denote different properties even though the predicates
‘F’ and ‘G’ are true of exactly the same things. The standard explanation
Frege, Russell, Carnap, et al. is that ‘the property of being F’ denotes the
property that the predicate ‘F’ expresses. Since predicates ‘F’ and ‘G’ can be
true of the same things without being synonyms, the property abstracts ‘being
F’ and ‘being G’ can denote different properties. Identity criteria. Some
philosophers believe that properties are identical if they necessarily have the
same instances. Other philosophers hold that this criterion of identity holds
only for a special subclass of properties
those that are purely qualitative
and that the properties for which this criterion does not hold are all
“complex” e.g., relational, disjunctive, conditional, or negative properties.
On this theory, complex properties are identical if they have the same form and
their purely qualitative constituents are identical. Ontological status.
Because properties are a kind of universal, each of the standard views on the
ontological status of universals has been applied to properties as a special
case. Nominalism: only particulars and perhaps collections of particulars
exist; therefore, either properties do not exist or they are reducible
following Carnap et al. to collections of particulars including perhaps
particulars that are not actual but only possible. Conceptualism: properties
exist but are dependent on the mind. Realism: properties exist independently of
the mind. Realism has two main versions. In rebus realism: a property exists only
if it has instances. Ante rem realism: a property can exist even if it has no
instances. For example, the property of being a man weighing over ton has no
instances; however, it is plausible to hold that this property does exist.
After all, this property seems to be what is expressed by the predicate ‘is a
man weighing over a ton’. Essence and accident. The properties that a given
entity has divide into two disjoint classes: those that are essential to the
entity and those that are accidental to it. A property is essential to an
entity if, necessarily, the entity cannot exist without being an instance of
the property. A property is accidental to an individual if it is possible for
the individual to exist without being an instance of the property. Being a number
is an essential property of nine; being the number of the planets is an
accidental property of nine. Some philosophers believe that all properties are
either essential by nature or accidental by nature. A property is essential by
nature if it can be an essential property of some entity and, necessarily, it
is an essential property of each entity that is an instance of it. The property
of being self-identical is thus essential by nature. However, it is
controversial whether every property that is essential to something must be
essential by nature. The following is a candidate counterexample. If this
automobile backfires loudly on a given occasion, loudness would seem to be an
essential property of the associated bang. That particular bang could not exist
without being loud. If the automobile had backfired softly, that particular
bang would not have existed; an altogether distinct bang a soft bang
would have existed. By contrast, if a man is loud, loudness is only an
accidental property of him; he could exist without being loud. Loudness thus
appears to be a counterexample: although it is an essential property of certain
particulars, it is not essential by nature. It might be replied echoing
Aristotle that a loud bang and a loud man instantiate loudness in different
ways and, more generally, that properties can be predicated instantiated in
different ways. If so, then one should be specific about which kind of
predication instantiation is intended in the definition of ‘essential by
nature’ and ‘accidental by nature’. When this is done, the counterexamples
might well disappear. If there are indeed different ways of being predicated
instantiated, most of the foregoing remarks about intensionality, identity
criteria, and the ontological status of properties should be refined
accordingly.
propositio
universalis: cf. substitutional
account of universal quantification, referred to by Grice for his treatment of
what he calls a Ryleian agitation caused by his feeling Byzantine. Vide
inverted A. A proposition (protasis), then, is a sentence affirming or denying
something of something; and this is either universal or particular or
indefinite. By universal I mean a statement that something belongs to all or
none of something; by particular that it belongs to some or not to some or not
to all; by indefinite that it does or does not belong, without any mark of
being universal or particular, e.g. ‘contraries are subjects of the same
science’, or ‘pleasure is not good’. (Prior Analytics I, 1, 24a16–21.)
propositional complexum: In logic, the first
proposition of a syllogism (class.): “propositio est, per quem locus is
breviter exponitur, ex quo vis omnis oportet emanet ratiocinationis,” Cic. Inv.
1, 37, 67; 1, 34, 35; Auct. Her. 2, 18, 28.— B. Transf. 1. A principal subject,
theme (class.), Cic. de Or. 3, 53; Sen. Ben. 6, 7, 1; Quint. 5, 14, 1.— 2.
Still more generally, a proposition of any kind (post-Aug.), Quint. 7, 1, 47, §
9; Gell. 2, 7, 21.—Do not expect Grice to use the phrase ‘propositional
content,’ as Hare does so freely. Grices proposes a propositional complexum,
rather, which frees him from a commitment to a higher-order calculus and the
abstract entity of a feature or a proposition. Grice regards a proposition as
an extensional family of propositional complexa (Paul saw Peter; Peter was seen
by Paul). The topic of a propositional complex Grice regards as Oxonian in
nature. Peacocke struggles with the same type of problems, in his essays on
content. Only a perception-based account of content in terms of qualia
gets the philosopher out of the vicious circle of appealing to a linguistic
entity to clarify a psychological entity. One way to discharge the burden
of giving an account of a proposition involves focusing on a range of
utterances, the formulation of which features no connective or quantifier. Each
expresses a propositional complexum which consists of a sequence simplex-1
and simplex-2, whose elements would be a set and an ordered sequence of this or
that individuum which may be a member of the set. The propositional
complexum ‘Fido is shaggy’ consists of a sequence of the set of shaggy
individua and the singleton consisting of the individuum Fido. ‘Smith loves
Fido’ is a propositional complexum, i. e., a sequence whose first element
is the class “love” correlated to a two-place predicate) and a the ordered pair
of the singletons Smith and Fido. We define alethic satisfactoriness. A
propositional complexum is alethically satisfactory just in case the sequence
is a member of the set. A “proposition” (prosthesis) simpliciter is defined as
a family of propositional complexa. Family unity may vary in
accordance with context.
proposition, an abstract
object said to be that to which a person is related by a belief, desire, or
other psychological attitude, typically expressed in language containing a
psychological verb ‘think’, ‘deny’, ‘doubt’, etc. followed by a thatclause. The
psychological states in question are called propositional attitudes. When I
believe that snow is white I stand in the relation of believing to the
proposition that snow is white. When I hope that the protons will not decay,
hope relates me to the proposition that the protons will not decay. A
proposition can be a common object for various attitudes of various agents:
that the protons will not decay can be the object of my belief, my hope, and
your fear. A sentence expressing an attitude is also taken to express the
associated proposition. Because ‘The protons will not decay’ identifies my
hope, it identifies the proposition to which my hope relates me. Thus the
proposition can be the shared meaning of this sentence and all its synonyms, in
English or elsewhere e.g., ‘die Protonen werden nicht zerfallen’. This, in sum,
is the traditional doctrine of propositions. Although it seems indispensable in
some form for theorizing about thought
and language, difficulties abound. Some critics regard propositions as excess
baggage in any account of meaning. But unless this is an expression of
nominalism, it is confused. Any systematic theory of meaning, plus an apparatus
of sets or properties will let us construct proposition-like objects. The
proposition a sentence S expresses might, e.g., be identified with a certain
set of features that determines S’s meaning. Other sentences with these same
features would then express the same proposition. A natural way to associate
propositions with sentences is to let the features in question be semantically
significant features of the words from which sentences are built. Propositions
then acquire the logical structures of sentences: they are atomic, conditional,
existential, etc. But combining the view of propositions as meanings with the
traditional idea of propositions as bearers of truthvalues brings trouble. It
is assumed that two sentences that express the same proposition have the same
truth-value indeed, that sentences have their truth-values in virtue of the
propositions they express. Yet if propositions are also meanings, this
principle fails for sentences with indexical elements: although ‘I am pale’ has
a single meaning, two utterances of it can differ in truth-value. In response,
one may suggest that the proposition a sentence S expresses depends both on the
linguistic meaning of S and on the referents of S’s indexical elements. But
this reveals that proposition is a quite technical concept and one that is not motivated simply by a
need to talk about meanings. Related questions arise for propositions as the
objects of propositional attitudes. My belief that I am pale may be true, yours
that you are pale false. So our beliefs should take distinct propositional
objects. Yet we would each use the same sentence, ‘I am pale’, to express our
belief. Intuitively, your belief and mine also play similar cognitive roles. We
may each choose the sun exposure, clothing, etc., that we take to be
appropriate to a fair complexion. So our attitudes seem in an important sense
to be the same an identity that the
assignment of distinct propositional objects hides. Apparently, the characterization
of beliefs e.g. as being propositional attitudes is at best one component of a
more refined, largely unknown account. Quite apart from complications about
indexicality, propositions inherit standard difficulties about meaning.
Consider the beliefs that Hesperus is a planet and that Phosphorus is a planet.
It seems that someone might have one but not the other, thus that they are
attitudes toward distinct propositions. This difference apparently reflects the
difference in meaning between the sentences ‘Hesperus is a planet’ and ‘Phosphorus
is a planet’. The principle would be that non-synonymous sentences express
distinct propositions. But it is unclear what makes for a difference in
meaning. Since the sentences agree in logico-grammatical structure and in the
referents of their terms, their specific meanings must depend on some more
subtle feature that has resisted definition. Hence our concept of proposition
is also only partly defined. Even the idea that the sentences here express the
same proposition is not easily refuted. What such difficulties show is not that
the concept of proposition is invalid but that it belongs to a still
rudimentary descriptive scheme. It is too thoroughly enmeshed with the concepts
of meaning and belief to be of use in solving their attendant problems. This observation
is what tends, through a confusion, to give rise to skepticism about
propositions. One may, e.g., reasonably posit structured abstract entities propositions
that represent the features on which the truth-values of sentences
depend. Then there is a good sense in which a sentence is true in virtue of the
proposition it expresses. But how does the use of words in a certain context
associate them with a particular proposition? Lacking an answer, we still
cannot explain why a given sentence is true. Similarly, one cannot explain
belief as the acceptance of a proposition, since only a substantive theory of
thought would reveal how the mind “accepts” a proposition and what it does to
accept one proposition rather than another. So a satisfactory doctrine of
propositions remains elusive.
propositional function,
an operation that, when applied to something as argument or to more than one
thing in a given order as arguments, yields a truth-value as the value of that
function for that argument or those arguments. This usage presupposes that
truth-values are objects. A function may be singulary, binary, ternary, etc. A
singulary propositional function is applicable to one thing and yields, when so
applied, a truth-value. For example, being a prime number, when applied to the
number 2, yields truth; negation, when applied to truth, yields falsehood. A
binary propositional function is applicable to two things in a certain order
and yields, when so applied, a truth-value. For example, being north of when
applied to New York and Boston in that order yields falsehood. Material
implication when applied to falsehood and truth in that order yields truth. The
term ‘propositional function’ has a second use, to refer to an operation that,
when applied to something as argument or to more than one thing in a given
order as arguments, yields a proposition as the value of the function for that
argument or those arguments. For example, being a prime number when applied to
2 yields the proposition that 2 is a prime number. Being north of, when applied
to New York and Boston in that order, yields the proposition that New York is
north of Boston. This usage presupposes that propositions are objects. In a
third use, ‘propositional function’ designates a sentence with free occurrences
of variables. Thus, ‘x is a prime number’, ‘It is not the case that p’, ‘x is
north of y’ and ‘if p then q’ are propositional functions in this sense. C.S.
propositional justification.
propositional opacity,
failure of a clause to express any particular proposition especially due to the
occurrence of pronouns or demonstratives. If having a belief about an
individual involves a relation to a proposition, and if a part of the
proposition is a way of representing the individual, then belief
characterizations that do not indicate the believer’s way of representing the
individual could be called propositionally opaque. They do not show all of the
propositional elements. For example, ‘My son’s clarinet teacher believes that
he should try the bass drum’ would be propositionally opaque because ‘he’ does
not indicate how my son John’s teacher represents John, e.g. as his student, as
my son, as the boy now playing, etc. This characterization of the example is
not appropriate if propositions are as Russell conceived them, sometimes
containing the individuals themselves as constituents, because then the
propositional constituent John has been referred to. Generally, a
characterization of a propositional
754 attitude is propositionally opaque if the expressions in the embedded
clause do not refer to the propositional constituents. It is propositionally
transparent if the expressions in the embedded clause do so refer. As a rule,
referentially opaque contexts are used in propositionally transparent
attributions if the referent of a term is distinct from the corresponding
propositional constituent.
proprietates terminorum
Latin, ‘properties of terms’, in medieval logic from the twelfth century on, a
cluster of semantic properties possessed by categorematic terms. For most
authors, these properties apply only when the terms occur in the context of a
proposition. The list of such properties and the theory governing them vary
from author to author, but always include 1 suppositio. Some authors add 2
appellatio ‘appellating’, ‘naming’, ‘calling’, often not sharply distinguishing
from suppositio, the property whereby a term in a certain proposition names or
is truly predicable of things, or in some authors of presently existing things.
Thus ‘philosophers’ in ‘Some philosophers are wise’ appellates philosophers
alive today. 3 Ampliatio ‘ampliation’, ‘broadening’, whereby a term refers to
past or future or merely possible things. The reference of ‘philosophers’ is
ampliated in ‘Some philosophers were wise’. 4 Restrictio ‘restriction’,
‘narrowing’, whereby the reference of a term is restricted to presently
existing things ‘philosophers’ is so restricted in ‘Some philosophers are
wise’, or otherwise narrowed from its normal range ‘philosophers’ in ‘Some
Grecian philosophers were wise’. 5 Copulatio ‘copulation’, ‘coupling’, which is
the type of reference adjectives have ‘wise’ in ‘Some philosophers are wise’,
or alternatively the semantic function of the copula. Other meanings too are
sometimes given to these terms, depending on the author. Appellatio especially
was given a wide variety of interpretations. In particular, for Buridan and
other fourteenth-century Continental authors, appellatio means ‘connotation’.
Restrictio and copulatio tended to drop out of the literature, or be treated
only perfunctorily, after the thirteenth century.
proprium: idion. See
Nicholas White's "The Origin of Aristotle's Essentialism," Review of
Metaphysics ~6. (September 1972): ... vice versa. The proprium is
a necessary, but non-essential, property. ... Alan Code pointed this out to me. '
Does Aristotle ... The
proprium is defined by the fact that it only holds of a
particular subject or ... Of the appropriate answers some are more specific or
distinctive (idion)
and are in ... and property possession comes close to what Alan Code in
a seminal paper ... but "substance of" is what is
"co-extensive (idion)
with each thing" (1038b9); so ... by an alternative name or definition,
and by a proprium)
and the third which is ... Woods's idea (recently nicknamed "Izzing before
Having" by Code and Grice) . As my chairmanship was
winding down, I suggested to Paul Grice on one of his ... in Aristotle's
technical sense of an idion (Latin proprium),
i.e., a characteristic or feature ... Code, which, arguably, is part of the
theory of Izzing and Having: D. Keyt. a proprium, since proprium belongs
to the genus of accident. ... Similarly, Code claims (10): 'In its other uses
the predicate “being'' signifies either “what ... Grice adds
a few steps to show that the plurality of universals signified correspond ...
Aristotle elsewhere calls an idion.353 If one predicates the genus in the
absence of. has described it by a paronymous form, nor as a property (idion), nor ...
terminology of Code and Grice.152 Thus
there is no indication that they are ... (14,20-31) 'Genus' and 'proprium'
(ἰδίου) are said homonymously in ten ways, as are. Ackrill replies to
this line of argument (75) as follows: [I]t is perfectly clear that Aristotle’s
fourfold classification is a classification of things and not names, and that
what is ‘said of’ something as subject is itself a thing (a species or genus)
and not a name. Sometimes, indeed, Aristotle will speak of ‘saying’ or
‘predicating’ a name of a subject; but it is not linguistic items but the things
they signify which are ‘said of a subject’… Thus at 2a19 ff. Aristotle sharply
distinguishes things said of subjects from the names of those things. This last
argument seems persuasive on textual grounds. After all, τὰ καθ᾽ ὑποκειμένου
λεγόμενα ‘have’ definitions and names (τῶν καθ᾽ υποκειμένου λεγομένων… τοὔνομα
καὶ τὸν λὸγον, 2a19-21): it is not the case that they ‘are’ definitions and
names, to adapt the terminology of Code and Grice.152 See A. Code, ‘Aristotle:
Essence and Accident’, in Grandy and Warner (eds.), Philosophical Grounds of
Rationality (Oxford, 1986), 411-39: particulars have their predicables, but
Forms are their predicables. Thus there is no indication that they are
linguistic terms in their own right.proprium, one of Porphyry’s five
predicables, often tr. as ‘property’ or ‘attribute’; but this should not be
confused with the broad modern sense in which any feature of a thing may be
said to be a property of it. A proprium is a nonessential peculiarity of a
species. There are no propria of individuals or genera generalissima, although
they may have other uniquely identifying features. A proprium necessarily holds
of all members of its species and of nothing else. It is not mentioned in a
real definition of the species, and so is not essential to it. Yet it somehow
follows from the essence or nature expressed in the real definition. The
standard example is risibility the ability to laugh as a proprium of the
species man. The real definition of ‘man’ is ‘rational animal’. There is no
mention of any ability to laugh. Nevertheless anything that can laugh has both
the biological apparatus to produce the sounds and so is an animal and also a
certain wit and insight into humor and so is rational. Conversely, any rational
animal will have both the vocal chords and diaphragm required for laughing
since it is an animal, although the inference may seem too quick and also the
mental wherewithal to see the point of a joke since it is rational. Thus any
rational animal has what it takes to laugh. In short, every man is risible, and
conversely, but risibility is not an essential feature of man.
Prosona – Grice’s
favoured spelling for ‘person’ – “seeing that it means a mask to improve
sonorisation’ personalism, a Christian socialism stressing social activism and
personal responsibility, the theoretical basis for the Christian workers’
Esprit movement begun in the 0s by Emmanuel Mounier 550, a Christian philosopher
and activist. Influenced by both the religious existentialism of Kierkegaard
and the radical social action called for by Marx and in part taking direction
from the earlier work of Charles Péguy, the movement strongly opposed fascism
and called for worker solidarity during the 0s and 0s. It also urged a more
humane treatment of France’s colonies. Personalism allowed for a Christian
socialism independent of both more conservative Christian groups and the
Communist labor unions and party. Its most important single book is Mounier’s
Personalism. The quarterly journal Esprit has regularly published contributions
of leading and international thinkers.
Such well-known Christian philosophers as Henry Duméry, Marcel, Maritain, and
Ricoeur were attracted to the movement.
protocol statement, one
of the statements that constitute the foundations of empirical knowledge. The
term was introduced by proponents of foundationalism, who were convinced that
in order to avoid the most radical skepticism, one must countenance beliefs
that are justified but not as a result of an inference. If all justified
beliefs are inferentially justified, then to be justified in believing one
proposition P on the basis of another, E, one would have to be justified in
believing both E and that E confirms P. But if all justification were
inferential, then to be justified in believing E one would need to infer it
from some other proposition one justifiably believes, and so on ad infinitum.
The only way to avoid this regress is to find some statement knowable without
inferring it from some other truth. Philosophers who agree that empirical
knowledge has foundations do not necessarily agree on what those foundations
are. The British empiricists restrict the class of contingent protocol
statements to propositions describing the contents of mind sensations, beliefs,
fears, desires, and the like. And even here a statement describing a mental
state would be a protocol statement only for the person in that state. Other
philosophers, however, would take protocol statements to include at least some
assertions about the immediate physical environment. The plausibility of a
given candidate for a protocol statement depends on how one analyzes
non-inferential justification. Some philosophers rely on the idea of acquaintance.
One is non-inferentially justified in believing something when one is directly
acquainted with what makes it true. Other philosophers rely on the idea of a
state that is in some sense self-presenting. Still others want to understand
the notion in terms of the inconceivability of error. The main difficulty in
trying to defend a coherent conception of non-inferential justification is to
find an account of protocol statements that gives them enough conceptual
content to serve as the premises of arguments, while avoiding the charge that
the application of concepts always brings with it the possibility of error and
the necessity of inference.
prototype theory, a
theory according to which human cognition involves the deployment of
“categories” organized around stereotypical exemplars. Prototype theory differs
from traditional theories that take the concepts with which we think to be
individuated by means of boundary-specifying necessary and sufficient
conditions. Advocates of prototypes hold that our concept of bird, for
instance, consists in an indefinitely bounded conceptual “space” in which
robins and sparrows are central, and chickens and penguins are peripheral though the category may be differently organized
in different cultures or groups. Rather than being all-ornothing, category
membership is a matter of degree. This conception of categories was originally
inspired by the notion, developed in a different context by Vitters, of family
resemblance. Prototypes were first discussed in detail and given empirical
credibility in the work of Eleanor Rosch see, e.g., “On the Internal Structure
of Perceptual and Semantic Categories,” 3.
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph
180965, socialist theorist and father of
anarchism. He became well known following the publication of What Is Property?
1840, the work containing his main ideas. He argued that the owner of the means
of production deprives the workers of a part of their labor: “property is
theft.” In order to enable each worker to dispose of his labor, capital and
largescale property must be limited. The need to abolish large-scale private
property surpassed the immediate need for a state as a controlling agent over
chaotic social relationships. To this end he stressed the need for serious
reforms in the exchange system. Since the economy and society largely depended
on the credit system, Proudhon advocated establishing popular banks that would
approve interest-free loans to the poor. Such a mutualism would start the
transformation of the actual into a just and nonexploited society of free
individuals. Without class antagonism and political authorities, such a society
would tend toward an association of communal and industrial collectivities. It
would move toward a flexible world federation based on self-management. The
main task of social science, then, is to make manifest this immanent logic of
social processes. Proudhon’s ideas influenced anarchists, populists Bakunin,
Herzen, and syndicalists Jaurès. His conception of self-management was an
important inspiration for the later concept of soviets councils. He criticized
the inequalities of the contemporary society from the viewpoint of small
producers and peasants. Although eclectic and theoretically rather naive, his
work attracted the serious attention of his contemporaries and led to a strong
attack by Marx in The Holy Family and The Poverty of Philosophy.
prudens: practical reason: In “Epilogue” Grice states that the principle of
conversational rationality is a sub-principle of the principle of rationality, simpliciter,
which is not involved with ‘communication’ per se. This is an application of
Occam’s razor: Rationalities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” This
motto underlies his aequi-vocality thesis: one reason: desiderative side,
judicative side. Literally, ‘practical reason’ is the buletic part of the soul
(psyche) that deals with praxis, where the weighing is central. We dont need
means-end rationality, we need value-oriented rationality. We dont need the
rationality of the means – this is obvious --. We want the rationality of the
ends. The end may justify the means. But Grice is looking for what justifies
the end. The topic of freedom fascinated Grice, because it merged the practical
with the theoretical. Grice sees the conception of freedom as crucial in
his elucidation of a rational being. Conditions of freedom are necessary for
the very idea, as Kant was well aware. A thief who is forced to steal is just a
thief. Grice would engage in a bit of language botany, when exploring the ways
the adjective free is used, freely, in ordinary language: free fall,
alcohol-free, sugar-free, and his favourite: implicature-free. Grices more
systematic reflections deal with Pology, or creature construction. A vegetals,
for example is less free than an animal, but more free than a stone! And Humans
are more free than non-human. Grice wants to deal with some of the paradoxes
identified by Kant about freedom, and he succeeds in solving some of them.
There is a section on freedom in Action and events for PPQ where he expands on eleutheria and notes the
idiocy of a phrase like free fall. Grice was irritated by the fact that his
friend Hart wrote an essay on liberty and not on freedom, cf. praxis. Refs.:
essays on ‘practical reason,’ and “Aspects,” in BANC.
ψ-transmissum. Or ‘soul-to-soul transfer’ “Before we study
‘psi’-transmission we should study ‘transmission’ simpliciter. It is cognate
with ‘emission.’ So the emissor is a transmissor. And the emissee is a
transemissee. Grice would never have
thougth that he had to lecture on what conversation is all about! He would
never have lectured on this to his tutees at St. John’s – but at Brighton is
all different. So, to communicate, for an emissor is to intend his recipient to
be in a state with content “p.” The modality of the ‘state’ – desiderative or
creditative – is not important. In a one-off predicament, the emissor draws a
skull to indicate that there is danger. So his belief and desire were
successfully transmitted. A good way to formulate the point of communication.
Note that Grice is never sure about analsans and analysandum: Emissor
communicates THAT P iff Emissor M-INTENDS THAT addressee is to psi- that P.
Which seems otiose. “It is raining” can be INFORMATIVE, but it is surely
INDICATIVE first. So it’s moke like the emissor intends his addressee to
believe that he, the utterer believes that p (the belief itself NOT being part
of what is meant, of course). So, there is psi-transmission not necessarily
when the utterer convinces his addressee, but just when he gets his addressee
to BELIEF that he, the utterer, psi-s that p. So the psi HAS BEEN TRANSMITTED.
Surely when the Beatles say “HELP” they don’t expect that their addressee will
need help. They intend their addressee to HELP them! Used by Grice in WoW: 287,
and emphasised by J. Baker. The gist of communication. trans-mitto or trāmitto
, mīsi, missum, 3, v. a. I. To send, carry, or convey across, over, or through;
to send off, despatch, transmit from one place or person to another (syn.:
transfero, traicio, traduco). A. Lit.: “mihi illam ut tramittas: argentum accipias,”
Plaut. Ep. 3, 4, 27: “illam sibi,” id. ib. 1, 2, 52: “exercitus equitatusque
celeriter transmittitur (i. e. trans flumen),” are conveyed across, Caes. B. G.
7, 61: “legiones,” Vell. 2, 51, 1: “cohortem Usipiorum in Britanniam,” Tac.
Agr. 28: “classem in Euboeam ad urbem Oreum,” Liv. 28, 5, 18: “magnam classem
in Siciliam,” id. 28, 41, 17: “unde auxilia in Italiam transmissurus erat,” id.
23, 32, 5; 27, 15, 7: transmissum per viam tigillum, thrown over or across, id.
1, 26, 10: “ponte transmisso,” Suet. Calig. 22 fin.: in partem campi pecora et
armenta, Tac. A. 13, 55: “materiam in formas,” Col. 7, 8, 6.— 2. To cause to
pass through: “per corium, per viscera Perque os elephanto bracchium
transmitteres,” you would have thrust through, penetrated, Plaut. Mil. 1, 30;
so, “ensem per latus,” Sen. Herc. Oet. 1165: “facem telo per pectus,” id.
Thyest. 1089: “per medium amnem transmittit equum,” rides, Liv. 8, 24, 13:
“(Gallorum reguli) exercitum per fines suos transmiserunt,” suffered to pass
through, id. 21, 24, 5: “abies folio pinnato densa, ut imbres non transmittat,”
Plin. 16, 10, 19, § 48: “Favonios,” Plin. Ep. 2, 17, 19; Tac. A. 13, 15: “ut
vehem faeni large onustam transmitteret,” Plin. 36, 15, 24, § 108.— B. Trop. 1.
To carry over, transfer, etc.: “bellum in Italiam,” Liv. 21, 20, 4; so,
“bellum,” Tac. A. 2, 6: “vitia cum opibus suis Romam (Asia),” Just. 36, 4, 12:
vim in aliquem, to send against, i. e. employ against, Tac. A. 2, 38.— 2. To
hand over, transmit, commit: “et quisquam dubitabit, quin huic hoc tantum
bellum transmittendum sit, qui, etc.,” should be intrusted, Cic. Imp. Pomp. 14,
42: “alicui signa et summam belli,” Sil. 7, 383: “hereditas transmittenda
alicui,” to be made over, Plin. Ep. 8, 18, 7; and with inf.: “et longo
transmisit habere nepoti,” Stat. S. 3, 3, 78 (analog. to dat habere, Verg. A.
9, 362; “and, donat habere,” id. ib. 5, 262); “for which: me famulo famulamque
Heleno transmisit habendam,” id. ib. 3, 329: “omne meum tempus amicorum
temporibus transmittendum putavi,” should be devoted, Cic. Imp. Pomp. 1, 1:
“poma intacta ore servis,” Tac. A. 4, 54.— 3. To let go: animo transmittente
quicquid acceperat, letting pass through, i. e. forgetting, Sen. Ep. 99, 6:
“mox Caesarem vergente jam senectā munia imperii facilius tramissurum,” would
let go, resign, Tac. A. 4, 41: “Junium mensem transmissum,” passed over,
omitted, id. ib. 16, 12 fin.: “Gangen amnem et quae ultra essent,” to leave
unconquered, Curt. 9, 4, 17: “leo imbelles vitulos Transmittit,” Stat. Th. 8,
596.— II. To go or pass over or across, to cross over; to cross, pass, go
through, traverse, etc. A. Lit. 1. In gen. (α). Act.: “grues cum maria
transmittant,” Cic. N. D. 2, 49, 125: “cur ipse tot maria transmisit,” id. Fin.
5, 29, 87; so, “maria,” id. Rep. 1, 3, 6: “satis constante famā jam Iberum
Poenos transmisisse,” Liv. 21, 20, 9 (al. transisse): “quem (Euphratem) ponte,”
Tac. A. 15, 7: “fluvium nando,” Stat. Th. 9, 239: “lacum nando,” Sil. 4, 347:
“murales fossas saltu,” id. 8, 554: “equites medios tramittunt campos,” ride through,
Lucr. 2, 330; cf.: “cursu campos (cervi),” run through, Verg. A. 4, 154:
quantum Balearica torto Funda potest plumbo medii transmittere caeli, can send
with its hurled bullet, i. e. can send its bullet, Ov. M. 4, 710: “tectum
lapide vel missile,” to fling over, Plin. 28, 4, 6, § 33; cf.: “flumina disco,”
Stat. Th. 6, 677.—In pass.: “duo sinus fuerunt, quos tramitti oporteret:
utrumque pedibus aequis tramisimus,” Cic. Att. 16, 6, 1: “transmissus amnis,”
Tac. A. 12, 13: “flumen ponte transmittitur,” Plin. Ep. 8, 8, 5.— (β). Neutr.:
“ab eo loco conscendi ut transmitterem,” Cic. Phil. 1, 3, 7: “cum exercitus
vestri numquam a Brundisio nisi summā hieme transmiserint,” id. Imp. Pomp. 12,
32: “cum a Leucopetrā profectus (inde enim tramittebam) stadia circiter CCC.
processissem, etc.,” id. Att. 16, 7, 1; 8, 13, 1; 8, 11, 5: “ex Corsicā subactā
Cicereius in Sardiniam transmisit,” Liv. 42, 7, 2; 32, 9, 6: “ab Lilybaeo
Uticam,” id. 25, 31, 12: “ad vastandam Italiae oram,” id. 21, 51, 4; 23, 38,
11; 24, 36, 7: “centum onerariae naves in Africam transmiserunt,” id. 30, 24,
5; Suet. Caes. 58: “Cyprum transmisit,” Curt. 4, 1, 27. — Pass. impers.: “in
Ebusum insulam transmissum est,” Liv. 22, 20, 7.—* 2. In partic., to go over,
desert to a party: “Domitius transmisit ad Caesa rem,” Vell. 2, 84 fin. (syn.
transfugio).— B. Trop. (post-Aug.). 1. In gen., to pass over, leave untouched
or disregarded (syn praetermitto): “haud fas, Bacche, tuos taci tum tramittere
honores,” Sil. 7, 162; cf.: “sententiam silentio, deinde oblivio,” Tac. H. 4, 9
fin.: “nihil silentio,” id. ib. 1, 13; “4, 31: aliquid dissimulatione,” id. A.
13, 39: “quae ipse pateretur,” Suet. Calig. 10; id. Vesp. 15. — 2. In partic.,
of time, to pass, spend (syn. ago): “tempus quiete,” Plin. Ep. 9, 6, 1: so, “vitam
per obscurum,” Sen. Ep. 19, 2: steriles annos, Stat. S. 4, 2, 12: “aevum,” id.
ib. 1, 4, 124: “quattuor menses hiemis inedia,” Plin. 8, 25, 38, § 94: “vigiles
noctes,” Stat. Th. 3, 278 et saep. — Transf.: “febrium ardorem,” i. e. to
undergo, endure, Plin. Ep. 1, 22, 7; cf. “discrimen,” id. ib. 8, 11, 2:
“secessus, voluptates, etc.,” id. ib. 6, 4, 2.
pseudo-hallucination, a
non-deceptive hallucination. An ordinary hallucination might be thought to
comprise two components: i a sensory component, whereby one experiences an
image or sensory episode similar in many respects to a veridical perceiving
except in being non-veridical; and ii a cognitive component, whereby one takes
or is disposed to take the image or sensory episode to be veridical. A
pseudohallucination resembles a hallucination, but lacks this second component.
In experiencing a pseudohallucination, one appreciates that one is not
perceiving veridically. The source of the term seems to be the painter Wassily
Kandinsky, who employed it in 5 to characterize a series of apparently
drug-induced images experienced and pondered by a friend who recognized them,
at the very time they were occurring, not to be veridical. Kandinsky’s account
is discussed by Jaspers in his General Psychopathology, 6, and thereby entered
the clinical lore. Pseudohallucinations may be brought on by the sorts of
pathological condition that give rise to hallucinations, or by simple fatigue,
emotional adversity, or loneliness. Thus, a driver, late at night, may react to
non-existent objects or figures on the road, and immediately recognize his
error.
psycholinguistics, an
interdisciplinary research area that uses theoretical descriptions of language
taken from linguistics to investigate psychological processes underlying
language production, perception, and learning. There is considerable
disagreement as to the appropriate characterization of the field and the major
problems. Philosophers discussed many of the problems now studied in
psycholinguistics before either psychology or linguistics were spawned, but the
self-consciously interdisciplinary field combining psychology and linguistics
emerged not long after the birth of the two disciplines. Meringer used the
adjective ‘psycholingisch-linguistische’ in an 5 book. Various national
traditions of psycholinguistics continued at a steady but fairly low level of
activity through the 0s and declined somewhat during the 0s and 0s because of
the antimentalist attitudes in both linguistics and psychology.
Psycholinguistic researchers in the USSR, mostly inspired by L. S. Vygotsky
Thought and Language, 4, were more active during this period in spite of
official suppression. Numerous quasi-independent sources contributed to the
rebirth of psycholinguistics in the 0s; the most significant was a seminar held
at a during the summer of 3 that led to
the publication of Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems
4, edited by C. E. Osgood and T. A. Sebeok
a truly interdisciplinary book jointly written by more than a dozen
authors. The contributors attempted to analyze and reconcile three disparate
approaches: learning theory from psychology, descriptive linguistics, and
information theory which came mainly from engineering. The book had a wide
impact and led to many further investigations, but the nature of the field
changed rapidly soon after its publication with the Chomskyan revolution in
linguistics and the cognitive turn in psychology. The two were not unrelated:
Chomsky’s positive contribution, Syntactic Structures, was less broadly
influential than his negative review Language, 9 of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal
Behavior. Against the empiricist-behaviorist view of language understanding and
production, in which language is merely the exhibition of a more complex form
of behavior, Chomsky argued the avowedly rationalist position that the ability
to learn and use language is innate and unique to humans. He emphasized the
creative aspect of language, that almost all sentences one hears or produces
are novel. One of his premises was the alleged infinity of sentences in natural
languages, but a less controversial argument can be given: there are tens of
millions of five-word sentences in English, all of which are readily understood
by speakers who have never heard them. Chomsky’s work promised the possibility
of uncovering a very special characteristic of the human mind. But the promise
was qualified by the disclaimer that linguistic theory describes only the
competence of the ideal speaker. Many psycholinguists spent countless hours
during the 0s and 0s seeking the traces of underlying competence beneath the
untidy performances of actual speakers. During the 0s, as Chomsky frequently
revised his theories of syntax and semantics in significant ways, and numerous
alternative linguistic models were under consideration, psychologists generated
a range of productive research problems that are increasingly remote from the
Chomskyan beginnings. Contemporary psycholinguistics addresses phonetic,
phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic influences on language
processing. Few clear conclusions of philosophical import have been
established. For example, several decades of animal research have shown that
other species can use significant portions of human language, but controversy
abounds over how central those portions are to language. Studies now clearly
indicate the importance of word frequency and coarticulation, the dependency of
a hearer’s identification of a sound as a particular phoneme, or of a visual
pattern as a particular letter, not only on the physical features of the
pattern but on the properties of other patterns not necessarily adjacent.
Physically identical patterns may be heard as a d in one context and a t in
another. It is also accepted that at least some of the human lignuistic abilities,
particularly those involved in reading and speech perception, are relatively
isolated from other cognitive processes. Infant studies show that children as
young as eight months learn statistically important patterns characteristic of
their natural language suggesting a
complex set of mechanisms that are automatic and invisible to us.
Pufendorf, S., G.
historian and theorist of natural law. Pufendorf was influenced by both Grotius
and Hobbes. He portrayed people as contentious and quarrelsome, yet as needing
one another’s company and assistance. Natural law shows how people can live
with one another while pursuing their own conflicting projects. To minimize
religious disputes about morals, Pufendorf sought a way of deriving laws of
nature from observable facts alone. Yet he thought divine activity essential to
morality. He opened his massive Latin treatise On the Law of Nature and of
Nations 1672 with a voluntarist account of God’s creation of the essence of
mankind: given that we have the nature God gave us, certain laws must be valid
for us, but only God’s will determined our nature. As a result, our nature
indicates God’s will for us. Hence observable facts about ourselves show us
what laws God commands us to obey. Because we so obviously need one another’s
assistance, the first law is to increase our sociability, i.e. our willingness
to live together. All other laws indicate acts that would bring about this end.
In the course of expounding the laws he thought important for the development
of social life to the high cultural level our complex nature points us toward,
Pufendorf analyzed all the main points that a full legal system must cover. He
presented the rudiments of laws of marriage, property, inheritance, contract,
and international relations in both war and peace. He also developed the
Grotian theory of personal rights, asserting for the first time that rights are
pointless unless for each right there are correlative duties binding on others.
Taking obligation as his fundamental concept, he developed an important
distinction between perfect and imperfect duties and rights. And in working out
a theory of property he suggested the first outlines of a historical sociology
of wealth later developed by Adam Smith. Pufendorf’s works on natural law were
textbooks for all of Europe for over a century and were far more widely read
than any other treatments of the subject.
pulchrum -- beauty, an aesthetic property commonly
thought of as a species of aesthetic value. As such, it has been variously thought
to be 1 a simple, indefinable property that cannot be defined in terms of any
other properties; 2 a property or set of properties of an object that makes the
object capable of producing a certain sort of pleasurable experience in any
suitable perceiver; or 3 whatever produces a particular sort of pleasurable
experience, even though what produces the experience may vary from individual
to individual. It is in this last sense that beauty is thought to be “in the
eye of the beholder.” If beauty is a simple, indefinable property, as in 1,
then it cannot be defined conceptually and has to be apprehended by intuition
or taste. Beauty, on this account, would be a particular sort of aesthetic
property. If beauty is an object’s Bayle, Pierre beauty 75 75 capacity to produce a special sort of
pleasurable experience, as in 2, then it is necessary to say what properties
provide it with this capacity. The most favored candidates for these have been
formal or structural properties, such as order, symmetry, and proportion. In
the Philebus Plato argues that the form or essence of beauty is knowable,
exact, rational, and measurable. He also holds that simple geometrical shapes,
simple colors, and musical notes all have “intrinsic beauty,” which arouses a
pure, “unmixed” pleasure in the perceiver and is unaffected by context. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many treatises were written on individual
art forms, each allegedly governed by its own rules. In the eighteenth century,
Hutcheson held that ‘beauty’ refers to an “idea raised in us,” and that any
object that excites this idea is beautiful. He thought that the property of the
object that excites this idea is “uniformity in variety.” Kant explained the
nature of beauty by analyzing judgments that something is beautiful. Such
judgments refer to an experience of the perceiver. But they are not merely
expressions of personal experience; we claim that others should also have the
same experience, and that they should make the same judgment i.e., judgments
that something is beautiful have “universal validity”. Such judgments are
disinterested determined not by any
needs or wants on the part of the perceiver, but just by contemplating the mere
appearance of the object. These are judgments about an object’s free beauty,
and making them requires using only those mental capacities that all humans
have by virtue of their ability to communicate with one another. Hence the
pleasures experienced in response to such beauty can in principle be shared by
anyone. Some have held, as in 3, that we apply the term ‘beautiful’ to things
because of the pleasure they give us, and not on the basis of any specific
qualities an object has. Archibald Alison held that it is impossible to find
any properties common to all those things we call beautiful. Santayana believed
beauty is “pleasure regarded as a quality of a thing,” and made no pretense
that certain qualities ought to produce that pleasure. The Grecian term to
kalon, which is often tr. as ‘beauty’, did not refer to a thing’s autonomous
aesthetic value, but rather to its “excellence,” which is connected with its
moral worth and/or usefulness. This concept is closer to Kant’s notion of
dependent beauty, possessed by an object judged as a particular kind of thing
such as a beautiful cat or a beautiful horse, than it is to free beauty,
possessed by an object judged simply on the basis of its appearance and not in
terms of any concept of use
punishment, a distinctive
form of legal sanction, distinguished first by its painful or unpleasant nature
to the offender, and second by the ground on which the sanction is imposed,
which must be because the offender offended against the norms of a society.
None of these three attributes is a strictly necessary condition for proper use
of the word ‘punishment’. There may be unpleasant consequences visited by
nature upon an offender such that he might be said to have been “punished
enough”; the consequences in a given case may not be unpleasant to a particular
offender, as in the punishment of a masochist with his favorite form of
self-abuse; and punishment may be imposed for reasons other than offense
against society’s norms, as is the case with punishment inflicted in order to
deter others from like acts. The “definitional stop” argument in discussions of
punishment seeks to tie punishment analytically to retributivism. Retributivism
is the theory that punishment is justified by the moral desert of the offender;
on this view, a person who culpably does a wrongful action deserves punishment,
and this desert is a sufficient as well as a necessary condition of just
punishment. Punishment of the deserving, on this view, is an intrinsic good
that does not need to be justified by any other good consequences such
punishment may achieve, such as the prevention of crime. Retributivism is not
to be confused with the view that punishment satisfies the feelings of vengeful
citizens nor with the view that punishment preempts such citizens from taking
the law into their own hands by vigilante action these latter views being utilitarian.
Retributivism is also not the view sometimes called “weak” or “negative”
retributivism that only the deserving are to be punished, for desert on such a
view typically operates only as a limiting and not as a justifying condition of
punishment. The thesis known as the “definitional stop” says that punishment
must be retributive in its justification if it is to be punishment at all. Bad
treatment inflicted in order to prevent future crime is not punishment but
deserves another name, usually ‘telishment’. The dominant justification of
non-retributive punishment or telishment is deterrence. The good in whose name
the bad of punishing is justified, on this view, is prevention of future
criminal acts. If punishment is inflicted to prevent the offender from
committing future criminal acts, it is styled “specific” or “special”
deterrence; if punishment is inflicted to prevent others from committing future
criminal acts, it is styled “general” deterrence. In either case, punishment of
an action is justified by the future effect of that punishment in deterring
future actors from committing crimes. There is some vagueness in the notion of
deterrence because of the different mechanisms by which potential criminals are
influenced not to be criminals by the example of punishment: such punishment
may achieve its effects through fear or by more benignly educating those
would-be criminals out of their criminal desires.
Putnam, Hilary b.6, philosopher who has made significant
contributions to the philosophies of language, science, and mind, and to
mathematical logic and metaphysics. He completed his Ph.D. in 1 at the of California Los Angeles and has taught at
Northwestern, Princeton, MIT, and Harvard. In the late 0s he contributed with
Martin Davis and Julia Robinson to a proof of the unsolvability of Hilbert’s
tenth problem completed in 0 by Yuri Matiyasevich. Rejecting both Platonism and
conventionalism in mathematics, he explored the concepts of mathematical truth
and logical necessity on the assumption that logic is not entirely immune from
empirical revision e.g., quantum
mechanics may require a rejection of classical logic. In the 0s and 0s he
advanced functionalism, an original theory of mind in which human beings are
conceived as Turing machines computers and mental states are functional or 759 computational states. While this theory
is presupposed by much contemporary research in cognitive science, Putnam
himself in Representation and Reality, 8 abandoned the view, arguing that
genuine intentionality cannot be reduced to computational states because the
content of beliefs is a determined by facts external to the individual and b
individuatable only by interpreting our belief system as a whole meaning
holism. Putnam’s criticism of functionalism relies on the “new theory of
reference” sometimes called the “causal”
or “direct” theory that he and Kripke
working independently developed during the late 0s and early 0s and that is
today embraced by many philosophers and scientists. In “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’
” 5 Putnam claims that the reference of natural kind terms like ‘water’ is
determined by facts about the world the
microphysical structure of water H2O and the linguistic practices of speakers and not by the internal mental states of
speakers. Early in his career, Putnam championed scientific realism, rejecting
conventionalism and arguing that without a realist commitment to theoretical
entities e.g., electrons the success of science would be a “miracle.” In 6 he
famously abandoned metaphysical realism in favor of “internal realism,” which
gives up commitment to mind-independent objects and relativizes ontology to
conceptual schemes. In a series of model-theoretic arguments, Putnam challenged
the metaphysical realist assumption that an epistemically ideal theory might be
false, claiming that it requires an implausibly “magical” theory of reference.
To the same end, he sought to demonstrate tha
t we are not “brains in a
vat” and that radical skepticism is incoherent Reason, Truth and History, 1.
More recently, he has emphasized conceptual relativity in his attack on
metaphysical realism’s commitment to “one true theory” and, in his Dewey
Lectures 4, has defended direct perceptual realism, showing his allegiance to
everyday “realism.” There is growing appreciation of the underlying unity in
Putnam’s work that helps correct his reputation for “changing his mind.” He has
consistently sought to do justice both to the “real world” of common sense and
science and to distinctly human ways of representing that world. In the 0s his
energies were increasingly directed to our “moral image of the world.” Leading
a revival of pragmatism, he has attacked
the factvalue dichotomy, articulating a moral view that resists both relativism
and authoritarianism. Putnam’s influence now extends beyond philosophers and
scientists, to literary theorists, cognitive linguists, and theologians.
Pyrrho of Elis, Grecian
philosopher, regarded as the founder of Skepticism. Like Socrates, he wrote
nothing, but impressed many with provocative ideas and calm demeanor. His
equanimity was admired by Epicurus; his attitude of indifference influenced
early Stoicism; his attack on knowledge was taken over by the skeptical
Academy; and two centuries later, a revival of Skepticism adopted his name.
Many of his ideas were anticipated by earlier thinkers, notably Democritus. But
in denying the veracity of all sensations and beliefs, Pyrrho carried doubt to
new and radical extremes. According to ancient anecdote, which presents him as
highly eccentric, he paid so little heed to normal sensibilities that friends
often had to rescue him from grave danger; some nonetheless insisted he lived
into his nineties. He is also said to have emulated the “naked teachers” as the
Hindu Brahmans were called by Grecians whom he met while traveling in the
entourage of Alexander the Great. Pyrrho’s chief exponent and publicist was
Timon of Phlius c.325c.235 B.C.. His bestpreserved work, the Silloi “Lampoons”,
is a parody in Homeric epic verse that mocks the pretensions of numerous
philosophers on an imaginary visit to the underworld. According to Timon,
Pyrrho was a “negative dogmatist” who affirmed that knowledge is impossible,
not because our cognitive apparatus is flawed, but because the world is
fundamentally indeterminate: things themselves are “no more” cold than hot, or
good than bad. But Timon makes clear that the key to Pyrrho’s Skepticism, and a
major source of his impact, was the ethical goal he sought to achieve: by
training himself to disregard all perception and values, he hoped to attain
mental tranquility.
Pythagoras, the most
famous of the pre-Socratic Grecian philosophers. He emigrated from the island
of Samos off Asia Minor to Croton southern Italy in 530. There he founded
societies based on a strict way of life. They had great political impact in
southern Italy and aroused opposition that resulted in the burning of their
meeting houses and, ultimately, in the societies’ disappearance in the fourth
century B.C. Pythagoras’s fame grew exponentially with the pasage of time.
Plato’s immediate successors in the Academy saw true philosophy as an unfolding
of the original insight of Pythagoras. By the time of Iamblichus late third
century A.D., Pythagoreanism and Platonism had become virtually identified. Spurious
writings ascribed both to Pythagoras and to other Pythagoreans arose beginning
in the third century B.C. Eventually any thinker who saw the natural world as
ordered according to pleasing mathematical relations e.g., Kepler came to be
called a Pythagorean. Modern scholarship has shown that Pythagoras was not a
scientist, mathematician, or systematic philosopher. He apparently wrote
nothing. The early evidence shows that he was famous for introducing the
doctrine of metempsychosis, according to which the soul is immortal and is
reborn in both human and animal incarnations. Rules were established to purify
the soul including the prohibition against eating beans and the emphasis on
training of the memory. General reflections on the natural world such as “number
is the wisest thing” and “the most beautiful, harmony” were preserved orally. A
belief in the mystical power of number is also visible in the veneration for
the tetractys tetrad: the numbers 14, which add up to the sacred number 10. The
doctrine of the harmony of the spheres
that the heavens move in accord with number and produce music may go back to Pythagoras. It is often
assumed that there must be more to Pythagoras’s thought than this, given his
fame in the later tradition. However, Plato refers to him only as the founder
of a way of life Republic 600a9. In his account of pre-Socratic philosophy,
Aristotle refers not to Pythagoras himself, but to the “so-called Pythagoreans”
whom he dates in the fifth century.
quale: a property of a
mental state or event, in particular of a sensation and a perceptual state,
which determine “what it is like” to have them. Sometimes ‘phenomenal
properties’ and ‘qualitative features’ are used with the same meaning. The felt
difference between pains and itches is said to reside in differences in their
“qualitative character,” i.e., their qualia. For those who accept an
“actobject” conception of perceptual experience, qualia may include such
properties as “phenomenal redness” and “phenomenal roundness,” thought of as
properties of sense-data, “phenomenal objects,” or portions of the visual
field. But those who reject this conception do not thereby reject qualia; a
proponent of the adverbial analysis of perceptual experience can hold that an
experience of “sensing redly” is so in virtue of, in part, what qualia it has,
while denying that there is any sense in which the experience itself is red.
Qualia are thought of as non-intentional, i.e., non-representational, features
of the states that have them. So in a case of “spectrum inversion,” where one
person’s experiences of green are “qualitatively” just like another person’s
experiences of red, and vice versa, the visual experiences the two have when
viewing a ripe tomato would be alike in their intentional features both would
be of a red, round, bulgy surface, but would have different qualia. Critics of
physicalist and functionalist accounts of mind have argued from the possibility
of spectrum inversion and other kinds of “qualia inversion,” and from such
facts as that no physical or functional description will tell one “what it is
like” to smell coffee, that such accounts cannot accommodate qualia. Defenders
of such accounts are divided between those who claim that their accounts can
accommodate qualia and those who claim that qualia are a philosophical myth and
thus that there are none to accommodate.
qualitative predicate, a
kind of predicate postulated in some attempts to solve the grue paradox. 1 On
the syntactic view, a qualitative predicate is a syntactically more or less
simple predicate. Such simplicity, however, is relative to the choice of
primitives in a language. In English, ‘green’ and ‘blue’ are primitive, while
‘grue’ and ‘bleen’ must be introduced by definitions ‘green and first examined
before T, or blue otherwise’, ‘blue and first examined before T, or green
otherwise’, respectively. In other languages, ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’ may be
primitive and hence “simple,” while ‘green’ and ‘blue’ must be introduced by
definitions ‘grue and first examined before T, or bleen otherwise’, ‘bleen and
first examined before T, or grue otherwise’, respectively. 2 On the semantic
view, a qualitative predicate is a predicate to which there corresponds a
property that is “natural” to us or of easy semantic access. The quality of greenness
is easy and natural; the quality of grueness is strained. 3 On the ontological
view, a qualitative predicate is a predicate to which there corresponds a
property that is woven into the causal or modal structure of reality in a way
that gruesome properties are not.
qualities, properties or
characteristics. There are three specific philosophical senses. 1 Qualities are
physical properties, logical constructions of physical properties, or
dispositions. Physical properties, such as mass, shape, and electrical charge,
are properties in virtue of which objects can enter into causal relations.
Logical constructions of physical properties include conjunctions and
disjunctions of them; being 10 # .02 cm long is a disjunctive property. A
disposition of an object is a potential for the object to enter into a causal
interaction of some specific kind under some specific condition; e.g., an
object is soluble in water if and only if it would dissolve were it in enough
pure water. Locke held a very complex theory of powers. On Locke’s theory, the
dispositions of objects are a kind of power and the human will is a kind of
power. However, the human will is not part of the modern notion of disposition.
So, predicating a disposition of an object implies a subjunctive conditional of
the form: if such-and-such were to happen to the object, then so-and-so would
happen to it; that my vase is fragile implies that if my vase were to be hit
sufficiently hard then it would break. Whether physical properties are distinct
from dispositions is disputed. Three sorts of qualities are often
distinguished. Primary qualities are physical properties or logical
constructions from physical properties. Secondary qualities are dispositions to
produce sensory experiences of certain phenomenal sorts under appropriate
conditions. The predication of a secondary quality, Q, to an object implies
that if the object were to be perceived under normal conditions then the object
would appear to be Q to the perceivers: if redness is a secondary quality, then
that your coat is red implies that if your coat were to be seen under normal
conditions, it would look red. Locke held that the following are secondary
qualities: colors, tastes, smells, sounds, and warmth or cold. Tertiary
qualities are dispositions that are not secondary qualities, e.g. fragility.
Contrary to Locke, the color realist holds that colors are either primary or
tertiary qualities; so that x is yellow is logically independent of the fact
that x looks yellow under normal conditions. Since different spectral
reflectances appear to be the same shade of yellow, some color realists hold
that any shade of yellow is a disjunctive property whose components are
spectral reflectances. 2 Assuming a representative theory of perception, as
Locke did, qualities have two characteristics: qualities are powers or
dispositions of objects to produce sensory experiences sensedata on some
theories in humans; and, in sensory experience, qualities are represented as
intrinsic properties of objects. Instrinsic properties of objects are
properties that objects have independently of their environment. Hence an exact
duplicate of an object has all the intrinsic properties of the original, and an
intrinsic property of x never has the form, x-stands-in-suchand-such-a-relation-to-y.
Locke held that the primary qualities are extension size, figure shape, motion
or rest, solidity impenetrability, and number; the primary qualities are
correctly represented in perception as intrinsic features of objects, and the
secondary qualities listed in 1 are incorrectly represented in perception as
intrinsic features of objects. Locke seems to have been mistaken in holding
that number is a quality of objects. Positional qualities are qualities defined
in terms of the relative positions of points in objects and their surrounding:
shape, size, and motion and rest. Since most of Locke’s primary qualities are
positional, some non-positional quality is needed to occupy positions. On
Locke’s account, solidity fulfills this role, although some have argued Hume
that solidity is not a primary quality. 3 Primary qualities are properties
common to and inseparable from all matter; secondary qualities are not really
qualities in objects, but only powers of objects to produce sensory effects in
us by means of their primary qualities. This is another use of ‘quality’ by
Locke, where ‘primary’ functions much like ‘real’ and real properties are given
by the metaphysical assumptions of the science of Locke’s time. Qualities are
distinct from representations of them in predications. Sometimes the same
quality is represented in different ways by different predications: ‘That is
water’ and ‘That is H2O’. The distinction between qualities and the way they
are represented in predications opens up the Lockean possibility that some
qualities are incorrectly represented in some predications. Features of
predications are sometimes used to define a quality; dispositions are sometimes
defined in terms of subjunctive conditionals see definition of ‘secondary
qualities’ in 1, and disjunctive properties are defined in terms of disjunctive
predications. Features of predications are also used in the following
definition of ‘independent qualities’: two qualities, P and Q, are independent
if and only if, for any object x, the predication of P and of Q to x are
logically independent i.e., that x is P and that x is Q are logically
independent; circularity and redness are independent, circularity and
triangularity are dependent. If two determinate qualities, e.g., circularity
and triangularity, belong to the same determinable, say shape, then they are
dependent, but if two determinate qualities, e.g., squareness and redness,
belong to different determinables, say shape and color, they are independent.
Quantification: H. P.
Grice, “Every nice girl loves a sailor.” -- the application of one or more
quantifiers e.g., ‘for all x’, ‘for some y’ to an open formula. A
quantification or quantified sentence results from first forming an open
formula from a sentence by replacing expressions belonging to a certain class
of expressions in the sentences by variables whose substituends are the
expressions of that class and then prefixing the formula with quantifiers using
those variables. For example, from ‘Bill hates Mary’ we form ‘x hates y’, to which
we prefix the quantifiers ‘for all x’ and ‘for some y’, getting the
quantification sentence ‘for all x, for some y, x hates y’ ‘Everyone hates
someone’. In referential quantification only terms of reference may be replaced
by variables. The replaceable terms of reference are the substituends of the
variables. The values of the variables are all those objects to which reference
could be made by a term of reference of the type that the variables may
replace. Thus the previous example ‘for all x, for some y, x hates y’ is a
referential quantification. Terms standing for people ‘Bill’, ‘Mary’, e.g. are
the substituends of the variables ‘x’ and ‘y’. And people are the values of the
variables. In substitutional quantification any type of term may be replaced by
variables. A variable replacing a term has as its substituends all terms of the
type of the replaced term. For example, from ‘Bill married Mary’ we may form
‘Bill R Mary’, to which we prefix the quantifier ‘for some R’, getting the
substitutional quantification ‘for some R, Bill R Mary’. This is not a
referential quantification, since the substituends of ‘R’ are binary predicates
such as ‘marries’, which are not terms of reference. Referential quantification
is a species of objectual quantification. The truth conditions of
quantification sentences objectually construed are understood in terms of the
values of the variable bound by the quantifier. Thus, ‘for all v, fv’ is true
provided ‘fv’ is true for all values of the variable ‘v’; ‘for some v, fv’ is true
provided ‘fv’ is true for some value of the variable ‘v’. The truth or falsity
of a substitutional quantification turns instead on the truth or falsity of the
sentences that result from the quantified formula by replacing variables by
their substituends. For example, ‘for some R, Bill R Mary’ is true provided
some sentence of the form ‘Bill R Mary’ is true. In classical logic the
universal quantifier ‘for all’ is definable in terms of negation and the
existential quantifier ‘for some’: ‘for all x’ is short for ‘not for some x
not’. The existential quantifier is similarly definable in terms of negation
and the universal quantifier. In intuitionistic logic, this does not hold. Both
quantifiers are regarded as primitive.
quantifying in, use of a
quantifier outside of an opaque construction to attempt to bind a variable
within it, a procedure whose legitimacy was first questioned by Quine. An
opaque construction is one that resists substitutivity of identity. Among
others, the constructions of quotation, the verbs of propositional attitude,
and the logical modalities can give rise to opacity. For example, the position
of ‘six’ in: 1 ‘six’ contains exactly three letters is opaque, since the
substitution for ‘six’ by its codesignate ‘immediate successor of five’ renders
a truth into a falsehood: 1H ‘the immediate successor of five’ contains exactly
three letters. Similarly, the position of ‘the earth’ in: 2 Tom believes that
the earth is habitable is opaque, if the substitution of ‘the earth’ by its
codesignate ‘the third planet from the sun’ renders a sentence that Tom would
affirm into one that he would deny: 2H Tom believes that the third planet from
the sun is habitable. Finally, the position of ‘9’ and of ‘7’ in: 3 Necessarily
9 7 is opaque, since the substitution of
‘the number of major planets’ for its codesignate ‘9’ renders a truth into a
falsehood: 3H Necessarily the number of major planets 7. Quine argues that since the positions
within opaque constructions resist substitutivity of identity, they cannot
meaningfully be quantified. Accordingly, the following three quantified
sentences are meaningless: 1I Ex ‘x’ 7,
2I Ex Tom believes that x is habitable, 3I Ex necessarily x 7. 1I, 2I, and 3I are meaningless, since the
second occurrence of ‘x’ in each of them does not function as a variable in the
ordinary nonessentialist quantificational way. The second occurrence of ‘x’ in
1I functions as a name that names the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet. The
second occurrences of ‘x’ in 2I and in 3I do not function as variables, since
they do not allow all codesignative terms as substituends without change of
truth-value. Thus, they may take objects as values but only objects designated
in certain ways, e.g., in terms of their intensional or essential properties.
So, short of acquiescing in an intensionalist or essentialist metaphysics,
Quine argues, we cannot in general quantify into opaque contexts.
quantum logic, the logic
of which the models are certain non-Boolean algebras derived from the
mathematical representation of quantum mechanical systems. The models of
classical logic are, formally, Boolean algebras. This is the central notion of
quantum logic in the literature, although the term covers a variety of modal
logics, dialogics, and operational logics proposed to elucidate the structure
of quantum mechanics and its relation to classical mechanics. The dynamical
quantities of a classical mechanical system position, momentum, energy, etc.
form a commutative algebra, and the dynamical properties of the system e.g.,
the property that the position lies in a specified range, or the property that
the momentum is greater than zero, etc. form a Boolean algebra. The transition
from classical to quantum mechanics involves the transition from a commutative
algebra of dynamical quantities to a noncommutative algebra of so-called
observables. One way of understanding the conceptual revolution from classical
to quantum mechanics is in terms of a shift from the class of Boolean algebras
to a class of non-Boolean algebras as the appropriate relational structures for
the dynamical properties of mechanical systems, hence from a Boolean classical
logic to a non-Boolean quantum logic as the logic applicable to the fundamental
physical processes of our universe. This conception of quantum logic was
developed formally in a classic 6 paper by G. Birkhoff and J. von Neumann
although von Neumann first proposed the idea in 7. The features that
distinguish quantum logic from classical logic vary with the formulation. In
the Birkhoffvon Neumann logic, the distributive law of classical logic fails,
but this is by no means a feature of all versions of quantum logic. It follows
from Gleason’s theorem 7 that the non-Boolean models do not admit two-valued
homomorphisms in the general case, i.e., there is no partition of the dynamical
properties of a quantum mechanical system into those possessed by the system
and those not possessed by the system that preserves algebraic structure, and
equivalently no assignment of values to the observables of the system that
preserves algebraic structure. This result was proved independently for finite
sets of observables by S. Kochen and E. P. Specker 7. It follows that the
probabilities specified by the Born interpretation of the state function of a
quantum mechanical system for the results of measurements of observables cannot
be derived from a probability distribution over the different possible sets of
dynamical properties of the system, or the different possible sets of values
assignable to the observables of which one set is presumed to be actual,
determined by hidden variables in addition to the state function, if these sets
of properties or values are required to preserve algebraic structure. While
Bell’s theorem 4 excludes hidden variables satisfying a certain locality
condition, the Kochen-Specker theorem relates the non-Booleanity of quantum
logic to the impossibility of hidden variable extensions of quantum mechanics,
in which value assignments to the observables satisfy constraints imposed by
the algebraic structure of the observables.
quantum mechanics, also
called quantum theory, the science governing objects of atomic and subatomic
dimensions. Developed independently by Werner Heisenberg as matrix mechanics, 5
and Erwin Schrödinger as wave mechanics, 6, quantum mechanics breaks with
classical treatments of the motions and interactions of bodies by introducing
probability and acts of measurement in seemingly irreducible ways. In the
widely used Schrödinger version, quantum mechanics associates with each
physical system a time-dependent function, called the state function
alternatively, the state vector or Y function. The evolution of the system is
represented by the temporal transformation of the state function in accord with
a master equation, known as the Schrödinger equation. Also associated with a
system are “observables”: in principle measurable quantities, such as position,
momentum, and energy, including some with no good classical analogue, such as
spin. According to the Born interpretation 6, the state function is understood
instrumentally: it enables one to calculate, for any possible value of an
observable, the probability that a measurement of that observable would find
that particular value. The formal properties of observables and state functions
imply that certain pairs of observables such as linear momentum in a given
direction, and position in the same direction are incompatible in the sense
that no state function assigns probability 1 to the simultaneous determination
of exact values for both observables. This is a qualitative statement of the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle alternatively, the indeterminacy principle, or
just the uncertainty principle. Quantitatively, that principle places a precise
limit on the accuracy with which one may simultaneously measure a pair of
incompatible observables. There is no corresponding limit, however, on the
accuracy with which a single observable say, position alone, or momentum alone
may be measured. The uncertainty principle is sometimes understood in terms of
complementarity, a general perspective proposed by Niels Bohr according to
which the connection between quantum phenomena and observation forces our
classical concepts to split into mutually exclusive packages, both of which are
required for a complete understanding but only one of which is applicable under
any particular experimental conditions. Some take this to imply an ontology in
which quantum objects do not actually possess simultaneous values for
incompatible observables; e.g., do not have simultaneous position and momentum.
Others would hold, e.g., that measuring the position of an object causes an
uncontrollable change in its momentum, in accord with the limits on
simultaneous accuracy built into the uncertainty principle. These ways of
treating the principle are not uncontroversial. Philosophical interest arises
in part from where the quantum theory breaks with classical physics: namely,
from the apparent breakdown of determinism or causality that seems to result
from the irreducibly statistical nature of the theory, and from the apparent
breakdown of observer-independence or realism that seems to result from the
fundamental role of measurement in the theory. Both features relate to the
interpretation of the state function as providing only a summary of the
probabilities for various measurement outcomes. Einstein, in particular,
criticized the theory on these grounds, and in 5 suggested a striking thought
experiment to show that, assuming no action-at-a-distance, one would have to consider
the state function as an incomplete description of the real physical state for
an individual system, and therefore quantum mechanics as merely a provisional
theory. Einstein’s example involved a pair of systems that interact briefly and
then separate, but in such a way that the outcomes of various measurements
performed on each system, separately, show an uncanny correlation. In 1 the
physicist David Bohm simplified Einstein’s example, and later 7 indicated that
it may be realizable experimentally. The physicist John S. Bell then formulated
a locality assumption 4, similar to Einstein’s, that constrains factors which
might be used in describing the state of an individual system, so-called hidden
variables. Locality requires that in the EinsteinBohm experiment hidden
variables not allow the measurement performed on one system in a correlated
pair immediately to influence the outcome obtained in measuring the other,
spatially separated system. Bell demonstrated that locality in conjunction with
other assumptions about hidden variables restricts the probabilities for
measurement outcomes according to a system of inequalities known as the Bell
inequalities, and that the probabilities of certain quantum systems violate
these inequalities. This is Bell’s theorem. Subsequently several experiments of
the Einstein-Bohm type have been performed to test the Bell inequalities.
Although the results have not been univocal, the consensus is that the
experimental data support the quantum theory and violate the inequalities.
Current research is trying to evaluate the implications of these results,
including the extent to which they rule out local hidden variables. See J.
Cushing and E. McMullin, eds., Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory, 9.
The descriptive incompleteness with which Einstein charged the theory suggests
other problems. A particularly dramatic one arose in correspondence between
Schrödinger and Einstein; namely, the “gruesome” Schrödinger cat paradox. Here
a cat is confined in a closed chamber containing a radioactive atom with a
fifty-fifty chance of decaying in the next hour. If the atom decays it triggers
a relay that causes a hammer to fall and smash a glass vial holding a quantity
of 766 prussic acid sufficient to kill
the cat. According to the Schrödinger equation, after an hour the state
function for the entire atom ! relay ! hammer ! glass vial ! cat system is such
that if we observe the cat the probability for finding it alive dead is 50
percent. However, this evolved state function is one for which there is no
definite result; according to it, the cat is neither alive nor dead. How then
does any definite fact of the matter arise, and when? Is the act of observation
itself instrumental in bringing about the observed result, does that result come
about by virtue of some special random process, or is there some other account
compatible with definite results of measurements? This is the so-called quantum
measurement problem and it too is an active area of research.
quasi-demonstratum: The use of ‘quasi-‘ is implicatural. Grice is
implicating this is NOT a demonstratum. By a demonstratum he is having in mind
a Kaplanian ‘dthis’ or ‘dthat.’ Grice was obsessed with this or that. An
abstractum (such as “philosopher”) needs to be attached in a communicatum by
what Grice calls a ‘quasi-demonstrative,’ and for which he uses “φ.” Consider,
Grice says, an utterance, out of the blue, such as ‘The philosopher in the
garden seems bored,’ involving two iota-operators. As there may be more that a
philosopher in a garden in the great big world, the utterer intends his
addressee to treat the utterance as expandable into ‘The A which is φ is
B,’ where “φ” is a quasi-demonstrative epithet to be identified in a particular
context of utterance. The utterer intends that, to identify the denotatum
of “φ” for a particular utterance of ‘The philosopher in the garden seems
bored,’ the addressee wil proceed via the identification of a particular
philosopher, say Grice, as being a good candidate for being the philosopher meant.
The addressee is also intended to identify the candidate for a denotatum of φ
by finding in the candidate a feature, e. g., that of being the garden at St.
John’s, which is intended to be used to yield a composite epithet (‘philosopher
in St. John’s garden’), which in turn fills the bill of being the epithet which
the utterer believes is being uniquely satisfied by the philosopher selected as
the candidate. Determining the denotatum of “φ” standardly involve determining
what feature the utterer believes is uniquely instantiated by the predicate
“philosopher.” This in turn involves satisfying oneself that some particular
feature is in fact uniquely satisfied by a particular actual item, viz. a
particular philosopher such as Grice seeming bored in the garden of St. John’s.
quasi-indicator,
Castañeda’s term for an expression used to ascribe indexical reference to a
speaker or thinker. If John says “I am hungry” it is incorrect to report what
he said with ‘John claims that I am hungry’, since ‘I’, being an indexical,
expresses speaker’s reference, not John’s. However, ‘John claims that John is
hungry’ fails to represent the indexical element of his assertion. Instead, we
use ‘John claims that he himself is hungry’, where ‘he himself’ is a
quasiindicator depicting John’s reference to himself qua self. Because of its
subjective and perspectival character, we cannot grasp the exact content of
another’s indexical reference, yet quasi-indexical representations are possible
since we confront the world through generically the same indexical modes of
presentation. If these modes are irreducible, then quasi-indicators are
indispensable for describing the thoughts and experiences of others. As such,
they are not equivalent to or replaceable by any antecedents occurring outside
the scope of psychological verbs to which they are subordinated.
Quineianism: corners,
also called corner quotes, quasi-quotes, a notational device ] ^ introduced by
Quine Mathematical Logic, 0 to provide a conveniently brief way of speaking
generally about unspecified expressions of such and such kind. For example, a
logician might want a conveniently brief way of saying in the metalanguage that
the result of writing a wedge ‘7’ the dyadic logical connective for a
truth-functional use of ‘or’ between any two well-formed formulas wffs in the
object language is itself a wff. Supposing the Grecian letters ‘f’ and ‘y’
available in the metalanguage as variables ranging over wffs in the object
language, it is tempting to think that the formation rule stated above can be
succinctly expressed simply by saying that if f and y are wffs, then ‘f 7 y’ is
a wff. But this will not do, for ‘f 7 y’ is not a wff. Rather, it is a hybrid
expression of two variables of the metalanguage and a dyadic logical connective
of the object language. The problem is that putting quotation marks around the
Grecian letters merely results in designating those letters themselves, not, as
desired, in designating the context of the unspecified wffs. Quine’s device of
corners allows one to transcend this limitation of straight quotation since
quasi-quotation, e.g., ]f 7 y^, amounts to quoting the constant contextual
background, ‘# 7 #’, and imagining the unspecified expressions f and y written
in the blanks. Quine, Willard Van Orman
– see Quine, “Reply to H. P. Grice,” --
philosopher and logician, renowned for his rejection of the
analyticsynthetic distinction and for his advocacy of extensionalism,
naturalism, physicalism, empiricism, and holism. Quine took his doctorate in
philosophy at Harvard in 2. After four years of postdoctoral fellowships, he
was appointed to the philosophy faculty at Harvard in 6. There he remained
until he retired from teaching in 8. During six decades Quine published scores
of journal articles and more than twenty books. His writings touch a number of
areas, including logic, philosophy of logic, set theory, philosophy of
language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology,
and ethics. Among his most influential articles and books are “New Foundations
for Mathematical Logic” 6, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” 1, “Epistemology
Naturalized” 9, and Word and Object 0. In “New Foundations” he develops a set
theory that avoids Russell’s paradox without relying on Russell’s theory of
types. Rather, following Ernst Zermelo, Quine drops the presumption that every
membership condition determines a set. The system of “New Foundations”
continues to be widely discussed by mathematicians. “Two Dogmas” sets out to
repudiate what he sees as two dogmas of logical empiricism. The first is the
so-called analyticsynthetic distinction; the second is a weak form of
reductionism to the effect that each synthetic statement has associated with it
a unique set of confirming experiences and a unique set of infirming
experiences. Against the first dogma, Quine argues that none of the
then-current attempts to characterize analyticity e.g., “a statement is
analytic if and only if it is true solely in virtue of its meaning” do so with
sufficient clarity, and that any similar characterization is likewise doomed to
fail. Against the second dogma, Quine argues that a more accurate account of
the relation between the statements of a theory and experience is holistic
rather than reductionistic, that is, only as a corporate body do the statements
of a theory face the tribunal of experience. Quine concludes that the effects
of rejecting these two dogmas of empiricism are 1 a blurring of the supposed
boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science and 2 a shift toward
pragmatism. In “Epistemology Naturalized” Quine argues in favor of naturalizing
epistemology: old-time epistemology first philosophy has failed in its attempt
to ground science on something firmer than science and should, therefore, be
replaced by a scientific account of how we acquire our overall theory of the
world and why it works so well. In Word and Object, Quine’s most famous book,
he argues in favor of 1 naturalizing epistemology, 2 physicalism as against
phenomenalism and mindbody dualism, and 3 extensionality as against
intensionality. He also 4 develops a behavioristic conception of
sentence-meaning, 5 theorizes about language learning, 6 speculates on the
ontogenesis of reference, 7 explains various forms of ambiguity and vagueness,
8 recommends measures for regimenting language so as to eliminate ambiguity and
vagueness as well as to make a theory’s logic and ontic commitments perspicuous
“to be is to be the value of a bound variable”, 9 argues against quantified
modal logic and the essentialism it presupposes, 10 argues for Platonic realism
in mathematics, 11 argues for scientific realism and against instrumentalism,
12 develops a view of philosophical analysis as explication, 13 argues against
analyticity and for holism, 14 argues against countenancing propositions, and
15 argues that the meanings of theoretical sentences are indeterminate and that
the reference of terms is inscrutable. Quine’s subsequent writings have largely
been devoted to summing up, clarifying, and expanding on themes found in Word
and Object.
A.M. Quinton’s
Gedanke Experiment: from “Spaces and
Times,” Philosophy.“hardly Thought Out” – Is this apriori or a posteriori? H.
P. Grice. Space is ordinarily seen to be a
unique individual. All real things are contained in one and the same space, and
all spaces are part of the one space. In principle, every place can be reached
from every other place by traveling through intermediate places. The spatial
relation is symmetrical. Grice’s friend, A. M. Quinton devised a thought experiment
to challenge this picture. Suppose that we have richly coherent and connected
experience in our dreams just as we have in waking life, so that it becomes
arbitrary to claim that our dream experience is not of an objectively existing
world like the world of our waking experience. If the space of my waking world
and my dream world are not mutually accessible, it is unlikely that we are
justified in claiming to be living in a single spatially isolated world. Hence,
space is not essentially singular. In assessing this account, we might
distinguish between systematic and public physical space and fragmentary and
private experiential space. The two-space myth raises questions about how we
can justify moving from experiential space to objective space in the world as
it is. “We can at least conceive circumstances in which we should have good
reason to say that we know of real things located in two distinct spaces.”
Quinton, “Spaces and Times,” Philosophy 37
Radix
-- Radix
-- Grice often talked about logical atomism and molecular propositions – and
radix – which is an atomic metaphor -- Democritus, Grecian preSocratic
philosopher. He was born at Abdera, in Thrace. Building on Leucippus and his
atomism, he developed the atomic theory in The Little World-system and numerous
other writings. In response to the Eleatics’ argument that the impossibility of
not-being entailed that there is no change, the atomists posited the existence
of a plurality of tiny indivisible beings
the atoms and not-being the void, or empty space. Atoms do not come
into being or perish, but they do move in the void, making possible the
existence of a world, and indeed of many worlds. For the void is infinite in
extent, and filled with an infinite number of atoms that move and collide with
one another. Under the right conditions a concentration of atoms can begin a
vortex motion that draws in other atoms and forms a spherical heaven enclosing
a world. In our world there is a flat earth surrounded by heavenly bodies
carried by a vortex motion. Other worlds like ours are born, flourish, and die,
but their astronomical configurations may be different from ours and they need
not have living creatures in them. The atoms are solid bodies with countless
shapes and sizes, apparently having weight or mass, and capable of motion. All
other properties are in some way derivative of these basic properties. The
cosmic vortex motion causes a sifting that tends to separate similar atoms as
the sea arranges pebbles on the shore. For instance heavier atoms sink to the
center of the vortex, and lighter atoms such as those of fire rise upward.
Compound bodies can grow by the aggregations of atoms that become entangled
with one another. Living things, including humans, originally emerged out of
slime. Life is caused by fine, spherical soul atoms, and living things die when
these atoms are lost. Human culture gradually evolved through chance
discoveries and imitations of nature. Because the atoms are invisible and the
only real properties are properties of atoms, we cannot have direct knowledge
of anything. Tastes, temperatures, and colors we know only “by convention.” In
general the senses cannot give us anything but “bastard” knowledge; but there
is a “legitimate” knowledge based on reason, which takes over where the senses
leave off presumably demonstrating that
there are atoms that the senses cannot testify of. Democritus offers a causal
theory of perception sometimes called
the theory of effluxes accounting for
tastes in terms of certain shapes of atoms and for sight in terms of
“effluences” or moving films of atoms that impinge on the eye. Drawing on both
atomic theory and conventional wisdom, Democritus develops an ethics of
moderation. The aim of life is equanimity euthumiê, a state of balance achieved
by moderation and proportionate pleasures. Envy and ambition are incompatible
with the good life. Although Democritus was one of the most prolific writers of
antiquity, his works were all lost. Yet we can still identify his atomic theory
as the most fully worked out of pre-Socratic philosophies. His theory of matter
influenced Plato’s Timaeus, and his naturalist anthropology became the
prototype for liberal social theories. Democritus had no immediate successors,
but a century later Epicurus transformed his ethics into a philosophy of
consolation founded on atomism. Epicureanism thus became the vehicle through
which atomic theory was transmitted to the early modern period.
ramseyified
description. Grice enjoyed Ramsey’s Engish humour: if you can say
it, you can’t whistle it either. Applied by Grice in “Method.”Agent A is
in a D state just in case there is a predicate “D” introduced via implicit definition by
nomological generalisation L within theory θ, such L obtains, A
instantiates D. Grice distinguishes the ‘descriptor’ from a more primitive
‘name.’ The reference is to Ramsey. The issue is technical and relates to the
introduction of a predicate constant – something he would never have dared to
at Oxford with Gilbert Ryle and D. F. Pears next to him! But in the New World,
they loved a formalism! And of course Ramsey would not have anything to do with
it! Ramsey: p. r. – cited by Grice, “The Ramseyfied description. Frank Plumpton
330, influential 769 R 769 British
philosopher of logic and mathematics. His primary interests were in logic and
philosophy, but decades after his untimely death two of his publications
sparked new branches of economics, and in pure mathematics his combinatorial
theorems gave rise to “Ramsey theory” Economic Journal 7, 8; Proc. London Math.
Soc., 8. During his lifetime Ramsey’s philosophical reputation outside
Cambridge was based largely on his architectural reparation of Whitehead and
Russell’s Principia Mathematica, strengthening its claim to reduce mathematics
to the new logic formulated in Volume 1
a reduction rounded out by Vitters’s assessment of logical truths as
tautologous. Ramsey clarified this logicist picture of mathematics by radically
simplifying Russell’s ramified theory of types, eliminating the need for the
unarguable axiom of reducibility Proc. London Math. Soc., 5. His philosophical
work was published mostly after his death. The canon, established by Richard
Braithwaite The Foundations of Mathematics . . . , 1, remains generally intact
in D. H. Mellor’s edition Philosophical Papers, 0. Further writings of varying
importance appear in his Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics M. C.
Galavotti, ed., 1 and On Truth Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer, eds., 1. As
an undergraduate Ramsey observed that the redundancy account of truth “enables
us to rule out at once some theories of truth such as that ‘to be true’ means
‘to work’ or ‘to cohere’ since clearly ‘p works’ and ‘p coheres’ are not
equivalent to ‘p’.” Later, in the canonical “Truth and Probability” 6, he readdressed
to knowledge and belief the main questions ordinarily associated with truth,
analyzing probability as a mode of judgment in the framework of a theory of
choice under uncertainty. Reinvented and acknowledged by L. J. Savage
Foundations of Statistics, 4, this forms the theoretical basis of the currently
dominant “Bayesian” view of rational decision making. Ramsey cut his
philosophical teeth on Vitters’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. His translation
appeared in 2; a long critical notice of the work 3 was his first substantial
philosophical publication. His later role in Vitters’s rejection of the
Tractatus is acknowledged in the foreword to Philosophical Investigations 3.
The posthumous canon has been a gold mine. An example: “Propositions” 9, reading
the theoretical terms T, U, etc. of an axiomatized scientific theory as
variables, sees the theory’s content as conveyed by a “Ramsey sentence” saying
that for some T, U, etc., the theory’s axioms are true, a sentence in which all
extralogical terms are observational. Another example: “General Propositions
and Causality” 9, offering in a footnote the “Ramsey test” for acceptability of
conditionals, i.e., add the if-clause to your ambient beliefs minimally
modified to make the enlarged set self-consistent, and accept the conditional
if the then-clause follows. Refs:
“Philosophical psychology,” in BANC. ‘
Ramus, Petrus, in ,
Pierre de La Ramée, philosopher who questioned the authority of Aristotle and
influenced the methods and teaching of logic through the seventeenth century.
In 1543 he published his Dialecticae institutiones libri XV, and in 1555
reworked it as Dialectique the first
philosophical work in . He was appointed by François I as the first Regius
Professor of the of Paris, where he
taught until he was killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. Ramus
doubted that we can apodictically intuit the major premises required for
Aristotle’s rational syllogism. Turning instead to Plato, Ramus proposed that a
“Socratizing” of logic would produce a more workable and fruitful result. As
had Agricola and Sturm, he reworked the rhetorical and liberal arts traditions’
concepts of “invention, judgment, and practice,” placing “method” in the center
of judgment. Proceeding in these stages, we can “read” nature’s “arguments,”
because they are modeled on natural reasoning, which in turn can emulate the
reasoning by which God creates. Often his results were depicted graphically in
tables as in chapter IX of Hobbes’s Leviathan. When carefully done they would
show both what is known and where gaps require further investigation; the
process from invention to judgment is continuous. Ramus’s works saw some 750
editions in one century, fostering the “Ramist” movement in emerging Protestant
universities and the colonies. He
influenced Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Methodism, Cambridge Platonism, and Alsted in
Europe, and Hooker and Congregationalism in Puritan America. Inconsistencies
make him less than a major figure in the history of logic, but his many works
and their rapid popularity led to philosophical and educational efforts to
bring the world of learning to the “plain man” by using the vernacular, and by
more closely correlating the rigor of philosophy with the memorable and
persuasive powers of rhetoric; he saw this goal as Socratic.
Rashdall, Hastings 18584,
English historian, theologian, and personal idealist. While acknowledging that
Berkeley needed to be corrected by Kant, Rashdall defended Berkeley’s thesis
that objects only exist for minds. From this he concluded that there is a
divine mind that guarantees the existence of nature and the objectivity of
morality. In his most important philosophical work, The Theory of Good and Evil
7, Rashdall argued that actions are right or wrong according to whether they
produce well-being, in which pleasure as well as a virtuous disposition are
constituents. Rashdall coined the name ‘ideal utilitarianism’ for this view.
rational
choice: as oppose to irrational
choice. V. choose. Grice, “Impicatures of ‘choosing’” “Hobson’s choice, or
Hobson’s ‘choice’?” Pears on conversational implicature and choosing. That includes choosing in its meaning, and then it is easy to
ac- cept the suggestion that choosing might be an S-factor, and that the
hypothetical might be a Willkür:
one of Grice’s favourite words from Kant – “It’s so Kantish!” I told Pears
about this, and having found it’s cognate with English ‘choose,’ he immediately
set to write an essay on the topic!” f., ‘option, discretion, caprice,’ from
MidHG. willekür, f., ‘free
choice, free will’; gee kiesen and Kur-.kiesen, verb, ‘to select,’ from Middle
High German kiesen, Old
High German chiosan, ‘to
test, try, taste for the purpose of testing, test by tasting, select after
strict examination.’ Gothic kiusan,
Anglo-Saxon ceósan,
English to choose.
Teutonic root kus (with
the change of s into r, kur in the participle erkoren, see also Kur,
‘choice’), from pre-Teutonic gus,
in Latin gus-tus, gus-tare, Greek γεύω for γεύσω, Indian root juš, ‘to select, be fond of.’
Teutonic kausjun passed
as kusiti into
Slavonic. Insofar as a philosopher explains and predicts the actum as
consequences of a choice, which are themselves explained in terms of alleged
reasons, it must depict agents as to some extent rational. Rationality, like
reasons, involves evaluation, and just as one can assess the rationality of
individual choices, so one can assess the rationality of social choices and
examine how they are and ought to be related to the preferences and judgments
of the actor. In addition, there are intricate questions concerning rationality
in ‘strategic’ situations in which outcomes depend on the choices of multiple
individuals. Since rationality is a central concept in branches of philosophy
such as Grice’s pragmatics, action theory, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy
of mind, studies of rationality frequently cross the boundaries various
branches of philosophy. The barebones theory of rationality takes an
agent’s preferences,
i. e. his rankings of states of affairs, to be rational if they are complete
and transitive, and it takes the agent’s choice to be rational if the agent
does not prefer any feasible alternative to the one he chooses. Such a theory
of rationality is clearly too weak. It says nothing about belief or what
rationality implies when the agent does not know (with certainty) everything
relevant to his choice. It may also be too strong, since there is nothing
irrational about having incomplete preferences in situations involving
uncertainty. Sometimes it is rational to suspend judgment and to refuse to rank
alternatives that are not well understood. On the other hand, transitivity is a
plausible condition, and the so-called “money pump” argument demonstrates that
if one’s preferences are intransitive and one is willing to make exchanges,
then one can be exploited. Suppose an agent A prefers X to Y, Y to Z and Z to X, and
that A will
pay some small amount of money $P to exchange Y for X, Z for Y, and X for Z. That means
that, starting with Z, A will pay $P for Y, then $P again
for X,
then $P again
for Z and
so on. An agent need not be this stupid. He will instead refuse to trade or
adjust his preferences to eliminate the intransitivity. On the other hand, there
is evidence that an agent’s preferences are not in fact transitive. Such
evidence does not establish that transitivity is not a requirement of
rationality. It may show instead that an agent may sometimes not be rational.
In, e. g. the case of preference reversals,” it seems plausible that the agent
in fact makes the ‘irrational choice.’ Evidence of persistent violations of
transitivity is disquieting, since standards of rationality should not be
impossibly high. A further difficulty
with the barebones theory of rationality concerns the individuation of the
objects of preference or choice. Consider e. g. data from a multi-stage
ultimatum game. Suppose A can propose any division of $10 between A and B. B can
accept or reject A’s proposal. If B rejects the proposal, the amount
of money drops to $5, and B gets to offer a division of the $5 which A can
accept or reject. If A rejects B’s offer, both players get nothing.
Suppose that A proposes
to divide the money with $7 for A and $3 for B. B declines
and offers to split the $5 evenly, with $2.50 for each. Behaviour such as this
is, in fact, common. Assuming that B prefers more money to less,
these choices appear to be a violation of transitivity. B prefers
$3 to $2.50, yet declines $3 for certain for $2.50 (with some slight chance
of A declining
and B getting
nothing). But the objects of choice are not just quantities of money. B is
turning down $3 as part of “a raw deal” in favour of $2.50 as part of a fair
arrangement. If the objects of choice are defined in this way, there is no
failure of transitivity. This plausible
observation gives rise to a serious conceptual problem that Grice thinks he can
solve. Unless there are constraints on how the objects of choice are
individuated, conditions of rationality such as transitivity are empty. A’s choice
of X over Y, Y over Z and Z over X does
not violate transitivity if “X when the alternative is Y” is not the
same object of choice as “X when the alternative is Z”. A further
substantive principle of rationality isrequired to limit how alternatives are
individuated or to require that agents be indifferent between alternatives such
as “X when
the alternative is Y” and “X when the alternative is Z.” To extend
the theory of rationality to circumstances involving risk (where
the objects of choice are lotteries with known probabilities) and uncertainty
(where agents do not know the probabilities or even all the possible outcomes
of their choices) requires a further principle of rationality, as well as a
controversial technical simplification. Subjective Bayesians suppose that the
agent in circumstances of uncertainty has well-defined subjective probabilities
(degrees of belief) over all the payoffs and thus that the objects of choice
can be modeled as lotteries, just as in circumstances involving risk, though
with subjective probabilities in place of objective probabilities. The most
important of the axioms needed for the theory of rational choice under
conditions of risk and uncertainty is the independence condition. The
preferences of a rational agent between two lotteries that differ in only one
outcome should match his preferences between the differing outcomes. A
considerable part of Grice’s rational choice theory is concerned with
formalizations of conditions of rationality and investigation of their
implications. When they are complete and transitive and satisfy a further
continuity condition, the agent’s preferences can be represented by an ordinal
utility function, i. e. it is then possible to define a function that
represents an agent’s preferences so that U(X) > U(Y) iff if the
agent prefers X to Y, and U(X) = U(Y) iff if the
agent is indifferent between X and Y. This
function represents the preference ranking, and contains no information beyond
the ranking. When in addition they satisfy the independence condition, the
agent’s preferences can be represented by an expected utility function (Ramsey
1926). Such a function has two important properties. First, the expected
utility of a lottery is equal to the sum of the expected utilities of its
prizes weighted by their probabilities. Second, expected utility functions are
unique up to a positive affine transformation. If U and V are
both expected utility functions representing the preferences of an agent, for
all objects of preference, X, V(X) must be equal to aU(X) + b, where a and b are
real numbers and a is positive. The axioms of rationality imply that
the agent’s degrees of belief will satisfy the axioms of the probability
calculus. A great deal of controversy surrounds Grice’s theory of rationality,
and there have been many formal investigations into amendeding it. Although a
conversational pair is very different from this agent and this other agent, the
pair has a mechanism to evaluate alternatives and make a choice. The evaluation
and the choice may be rational or irrational. Pace Grice’s fruitful seminars on
rational helpfulness in cooperation, t is not, however, obvious, what
principles of rationality should govern the choices and evaluations of the
conversational dyad. Transitivity is one plausible condition. It seems that a
conversational dyad that chooses X when faced with the alternatives X or Y, Y when
faced with the alternatives Y or Z and Z when
faced with the alternatives X or Z, the conversational dyad has had “a
change of hearts” or is choosing ‘irrationally.’ Yet, purported irrationalities
such as these can easily arise from a standard mechanism that aims to link a
‘conversational choice’ and individual preferences. Suppose there are two
conversationalists in the dyad. Individual One ranks the alternatives X, Y, Z. Individual
Two ranks them Y, Z, X. (An Individual Three if he comes by, may ranks
them Z, X, Y). If
decisions are made by pairwise majority voting, X will be
chosen from the pair (X, Y), Y will be chosen from (Y, Z), and Z will be
chosen from (X, Z). Clearly
this is unsettling. But is a possible cycle in a ‘conversational choice’ “irrational”? Similar
problems affect what one might call the logical coherence of a conversational
judgment Suppose the dyad consists of two individuals who make the following
judgments concerning the truth or falsity of the propositions P and Q and
that “conversational” judgment follows the majority. P if P, Q Q
Conversationalist A true
true true Conversationalist B false true false (Conversationalist C, if he
passes by) true false false
“Conversation” as an Institution: true true false. The judgment of each
conversationalist is consistent with the principles of logic, while the
“conversational co-operative” judgment violates the principles of logic. The
“cooperative conversational,” “altruistic,” “joint judgment” need not be
consistent with the principles of egoist logic. Although conversational choice
theory bears on questions of conversational rationality, most work in
conversational choice theory explores the consequences of principles of
rationality coupled with this or that explicitly practical, or meta-ethical constraint.
Grice does not use ‘moral,’ since he distinguishes what he calls a
‘conversational maxim’ from a ‘moral maxim’ of the type Kant universalizes. Arrow’s
impossibility theorem assumes that an individual preference and a concerted,
joint preference are complete and transitive and that the method of forming a
conversational, concerted, joint preference (or making a conversational,
concerted, choice) issues in some joint preference ranking or joint choice for
any possible profile (or dossier, as Grice prefers) of each individual
preference. Arrow’s impossibility theorem imposes a weak UNANIMITY (one-soul)
condition. If A and B prefers X to Y, Y must
not jointly preferred. Arrow’s impossibility theorem requires that there be no
boss (call him Immanuel, the Genitor) whose preference determines a joint
preference or choice irrespective of the preferences of anybody else. Arrow’s
impossibility theorem imposes the condition that the joint concerted
conversational preference between X and Y should
depend on how A and B rank X and Y and on nothing else. Arrow’s
impossibility theorem proves that no method of co-relating or linking
conversational and a monogogic preference can satisfy all these conditions. If
an monopreference and a mono-evaluations both satisfy the axioms of expected
utility theory (with shared or objective probabilities) and that a
duo-preference conform to the unanimous mono-preference, a duo- evaluation is
determined by a weighted sum of individual utilities. A form of weighted futilitarianism,
which prioritizes the interests of the recipient, rather than the emissor,
uniquely satisfies a longer list of rational and practical constraints. When
there are instead disagreements in probability assignments, there is an impossibility
result. The unanimity (‘one-soul’) condition implies that for some profiles of
individual preferences, a joint or duo-evaluation will not satisfy the axioms
of expected utility theory. When outcomes depend on what at least two
autonomous free agents do, one agent’s best choice may depend on what the other
agent chooses. Although the principles of rationality governing mono-choice
still apply, there is a further principle of conversational rationality
governing the ‘expectation’ (to use Grice’s favourite term) of the action (or
conversational move) of one’s co-conversationalist (and obviously, via the
mutuality requirement of applicational universalizability) of the
co-conversationalist’s ‘expectation’ concerning the conversationalist’s action
and expectation, and so forth. Grice’s Conversational Game Theory plays a
protagonist role within philosophy, and it is relevant to inquiries concerning conversational
rationality and inquiries concerning conversational ethics. Rational choice --
Probability -- Dutch book, a bet or combination of bets whereby the bettor is
bound to suffer a net loss regardless of the outcome. A simple example would be
a bet on a proposition p at odds of 3 : 2 combined with a bet on not-p at the
same odds, the total amount of money at stake in each bet being five dollars.
Under this arrangement, if p turned out to be true one would win two dollars by
the first bet but lose three dollars by the second, and if p turned out to be
false one would win two dollars by the second bet but lose three dollars by the
first. Hence, whatever happened, one would lose a dollar. Dutch book argument, the argument that a
rational person’s degrees of belief must conform to the axioms of the
probability calculus, since otherwise, by the Dutch book theorem, he would be
vulnerable to a Dutch book. R.Ke. Dutch book theorem, the proposition that
anyone who a counts a bet on a proposition p as fair if the odds correspond to
his degree of belief that p is true and who b is willing to make any
combination of bets he would regard individually as fair will be vulnerable to
a Dutch book provided his degrees of belief do not conform to the axioms of the
probability calculus. Thus, anyone of whom a and b are true and whose degree of
belief in a disjunction of two incompatible propositions is not equal to the
sum of his degrees of belief in the two propositions taken individually would
be vulnerable to a Dutch book.
rational
decision theory -- decidability, as a property of sets,
the existence of an effective procedure a “decision procedure” which, when
applied to any object, determines whether or not the object belongs to the set.
A theory or logic is decidable if and only if the set of its theorems is.
Decidability is proved by describing a decision procedure and showing that it
works. The truth table method, for example, establishes that classical
propositional logic is decidable. To prove that something is not decidable
requires a more precise characterization of the notion of effective procedure.
Using one such characterization for which there is ample evidence, Church
proved that classical predicate logic is not decidable. decision theory, the
theory of rational decision, often called “rational choice theory” in political
science and other social sciences. The basic idea probably Pascal’s was
published at the end of Arnaud’s Port-Royal Logic 1662: “To judge what one must
do to obtain a good or avoid an evil one must consider not only the good and
the evil in itself but also the probability of its happening or not happening,
and view geometrically the proportion that all these things have together.”
Where goods and evils are monetary, Daniel Bernoulli 1738 spelled the idea out
in terms of expected utilities as figures of merit for actions, holding that
“in the absence of the unusual, the utility resulting from a fixed small
increase in wealth will be inversely proportional to the quantity of goods
previously possessed.” This was meant to solve the St. Petersburg paradox:
Peter tosses a coin . . . until it should land “heads” [on toss n]. . . . He
agrees to give Paul one ducat if he gets “heads” on the very first throw [and]
with each additional throw the number of ducats he must pay is doubled. . . .
Although the standard calculation shows that the value of Paul’s expectation
[of gain] is infinitely great [i.e., the sum of all possible gains $
probabilities, 2n/2 $ ½n], it has . . . to be admitted that any fairly
reasonable man would sell his chance, with great pleasure, for twenty ducats.
In this case Paul’s expectation of utility is indeed finite on Bernoulli’s
assumption of inverse proportionality; but as Karl Menger observed 4,
Bernoulli’s solution fails if payoffs are so large that utilities are inversely
proportional to probabilities; then only boundedness of utility scales resolves
the paradox. Bernoulli’s idea of diminishing marginal utility of wealth
survived in the neoclassical texts of W. S. Jevons 1871, Alfred Marshall 0, and
A. C. Pigou 0, where personal utility judgment was understood to cause
preference. But in the 0s, operationalistic arguments of John Hicks and R. G.
D. Allen persuaded economists that on the contrary, 1 utility is no cause but a
description, in which 2 the numbers indicate preference order but not
intensity. In their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior 6, John von Neumann
and Oskar Morgenstern undid 2 by pushing 1 further: ordinal preferences among
risky prospects were now seen to be describable on “interval” scales of
subjective utility like the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales for temperature, so
that once utilities, e.g., 0 and 1, are assigned to any prospect and any
preferred one, utilities of all prospects are determined by overall preferences
among gambles, i.e., probability distributions over prospects. Thus, the
utility midpoint between two prospects is marked by the distribution assigning
probability ½ to each. In fact, Ramsey had done that and more in a
little-noticed essay “Truth and Probability,” 1 teasing subjective
probabilities as well as utilities out of ordinal preferences among gambles. In
a form independently invented by L. J. Savage Foundations of Statistics, 4,
this approach is now widely accepted as a basis for rational decision analysis.
The 8 book of that title by Howard Raiffa became a theoretical centerpiece of
M.B.A. curricula, whose graduates diffused it through industry, government, and
the military in a simplified format for defensible decision making, namely,
“costbenefit analyses,” substituting expected numbers of dollars, deaths, etc.,
for preference-based expected utilities. Social choice and group decision form
the native ground of interpersonal comparison of personal utilities. Thus, John
C. Harsanyi 5 proved that if 1 individual and social preferences all satisfy
the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms, and 2 society is indifferent between two
prospects whenever all individuals are, and 3 society prefers one prospect to
another whenever someone does and nobody has the opposite preference, then
social utilities are expressible as sums of individual utilities on interval
scales obtained by stretching or compressing the individual scales by amounts
determined by the social preferences. Arguably, the theorem shows how to derive
interpersonal comparisons of individual preference intensities from social
preference orderings that are thought to treat individual preferences on a par.
Somewhat earlier, Kenneth Arrow had written that “interpersonal comparison of
utilities has no meaning and, in fact, there is no meaning relevant to welfare
economics in the measurability of individual utility” Social Choice and
Individual Values, 1 a position later
abandoned P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and
Society, 7. Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” is illustrated by cyclic preferences
observed by Condorcet in 1785 among candidates A, B, C of voters 1, 2, 3, who
rank them ABC, BCA, CAB, respectively, in decreasing order of preference, so
that majority rule yields intransitive preferences for the group of three, of
whom two 1, 3 prefer A to B and two 1, 2 prefer B to C but two 2, 3 prefer C to
A. In general, the theorem denies existence of technically democratic schemes
for forming social preferences from citizens’ preferences. A clause
tendentiously called “independence of irrelevant alternatives” in the
definition of ‘democratic’ rules out appeal to preferences among non-candidates
as a way to form social preferences among candidates, thus ruling out the
preferences among gambles used in Harsanyi’s theorem. See John Broome, Weighing
Goods, 1, for further information and references. Savage derived the agent’s
probabilities for states as well as utilities for consequences from preferences
among abstract acts, represented by deterministic assignments of consequences
to states. An act’s place in the preference ordering is then reflected by its
expected utility, a probability-weighted average of the utilities of its
consequences in the various states. Savage’s states and consequences formed
distinct sets, with every assignment of consequences to states constituting an
act. While Ramsey had also taken acts to be functions from states to
consequences, he took consequences to be propositions sets of states, and
assigned utilities to states, not consequences. A further step in that
direction represents acts, too, by propositions see Ethan Bolker, Functions
Resembling Quotients of Measures,
Microfilms, 5; and Richard Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision, 5, 0.
Bolker’s representation theorem states conditions under which preferences
between truth of propositions determine probabilities and utilities nearly
enough to make the position of a proposition in one’s preference ranking
reflect its “desirability,” i.e., one’s expectation of utility conditionally on
it. decision theory decision theory 208
208 Alongside such basic properties as transitivity and connexity, a
workhorse among Savage’s assumptions was the “sure-thing principle”:
Preferences among acts having the same consequences in certain states are
unaffected by arbitrary changes in those consequences. This implies that agents
see states as probabilistically independent of acts, and therefore implies that
an act cannot be preferred to one that dominates it in the sense that the
dominant act’s consequences in each state have utilities at least as great as
the other’s. Unlike the sure thing principle, the principle ‘Choose so as to
maximize CEU conditional expectation of utility’ rationalizes action aiming to
enhance probabilities of preferred states of nature, as in quitting cigarettes
to increase life expectancy. But as Nozick pointed out in 9, there are problems
in which choiceworthiness goes by dominance rather than CEU, as when the smoker
like R. A. Fisher in 9 believes that the statistical association between
smoking and lung cancer is due to a genetic allele, possessors of which are
more likely than others to smoke and to contract lung cancer, although among
them smokers are not especially likely to contract lung cancer. In such
“Newcomb” problems choices are ineffectual signs of conditions that agents
would promote or prevent if they could. Causal decision theories modify the CEU
formula to obtain figures of merit distinguishing causal efficacy from
evidentiary significance e.g., replacing
conditional probabilities by probabilities of counterfactual conditionals; or
forming a weighted average of CEU’s under all hypotheses about causes, with
agents’ unconditional probabilities of hypotheses as weights; etc. Mathematical
statisticians leery of subjective probability have cultivated Abraham Wald’s
Theory of Statistical Decision Functions 0, treating statistical estimation,
experimental design, and hypothesis testing as zero-sum “games against nature.”
For an account of the opposite assimilation, of game theory to probabilistic
decision theory, see Skyrms, Dynamics of Rational Deliberation 0. The
“preference logics” of Sören Halldén, The Logic of ‘Better’ 7, and G. H. von
Wright, The Logic of Preference 3, sidestep probability. Thus, Halldén holds
that when truth of p is preferred to truth of q, falsity of q must be preferred
to falsity of p, and von Wright with Aristotle holds that “this is more
choiceworthy than that if this is choiceworthy without that, but that is not
choiceworthy without this” Topics III, 118a. Both principles fail in the
absence of special probabilistic assumptions, e.g., equiprobability of p with
q. Received wisdom counts decision theory clearly false as a description of
human behavior, seeing its proper status as normative. But some, notably
Davidson, see the theory as constitutive of the very concept of preference, so
that, e.g., preferences can no more be intransitive than propositions can be at
once true and false. Rational decision:
envelope paradox, an apparent paradox in decision theory that runs as follows.
You are shown two envelopes, M and N, and are reliably informed that each
contains some finite positive amount of money, that the amount in one
unspecified envelope is twice the amount in the unspecified other, and that you
may choose only one. Call the amount in M ‘m’ and that in N ‘n’. It might seem
that: there is a half chance that m % 2n and a half chance that m = n/2, so
that the “expected value” of m is ½2n ! ½n/2 % 1.25n, so that you should prefer
envelope M. But by similar reasoning it might seem that the expected value of n
is 1.25m, so that you should prefer envelope N.
rationality – while Grice
never used to employ ‘rationality’ he learned to! In “Retrospective epilogue”
in fact he refers to the principle of conversational helpfulness as ‘promoting
conversational rationality.’ Rationality as a faculty psychology, the view that
the mind is a collection of departments responsible for distinct psychological
functions. Related to faculty psychology is the doctrine of localization of
function, wherein each faculty has a specific brain location. Faculty
psychologies oppose theories of mind as a unity with one function e.g., those
of Descartes and associationism or as a unity with various capabilities e.g.,
that of Ockham, and oppose the related holistic distributionist or mass-action
theory of the brain. Faculty psychology began with Aristotle, who divided the
human soul into five special senses, three inner senses common sense,
imagination, memory and active and passive mind. In the Middle Ages e.g.,
Aquinas Aristotle’s three inner senses were subdivied, creating more elaborate
lists of five to seven inward wits. Islamic physicianphilosophers such as
Avicenna integrated Aristotelian faculty psychology with Galenic medicine by
proposing brain locations for the faculties. Two important developments in faculty
psychology occurred during the eighteenth century. First, Scottish philosophers
led by Reid developed a version of faculty psychology opposed to the empiricist
and associationist psychologies of Locke and Hume. The Scots proposed that
humans were endowed by God with a set of faculties permitting knowledge of the
world and morality. The Scottish system exerted considerable influence in the
United States, where it was widely taught as a moral, character-building
discipline, and in the nineteenth century this “Old Psychology” opposed the
experimental “New Psychology.” Second, despite then being called a charlatan,
Franz Joseph Gall 17581828 laid the foundation for modern neuropsychology in
his work on localization of function. Gall rejected existing faculty
psychologies as philosophical, unbiological, and incapable of accounting for
everyday behavior. Gall proposed an innovative behavioral and biological list
of faculties and brain localizations based on comparative anatomy, behavior
study, and measurements of the human skull. Today, faculty psychology survives
in trait and instinct theories of personality, Fodor’s theory that mental
functions are implemented by neurologically “encapsulated” organs, and
localizationist theories of the brain.
rationalism, the position
that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge, or, more
strongly, that it is the unique path to knowledge. It is most often encountered
as a view in epistemology, where it is traditionally contrasted with
empiricism, the view that the senses are primary with respect to knowledge. It
is important here to distinguish empiricism with respect to knowledge from
empiricism with respect to ideas or concepts; whereas the former is opposed to
rationalism, the latter is opposed to the doctrine of innate ideas. The term is
also encountered in the philosophy of religion, where it may designate those
who oppose the view that revelation is central to religious knowledge; and in
ethics, where it may designate those who oppose the view that ethical
principles are grounded in or derive from emotion, empathy, or some other
non-rational foundation. The term ‘rationalism’ does not generally designate a
single precise philosophical position; there are several ways in which reason
can have precedence, and several accounts of knowledge to which it may be
opposed. Furthermore, the very term ‘reason’ is not altogether clear. Often it
designates a faculty of the soul, distinct from sensation, imagination, and
memory, which is the ground of a priori knowledge. But there are other
conceptions of reason, such as the narrower conception in which Pascal opposes
reason to “knowledge of the heart” Pensées, section 110, or the computational
conception of reason Hobbes advances in Leviathan I.5. The term might thus be
applied to a number of philosophical positions from the ancients down to the
present. Among the ancients, ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ especially denote
two schools of medicine, the former relying primarily on a theoretical
knowledge of the hidden workings of the human body, the latter relying on
direct clinical experience. The term might also be used to characterize the
views of Plato and later Neoplatonists, who argued that we have pure
intellectual access to the Forms and general principles that govern reality,
and rejected sensory knowledge of the imperfect realization of those Forms in
the material world. In recent philosophical writing, the term ‘rationalism’ is
most closely associated with the positions of a group of seventeenth-century
philosophers, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and sometimes Malebranche. These
thinkers are often referred to collectively as the Continental rationalists,
and are generally opposed to the socalled British empiricists, Locke, Berkeley,
and Hume. All of the former share the view that we have a non-empirical and
rational access to the truth about the way the world is, and all privilege
reason over knowledge derived from the senses. These philosophers are also
attracted to mathematics as a model for knowledge in general. But these common
views are developed in quite different ways. Descartes claims to take his
inspiration from mathematics not
mathematics as commonly understood, but the analysis of the ancients. According
to Descartes, we start from first principles known directly by reason the
cogito ergo sum of the Meditations, what he calls intuition in his Rules for
the Direction of the Mind; all other knowledge is deduced from there. A central
aim of his Meditations is to show that this faculty of reason is trustworthy.
The senses, on the other hand, are generally deceptive, leading us to mistake
sensory qualities for real qualities of extended bodies, and leading us to the
false philosophy of Aristotle and to Scholasticism. Descartes does not reject
the senses altogether; in Meditation VI he argues that the senses are most
often correct in circumstances concerning the preservation of life. Perhaps
paradoxically, experiment is important to Descartes’s scientific work. However,
his primary interest is in the theoretical account of the phenomena experiment
reveals, and while his position is unclear, he may have considered experiment
as an auxiliary to intuition and deduction, or as a second-best method that can
be used with problems too complex for pure reason. Malebranche, following
Descartes, takes similar views in his Search after Truth, though unlike
Descartes, he emphasizes original sin as the cause of our tendency to trust the
senses. Spinoza’s model for knowledge is Euclidean geometry, as realized in the
geometrical form of the Ethics. Spinoza explicitly argues that we cannot have
adequate ideas of the world through sensation Ethics II, propositions 1631. In
the Ethics he does see a role for the senses in what he calls knowledge of the
first and knowledge of the second kinds, and in the earlier Emendation of the
Intellect, he suggests that the senses may be auxiliary aids to genuine
knowledge. But the senses are imperfect and far less valuable, according to
Spinoza, than intuition, i.e., knowledge of the third kind, from which sensory
experience is excluded. Spinoza’s rationalism is implicit in a central
proposition of the Ethics, in accordance with which “the order and connection
of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” Ethics II,
proposition 7, allowing one to infer causal connections between bodies and
states of the material world directly from the logical connections between
ideas. Leibniz, too, emphasizes reason over the senses in a number of ways. In
his youth he believed that it would be possible to calculate the truth-value of
every sentence by constructing a logical language whose structure mirrors the
structure of relations between concepts in the world. This view is reflected in
his mature thought in the doctrine that in every truth, the concept of the
predicate is contained in the concept of the subject, so that if one could take
the God’s-eye view which, he concedes, we cannot, one could determine the truth
or falsity of any proposition without appeal to experience Discourse on
Metaphysics, section 8. Leibniz also argues that all truths are based on two
basic principles, the law of non-contradiction for necessary truths, and the
principle of sufficient reason for contingent truths Monadology, section 31,
both of which can be known a priori. And so, at least in principle, the
truth-values of all propositions can be determined a priori. This reflects his
practice in physics, where he derives a number of laws of motion from the
principle of the equality of cause and effect, which can be known a priori on
the basis of the principle of sufficient reason. But, at the same time,
referring to the empirical school of ancient medicine, Leibniz concedes that
“we are all mere Empirics in three fourths of our actions” Monadology, section
28. Each of the so-called Continental rationalists does, in his own way,
privilege reason over the senses. But the common designation ‘Continental
rationalism’ arose only much later, probably in the nineteenth century. For
their contemporaries, more impressed with their differences than their common
doctrines, the Continental rationalists did not form a single homogeneous
school of thought.
rationality. In its
primary sense, rationality is a normative concept that philosophers have
generally tried to characterize in such a way that, for any action, belief, or
desire, if it is rational we ought to choose it. No such positive
characterization has achieved anything close to universal assent because,
often, several competing actions, beliefs, or desires count as rational. Equating
what is rational with what is rationally required eliminates the category of
what is rationally allowed. Irrationality seems to be the more fundamental
normative category; for although there are conflicting substantive accounts of
irrationality, all agree that to say of an action, belief, or desire that it is
irrational is to claim that it should always be avoided. Rationality is also a
descriptive concept that refers to those intellectual capacities, usually
involving the ability to use language, that distinguish persons from plants and
most other animals. There is some dispute about whether some non-human animals,
e.g., dolphins and chimpanzees, are rational in this sense. Theoretical
rationality applies to beliefs. An irrational belief is one that obviously
conflicts with what one should know. This characterization of an irrational
belief is identical with the psychiatric characterization of a delusion. It is
a personrelative concept, because what obviously conflicts with what should be
known by one person need not obviously conflict with what should be known by
another. On this account, any belief that is not irrational counts as rational.
Many positive characterizations of rational beliefs have been proposed, e.g., 1
beliefs that are either self-evident or derived from self-evident beliefs by a
reliable procedure and 2 beliefs that are consistent with the overwhelming
majority of one’s beliefs; but all of these positive characterizations have
encountered serious objections. Practical rationality applies to actions. For
some philosophers it is identical to instrumental rationality. On this view,
commonly called instrumentalism, acting rationally simply means acting in a way
that is maximally efficient in achieving one’s goals. However, most
philosophers realize that achieving one goal may conflict with achieving
another, and therefore require that a rational action be one that best achieves
one’s goals only when these goals are considered as forming a system. Others
have added that all of these goals must be ones that would be chosen given
complete knowledge and understanding of what it would be like to achieve these
goals. On the latter account of rational action, the system of goals is chosen
by all persons for themselves, and apart from consistency there is no external
standpoint from which to evaluate rationally any such system. Thus, for a
person with a certain system of goals it will be irrational to act morally.
Another account of rational action is not at all person-relative. On this
account, to act rationally is to act on universalizable principles, so that
what is a reason for one person must be a reason for everyone. One point of
such an account is to make it rationally required to act morally, thus making
all immoral action irrational. However, if to call an action irrational is to
claim that everyone would hold that it is always to be avoided, then it is
neither irrational to act immorally in order to benefit oneself or one’s
friends, nor irrational to act morally even when that goes against one’s system
of goals. Only a negative characterization of what is rational as what is not
irrational, which makes it rationally permissible to act either morally or in
accordance with one’s own system of goals, as long as these goals meet some
minimal objective standard, seems likely to be adequate.
rationalization, 1 an
apparent explanation of a person’s action or attitude by appeal to reasons that
would justify or exculpate the person for it
if, contrary to fact, those reasons were to explain it; 2 an explanation
or interpretation made from a rational perspective. In sense 1,
rationalizations are pseudo-explanations, often motivated by a desire to
exhibit an item in a favorable light. Such rationalizations sometimes involve
self-deception. Depending on one’s view of justification, a rationalization
might justify an action by adducing
excellent reasons for its performance
even if the agent, not having acted for those reasons, deserves no
credit for so acting. In sense 2 a sense popularized in philosophy by Donald
Davidson, rationalizations of intentional actions are genuine explanations in
terms of agents’ reasons. In this sense, we provide a rationalization for or “rationalize” Robert’s shopping at Zed’s by identifying the
reasons for which he does so: e.g., he wants to buy an excellent kitchen knife
and believes that Zed’s sells the best cutlery in town. Also, the reasons for
which an agent acts may themselves be said to rationalize the action. Beliefs,
desires, and intentions may be similarly rationalized. In each case, a
rationalization exhibits the rationalized item as, to some degree, rational
from the standpoint of the person to whom it is attributed.
rational psychology, the
a priori study of the mind. This was a large component of eighteenthand nineteenth-century
psychology, and was contrasted by its exponents with empirical psychology,
which is rooted in contingent experience. The term ‘rational psychology’ may
also designate a mind, or form of mind, having the property of rationality.
Current philosophy of mind includes much discussion of rational psychologies,
but the notion is apparently ambiguous. On one hand, there is rationality as
intelligibility. This is a minimal coherence, say of desires or inferences,
that a mind must possess to be a mind. For instance, Donald Davidson, many
functionalists, and some decision theorists believe there are principles of
rationality of this sort that constrain the appropriate attribution of beliefs
and desires to a person, so that a mind must meet such constraints if it is to
have beliefs and desires. On another pole, there is rationality as
justification. For someone’s psychology to have this property is for that
psychology to be as reason requires it to be, say for that person’s inferences
and desires to be supported by proper reasons given their proper weight, and
hence to be justified. Rationality as justification is a normative property,
which it would seem some minds lack. But despite the apparent differences
between these two sorts of rationality, some important work in philosophy of
mind implies either that these two senses in fact collapse, or at least that
there are intervening and significant senses, so that things at least a lot
like normative principles constrain what our psychologies are.
rational reconstruction,
also called logical reconstruction, translation of a discourse of a certain
conceptual type into a discourse of another conceptual type with the aim of
making it possible to say everything or everything important that is
expressible in the former more clearly or perspicuously in the latter. The
best-known example is one in Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau der Welt. Carnap
attempted to translate discourse concerning physical objects e.g., ‘There is a
round brown table’ into discourse concerning immediate objects of sense
experience ‘Color patches of such-and-such chromatic characteristics and shape
appear in such-and-such a way’. He was motivated by the empiricist doctrine
that immediate sense experience is conceptually prior to everything else, including
our notion of a physical object. In addition to talk of immediate sense
experience, Carnap relied on logic and set theory. Since their use is difficult
to reconcile with strict empiricism, his translation would not have fully
vindicated empiricism even if it had succeeded.
Rationality -- reasons
for action, considerations that call for or justify action. They may be
subjective or objective. A subjective reason is a consideration an agent
understands to support a course of action, whether or not it actually does. An
objective reason is one that does support a course of action, regardless of
whether the agent realizes it. What are cited as reasons may be matters either
of fact or of value, but when facts are cited values are also relevant. Thus
the fact that cigarette smoke contains nicotine is a reason for not smoking
only because nicotine has undesirable effects. The most important evaluative
reasons are normative reasons i.e.,
considerations having e.g. ethical force. Facts become obligating reasons when,
in conjunction with normative considerations, they give rise to an obligation.
Thus in view of the obligation to help the needy, the fact that others are
hungry is an obligating reason to see they are fed. Reasons for action enter
practical thinking as the contents of beliefs, desires, and other mental
states. But not all the reasons one has need motivate the corresponding
behavior. Thus I may recognize an obligation to pay taxes, yet do so only for
fear of punishment. If so, then only my fear is an explaining reason for my
action. An overriding reason is one that takes precedence over all others. It
is often claimed that moral reasons override all others objectively, and should
do so subjectively as well. Finally, one may speak of an all-things-considered
reason one that after due consideration
is taken as finally determinative of what shall be done. reasons for belief, roughly, bases of
belief. The word ‘belief’ is commonly used to designate both a particular sort
of psychological state, a state of believing, and a particular intentional
content or proposition believed. Reasons for belief exhibit an analogous
duality. A proposition, p, might be said to provide a normative reason to
believe a proposition, q, for instance, when p bears some appropriate
warranting relation to q. And p might afford a perfectly good reason to believe
q, even though no one, as a matter of fact, believes either p or q. In
contrast, p is a reason that I have for believing q, if I believe p and p
counts as a reason in the sense above to believe q. Undoubtedly, I have reason
to believe countless propositions that I shall never, as it happens, come to
believe. Suppose, however, that p is a reason for which I believe q. In that
case, I must believe both p and q, and p must be a reason to believe q or, at any rate, I must regard it as such. It
may be that I must, in addition, believe q at least in part because I believe
p. Reasons in these senses are inevitably epistemic; they turn on considerations
of evidence, truth-conduciveness, and the like. But not all reasons for belief
are of this sort. An explanatory reason, a reason why I believe p, may simply
be an explanation for my having or coming to have this belief. Perhaps I
believe p because I was brainwashed, or struck on the head, or because I have
strong non-epistemic motives for this belief. I might, of course, hold the
belief on the basis of unexceptionable epistemic grounds. When this is so, my
believing p may both warrant and explain my believing q. Reflections of this sort
can lead to questions concerning the overall or “all-things-considered”
reasonableness of a given belief. Some philosophers e.g., Clifford argue that a
belief’s reasonableness depends exclusively on its epistemic standing: my
believing p is reasonable for me provided it is epistemically reasonable for
me; where belief is concerned, epistemic reasons are overriding. Others, siding
with James, have focused on the role of belief in our psychological economy,
arguing that the reasonableness of my holding a given belief can be affected by
a variety of non-epistemic considerations. Suppose I have some evidence that p
is false, but that I stand to benefit in a significant way from coming to
believe p. If that is so, and if the practical advantages of my holding p
considerably outweigh the practical disadvantages, it might seem obvious that
my holding p is reasonable for me in some all-embracing sense.
Rawls, John b.1, philosopher widely recognized as one of the
leading political philosophers of the twentieth century. His A Theory of
Justice 1 is one of the primary texts in political philosophy. Political
Liberalism 3 revises Rawls’s theory to make his conception of justice
compatible with liberal pluralism, but leaves the core of his conception
intact. Drawing on the liberal and democratic social contract traditions of
Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, Rawls argues that the most reasonable principles of
justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position.
Since these principles determine the justice of society’s political
constitution, economy, and property rules its “basic structure”, Rawls takes a
fair agreement situation to be one where everyone is impartially situated as
equals. In this so-called original position everyone is equally situated by a
hypothetical “veil of ignorance.” This veil requires individuals to set aside
their knowledge of their particular differences, including knowledge of their
talents, wealth, social position, religious and philosophical views, and
particular conceptions of value. Rawls argues that in the hypothetical original
position everyone would reject utilitarianism, perfectionism, and intuitionist
views. Instead they would unanimously accept justice as fairness. This
conception of justice consists mainly of two principles. The first principle
says that certain liberties are basic and are to be equally provided to all:
liberty of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of association, equal
political liberties, freedom and integrity of the person, and the liberties that
maintain the rule of law. These are basic liberties, because they are necessary
to exercise one’s “moral powers.” The two moral powers are, first, the capacity
to be rational, to have a rational conception of one’s good; and second, the
capacity for a sense of justice, to understand, apply, and act from
requirements of justice. These powers constitute essential interests of free
and equal moral persons since they enable each person to be a free and
responsible agent taking part in social cooperation. Rawls’s second principle
of justice, the difference principle, regulates permissible differences in
rights, powers, and privileges. It defines the limits of inequalities in
wealth, income, powers, and positions that may exist in a just society. It
says, first, that social positions are to be open to all to compete for on
terms of fair equality of opportunity. Second, inequalities in wealth, income,
and social powers and positions are permissible only if they maximally benefit
the least advantaged class in society. The difference principle implies that a
just economic system distributes income and wealth so as to make the class of
least advantaged persons better off than they would be under any alternative
economic system. This principle is to be consistent with the “priority” of the
first principle, which requires that equal basic liberties cannot be traded for
other benefits. The least advantaged’s right to vote, for example, cannot be
limited for the sake of improving their relative economic position. Instead, a
basic liberty can be limited only for the sake of maintaining other basic
liberties. Rawls contends that, taking the two principles of justice together,
a just society maximizes the worth to the least advantaged of the basic
liberties shared by all Theory, p. 205. The priority of basic liberty implies a
liberal egalitarian society in which each person is ensured adequate resources
to effectively exercise her basic liberties and become independent and
self-governing. A just society is then governed by a liberal-democratic
constitution that protects the basic liberties and provides citizens with
equally effective rights to participate in electoral processes and influence
legislation. Economically a just society incorporates a modified market system
that extensively distributes income and wealth
either a “property-owning democracy” with widespread ownership of means
of production, or liberal socialism.
Ray, J. English
naturalist whose work on the structure and habits of plants and animals led to
important conclusions on the methodology of classification and gave a strong
impetus to the design argument in natural theology. In an early paper he argued
that the determining characteristics of a species are those transmitted by
seed, since color, scent, size, etc., vary with climate and nutriment.
Parallels from the animal kingdom suggested the correct basis for
classification would be structural. But we have no knowledge of real essences.
Our experience of nature is of a continuum, and for practical purposes kinships
are best identified by a plurality of criteria. His mature theory is set out in
Dissertatio Brevis 1696 and Methodus Emendata 1703. The Wisdom of God
Manifested in the Works of the Creation 1691 and three revisions was a
best-selling compendium of Ray’s own scientific learning and was imitated and
quarried by many later exponents of the design argument. Philosophically, he
relied on others, from Cicero to Cudworth, and was superseded by Paley.
Realism – causal realism
-- direct realism, the theory that perceiving is epistemically direct,
unmediated by conscious or unconscious inference. Direct realism is
distinguished, on the one hand, from indirect, or representative, realism, the
view that perceptual awareness of material objects is mediated by an awareness
of sensory representations, and, on the other hand, from forms of phenomenalism
that identify material objects with states of mind. It might be thought that
direct realism is incompatible with causal theories of perception. Such
theories invoke causal chains leading from objects perceived causes to
perceptual states of perceivers effects. Since effects must be distinct from
causes, the relation between an instance of perceiving and an object perceived,
it would seem, cannot be direct. This, however, confuses epistemic directness
with causal directness. A direct realist need only be committed to the former.
In perceiving a tomato to be red, the content of my perceptual awareness is the
tomato’s being red. I enter this state as a result of a complex causal process,
perhaps. But my perception may be direct in the sense that it is unmediated by
an awareness of a representational sensory state from which I am led to an
awareness of the tomato. Perceptual error, and more particularly,
hallucinations and illusions, are usually thought to pose special difficulties
for direct realists. My hallucinating a red tomato, for instance, is not my
being directly aware of a red tomato, since I may hallucinate the tomato even
when none is present. Perhaps, then, my hallucinating a red tomato is partly a
matter of my being directly aware of a round, red sensory representation. And
if my awareness in this case is indistinguishable from my perception of an
actual red tomato, why not suppose that I am aware of a sensory representation
in the veridical case as well? A direct realist may respond by denying that
hallucinations are in fact indistinguishable from veridical perceivings or by
calling into question the claim that, if sensory representations are required
to explain hallucinations, they need be postulated in the veridical case. reality, in standard philosophical usage, how
things actually are, in contrast with their mere appearance. Appearance has to
do with how things seem to a particular perceiver or group of perceivers.
Reality is sometimes said to be twoway-independent of appearance. This means
that appearance does not determine reality. First, no matter how much agreement
there is, based on appearance, about the nature of reality, it is always
conceivable that reality differs from appearance. Secondly, appearances are in
no way required for reality: reality can outstrip the range of all
investigations that we are in a position to make. It may be that reality always
brings with it the possibility of appearances, in the counterfactual sense that
if there were observers suitably situated, then if conditions were not
conducive to error, they would have experiences of such-and-such a kind. But
the truth of such a counterfactual seems to be grounded in the facts of reality.
Phenomenalism holds, to the contrary, that the facts of reality can be
explained by such counterfactuals, but phenomenalists have failed to produce
adequate non-circular analyses. The concept of reality on which it is
two-wayindependent of experience is sometimes called objective reality.
However, Descartes used this phrase differently, to effect a contrast with
formal or actual reality. He held that there must be at least as much reality
in the efficient and total cause of an effect as in the effect itself, and
applied this principle as follows: “There must be at least as much actual or
formal reality in the efficient and total cause of an idea as objective reality
in the idea itself.” The objective reality of an idea seems to have to do with
its having representational content, while actual or formal reality has to do
with existence independent of the mind. Thus the quoted principle relates
features of the cause of an idea to the representational content of the idea.
Descartes’s main intended applications were to God and material objects.
recursive function
theory, a relatively recent area of mathematics that takes as its point of
departure the study of an extremely limited class of arithmetic functions
called the recursive functions. Strictly speaking, recursive function theory is
a branch of higher arithmetic number theory, or the theory of natural numbers
whose universe of discourse is restricted to the nonnegative integers: 0, 1, 2,
etc. However, the techniques and results of the newer area do not resemble
those traditionally associated with number theory. The class of recursive
functions is defined in a way that makes evident that every recursive function
can be computed or calculated. The hypothesis that every calculable function is
recursive, which is known as Church’s thesis, is often taken as a kind of axiom
in recursive function theory. This theory has played an important role in
modern philosophy of mathematics, especially when epistemological issues are
studied.
redintegration, a
psychological process, similar to or involving classical conditioning, in which
one feature of a situation causes a person to recall, visualize, or recompose
an entire original situation. On opening a pack of cigarettes, a person may
visualize the entire process, including striking the match, lighting the
cigarette, and puffing. Redintegration is used as a technique in behavior
therapy, e.g. when someone trying to refrain from smoking is exposed to
unpleasant odors and vivid pictures of lungs caked with cancer, and then
permitted to smoke. If the unpleasantness of the odors and visualization
outweighs the reinforcement of smoking, the person may resist smoking.
Philosophically, redintegration is of interest for two reasons. First, the
process may be critical in prudence. By bringing long-range consequences of
behavior into focus in present deliberation, redintegration may help to protect
long-range interests. Second, redintegration offers a role for visual images in
producing behavior. Images figure in paradigmatic cases of redintegration. In
recollecting pictures of cancerous lungs, the person may refrain from smoking.
reductionism: The issue of reductionism is very much
twentieth-century. There was Wisdom’s boring contribtions to Mind on ‘logical
construction,’ Grice read the summary from Broad. One of the twelve –isms that
Grice finds on his ascent to the City of Eternal Truth. He makes the reductive-reductionist
distinction. Against J. M. Rountree. So, for Grice, the bad heathen vicious
Reductionism can be defeated by the good Christian virtuous Reductivism. A
reductivist tries to define, say, what an emissor communicates (that p) in
terms of the content of that proposition that he intends to transmit to his
recipient. Following Aristotle, Grice reduces the effect to a ‘pathemata
psucheos,’ i. e. a passio of the anima, as Boethius translates. This can be
desiderative (“Thou shalt not kill”) or creditativa (“The grass is green.”)
reductio ad absurdum. 1
The principles A / - A / -A and -A / A / A. 2 The argument forms ‘If A then B
and not-B; therefore, not-A’ and ‘If not-A then B and not-B; therefore, A’ and
arguments of these forms. Reasoning via such arguments is known as the method
of indirect proof. 3 The rules of inference that permit i inferring not-A
having derived a contradiction from A and ii inferring A having derived a
contradiction from not-A. Both rules hold in classical logic and come to the
same thing in any logic with the law of double negation. In intuitionist logic,
however, i holds but ii does not.
reduction, the
replacement of one expression by a second expression that differs from the
first in prima facie reference. So-called reductions have been meant in the
sense of uniformly applicable explicit definitions, contextual definitions, or
replacements suitable only in a limited range of contexts. Thus, authors have
spoken of reductive conceptual analyses, especially in the early days of
analytic philosophy. In particular, in the sensedatum theory talk of physical
objects was supposed to be reduced to talk of sense-data by explicit
definitions or other forms of conceptual analysis. Logical positivists talked
of the reduction of theoretical vocabulary to an observational vocabulary,
first by explicit definitions, and later by other devices, such as Carnap’s
reduction sentences. These appealed to a test condition predicate, T e.g., ‘is
placed in water’, and a display predicate, D e.g., ‘dissolves’, to introduce a
dispositional or other “non-observational” term, S e.g., ‘is water-soluble’: Ex
[Tx / Dx / Sx], with ‘/’ representing the material conditional. Negative
reduction sentences for non-occurrence of S took the form Ex [NTx / NDx / -
Sx]. For coinciding predicate pairs T and TD and -D and ND Carnap referred to
bilateral reduction sentences: Ex [Tx / Dx S Sx]. Like so many other attempted
reductions, reduction sentences did not achieve replacement of the “reduced”
term, S, since they do not fix application of S when the test condition, T,
fails to apply. In the philosophy of mathematics, logicism claimed that all of
mathematics could be reduced to logic, i.e., all mathematical terms could be
defined with the vocabulary of logic and all theorems of mathematics could be
derived from the laws of logic supplemented by these definitions. Russell’s
Principia Mathematica carried out much of such a program with a reductive base
of something much more like what we now call set theory rather than logic,
strictly conceived. Many now accept the reducibility of mathematics to set
theory, but only in a sense in which reductions are not unique. For example,
the natural numbers can equally well be modeled as classes of equinumerous sets
or as von Neumann ordinals. This non-uniqueness creates serious difficulties,
with suggestions that set-theoretic reductions can throw light on what numbers
and other mathematical objects “really are.” In contrast, we take scientific
theories to tell us, unequivocally, that water is H20 and that temperature is
mean translational kinetic energy. Accounts of theory reduction in science
attempt to analyze the circumstance in which a “reducing theory” appears to
tell us the composition of objects or properties described by a “reduced
theory.” The simplest accounts follow the general pattern of reduction: one
provides “identity statements” or “bridge laws,” with at least the form of
explicit definitions, for all terms in the reduced theory not already appearing
in the reducing theory; and then one argues that the reduced theory can be
deduced from the reducing theory augmented by the definitions. For example, the
laws of thermodynamics are said to be deducible from those of statistical
mechanics, together with statements such as ‘temperature is mean translational
kinetic energy’ and ‘pressure is mean momentum transfer’. How should the
identity statements or bridge laws be understood? It takes empirical
investigation to confirm statements such as that temperature is mean
translational kinetic energy. Consequently, some have argued, such statements
at best constitute contingent correlations rather than strict identities. On
the other hand, if the relevant terms and their extensions are not mediated by
analytic definitions, the identity statements may be analogized to identities
involving two names, such as ‘Cicero is Tully’, where it takes empirical investigation
to establish that the two names happen to have the same referent. One can
generalize the idea of theory reduction in a variety of ways. One may require
the bridge laws to suffice for the deduction of the reduced from the reducing
theory without requiring that the bridge laws take the form of explicit
identity statements or biconditional correlations. Some authors have also
focused on the fact that in practice a reducing theory T2 corrects or refines
the reduced theory T1, so that it is really only a correction or refinement,
T1*, that is deducible from T2 and the bridge laws. Some have consequently
applied the term ‘reduction’ to any pair of theories where the second corrects
and extends the first in ways that explain both why the first theory was as
accurate as it was and why it made the errors that it did. In this extended
sense, relativity is said to reduce Newtonian mechanics. Do the social
sciences, especially psychology, in principle reduce to physics? This prospect
would support the so-called identity theory of mind and body, in particular
resolving important problems in the philosophy of mind, such as the mindbody
problem and the problem of other minds. Many though by no means all are now
skeptical about the prospects for identifying mental properties, and the
properties of other special sciences, with complex physical properties. To
illustrate with an example from economics adapted from Fodor, in the right
circumstances just about any physical object could count as a piece of money.
Thus prospects seem dim for finding a closed and finite statement of the form
‘being a piece of money is . . .’, with only predicates from physics appearing
on the right though some would want to admit infinite definitions in providing
reductions. Similarly, one suspects that attributes, such as pain, are at best
functional properties with indefinitely many possible physical realizations.
Believing that reductions by finitely stable definitions are thus out of reach,
many authors have tried to express the view that mental properties are still
somehow physical by saying that they nonetheless supervene on the physical
properties of the organisms that have them. In fact, these same difficulties
that affect mental properties affect the paradigm case of temperature, and probably
all putative examples of theoretical reduction. Temperature is mean
translational temperature only in gases, and only idealized ones at that. In
other substances, quite different physical mechanisms realize temperature.
Temperature is more accurately described as a functional property, having to do
with the mechanism of heat transfer between bodies, where, in principle, the
required mechanism could be physically realized in indefinitely many ways. In
most and quite possibly all cases of putative theory reduction by strict
identities, we have instead a relation of physical realization, constitution,
or instantiation, nicely illustrated by the property of being a calculator
example taken from Cummins. The property of being a calculator can be physically
realized by an abacus, by devices with gears and levers, by ones with vacuum
tubes or silicon chips, and, in the right circumstances, by indefinitely many
other physical arrangements. Perhaps many who have used ‘reduction’,
particularly in the sciences, have intended the term in this sense of physical
realization rather than one of strict identity. Let us restrict attention to
properties that reduce in the sense of having a physical realization, as in the
cases of being a calculator, having a certain temperature, and being a piece of
money. Whether or not an object counts as having properties such as these will
depend, not only on the physical properties of that object, but on various
circumstances of the context. Intensions of relevant language users constitute
a plausible candidate for relevant circumstances. In at least many cases,
dependence on context arises because the property constitutes a functional
property, where the relevant functional system calculational practices, heat
transfer, monetary systems are much larger than the propertybearing object in
question. These examples raise the question of whether many and perhaps all
mental properties depend ineliminably on relations to things outside the
organisms that have the mental properties.
reduction sentence, for a
given predicate Q3 of space-time points in a first-order language, any
universal sentence S1 of the form: x [Q1x / Q2x / Q3 x], provided that the
predicates Q1 and Q2 are consistently applicable to the same space-time points.
If S1 has the form given above and S2 is of the form x [Q4x / Q5 / - Q6] and
either S1 is a reduction sentence for Q3 or S2 is a reduction sentence for -Q3,
the pair {S1, S2} is a reduction pair for Q3. If Q1 % Q4 and Q2 % - Q5, the
conjunction of S1 and S2 is equivalent to a bilateral reduction sentence for Q3
of the form x [Q1 / Q3 S Q2]. These concepts were introduced by Carnap in
“Testability and Meaning,” Philosophy of Science 637, to modify the
verifiability criterion of meaning to a confirmability condition where terms
can be introduced into meaningful scientific discourse by chains of reduction
pairs rather than by definitions. The incentive for this modification seems to
have been to accommodate the use of disposition predicates in scientific
discourse. Carnap proposed explicating a disposition predicate Q3 by bilateral
reduction sentences for Q3. An important but controversial feature of Carnap’s
approach is that it avoids appeal to nonextensional conditionals in explicating
disposition predicates.
RELATUM -- referentially
transparent. An occurrence of a singular term t in a sentence ‘. . . t . . .’
is referentially transparent or purely referential if and only if the
truth-value of ‘. . . t . . .’ depends on whether the referent of t satisfies
the open sentence ‘. . . x . . .’; the satisfaction of ‘. . . x . . .’ by the
referent of t would guarantee the truth of ‘. . . t . . .’, and failure of this
individual to satisfy ‘. . . x . . .’ would guarantee that ‘. . . t . . .’ was
not true. ‘Boston is a city’ is true if and only if the referent of ‘Boston’
satisfies the open sentence ‘x is a city’, so the occurrence of ‘Boston’ is
referentially transparent. But in ‘The expression “Boston” has six letters’,
the length of the word within the quotes, not the features of the city Boston,
determines the truth-value of the sentence, so the occurrence is not
referentially transparent. According to a Fregean theory of meaning, the
reference of any complex expression that is a meaningful unit is a function of
the referents of its parts. Within this context, an occurrence of a referential
term t in a meaningful expression ‘. . . t . . .’ is referentially transparent
or purely referential if and only if t contributes its referent to the
reference of ‘. . . t . . .’. The expression ‘the area around Boston’ refers to
the particular area it does because of the referent of ‘Boston’ and the
reference or extension of the function expressed by ‘the area around x’. An
occurrence of a referential term t in a meaningful expression ‘. . . t . . .’
is referentially opaque if and only if it is not referentially transparent.
Thus, if t has a referentially opaque occurrence in a sentence ‘. . . t . . .’,
then the truth-value of ‘. . . t . . .’ depends on something reduction,
phenomenological referentially transparent 780 780 other than whether the referent of t
satisfies ‘. . . x . . .’. Although these definitions apply to occurrences of
referential terms, the terms ‘referentially opaque’ and ‘referentially
transparent’ are used primarily to classify linguistic contexts for terms as
referentially opaque contexts. If t occurs purely referentially in S but not in
CS, then C is a referentially opaque
context. But we must qualify this: C is
a referentially opaque context for that occurrence of t in S. It would not
follow without further argument that C
is a referentially opaque context for other occurrences of terms in
sentences that could be placed into C . Contexts of quotation, propositional
attitude, and modality have been widely noted for their potential to produce
referential opacity. Consider: 1 John believes that the number of planets is
less than eight. 2 John believes that nine is less than eight. If 1 is true but
2 is not, then either ‘the number of planets’ or ‘nine’ has an occurrence that
is not purely referential, because the sentences would differ in truth-value
even though the expressions are co-referential. But within the sentences: 3 The
number of planets is less than eight. 4 Nine is less than eight. the
expressions appear to have purely referential occurrence. In 3 and 4, the
truth-value of the sentence as a whole depends on whether the referent of ‘The
number of planets’ and ‘Nine’ satisfies ‘x is less than eight’. Because the
occurrences in 3 and 4 are purely referential but those in 1 and 2 are not, the
context ‘John believes that ’ is a
referentially opaque context for the relevant occurrence of at least one of the
two singular terms. Some argue that the occurrence of ‘nine’ in 2 is purely
referential because the truth-value of the sentence as a whole depends on
whether the referent, nine, satisfies the open sentence ‘John believes that x
is less than eight’. Saying so requires that we make sense of the concept of
satisfaction for such sentences belief sentences and others and that we show
that the concept of satisfaction applies in this way in the case at hand
sentence 2. There is controversy about whether these things can be done. In 1,
on the other hand, the truth-value is not determined by whether nine the
referent of ‘the number of planets’ satisfies the open sentence, so that
occurrence is not purely referential. Modal contexts raise similar questions. 5
Necessarily, nine is odd. 6 Necessarily, the number of planets is odd. If 5 is
true but 6 is not, then at least one of the expressions does not have a purely
referential occurrence, even though both appear to be purely referential in the
non-modal sentence that appears in the context ‘Necessarily, ———’. Thus the
context is referentially opaque for the occurrence of at least one of these
terms. On an alternative approach, genuinely singular terms always occur
referentially, and ‘the number of planets’ is not a genuinely singular term.
Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, e.g., provides an alternative
semantic analysis for sentences involving definite descriptions. This would
enable us to say that even simple sentences like 3 and 4 differ considerably in
syntactic and semantic structure, so that the similarity that suggests the
problem, the seemingly similar occurrences of co-referential terms, is merely
apparent.
Mise-en-abyme--
reflection principles, two varieties of internal statements related to
correctness in formal axiomatic systems. 1 Proof-theoretic reflection
principles are formulated for effectively presented systems S that contain a
modicum of elementary number theory sufficient to arithmetize their own
syntactic notions, as done by Kurt Gödel in his 1 work on incompleteness. Let
ProvS x express that x is the Gödel number of a statement provable in S, and let
nA be the number of A, for any statement A of S. The weakest reflection
principle considered for S is the collection RfnS of all statements of the form
ProvS nA P A, which express that if A is provable from S then A is true. The
proposition ConS expressing the consistency of S is a consequence of RfnS
obtained by taking A to be a disprovable statement. Thus, by Gödel’s second
incompleteness theorem, RfnS is stronger than S if S is consistent. Reflection
principles are used in the construction of ordinal logics as a systematic means
of overcoming incompleteness. 2 Set-theoretic reflection principles are
formulated for systems S of axiomatic set theory, such as ZF Zermelo-Fraenkel.
In the simplest form they express that any property A in the language of S that
holds of the universe of “all” sets, already holds of a portion of that
universe coextensive with some set x. This takes the form A P DxAx where in Ax
all quantifiers of A are relativized to x. In contrast to proof-theoretic
reflection principles, these may be established as theorems of ZF.
reflective equilibrium,
as usually conceived, a coherence method for justifying evaluative principles
and theories. The method was first described by Goodman, who proposed it be
used to justify deductive and inductive principles. According to Goodman Fact,
Fiction and Forecast, 5, a particular deductive inference is justified by its
conforming with deductive principles, but these principles are justified in
their turn by conforming with accepted deductive practice. The idea, then, is
that justified inferences and principles are those that emerge from a process
of mutual adjustment, with principles being revised when they sanction
inferences we cannot bring ourselves to accept, and particular inferences being
rejected when they conflict with rules we are unwilling to revise. Thus,
neither principles nor particular inferences are epistemically privileged. At
least in principle, everything is liable to revision. Rawls further articulated
the method of reflective equilibrium and applied it in ethics. According to
Rawls A Theory of Justice, 1, inquiry begins with considered moral judgments,
i.e., judgments about which we are confident and which are free from common
sources of error, e.g., ignorance of facts, insufficient reflection, or
emotional agitation. According to narrow reflective equilibrium, ethical
principles are justified by bringing them into coherence with our considered
moral judgments through a process of mutual adjustment. Rawls, however, pursues
a wide reflective equilibrium. Wide equilibrium is attained by proceeding to
consider alternatives to the moral conception accepted in narrow equilibrium,
along with philosophical arguments that might decide among these conceptions.
The principles and considered judgments accepted in narrow equilibrium are then
adjusted as seems appropriate. One way to conceive of wide reflective
equilibrium is as an effort to construct a coherent system of belief by a
process of mutual adjustment to considered moral judgments and moral principles
as in narrow equilibrium along with the background philosophical, social
scientific, and any other relevant beliefs that might figure in the arguments
for and against alternative moral conceptions, e.g., metaphysical views
regarding the nature of persons. As in Goodman’s original proposal, none of the
judgments, principles, or theories involved is privileged: all are open to
revision.
Griceian renaissance –
after J. L. Austin’s death -- Erasmus, D., philosopher who played an important
role in Renaissance humanism. Like his
forerunners Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, Lorenzo Valla, Leonardo Bruni,
and others, Erasmus stressed within philosophy and theology the function of
philological precision, grammatical correctness, and rhetorical elegance. But
for Erasmus the virtues of bonae literarae which are cultivated by the study of
authors of Latin and Grecian antiquity must be decisively linked with Christian
spirituality. Erasmus has been called by Huizinga the first modern intellectual
because he tried to influence and reform the mentality of society by working
within the shadow of ecclesiastical and political leaders. He epistemology,
evolutionary Erasmus, Desiderius 278
278 became one of the first humanists to make efficient use of the then
new medium of printing. His writings embrace various forms, including diatribe,
oration, locution, comment, dialogue, and letter. After studying in Christian
schools and living for a time in the monastery of Steyn near Gouda in the
Netherlands, Erasmus worked for different patrons. He gained a post as
secretary to the bishop of Kamerijk, during which time he wrote his first
published book, the Adagia first edition 1500, a collection of annotated Latin
adages. Erasmus was an adviser to the Emperor Charles V, to whom he dedicated
his Institutio principii christiani 1516. After studies at the of Paris, where he attended lectures by the
humanist Faber Stapulensis, Erasmus was put in touch by his patron Lord
Mountjoy with the British humanists John Colet and Thomas More. Erasmus led a
restless life, residing in several European cities including London, Louvain,
Basel, Freiburg, Bologna, Turin where he was awarded a doctorate of theology in
1506, and Rome. By using the means of modern philology, which led to the ideal of
the bonae literarae, Erasmus tried to reform the Christian-influenced mentality
of his times. Inspired by Valla’s Annotationes to the New Testament, he
completed a new Latin translation of the New Testament, edited the writings of
the early church fathers, especially St. Hieronymus, and wrote several
commentaries on psalms. He tried to regenerate the spirit of early Christianity
by laying bare its original sense against the background of scholastic
interpretation. In his view, the rituals of the existing church blocked the
development of an authentic Christian spirituality. Though Erasmus shared with
Luther a critical approach toward the existing church, he did not side with the
Reformation. His Diatribe de libero arbitrio 1524, in which he pleaded for the
free will of man, was answered by Luther’s De servo arbitrio. The historically
most influential books of Erasmus were Enchirion militis christiani 1503, in
which he attacked hirelings and soldiers; the Encomium moriae id est Laus
stultitiae 1511, a satire on modern life and the ecclesiastical pillars of
society; and the sketches of human life, the Colloquia first published in 1518,
often enlarged until 1553. In the small book Querela pacis 1517, he rejected
the ideology of justified wars propounded by Augustine and Aquinas. Against the
madness of war Erasmus appealed to the virtues of tolerance, friendliness, and
gentleness. All these virtues were for him the essence of Christianity.
regression analysis, a
part of statistical theory concerned with the analysis of data with the aim of
inferring a linear functional relationship between assumed independent
“regressor” variables and a dependent “response” variable. A typical example
involves the dependence of crop yield on the application of fertilizer. For the
most part, higher amounts of fertilizer are associated with higher yields. But
typically, if crop yield is plotted vertically on a graph with the horizontal
axis representing amount of fertilizer applied, the resulting points will not
fall in a straight line. This can be due either to random “stochastic”
fluctuations involving measurement errors, irreproducible conditions, or
physical indeterminism or to failure to take into account other relevant
independent variables such as amount of rainfall. In any case, from any
resulting “scatter diagram,” it is possible mathematically to infer a
“best-fitting” line. One method is, roughly, to find the line that minimizes
the average absolute distance between a line and the data points collected.
More commonly, the average of the squares of these distances is minimized this
is the “least squares” method. If more than one independent variable is
suspected, the theory of multiple regression, which takes into account multiple
regressors, can be applied: this can help to minimize an “error term” involved
in regression. Computers must be used for the complex computations typically
encountered. Care must be taken in connection with the possibility that a
lawlike, causal dependence is not really linear even approximately over all
ranges of the regressor variables e.g., in certain ranges of amounts of
application, more fertilizer is good for a plant, but too much is bad.
Reichenbach, Hans 13, G.
philosopher of science and a major leader of the movement known as logical empiricism.
Born in Hamburg, he studied engineering for a brief time, then turned to
mathematics, philosophy, and physics, which he pursued at the universities of
Berlin, Munich, and Göttingen. He took his doctorate in philosophy at Erlangen
5 with a dissertation on mathematical and philosophical aspects of probability,
and a degree in mathematics and physics by state examination at Göttingen 6. In
3, with Hitler’s rise to power, he fled to Istanbul, then to the of California at Los Angeles, where he
remained until his death. Prior to his departure from G.y he was professor of
philosophy of science at the of Berlin,
leader of the Berlin Group of logical empiricists, and a close associate of
Einstein. With Carnap he founded Erkenntnis, the major journal of scientific
philosophy before World War II. After a short period early in his career as a
follower of Kant, Reichenbach rejected the synthetic a priori, chiefly because
of considerations arising out of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He
remained thereafter champion of empiricism, adhering to a probabilistic version
of the verifiability theory of cognitive meaning. Never, however, did he
embrace the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle; indeed, he explicitly
described his principal epistemological work, Experience and Prediction 8, as
his refutation of logical positivism. In particular, his logical empiricism
consisted in rejecting phenomenalism in favor of physicalism; he rejected
phenomenalism both in embracing scientific realism and in insisting on a
thoroughgoing probabilistic analysis of scientific meaning and scientific
knowledge. His main works span a wide range. In Probability and Induction he
advocated the frequency interpretation of probability and offered a pragmatic
justification of induction. In his philosophy of space and time he defended
conventionality of geometry and of simultaneity. In foundations of quantum
mechanics he adopted a three-valued logic to deal with causal anomalies. He
wrote major works on epistemology, logic, laws of nature, counterfactuals, and
modalities. At the time of his death he had almost completed The Direction of
Time, which was published posthumously 6.
Reid, Thomas 171096,
Scottish philosopher, a defender of common sense and critic of the theory of
impressions and ideas articulated by Hume. Reid was born exactly one year
before Hume, in Strachan, Scotland. A bright lad, he went to Marischal in Aberdeen at the age of twelve, studying
there with Thomas Blackwell and George Turnbull. The latter apparently had great
influence on Reid. Turnbull contended that knowledge of the facts of sense and
introspection may not be overturned by reasoning and that volition is the only
active power known from experience. Turnbull defended common sense under the
cloak of Berkeley. Reid threw off that cloak with considerable panache, but he
took over the defense of common sense from Turnbull. Reid moved to a position
of regent and lecturer at King’s in
Aberdeen in 1751. There he formed, with John Gregory, the Aberdeen
Philosophical Society, which met fortnightly, often to discuss Hume. Reid
published his Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense in
1764, and, in the same year, succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of moral
philosophy at Old in Glasgow. After 1780
he no longer lectured but devoted himself to his later works, Essays on the
Intellectual Powers 1785 and Essays on the Active Powers 1788. He was highly
influential in Scotland and on the Continent in the eighteenth century and,
from time to time, in England and the United States thereafter. Reid thought
that one of his major contributions was the refutation of Hume’s theory of
impressions and ideas. Reid probably was convinced in his teens of the truth of
Berkeley’s doctrine that what the mind is immediately aware of is always some
idea, but his later study of Hume’s Treatise convinced him that, contrary to
Berkeley, it was impossible to reconcile this doctrine, the theory of ideas,
with common sense. Hume had rigorously developed the theory, Reid said, and drew
forth the conclusions. These, Reid averred, were absurd. They included the
denial of our knowledge of body and mind, and, even more strikingly, of our
conceptions of these things. The reason Reid thought that Hume’s theory of
ideas led to these conclusions was that for Hume, ideas were faded impressions
of sense, hence, sensations. No sensation is like a quality of a material
thing, let alone like the object that has the quality. Consider movement.
Movement is a quality of an object wherein the object changes from one place to
another, but the visual sensation that arises in us is not the change of place
of an object, it is an activity of mind. No two things could, in fact, be more
unalike. If what is before the mind is always some sensation, whether vivacious
or faded, we should never obtain the conception of something other than a
sensation. Hence, we could never even conceive of material objects and their
qualities. Even worse, we could not conceive of our own minds, for they are not
sensations either, and only sensations are immediately before the mind,
according to the theory of ideas. Finally, and even more absurdly, we could not
conceive of past sensations or anything that does not now exist. For all that
is immediately before the mind is sensations that exist presently. Thus, we
could not even conceive of qualities, bodies, minds, and things that do not now
exist. But this is absurd, since it is obvious that we do think of all these
things and even of things that have never existed. The solution, Reid
suggested, is to abandon the theory of ideas and seek a better one. Many have
thought Reid was unfair to Hume and misinterpreted him. Reid’s Inquiry was
presented to Hume by Dr. Blair in manuscript form, however, and in reply Hume
does not at all suggest that he has been misinterpreted or handled unfairly.
Whatever the merits of Reid’s criticism of Hume, it was the study of the
consequences of Hume’s philosophy that accounts for Reid’s central doctrine of
the human faculties and their first principles. Faculties are innate powers,
among them the powers of conception and conviction. Reid’s strategy in reply to
Hume is to build a nativist theory of conception on the failure of Hume’s
theory of ideas. Where the theory of ideas, the doctrine of impressions and
ideas, fails to account for our conception of something, of qualities, bodies,
minds, past things, nonexistent things, Reid hypothesizes that our conceptions
originate from a faculty of the mind, i.e., from an innate power of conception.
This line of argument reflects Reid’s respect for Hume, whom he calls the
greatest metaphysician of the age, because Hume drew forth the consequences of
a theory of conception, which we might call associationism, according to which
all our conceptions result from associating sensations. Where the
associationism of Hume failed, Reid hypothesized that conceptions arise from
innate powers of conception that manifest themselves in accordance with
original first principles of the mind. The resulting hypotheses were not treated
as a priori necessities but as empirical hypotheses. Reid notes, therefore,
that there are marks by which we can discern the operation of an innate first
principle, which include the early appearance of the operation, its
universality in mankind, and its irresistibility. The operations of the mind
that yield our conceptions of qualities, bodies, and minds all bear these
marks, Reid contends, and that warrants the conclusion that they manifest first
principles. It should be noted that Reid conjectured that nature would be
frugal in the implantation of innate powers, supplying us with no more than
necessary to produce the conceptions we manifest. Reid is, consequently, a
parsimonious empiricist in the development of his nativist psychology. Reid
developed his theory of perception in great detail and his development led,
surprisingly, to his articulation of non-Euclidean geometry. Indeed, while Kant
was erroneously postulating the a priori necessity of Euclidean space, Reid was
developing non-Euclidean geometry to account for the empirical features of
visual space. Reid’s theory of perception is an example of his empiricism. In
the Inquiry, he says that sensations, which are operations of the mind, and
impressions on the organs of sense, which are material, produce our conceptions
of primary and secondary qualities. Sensations produce our original conceptions
of secondary qualities as the causes of those sensations. They are signs that
suggest the existence of the qualities. A sensation of smell suggests the existence
of a quality in the object that causes the sensation, though the character of
the cause is otherwise unknown. Thus, our original conception of secondary
qualities is a relative conception of some unknown cause of a sensation. Our
conception of primary qualities differs not, as Locke suggested, because of
some resemblance between the sensation and the quality for, as Berkeley noted,
there is no resemblance between a sensation and quality, but because our
original conceptions of primary qualities are clear and distinct. The sensation
is a sign that suggests a definite conception of the primary quality, e.g. a
definite conception of the movement of the object, rather than a mere
conception of something, we know not what, that gives rise to the sensation. These
conceptions of qualities signified by sensations result from the operations of
principles of our natural constitution. These signs, which suggest the
conception of qualities, also suggest a conception of some object that has
them. This conception of the object is also relative, in that it is simply a
conception of a subject of the qualities. In the case of physical qualities,
the conception of the object is a conception of a material object. Though
sensations, which are activities of the mind, suggest the existence of
qualities, they are not the only signs of sense perception. Some impressions on
the organs of sense, the latter being material, also give rise to conceptions
of qualities, especially to our conception of visual figure, the seen shape of the
object. But Reid can discern no sensation of shape. There are, of course,
sensations of color, but he is convinced from the experience of those who have
cataracts and see color but not shape that the sensations of color are
insufficient to suggest our conceptions of visual figure. His detailed account
of vision and especially of the seeing of visual figure leads him to one of his
most brilliant moments. He asks what sort of data do we receive upon the eye
and answers that the data must be received at the round surface of the eyeball
and processed within. Thus, visual space is a projection in three dimensions of
the information received on the round surface of the eye, and the geometry of
this space is a non-Euclidean geometry of curved space. Reid goes on to derive
the properties of the space quite correctly, e.g., in concluding that the
angles of a triangle will sum to a figure greater than 180 degrees and thereby
violate the parallels postulate. Thus Reid discovered that a non-Euclidean
geometry was satisfiable and, indeed, insisted that it accurately described the
space of vision not, however, the space of touch, which he thought was
Euclidean. From the standpoint of his theory of perceptual signs, the example
of visual figure helps to clarify his doctrine of the signs of perception. We
do not perceive signs and infer what they signify. This inference, Reid was
convinced by Hume, would lack the support of reasoning, and Reid concluded that
reasoning was, in this case, superfluous. The information received on the
surface of the eye produces our conceptions of visual figure immediately.
Indeed, these signs pass unnoticed as they give rise to the conception of
visual figure in the mind. The relation of sensory signs to the external things
they signify originally is effected by a first principle of the mind without
the use of reason. The first principles that yield our conceptions of qualities
and objects yield convictions of the existence of these things at the same
time. A question naturally arises as to the evidence of these convictions.
First principles yield the convictions along with the conceptions, but do we
have evidence of the existence of the qualities and objects we are convinced
exist? We have the evidence of our senses, of our natural faculties, and that
is all the evidence possible here. Reid’s point is that the convictions in
questions resulting from the original principles of our faculties are
immediately justified. Our faculties are, however, all fallible, so the
justification that our original convictions possess may be refuted. We can now
better understand Reid’s reply to Hume. To account for our convictions of the
existence of body, we must abandon Hume’s theory of ideas, which cannot supply
even the conception of body. We must discover both the original first
principles that yield the conception and conviction of objects and their
qualities, and first principles to account for our convictions of the past, of
other thinking beings, and of morals. Just as there are first principles of
perception that yield convictions of the existence of presently existing
objects, so there are first principles of memory that yield the convictions of
the existence of past things, principles of testimony that yield the
convictions of the thoughts of others, and principles of morals that yield
convictions of our obligations. Reid’s defense of a moral faculty alongside the
faculties of perception and memory is striking. The moral faculty yields
conceptions of the justice and injustice of an action in response to our conception
of that action. Reid shrewdly notes that different people may conceive of the
same action in different ways. I may conceive of giving some money as an action
of gratitude, while you may consider it squandering money. How we conceive of
an action depends on our moral education, but the response of our moral faculty
to an action conceived in a specific way is original and the same in all who
have the faculty. Hence differences in moral judgment are due, not to
principles of the moral faculty, but to differences in how we conceive of our
actions. This doctrine of a moral faculty again provides a counterpoint to the
moral philosophy of Hume, for, according Reid, Thomas Reid, Thomas 785 785 to Reid, judgments of justice and
injustice pertaining to all matters, including promises, contracts, and
property, arise from our natural faculties and do not depend on anything
artificial. Reid’s strategy for defending common sense is clear enough. He
thinks that Hume showed that we cannot arrive at our convictions of external
objects, of past events, of the thoughts of others, of morals, or, for that
matter, of our own minds, from reasoning about impressions and ideas. Since
those convictions are a fact, philosophy must account for them in the only way
that remains, by the hypothesis of innate faculties that yield them. But do we
have any evidence for these convictions? Evidence, Reid says, is the ground of
belief, and our evidence is that of our faculties. Might our faculties deceive
us? Reid answers that it is a first principle of our faculties that they are
not fallacious. Why should we assume that our faculties are not fallacious?
First, the belief is irresistible. However we wage war with first principles,
the principles of common sense, they prevail in daily life. There we trust our
faculties whether we choose to or not. Second, all philosophy depends on the
assumption that our faculties are not fallacious. Here Reid employs an ad
hominem argument against Hume, but one with philosophical force. Reid says that,
in response to a total skeptic who decides to trust none of his faculties, he
puts his hand over his mouth in silence. But Hume trusted reason and
consciousness, and therefore is guilty of pragmatic inconsistency in calling
the other faculties into doubt. They come from the same shop, Reid says, and he
who calls one into doubt has no right to trust the others. All our faculties
are fallible, and, therefore, we must, to avoid arbitrary favoritism, trust
them all at the outset or trust none. The first principles of our faculties are
trustworthy. They not only account for our convictions, but are the ground and
evidence of those convictions. This nativism is the original engine of
justification. Reid’s theory of original perceptions is supplemented by a theory
of acquired perceptions, those which incorporate the effects of habit and
association, such as the perception of a passing coach. He distinguishes
acquired perceptions from effects of reasoning. The most important way our
original perceptions must be supplemented is by general conceptions. These
result from a process whereby our attention is directed to some individual
quality, e.g., the whiteness of a piece of paper, which he calls abstraction,
and a further process of generalizing from the individual quality to the
general conception of the universal whiteness shared by many individuals. Reid
is a sophisticated nominalist; he says that the only things that exist are
individual, but he includes individual qualities as well as individual objects.
The reason is that individual qualities obviously exist and are needed as the
basis of generalization. To generalize from an individual we must have some
conception of what it is like, and this conception cannot be general, on pain
of circularity or regress, but must be a conception of an individual quality,
e.g., the whiteness of this paper, which it uniquely possesses. Universals,
though predicated of objects to articulate our knowledge, do not exist. We can
think of universals, just as we can think of centaurs, but though they are the
objects of thought and predicated of individuals that exist, they do not
themselves exist. Generalization is not driven by ontology but by utility. It
is we and not nature that sort things into kinds in ways that are useful to us.
This leads to a division-of-labor theory of meaning because general conceptions
are the meanings of general words. Thus, in those domains in which there are
experts, in science or the law, we defer to the experts concerning the general
conceptions that are the most useful in the area in question. Reid’s theory of
the intellectual powers, summarized briefly above, is supplemented by his
theory of our active powers, those that lead to actions. His theory of the
active powers includes a theory of the principles of actions. These include
animal principles that operate without understanding, but the most salient and
philosophically important part of Reid’s theory of the active powers is his
theory of the rational principles of action, which involve understanding and
the will. These rational principles are those in which we have a conception of
the action to be performed and will its performance. Action thus involves an
act of will or volition, but volitions as Reid conceived of them are not the
esoteric inventions of philosophy but, instead, the commonplace activities of
deciding and resolving to act. Reid is a libertarian and maintains that our
liberty or freedom refutes the principle of necessity or determinism. Freedom
requires the power to will the action and also the power not to will it. The
principle of necessity tells us that our action was necessitated and,
therefore, that it was not in our power not to have willed as we did. It is not
sufficient for freedom, as Hume suggested, that we act as we will. We must also
have the Reid, Thomas Reid, Thomas 786
786 power to determine what we will. The reason is that willing is the
means to the end of action, and he who lacks power over the means lacks power
over the end. This doctrine of the active power over the determinations of our
will is founded on the central principle of Reid’s theory of the active powers,
the principle of agent causation. The doctrine of acts of the will or volitions
does not lead to a regress, as critics allege, because my act of will is an exercise
of the most basic kind of causality, the efficient causality of an agent. I am
the efficient cause of my acts of will. My act of will need not be caused by an
antecedent act of will because my act of will is the result of my exercise of
my causal power. This fact also refutes an objection to the doctrine of
liberty that if my action is not
necessitated, then it is fortuitous. My free actions are caused, not
fortuitous, though they are not necessitated, because they are caused by me.
How, one might inquire, do we know that we are free? The doubt that we are free
is like other skeptical doubts, and receives a similar reply, namely, that the
conviction of our freedom is a natural and original conviction arising from our
faculties. It occurs prior to instruction and it is irresistible in practical
life. Any person with two identical coins usable to pay for some item must be
convinced that she can pay with the one or the other; and, unlike the ass of
Buridan, she readily exercises her power to will the one or the other. The
conviction of freedom is an original one, not the invention of philosophy, and
it arises from the first principles of our natural faculties, which are
trustworthy and not fallacious. The first principles of our faculties hang
together like links in a chain, and one must either raise up the whole or the
links prove useless. Together, they are the foundation of true philosophy,
science, and practical life, and without them we shall lead ourselves into the
coalpit of skepticism and despair.
Reimarus, Hermann Samuel
16941768, G. philosopher, born in Hamburg and educated in philosophy and
theology at Jena. For most of his life he taught Oriental languages at a high
school in Hamburg. The most important writings he published were a treatise on
natural religion, Abhandlungen von den vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen
Religion 1754; a textbook on logic, Vernunftlehre 1756; and an interesting work
on instincts in animals, Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Tiere
1760. However, he is today best known for his Apologie oder Schutzschrift für
die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes “Apology for or Defense of the Rational
Worshipers of God”, posthumously published in 177477. In it, Reimarus reversed
his stance on natural theology and openly advocated a deism in the British
tradition. The controversy created by its publication had a profound impact on
the further development of G. theology. Though Reimarus always remained
basically a follower of Wolff, he was often quite critical of Wolffian rationalism
in his discussion of logic and psychology.
Reinhold, Karl Leonhard
17431819, Austrian philosopher who was both a popularizer and a critic of Kant.
He was the first occupant of the chair of critical philosophy established at
the of Jena in 1787. His Briefe über die
Kantische Philosophie 1786/87 helped to popularize Kantianism. Reinhold also
proclaimed the need for a more “scientific” presentation of the critical
philosophy, in the form of a rigorously deductive system in which everything is
derivable from a single first principle “the principle of consciousness”. He
tried to satisfy this need with Elementarphilosophie “Elementary Philosophy” or
“Philosophy of the Elements”, expounded in his Versuch einer neuen Theorie des
menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens “Attempt at a New Theory of the Human
Faculty of Representation,” 1789, Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger
Missverständnisse der Philosophen I “Contributions to the Correction of the
Prevailing Misunderstandings of Philosophers,” 1790, and Ueber das Fundament
des philosophischen Wissens “On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge,”
1791. His criticism of the duality of Kant’s starting point and of the ad hoc
character of his deductions contributed to the demand for a more coherent
exposition of transcendental idealism, while his strategy for accomplishing
this task stimulated others above all, Fichte to seek an even more
“fundamental” first principle for philosophy. Reinhold later became an
enthusiastic adherent, first of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and then of
Bardili’s “rational realism,” before finally adopting a novel “linguistic”
approach to philosophical problems.
reism, also called
concretism, the theory that the basic entities are concrete objects. Reism
differs from nominalism in that the problem of universals is not its only
motivation and often not the principal motivation for the theory. Three types
of reism can be distinguished. 1 Brentano held that every object is a concrete
or individual thing. He said that substances, aggregates of substances, parts
of substances, and individual properties of substances are the only things that
exist. There is no such thing as the existence or being of an object; and there
are no non-existent objects. One consequence of this doctrine is that the object
of thought what the thought is about is always an individual object and not a
proposition. For example, the thought that this paper is white is about this
paper and not about the proposition that this paper is white. Meinong attacked
Brentano’s concretism and argued that thoughts are about “objectives,” not
objects. 2 Kotarbigski, who coined the term ‘reism’, holds as a basic principle
that only concrete objects exist. Although things may be hard or soft, red or
blue, there is no such thing as hardness, softness, redness, or blueness.
Sentences that contain abstract words are either strictly meaningless or can be
paraphrased into sentences that do not contain any abstract words. Kotarbinski
is both a nominalist and a materialist. Brentano was a nominalist and a
dualist. 3 Thomas Garrigue Masaryk’s concretism is quite different from the
first two. For him, concretism is the theory that all of a person’s cognitive
faculties participate in every instance of knowing: reason, senses, emotion,
and will.
relation, a
two-or-more-place property e.g., loves or between, or the extension of such a
property. In set theory, a relation is any set of ordered pairs or triplets,
etc., but these are reducible to pairs. For simplicity, the formal exposition
here uses the language of set theory, although an intensional
property-theoretic view is later assumed. The terms of a relation R are the
members of the pairs constituting R, the items that R relates. The collection D
of all first terms of pairs in R is the domain of R; any collection with D as a
subcollection may also be so called. Similarly, the second terms of these pairs
make up or are a subcollection of the range counterdomain or converse domain of
R. One usually works within a set U such that R is a subset of the Cartesian
product U$U the set of all ordered pairs on U. Relations can be: 1 reflexive or
exhibit reflexivity: for all a, aRa. That is, a reflexive relation is one that,
like identity, each thing bears to itself. Examples: a weighs as much as b; or
the universal relation, i.e., the relation R such that for all a and b, aRb. 2
symmetrical or exhibit symmetry: for all a and b, aRb P bRa. In a symmetrical
relation, the order of the terms is reversible. Examples: a is a sibling of b;
a and b have a common divisor. Also symmetrical is the null relation, under
which no object is related to anything. 3 transitive or exhibit transitivity:
for all a, b, and c, aRb & bRc P aRc. Transitive relations carry across a
middle term. Examples: a is less than b; a is an ancestor of b. Thus, if a is
less than b and b is less than c, a is less than c: less than has carried
across the middle term, b. 4 antisymmetrical: for all a and b, aRb & bRa P
a % b. 5 trichotomous, connected, or total trichotomy: for all a and b, aRb 7
bRa 7 a % b. 6 asymmetrical: aRb & bRa holds for no a and b. 7 functional:
for all a, b, and c, aRb & aRc P b % c. In a functional relation which may
also be called a function, each first term uniquely determines a second term. R
is non-reflexive if it is not reflexive, i.e., if the condition 1 fails for at
least one object a. R is non-symmetric if 2 fails for at least one pair of
objects a, b. Analogously for non-transitive. R is irreflexive aliorelative if
1 holds for no object a and intransitive if 3 holds for no objects a, b, and c.
Thus understands is non-reflexive since some things do not understand
themselves, but not irreflexive, since some things do; loves is nonsymmetric
but not asymmetrical; and being a cousin of is non-transitive but not
intransitive, as being mother of is. 13 define an equivalence relation e.g.,
the identity relation among numbers or the relation of being the same age as
among people. A class of objects bearing an equivalence relation R to each
other is an equivalence class under R. 1, 3, and 4 define a partial order; 3,
5, and 6 a linear order. Similar properties define other important
classifications, such as lattice and Boolean algebra. The converse of a
relation R is the set of all pairs b, a such that aRb; the comreism relation
788 788 plement of R is the set of all pairs a, b
such that aRb i.e. aRb does not hold. A more complex example will show the
power of a relational vocabulary. The ancestral of R is the set of all a, b
such that either aRb or there are finitely many cI , c2, c3, . . . , cn such
that aRcI and c1Rc2 and c2Rc3 and . . . and cnRb. Frege introduced the
ancestral in his theory of number: the natural numbers are exactly those
objects bearing the ancestral of the successor-of relation to zero.
Equivalently, they are the intersection of all sets that contain zero and are
closed under the successor relation. This is formalizable in second-order
logic. Frege’s idea has many applications. E.g., assume a set U, relation R on
U, and property F. An element a of U is hereditarily F with respect to R if a
is F and any object b which bears the ancestral of R to a is also F. Hence F is
here said to be a hereditary property, and the set a is hereditarily finite
with respect to the membership relation if a is finite, its members are, as are
the members of its members, etc. The hereditarily finite sets or the sets
hereditarily of cardinality ‹ k for any inaccessible k are an important
subuniverse of the universe of sets. Philosophical discussions of relations
typically involve relations as special cases of properties or sets. Thus
nominalists and Platonists disagree over the reality of relations, since they
disagree about properties in general. Similarly, one important connection is to
formal semantics, where relations are customarily taken as the denotations of
relational predicates. Disputes about the notion of essence are also pertinent.
One says that a bears an internal relation, R, to b provided a’s standing in R
to b is an essential property of a; otherwise a bears an external relation to
b. If the essentialaccidental distinction is accepted, then a thing’s essential
properties will seem to include certain of its relations to other things, so
that we must admit internal relations. Consider a point in space, which has no
identity apart from its place in a certain system. Similarly for a number. Or
consider my hand, which would perhaps not be the same object if it had not
developed as part of my body. If it is true that I could not have had other
parents that possible persons similar to
me but with distinct parents would not really be me then I, too, am internally related to other
things, namely my parents. Similar arguments would generate numerous internal
relations for organisms, artifacts, and natural objects in general. Internal relations
will also seem to exist among properties and relations themselves. Roundness is
essentially a kind of shape, and the relation larger than is essentially the
converse of the relation smaller than. In like usage, a relation between a and
b is intrinsic if it depends just on how a and b are; extrinsic if they have it
in virtue of their relation to other things. Thus, higher-than intrinsically
relates the Alps to the Appalachians. That I prefer viewing the former to the
latter establishes an extrinsic relation between the mountain ranges. Note that
this distinction is obscure as is internal-external. One could argue that the
Alps are higher than the Appalachians only in virtue of the relation of each to
something further, such as space, light rays, or measuring rods. Another issue
specific to the theory of relations is whether relations are real, given that
properties do exist. That is, someone might reject nominalism only to the
extent of admitting one-place properties. Although such doctrines have some
historical importance in, e.g., Plato and Bradley, they have disappeared. Since
relations are indispensable to modern logic and semantics, their inferiority to
one-place properties can no longer be seriously entertained. Hence relations
now have little independent significance in philosophy.
relational logic, the
formal study of the properties of and operations on binary relations that was
initiated by Peirce between 1870 and 2. Thus, in relational logic, one might
examine the formal properties of special kinds of relations, such as transitive
relations, or asymmetrical ones, or orderings of certain types. Or the focus
might be on various operations, such as that of forming the converse or
relative product. Formal deductive systems used in such studies are generally
known as calculi of relations.
relativism, the denial
that there are certain kinds of universal truths. There are two main types,
cognitive and ethical. Cognitive relativism holds that there are no universal
truths about the world: the world has no intrinsic characteristics, there are
just different ways of interpreting it. The Grecian Sophist Protagoras, the
first person on record to hold such a view, said, “Man is the measure of all
things; of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they
are not.” Goodman, Putnam, and Rorty are contemporary philosophers who have
held versions of relativism. Rorty says, e.g., that “ ‘objective truth’ is no
more and no less than the best idea we currently have about how to explain what
is going on.” Critics of cognitive relativism contend that it is
self-referentially incoherent, since it presents its statements as universally
true, rather than simply relatively so. Ethical relativism is the theory that
there are no universally valid moral principles: all moral principles are valid
relative to culture or individual choice. There are two subtypes:
conventionalism, which holds that moral principles are valid relative to the
conventions of a given culture or society; and subjectivism, which maintains
that individual choices are what determine the validity of a moral principle.
Its motto is, Morality lies in the eyes of the beholder. As Ernest Hemingway
wrote, “So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel
good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” Conventionalist
ethical relativism consists of two theses: a diversity thesis, which specifies
that what is considered morally right and wrong varies from society to society,
so that there are no moral principles accepted by all societies; and a
dependency thesis, which specifies that all moral principles derive their
validity from cultural acceptance. From these two ideas relativists conclude
that there are no universally valid moral principles applying everywhere and at
all times. The first thesis, the diversity thesis, or what may simply be called
cultural relativism, is anthropological; it registers the fact that moral rules
differ from society to society. Although both ethical relativists and
non-relativists typically accept cultural relativism, it is often confused with
the normative thesis of ethical relativism. The opposite of ethical relativism
is ethical objectivism, which asserts that although cultures may differ in
their moral principles, some moral principles have universal validity. Even if,
e.g., a culture does not recognize a duty to refrain from gratuitous harm, that
principle is valid and the culture should adhere to it. There are two types of
ethical objectivism, strong and weak. Strong objectivism, sometimes called
absolutism, holds that there is one true moral system with specific moral
rules. The ethics of ancient Israel in the Old Testament with its hundreds of
laws exemplifies absolutism. Weak objectivism holds that there is a core
morality, a determinate set of principles that are universally valid usually
including prohibitions against killing the innocent, stealing, breaking of
promises, and lying. But weak objectivism accepts an indeterminate area where
relativism is legitimate, e.g., rules regarding sexual mores and regulations of
property. Both types of objectivism recognize what might be called application
relativism, the endeavor to apply moral rules where there is a conflict between
rules or where rules can be applied in different ways. For example, the ancient
Callactians ate their deceased parents but eschewed the impersonal practice of
burying them as disrespectful, whereas contemporary society has the opposite
attitudes about the care of dead relatives; but both practices exemplify the
same principle of the respect for the dead. According to objectivism, cultures
or forms of life can fail to exemplify an adequate moral community in at least
three ways: 1 the people are insufficiently intelligent to put constitutive
principles in order; 2 they are under considerable stress so that it becomes
too burdensome to live by moral principles; and 3 a combination of 1 and 2.
Ethical relativism is sometimes confused with ethical skepticism, the view that
we cannot know whether there are any valid moral principles. Ethical nihilism
holds that there are no valid moral principles. J. L. Mackie’s error theory is
a version of this view. Mackie held that while we all believe some moral
principles to be true, there are compelling arguments to the contrary. Ethical
objectivism must be distinguished from moral realism, the view that valid moral
principles are true, independently of human choice. Objectivism may be a form
of ethical constructivism, typified by Rawls, whereby objective principles are
simply those that impartial human beings would choose behind the veil of
ignorance. That is, the principles are not truly independent of hypothetical
human choices, but are constructs from those choices.
relativity, a term
applied to Einstein’s theories of electrodynamics special relativity, 5 and
gravitation general relativity, 6 because both hold that certain physical
quantities, formerly considered objective, are actually “relative to” the state
of motion of the observer. They are called “special” and “general” because, in
special relativity, electrodynamical laws determine a restricted class of
kinematical reference frames, the “inertial frames”; in general relativity, the
very distinction between inertial frames and others becomes a relative
distinction. Special relativity. Classical mechanics makes no distinction
between uniform motion and rest: not velocity, but acceleration is physically
detectable, and so different states of uniform motion are physically
equivalent. But classical electrodynamics describes light as wave motion with a
constant velocity through a medium, the “ether.” It follows that the measured
velocity of light should depend on the motion of the observer relative to the
medium. When interferometer experiments suggested that the velocity of light is
independent of the motion of the source, H. A. Lorentz proposed that objects in
motion contract in the direction of motion through the ether while their local
time “dilates”, and that this effect masks the difference in the velocity of
light. Einstein, however, associated the interferometry results with many other
indications that the theoretical distinction between uniform motion and rest in
the ether lacks empirical content. He therefore postulated that, in
electrodynamics as in mechanics, all states of uniform motion are equivalent.
To explain the apparent paradox that observers with different velocities can
agree on the velocity of light, he criticized the idea of an “absolute” or
frame-independent measure of simultaneity: simultaneity of distant events can
only be established by some kind of signaling, but experiment suggested that
light is the only signal with an invariant velocity, and observers in relative
motion who determine simultaneity with light signals obtain different results.
Furthermore, since objective measurement of time and length presupposes
absolute simultaneity, observers in relative motion will also disagree on time
and length. So Lorentz’s contraction and dilatation are not physical effects,
but consequences of the relativity of simultaneity, length, and time, to the
motion of the observer. But this relativity follows from the invariance of the
laws of electrodynamics, and the invariant content of the theory is expressed
geometrically in Minkowski spacetime. Logical empiricists took the theory as an
illustration of how epistemological analysis of a concept time could eliminate
empirically superfluous notions absolute simultaneity. General relativity.
Special relativity made the velocity of light a limit for all causal processes and
required revision of Newton’s theory of gravity as an instantaneous action at a
distance. General relativity incorporates gravity into the geometry of
space-time: instead of acting directly on one another, masses induce curvature
in space-time. Thus the paths of falling bodies represent not forced deviations
from the straight paths of a flat space-time, but “straightest” paths in a
curved space-time. While space-time is “locally” Minkowskian, its global
structure depends on mass-energy distribution. The insight behind this theory
is the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass: since a given
gravitational field affects all bodies equally, weight is indistinguishable
from the inertial force of acceleration; freefall motion is indistinguishable
from inertial motion. This suggests that the Newtonian decomposition of free
fall into inertial and accelerated components is arbitrary, and that the
freefall path itself is the invariant basis for the structure of space-time. A
philosophical motive for the general theory was to extend the relativity of
motion. Einstein saw special relativity’s restricted class of equivalent
reference frames as an “epistemological defect,” and he sought laws that would
apply to any frame. His inspiration was Mach’s criticism of the Newtonian
distinction between “absolute” rotation and rotation relative to observable
bodies like the “fixed stars.” Einstein formulated Mach’s criticism as a
fundamental principle: since only relative motions are observable, local
inertial effects should be explained by the cosmic distribution of masses and
by motion relative to them. Thus not only velocity and rest, but motion in
general would be relative. Einstein hoped to effect this generalization by
eliminating the distinction between inertial frames and freely falling frames.
Because free fall remains a privileged state of motion, however,
non-gravitational acceleration remains detectable, and absolute rotation
remains distinct from relative rotation. Einstein also thought that relativity
of motion would result from the general covariance coordinate-independence of
his theory i.e., that general
equivalence of coordinate systems meant general equivalence relativism,
scientific relativity 791 791 of
states of motion. It is now clear, however, that general covariance is a
mathematical property of physical theories without direct implications about
motion. So general relativity does not “generalize” the relativity of motion as
Einstein intended. Its great accomplishments are the unification of gravity and
geometry and the generalization of special relativity to space-times of
arbitrary curvature, which has made possible the modern investigation of
cosmological structure.
relevance logic, any of a
range of logics and philosophies of logic united by their insistence that the
premises of a valid inference must be relevant to the conclusion. Standard, or
classical, logic contains inferences that break this requirement, e.g., the
spread law, that from a contradiction any proposition whatsoever follows. Relevance
logic had its genesis in a system of strenge Implikation published by Wilhelm
Ackermann in 6. Ackermann’s idea for rejecting irrelevance was taken up and
developed by Alan Anderson and Nuel Belnap in a series of papers between 9 and
Anderson’s death in 4. The first main summaries of these researches appeared
under their names, and those of many collaborators, in Entailment: The Logic of
Relevance and Necessity vol. 1, 5; vol. 2, 2. By the time of Anderson’s death,
a substantial research effort into relevance logic was under way, and it has
continued. Besides the rather vague unity of the idea of relevance between
premises and conclusion, there is a technical criterion often used to mark out
relevance logic, introduced by Belnap in 0, and applicable really only to
propositional logics the main focus of concern to date: a necessary condition
of relevance is that premises and conclusion should share a propositional
variable. Early attention was focused on systems E of entailment and T of
ticket entailment. Both are subsystems of C. I. Lewis’s system S4 of strict
implication and of classical truth-functional logic i.e., consequences in E and
T in ‘P’ are consequences in S4 in ‘ ’ and in classical logic in ‘/’. Besides
rejection of the spread law, probably the most notorious inference that is
rejected is disjunctive syllogism DS for extensional disjunction which is
equivalent to detachment for material implication: A 7 B,ÝA , B. The reason is
immediate, given acceptance of Simplification and Addition: Simplification
takes us from A & ÝA to each conjunct, and Addition turns the first
conjunct into A 7 B. Unless DS were rejected, the spread law would follow.
Since the late 0s, attention has shifted to the system R of relevant
implication, which adds permutation to E, to mingle systems which extend E and
R by the mingle law A P A P A, and to contraction-free logics, which
additionally reject contraction, in one form reading A P A P B P A P B. R minus
contraction RW differs from linear logic, much studied recently in computer
science, only by accepting the distribution of ‘&’ over ‘7’, which the
latter rejects. Like linear logic, relevance logic contains both
truth-functional and non-truth-functional connectives. Unlike linear logic,
however, R, E, and T are undecidable unusual among propositional logics. This
result was obtained only in 4. In the early 0s, relevance logics were given
possible-worlds semantics by several authors working independently. They also
have axiomatic, natural deduction, and sequent or consecution formulations. One
technical result that has attracted attention has been the demonstration that,
although relevance logics reject DS, they all accept Ackermann’s rule Gamma:
that if A 7 B and ÝA are theses, so is B. A recent result occasioning much
surprise was that relevant arithmetic consisting of Peano’s postulates on the
base of quantified R does not admit Gamma.
reliabilism, a type of
theory in epistemology that holds that what qualifies a belief as knowledge or
as epistemically justified is its reliable linkage to the truth. David
Armstrong motivates reliabilism with an analogy between a thermometer that
reliably indicates the temperature and a belief that reliably indicates the
truth. A belief qualifies as knowledge, he says, if there is a lawlike
connection in nature that guarantees that the belief is true. A cousin of the
nomic sufficiency account is the counterfactual approach, proposed by Dretske,
Goldman, and Nozick. A typical formulation of this approach says that a belief
qualifies relativity, general reliabilism 792
792 as knowledge if the belief is true and the cognizer has reasons for
believing it that would not obtain unless it were true. For example, someone
knows that the telephone is ringing if he believes this, it is true, and he has
a specific auditory experience that would not occur unless the telephone were
ringing. In a slightly different formulation, someone knows a proposition if he
believes it, it is true, and if it were not true he would not believe it. In
the example, if the telephone were not ringing, he would not believe that it
is, because he would not have the same auditory experience. These accounts are
guided by the idea that to know a proposition it is not sufficient that the
belief be “accidentally” true. Rather, the belief, or its mode of acquisition,
must “track,” “hook up with,” or “indicate” the truth. Unlike knowledge,
justified belief need not guarantee or be “hooked up” with the truth, for a
justified belief need not itself be true. Nonetheless, reliabilists insist that
the concept of justified belief also has a connection with truth acquisition.
According to Goldman’s reliable process account, a belief’s justificational
status depends on the psychological processes that produce or sustain it.
Justified beliefs are produced by appropriate psychological processes,
unjustified beliefs by inappropriate processes. For example, beliefs produced
or preserved by perception, memory, introspection, and “good” reasoning are
justified, whereas beliefs produced by hunch, wishful thinking, or “bad”
reasoning are unjustified. Why are the first group of processes appropriate and
the second inappropriate? The difference appears to lie in their reliability.
Among the beliefs produced by perception, introspection, or “good” reasoning, a
high proportion are true; but only a low proportion of beliefs produced by
hunch, wishful thinking, or “bad” reasoning are true. Thus, what qualifies a
belief as justified is its being the outcome of a sequence of reliable
belief-forming processes. Reliabilism is a species of epistemological
externalism, because it makes knowledge or justification depend on factors such
as truth connections or truth ratios that are outside the cognizer’s mind and
not necessarily accessible to him. Yet reliabilism typically emphasizes
internal factors as well, e.g., the cognitive processes responsible for a
belief. Process reliabilism is a form of naturalistic epistemology because it
centers on cognitive operations and thereby paves the way for cognitive psychology
to play a role in epistemology.
Renouvier, Charles
18153, philosopher influenced by Kant
and Comte, the latter being one of his teachers. Renouvier rejected many of the
views of both these philosophers, however, charting his own course. He emphasized
the irreducible plurality and individuality of all things against the
contemporary tendencies toward absolute idealism. Human individuality he
associated with indeterminism and freedom. To the extent that agents are
undetermined by other things and self-determining, they are unique individuals.
Indeterminism also extends to the physical world and to knowledge. He rejected
absolute certitude, but defended the universality of the laws of logic and
mathematics. In politics and religion, he emphasized individual freedom and
freedom of conscience. His emphasis on plurality, indeterminism, freedom,
novelty, and process influenced James and, through James, pragmatism.
re-praesentatum: Grice plays with this as a philosophical semanticist,
rather than a philosophical psychologist. But the re-praesentatum depends on
the ‘praesentatum,’ which corresponds to Grice’s sub-perceptum (not the
‘conceptus’). cf. Grice on Peirce’s representamen (“You don’t want to go
there,” – Grice to his tutees). It seems that in the one-off predicament,
iconicy plays a role: the drawing of a skull to indicate danger, the drawing of
an arrow at the fork of a road to indicate which way the emissor’s flowers, who
were left behind, are supposed to take (Carruthers). Suppose Grice joins the Oxfordshire
cricket club. He will represent Oxfordshire. He will do for Oxfordshire what
Oxfordshire cannot do for herself. Similarly, by uttering “Smoke!,” the utterer
means that there is fire somewhere. “Smoke!” is a communication-device if it
does for smoke what smoke cannot do for itself, influence thoughts and
behaviour. Or does it?! It MWheIGHT. But suppose that the fire is some distant
from the addresse. And the utterer HAS LEARNED That there is fire in the
distance. So he utters ‘Smoke!’ Where? Oh, you won’t see it. But I was told
there is smoke on the outskirts. Thanks for warning me! rĕ-praesento , āvi,
ātum, 1, v. a. I. To bring before one, to bring back; to show, exhibit,
display, manifest, represent (class.): “per quas (visiones) imagines rerum absentium
ita repraesentantur animo, ut eas cernere oculis ac praesentes habere
videamur,” Quint. 6, 2, 29: “memoriae vis repraesentat aliquid,” id. 11, 2, 1;
cf. Plin. Ep. 9, 28, 3: “quod templum repraesentabat memoriam consulatūs mei,”
Cic. Sest. 11, 26: si quis vultu torvo ferus simulet Catonem, Virtutemne
repraesentet moresque Catonis? * Hor. Ep. 1, 19, 14: “imbecillitatem ingenii
mei,” Val. Max. 2, 7, 6: “movendi ratio aut in repraesentandis est aut
imitandis adfectibus,” Quint. 11, 3, 156: “urbis species repraesentabatur
animis,” Curt. 3, 10, 7; cf.: “affectum patris amissi,” Plin. Ep. 4, 19, 1:
“nam et vera esse et apte ad repraesentandam iram deūm ficta possunt,” Liv. 8,
6, 3 Weissenb. ad loc.: “volumina,” to recite, repeat, Plin. 7, 24, 24, § 89: “viridem
saporem olivarum etiam post annum,” Col. 12, 47, 8: “faciem veri maris,” id. 8,
17, 6: “colorem constantius,” to show, exhibit, Plin. 37, 8, 33, § 112: “vicem
olei,” i. e. to supply the place of, id. 28, 10, 45, § 160; cf. id. 18, 14, 36,
§ 134.— B. Of painters, sculptors, etc., to represent, portray, etc. (post-Aug.
for adumbro): “Niceratus repraesentavit Alcibiadem,” Plin. 34, 8, 19, §
88.—With se, to present one's self, be present, Col. 1, 8, 11; 11, 1, 26; Dig.
48, 5, 15, § 3.— II. In partic., mercant. t. t., to pay immediately or on the
spot; to pay in ready money: reliquae pecuniae vel usuram Silio pendemus, dum a
Faberio vel ab aliquo qui Faberio debet, repraesentabimus, shall be enabled to
pay immediately, Cic. Att. 12, 25, 1; 12, 29, 2: “summam,” Suet. Aug. 101:
“legata,” id. Calig. 16: “mercedem,” id. Claud. 18; id. Oth. 5; Front. Strat.
1, 11, 2 Oud. N. cr.: “dies promissorum adest: quem etiam repraesentabo, si
adveneris,” shall even anticipate, Cic. Fam. 16, 14, 2; cf. fideicommissum, to
discharge immediately or in advance, Dig. 35, 1, 36.— B. Transf., in gen., to
do, perform, or execute any act immediately, without delay, forthwith; hence,
not to defer or put off; to hasten (good prose): se, quod in longiorem diem
collaturus esset, repraesentaturum et proximā nocte castra moturum, * Caes. B.
G. 1, 40: “festinasse se repraesentare consilium,” Curt. 6, 11, 33: “petis a
me, ut id quod in diem suum dixeram debere differri, repraesentem,” Sen. Ep.
95, 1; and Front. Aquaed. 119 fin.: “neque exspectare temporis medicinam, quam
repraesentare ratione possimus,” to apply it immediately, Cic. Fam. 5, 16, 6;
so, “improbitatem suam,” to hurry on, id. Att. 16, 2, 3: “spectaculum,” Suet.
Calig. 58: “tormenta poenasque,” id. Claud. 34: “poenam,” Phaedr. 3, 10, 32;
Val. Max. 6, 5, ext. 4: “verbera et plagas,” Suet. Vit. 10: “vocem,” to sing
immediately, id. Ner. 21 et saep.: “si repraesentari morte meā libertas
civitatis potest,” can be immediately recovered, Cic. Phil. 2, 46, 118: “minas
irasque caelestes,” to fulfil immediately, Liv. 2, 36, 6 Weissenb. ad loc.; cf.
Suet. Claud. 38: “judicia repraesentata,” held on the spot, without
preparation, Quint. 10, 7, 2.— C. To represent, stand in the place of (late
Lat.): nostra per eum repraesentetur auctoritas, Greg. M. Ep. 1, 1.
Response: Chomsky hated it. Grice changed it to
‘effect.’ Or not. “Stimulus and response,” Skinner's
behavioral theory was largely set forth in his first book, Behavior of
Organisms (1938).[9] Here, he gives a systematic description of the manner in
which environmental variables control behavior. He distinguished two sorts of
behavior which are controlled in different ways: Respondent behaviors are
elicited by stimuli, and may be modified through respondent conditioning, often
called classical (or pavlovian) conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus is
paired with an eliciting stimulus. Such behaviors may be measured by their
latency or strength. Operant behaviors are 'emitted,' meaning that initially
they are not induced by any particular stimulus. They are strengthened through
operant conditioning (aka instrumental conditioning), in which the occurrence
of a response yields a reinforcer. Such behaviors may be measured by their
rate. Both of these sorts of behavior had already been studied experimentally,
most notably: respondents, by Ivan Pavlov;[25] and operants, by Edward
Thorndike.[26] Skinner's account differed in some ways from earlier ones,[27]
and was one of the first accounts to bring them under one roof.
rerum natura Latin, ‘the
nature of things’, metaphysics. The phrase can also be used more narrowly to
mean the nature of physical reality, and often it presupposes a naturalistic
view of all reality. Lucretius’s epic poem De rerum natura is an Epicurean
physics, designed to underpin the Epicurean morality.
Responsibility – cited by
H. P. Grice in “The causal theory of perception” -- a condition that relates an
agent to actions of, and consequences connected to, that agent, and is always
necessary and sometimes sufficient for the appropriateness of certain kinds of
appraisals of that agent. Responsibility has no single definition, but is
several closely connected specific concepts. Role responsibility. Agents are
identified by social roles that they occupy, say parent or professor. Typically
duties are associated with such roles to
care for the needs of their children, to attend classes and publish research
papers. A person in a social role is “responsible for” the execution of those
duties. One who carries out such duties is “a responsible person” or “is behaving
responsibly.” Causal responsibility. Events, including but not limited to human
actions, cause other events. The cause is “responsible” for the effect. Causal
responsibility does not imply consciousness; objects and natural phenomena may
have causal responsibility. Liability responsibility. Practices of praise and
blame include constraints on the mental stance that an agent must have toward
an action or a consequence of action, in order for praise or blame to be
appropriate. To meet such constraints is to meet a fundamental necessary
condition for liability for praise or blame
hence the expression ‘liability responsibility’. These constraints
include such factors as intention, knowledge, recklessness toward consequences,
absence of mistake, accident, inevitability of choice. An agent with the
capability for liability responsibility may lack it on some occasion when mistaken, for example. Capacity
responsibility. Practices of praise and blame assume a level of intellectual
and emotional capability. The severely mentally disadvantaged or the very
young, for example, do not have the capacity to meet the conditions for
liability responsibility. They are not “responsible” in that they lack capacity
responsibility. Both morality and law embody and respect these distinctions,
though law institutionalizes and formalizes them. Final or “bottom-line”
assignment of responsibility equivalent to indeed deserving praise or blame
standardly requires each of the latter three specific kinds of responsibility.
The first kind supplies some normative standards for praise or blame.
resultance, a relation
according to which one property the resultant property, sometimes called the
consequential property is possessed by some object or event in virtue of and
hence as a result of that object or event possessing some other property or set
of properties. The idea is that properties of things can be ordered into
connected levels, some being more basic than and giving rise to others, the
latter resulting from the former. For instance, a figure possesses the property
of being a triangle in virtue of its possessing a collection of properties,
including being a plane figure, having three sides, and so on; the former
resulting from the latter. An object is brittle has the property of being
brittle in virtue of having a certain molecular structure. It is often claimed
that moral properties like rightness and goodness are resultant properties: an
action is right in virtue of its possessing other properties. These examples
make it clear that the nature of the necessary connection holding between a
resultant property and those base properties that ground it may differ from
case to case. In the geometrical example, the very concept of being a triangle
grounds the resultance relation in question, and while brittleness is
nomologically related to the base properties from which it results, in the
moral case, the resultance relation is arguably neither conceptual nor
causal.
Richard Rufus, also
called Richard of Cornwall d. c.1260, English philosopher-theologian who wrote
some of the earliest commentaries on Aristotle in the Latin West. His
commentaries were not cursory summaries; they included sustained philosophical
discussions. Richard was a master of arts at Paris, where he studied with Alexander
of Hales; he was also deeply influenced by Robert Grosseteste. He left Paris
and joined the Franciscan order in 1238; he was ordained in England. In 1256,
he became regent master of the Franciscan studium at Oxford; according to Roger
Bacon, he was the most influential philosophical theologian at Oxford in the
second half of the thirteenth century. In addition to his Aristotle
commentaries, Richard wrote two commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences
c.1250, c.1254. In the first of these he borrowed freely from Robert
Grosseteste, Alexander of Hales, and Richard Fishacre; the second commentary
was a critical condensation of the lectures of his younger contemporary, St.
Bonaventure, presented in Paris. Richard Rufus was the first medieval proponent
of the theory of impetus; his views on projectile motion were cited by
Franciscus Meyronnes. He also advocated other arguments first presented by
Johannes Philoponus. Against the eternity of the world, he argued: 1 past time
is necessarily finite, since it has been traversed, and 2 the world is not
eternal, since if the world had no beginning, no more time would transpire
before tomorrow than before today. He also argued that if the world had not be
en created ex nihilo, the
first cause would be mutable. Robert Grosseteste cited one of Richard’s
arguments against the eternity of the world in his notes on Aristotle’s
Physics. In theology, Richard denied the validity of Anselm’s ontological
argument, but, anticipating Duns Scotus, he argued that the existence of an
independent being could be inferred from its possibility. Like Duns Scotus, he
employs the formal distinction as an explanatory tool; in presenting his own
views, Duns Scotus cited Richard’s definition of the formal distinction.
Richard stated his philosophical views briefly, even cryptically; his Latin
prose style is sometimes eccentric, characterized by interjections in which he
addresses questions to God, himself, and his readers. He was hesitant about the
value of systematic theology for the theologian, deferring to biblical
exposition as the primary forum for theological discussion. In systematic
theology, he emphasized Aristotelian philosophy and logic. He was a well-known
logician; some scholars believe he is the famous logician known as the Magister
Abstractionum. Though he borrowed freely from his contemporaries, he was a
profoundly original philosopher.
Ricoeur, P. hermeneuticist and phenomenologist who has
been a professor at several universities
as well as the of Naples, Yale , and the of Chicago. He has received major prizes from
France, G.y, and Italy. He is the author of twenty-some volumes tr. in a
variety of languages. Among his best-known books are Freedom and Nature: The
Voluntary and the Involuntary; Freud and Philosophy: An Essay of
Interpretation; The Conflict of Interpretations: Essay in Hermeneutics; The
Role of the Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in
Language, Time and Narrative; and Oneself as Another. His early studies with
the existentialist Marcel resulted in a
book-length study of Marcel’s work and later a series of published dialogues
with him. Ricoeur’s philosophical enterprise is colored by a continuing tension
between faith and reason. His long-standing commitments to both the significance
of the individual and the Christian faith are reflected in his hermeneutical
voyage, his commitment to the Esprit movement, and his interest in the writings
of Emmanuel Mounier. This latter point is also seen in his claim of the
inseparability of action and discourse in our quest for meaning. In our
comprehension of both history and fiction one must turn to the text to
understand its plot as guideline if we are to comprehend experience of any
reflective sort. In the end there are no metaphysical or epistemological
grounds by which meaning can be verified, and yet our nature is such that
possibility must be present before us. Ricoeur attempts his explanation through
a hermeneutic phenomenology. The very hermeneutics of existence that follows is
itself limited by reason’s questioning of experience and its attempts to
transcend the limit through the language of symbols and metaphors. Freedom and
meaning come to be realized in the actualization of an ethics that arises out
of the very act of existing and thus transcends the mere natural voluntary
distinction of a formal ethic. It is clear from his later work that he rejects
any form of foundationalism including phenomenology as well as nihilism and
easy skepticism. Through a sort of interdependent dialectic that goes beyond
the more mechanical models of Hegelianism or Marxism, the self understands
itself and is understood by the other in terms of its suffering and its moral
actions.
rights, advantageous
positions conferred on some possessor by law, morals, rules, or other norms.
There is no agreement on the sense in which rights are advantages. Will
theories hold that rights favor the will of the possessor over the conflicting
will of some other party; interest theories maintain that rights serve to protect
or promote the interests of the right-holder. Hohfeld identified four legal
advantages: liberties, claims, powers, and immunities. The concept of a right
arose in Roman jurisprudence and was extended to ethics via natural law theory.
Just as positive law, the law posited by human lawmakers, confers legal rights,
so the natural law confers natural rights. Rights are classified by their
specific sources in different sorts of rules. Legal rights are advantageous
positions under the law of a society. Other species of institutional rights are
conferred by the rules of private organizations, of the moral code of a
society, or even of some game. Those who identify natural law with the moral
law often identify natural rights with moral rights, but some limit natural
rights to our most fundamental rights and contrast them with ordinary moral
rights. Others deny that moral rights are natural because they believe that
they are conferred by the mores or positive morality of one’s society. One
always possesses any specific right by virtue of possessing some status. Thus,
rights are also classified by status. Civil rights are those one possesses as a
citizen; human rights are possessed by virtue of being human. Presumably
women’s rights, children’s rights, patients’ rights, and the rights of blacks
as such are analogous. Human rights play very much the same role in ethics once
played by natural rights. This is partly because ontological doubts about the
existence of God undermine the acceptance of any natural law taken to consist
in divine commands, and epistemological doubts about self-evident moral truths
lead many to reject any natural law conceived of as the dictates of reason.
Although the Thomistic view that natural rights are grounded on the nature of
man is often advocated, most moral philosophers reject its teleological
conception of human nature defined by essential human purposes. It seems
simpler to appeal instead to fundamental rights that must be universal among
human beings because they are possessed merely by virtue of one’s status as a
human being. Human rights are still thought of as natural in the very broad
sense of existing independently of any human action or institution. This
explains how they can be used as an independent standard in terms of which to criticize
the laws and policies of governments and other organizations. Since human
rights are classified by status rather than source, there is another species of
human rights that are institutional rather than natural. These are the human
rights that have been incorporated into legal systems by international
agreements such as the European Convention on Human Rights. It is sometimes
said that while natural rights were conceived as purely negative rights, such
as the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, human rights are conceived more
broadly to include positive social and economic rights, such as the right to
social security or to an adequate standard of living. But this is surely not
true by definition. Traditional natural law theorists such as Grotius and Locke
spoke of natural rights as powers and associated them with liberties, rather
than with claims against interference. And while modern declarations of human
rights typically include social and economic rights, they assume that these are
rights in the same sense that traditional political rights are. Rights are
often classified by their formal properties. For example, the right not to be
battered is a negative right because it imposes a negative duty not to batter,
while the creditor’s right to be repaid is a positive right because it imposes
a positive duty to repay. The right to be repaid is also a passive right
because its content is properly formulated in the passive voice, while the
right to defend oneself is an active right because its content is best stated
in the active voice. Again, a right in rem is a right that holds against all
second parties; a right in personam is a right that holds against one or a few
others. This is not quite Hart’s distinction between general and special
rights, rights of everyone against everyone, such as the right to free speech,
and rights arising from special relations, such as that between creditor and
debtor or husband and wife. Rights are conceptually contrasted with duties
because rights are advantages while duties are disadvantages. Still, many
jurists and philosophers have held that rights and duties are logical
correlatives. This does seem to be true of claim rights; thus, the creditor’s
right to be repaid implies the debtor’s duty to repay and vice versa. But the
logical correlative of a liberty right, such as one’s right to park in front of
one’s house, is the absence of any duty for one not to do so. This contrast is
indicated by D. D. Raphael’s distinction between rights of recipience and
rights of action. Sometimes to say that one has a right to do something is to
say merely that it is not wrong for one to act in this way. This has been
called the weak sense of ‘a right’. More often to assert that one has a right
to do something does not imply that exercising this right is right. Thus, I
might have a right to refuse to do a favor for a friend even though it would be
wrong for me to do so. Finally, many philosophers distinguish between absolute
and prima facie rights. An absolute right always holds, i.e., disadvantages
some second party, within its scope; a prima facie right is one that holds
unless the ground of the right is outweighed by some stronger contrary
reason.
rigorism, the view that
morality consists in that single set of simple or unqualified moral rules,
discoverable by reason, which applies to all human beings at all times. It is
often said that Kant’s doctrine of the categorical imperative is rigoristic.
Two main objections to rigorism are 1 some moral rules do not apply universally e.g., ‘Promises should be kept’ applies only
where there is an institution of promising; and 2 some rules that could be
universally kept are absurd e.g., that
everyone should stand on one leg while the sun rises. Recent interpreters of
Kant defend him against these objections by arguing, e.g., that the “rules” he
had in mind are general guidelines for living well, which are in fact universal
and practically relevant, or that he was not a rigorist at all, seeing moral
worth as issuing primarily from the agent’s character rather than adherence to
rules.
ring of Gyges, a ring
that gives its wearer invisibility, discussed in Plato’s Republic II, 359b
360d. Glaucon tells the story of a man who discovered the ring and used it to
usurp the throne to defend the claim that those who behave justly do so only
because they lack the power to act unjustly. If they could avoid paying the
penalty of injustice, Glaucon argues, everyone would be unjust.
Rorty, R. philosopher,
notable for the breadth of his philosophical and cultural interests. He was
educated at the of Chicago and Yale and
has taught at Wellesley, Princeton, Virginia, and Stanford. His early work was
primarily in standard areas of analytic philosophy such as the philosophy of
mind, where, for example, he developed an important defense of eliminative
materialism. In 9, however, he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,
which was both hailed and denounced as a fundamental critique of analytic
philosophy. Both the praise and the abuse were often based on misconceptions,
but there is no doubt that Rorty questioned fundamental presuppositions of many
Anglo- philosophers and showed affinities for Continental alternatives to
analytic philosophy. At root, however, Rorty’s position is neither analytic
except in its stylistic clarity nor Continental except in its cultural breadth.
His view is, rather, pragmatic, a contemporary incarnation of the
distinctively philosophizing of James,
Peirce, and Dewey. On Rorty’s reading, pragmatism involves a rejection of the
representationalism that has dominated modern philosophy from Descartes through
logical positivism. According to representationalism, we have direct access
only to ideas that represent the world, not to the world itself. Philosophy has
the privileged role of determining the criteria for judging that our
representations are adequate to reality. A main thrust of Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature is to discredit representationalism, first by showing how it
has functioned as an unjustified presupposition in classical modern
philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant, and second by showing how
analytic philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars and Quine have revealed the
incoherence of representationalist assumptions in contemporary epistemology.
Since, on Rorty’s view, representationalism defines the epistemological project
of modern philosophy, its failure requires that we abandon this project and,
with it, traditional pretensions to a privileged cognitive role for philosophy.
Rorty sees no point in seeking a non-representationalist basis for the
justification or the truth of our knowledge claims. It is enough to accept as
justified beliefs those on which our epistemic community agrees and to use
‘true’ as an honorific term for beliefs that we see as “justified to the hilt.”
Rorty characterizes his positive position as “liberal ironism.” His liberalism
is of a standard sort, taking as its basic value the freedom of all
individuals: first, their freedom from suffering, but then also freedom to form
their lives with whatever values they find most compelling. Rorty distinguishes
the “public sphere” in which we all share the liberal commitment to universal
freedom from the “private spheres” in which we all work out our own specific
conception of the good. His ironism reflects his realization that there is no
grounding for public or private values other than our deep but contingent
commitment to them and his appreciation of the multitude of private values that
he does not himself happen to share. Rorty has emphasized the importance of
literature and literary criticism as
opposed to traditional philosophy for
providing the citizens of a liberal society with appropriate sensitivities to
the needs and values of others.
Roscelin de Compiègne,
philosopher and logician who became embroiled in theological controversy when
he applied his logical teachings to the doctrine of the Trinity. Since almost
nothing survives of his written work, we must rely on hostile accounts of his
views by Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard, both of whom openly opposed
his positions. Perhaps the most notorious view Roscelin is said to have held is
that universals are merely the puffs of air produced when a word is pronounced.
On this point he opposed views current among many theologians that a universal
has an existence independent of language, and somehow is what many different
particulars are. Roscelin’s aversion to any proposal that different things can
be some one thing is probably what led him in his thinking about the three
persons of God to a position that sounded suspiciously like the heresy of
tritheism. Roscelin also evidently held that the qualities of things are not
entities distinct from the subjects that possess them. This indicates that
Roscelin probably denied that terms in the Aristotelian categories other than
substance signified anything distinct from substances. Abelard, the foremost
logician of the twelfth century, studied under Roscelin around 1095 and was
undoubtedly influenced by him on the question of universals. Roscelin’s view
that universals are linguistic entities remained an important option in
medieval thought. Otherwise his positions do not appear to have had much
currency in the ensuing decades.
Rosenzweig, F. G.
philosopher and Jewish theologian known as one of the founders of religious
existentialism. His early relation to Judaism was tenuous, and at one point he
came close to converting to Christianity. A religious experience in a synagogue
made him change his mind and return to Judaism. His chief philosophic works are
a two-volume study, Hegel and the State 0, and his masterpiece, The Star of
Redemption 1. Rosenzweig’s experience in World War I caused him to reject
absolute idealism on the ground that it cannot account for the privacy and
finality of death. Instead of looking for a unifying principle behind
existence, Rosenzweig starts with three independent realities “given” in
experience: God, the self, and the world. Calling his method “radical
empiricism,” he explains how God, the self, and the world are connected by
three primary relations: creation, revelation, and redemption. In revelation,
God does not communicate verbal statements but merely a presence that calls for
love and devotion from worshipers.
Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio,
philosopher, Catholic priest, counselor to Pope Pius IX, and supporter of the
supremacy of the church over civil government Neo-Guelphism. Rosmini had two
major concerns: the objectivity of human knowledge and the synthesis of
philosophical thought within the tradition of Catholic thought. In his Nuovo
saggio sull’origine delle idee “New Essay on the Origin of Ideas,” 1830, he
identifies the universal a priori intuitive component of all human knowledge
with the idea of being that gives us the notion of a possible or ideal being.
Everything in the world is known by intellectual perception, which is the
synthesis of sensation and the idea of being. Except for the idea of being,
which is directly given by God, all ideas derive from abstraction. The
objectivity of human knowledge rests on its universal origin in the idea of
being. The harmony between philosophy and religion comes from the fact that all
human knowledge is the result of divine revelation. Rosmini’s thought was
influenced by Augustine and Aquinas, and stimulated by the attempt to find a
solution to the contrasting needs of rationalism and empiricism.
Ross: w. d. Aristotelian
scholar and moral philosopher. Born in Edinburgh and educated at the of Edinburgh and at Balliol , Oxford, he
became a fellow of Merton , then a fellow, tutor, and eventually provost at
Oriel . He was vice-chancellor of Oxford
144 and president of the British Academy 640. He was knighted in 8 in
view of national service. Ross was a distinguished classical scholar: he edited
the Oxford translations of Aristotle 831 and tr. the Metaphysics and the Ethics
himself. His Aristotle 3 is a judicious exposition of Aristotle’s work as a
whole. Kant’s Ethical Theory 4 is a commentary on Kant’s The Groundwork of
Ethics. His major contribution to philosophy was in ethics: The Right and the
Good 0 and Foundations of Ethics9. The view he expressed there was
controversial in English-speaking countries for ten years or so. He held that
‘right’ and ‘good’ are empirically indefinable terms that name objective
properties the presence of which is known intuitively by persons who are mature
and educated. We first cognize them in particular instances, then arrive at
general principles involving them by “intuitive induction.” He thought every
ethical theory must admit at least one intuition. The knowledge of moral
principles is thus rather like knowledge of the principles of geometry. ‘Right’
‘dutiful’ applies to acts, in the sense of what an agent brings about and there
is no duty to act from a good motive, and a right act can have a bad motive;
‘morally good’ applies primarily to the desires that bring about action. He
castigated utilitarianism as absorbing all duties into enhancing the wellbeing
of everyone affected, whereas in fact we have strong special obligations to
keep promises, make reparation for injuries, repay services done, distribute
happiness in accord with merit, benefit individuals generally and he concedes
this is a weighty matter and ourselves only in respect of knowledge and virtue,
and not injure others normally a stronger obligation than that to benefit. That
we have these “prima facie” duties is self-evident, but they are only prima
facie in the sense that they are actual duties only if there is no stronger
conflicting prima facie duty; and when prima facie duties conflict, what one
ought to do is what satisfies all of them best
although which this is is a matter of judgment, not self-evidence. He
conceded, however, in contrast to his general critique of utilitarianism, that
public support of these prima facie principles with their intuitive strength
can be justified on utilitarian grounds. To meet various counterexamples Ross
introduced complications, such as that a promise is not binding if discharge of
it will not benefit the promisee providing this was an implicit understanding,
and it is less binding if made long ago or in a casual manner. Only four states
of affairs are good in themselves: desire to do one’s duty virtue, knowledge,
pleasure, and the distribution of happiness in accordance with desert. Of
these, virtue is more valuable than any amount of knowledge or pleasure. In
Foundations of Ethics he held that virtue and pleasure are not good in the same
sense: virtue is “admirable” but pleasure only a “worthy object of
satisfaction” so ‘good’ does not name just one property.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques,
philosopher, essayist, novelist, and musician, best known for his theories on
social freedom and societal rights, education, and religion. Born in Geneva, he
was largely self-educated and moved to France as a teenager. Throughout much of
his life he moved between Paris and the provinces with several trips abroad
including a Scottish stay with Hume and a return visit to Geneva, where he
reconverted to Protestantism from his earlier conversion to Catholicism. For a time
he was a friend of Diderot and other philosophes and was asked to contribute
articles on music for the Encyclopedia. Rousseau’s work can be seen from at
least three perspectives. As social contract theorist, he attempts to construct
a hypothetical state of nature to explain the current human situation. This
evolves a form of philosophical anthropology that gives us both a theory of
human nature and a series of pragmatic claims concerning social organization.
As a social commentator, he speaks of both practical and ideal forms of
education and social organization. As a moralist, he continually attempts to
unite the individual and the citizen through some form of universal political
action or consent. In Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among
Mankind 1755, Rousseau presents us with an almost idyllic view of humanity. In
nature humans are first seen as little more than animals except for their
special species sympathy. Later, through an explanation of the development of
reason and language, he is able to suggest how humans, while retaining this
sympathy, can, by distancing themselves from nature, understand their
individual selves. This leads to natural community and the closest thing to
what Rousseau considers humanity’s perfect moment. Private property quickly
follows on the division of labor, and humans find themselves alienated from
each other by the class divisions engendered by private property. Thus man, who
was born in freedom, now finds himself in chains. The Social Contract or Principles
of Political Right 1762 has a more ambitious goal. With an account of the
practical role of the legislator and the introduction of the concept of the
general will, Rousseau attempts to give us a foundation for good government by
presenting a solution to the conflicts between the particular and the
universal, the individual and the citizen, and the actual and the moral.
Individuals, freely agreeing to a social pact and giving up their rights to the
community, are assured of the liberties and equality of political citizenship
found in the contract. It is only through being a citizen that the individual
can fully realize his freedom and exercise his moral rights and duties. While
the individual is naturally good, he must always guard against being dominated
or dominating. Rousseau finds a solution to the problems of individual freedoms
and interests in a superior form of moral/political action that he calls the
general will. The individual as citizen substitutes “I must” for “I will,”
which is also an “I shall” when it expresses assent to the general will. The
general will is a universal force or statement and thus is more noble than any
particular will. In willing his own interest, the citizen is at the same time
willing what is communally good. The particular and the universal are united.
The individual human participant realizes himself in realizing the good of all.
As a practical political commentator Rousseau knew that the universal and the
particular do not always coincide. For this he introduced the idea of the
legislator, which allows the individual citizen to realize his fulfillment as
social being and to exercise his individual rights through universal consent.
In moments of difference between the majority will and the general will the
legislator will instill the correct moral/political understanding. This will be
represented in the laws. While sovereignty rests with the citizens, Rousseau
does not require that political action be direct. Although all government
should be democratic, various forms of government from representative democracy
preferable in small societies to strong monarchies preferable in large
nation-states may be acceptable. To shore up the unity and stability of
individual societies, Rousseau suggests a sort of civic religion to which all
citizens subscribe and in which all members participate. His earlier writings
on education and his later practical treatises on the governments of Poland and
Corsica reflect related concerns with natural and moral development and with
historical and geographical considerations.
Royce, J. philosopher
best known for his pragmatic idealism, his ethics of loyalty, and his theory of
community. Educated at Berkeley, at Johns Hopkins, and in G.y, he taught
philosophy at Harvard from 2. Royce held that a concept of the absolute or
eternal was needed to account for truth, ultimate meaning, and reality in the
face of very real evil in human experience. Seeking to reconcile individuals
with the Absolute, he postulated, in The World and the Individual 9,1, Absolute
Will and Thought as an expression of the concrete and differentiated
individuality of the world. Royce saw the individual self as both moral and
sinful, developing through social interaction, community experience, and
communal and self-interpretation. Self is constituted by a life plan, by
loyalty to an ultimate goal. Yet selflimitation and egoism, two human sins,
work against achievement of individual goals, perhaps rendering life a
senseless failure. The self needs saving and this is the message of religion,
argues Royce The Religious Aspects of Philosophy, 5; The Sources of Religious
Insight, 2. For Royce, the instrument of salvation is the community. In The
Philosophy of Loyalty 8, he develops an ethics of loyalty to loyalty, i.e., the
extension of loyalty throughout the human community. In The Problem of
Christianity 3, Royce presents a doctrine of community that overcomes the
individualismcollectivism dilemma and allows a genuine blending of individual
and social will. Community is built through interpretation, a mediative process
that reconciles two ideas, goals, and persons, bringing common meaning and
understanding. Interpretation involves respect for selves as dynamos of ideas
and purposes, the will to interpret, dissatisfaction with partial meanings and
narrowness of view, reciprocity, and mutuality. In this work, the Absolute is a
“Community of Interpretation and Hope,” in which there is an endlessly
accumulating series of interpretations and significant deeds. An individual
contribution thus is not lost but becomes an indispensable element in the
divine life. Among Royce’s influential students were C. I. Lewis, William
Ernest Hocking, Norbert Wiener, Santayana, and T. S. Eliot.
rule of law, the largely
formal or procedural properties of a well-ordered legal system. Commonly, these
properties are thought to include: a prohibition of arbitrary power the
lawgiver is also subject to the laws; laws that are general, prospective,
clear, and consistent capable of guiding conduct; and tribunals courts that are
reasonably accessible and fairly structured to hear and determine legal claims.
Contemporary discussions of the rule of law focus on two major questions: 1 to
what extent is conformity to the rule of law essential to the very idea of a
legal system; and 2 what is the connection between the rule of law and the
substantive moral value of a legal system?
Russell, Bertrand Arthur
William, philosopher, logician, social reformer, and man of letters, one of the
founders of analytic philosophy. Born of Celtic Highland stock into an
aristocratic family in Wales (then part of England), Russell always divided his
interests between politics, philosophy, and the ladies (he married six times). Orphaned
at four, he was brought up by his grandmother, who educated him at home with
the help of “rather dull” tutors. He studied mathematics at Cambridge and then,
as his grandmother says, ‘out of the blue,’ he turned to philosophy. At home he
had absorbed J. S. Mill’s liberalism, but not his empiricism. At Cambridge he
came under the influence of neo-Hegelianism, especially the idealism of
McTaggart, Ward his tutor, and Bradley. His earliest logical views were
influenced most by Bradley, especially Bradley’s rejection of psychologism.
But, like Ward and McTaggart, he rejected Bradley’s metaphysical monism in
favor of pluralism or monadism. Even as an idealist, he held that scientific
knowledge was the best available and that philosophy should be built around it.
Through many subsequent changes, this belief about science, his pluralism, and
his anti-psychologism remained constant. In 5, he conceived the idea of an
idealist encyclopedia of the sciences to be developed by the use of
transcendental arguments to establish the conditions under which the special
sciences are possible. Russell’s first philosophical book, An Essay on the
Foundations of Geometry 7, was part of this project, as were other mostly
unfinished and unpublished pieces on physics and arithmetic written at this
time see his Collected Papers, vols. 12. Russell claimed, in contrast to Kant,
to use transcendental arguments in a purely logical way compatible with his
anti-psychologism. In this case, however, it should be both possible and
preferable to replace them by purely deductive arguments. Another problem arose
in connection with asymmetrical relations, which led to contradictions if
treated as internal relations, but which were essential for any treatment of
mathematics. Russell resolved both problems in 8 by abandoning idealism
including internal relations and his Kantian methodology. He called this the
one real revolution in his philosophy. With his Cambridge contemporary Moore,
he adopted an extreme Platonic realism, fully stated in The Principles of
Mathematics 3 though anticipated in A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of
Leibniz 0. Russell’s work on the sciences was by then concentrated on pure
mathematics, but the new philosophy yielded little progress until, in 0, he
discovered Peano’s symbolic logic, which offered hope that pure mathematics could
be treated without Kantian intuitions or transcendental arguments. On this
basis Russell propounded logicism, the claim that the whole of pure mathematics
could be derived deductively from logical principles, a position he came to
independently of Frege, who held a similar but more restricted view but whose
work Russell discovered only later. Logicism was announced in The Principles of
Mathematics; its development occupied Russell, in collaboration with Whitehead,
for the next ten years. Their results were published in Principia Mathematica
013, 3 vols., in which detailed derivations were given for Cantor’s set theory,
finite and transfinite arithmetic, and elementary parts of measure theory. As a
demonstration of Russell’s logicism, Principia depends upon much prior
arithmetization of mathematics, e.g. of analysis, which is not explicitly
treated. Even with these allowances much is still left out: e.g., abstract
algebra and statistics. Russell’s unpublished papers Papers, vols. 45, however,
contain logical innovations not included in Principia, e.g., anticipations of
Church’s lambda-calculus. On Russell’s extreme realism, everything that can be
referred to is a term that has being though not necessarily existence. The
combination of terms by means of a relation results in a complex term, which is
a proposition. Terms are neither linguistic nor psychological. The first task
of philosophy is the theoretical analysis of propositions into their
constituents. The propositions of logic are unique in that they remain true
when any of their terms apart from logical constants are replaced by any other
terms. In 1 Russell discovered that this position fell prey to self-referential
paradoxes. For example, if the combination of any number of terms is a new
term, the combination of all terms is a term distinct from any term. The most
famous such paradox is called Russell’s paradox. Russell’s solution was the
theory of types, which banned self-reference by stratifying terms and
expressions into complex hierarchies of disjoint subclasses. The expression
‘all terms’, e.g., is then meaningless unless restricted to terms of specified
types, and the combination of terms of a given type is a term of different
type. A simple version of the theory appeared in Principles of Mathematics
appendix A, but did not eliminate all the paradoxes. Russell developed a more
elaborate version that did, in “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of
Types” 8 and in Principia. From 3 to 8 Russell sought to preserve his earlier
account of logic by finding other ways to avoid the paradoxes including a well-developed substitutional
theory of classes and relations posthumously published in Essays in Analysis,
4, and Papers, vol. 5. Other costs of type theory for Russell’s logicism
included the vastly increased complexity of the resulting sysRussell, Bertrand
Arthur William Russell, Bertrand Arthur William 802 802 tem and the admission of the
problematic axiom of reducibility. Two other difficulties with Russell’s
extreme realism had important consequences: 1 ‘I met Quine’ and ‘I met a man’
are different propositions, even when Quine is the man I met. In the
Principles, the first proposition contains a man, while the second contains a
denoting concept that denotes the man. Denoting concepts are like Fregean
senses; they are meanings and have denotations. When one occurs in a
proposition the proposition is not about the concept but its denotation. This
theory requires that there be some way in which a denoting concept, rather than
its denotation, can be denoted. After much effort, Russell concluded in “On
Denoting” 5 that this was impossible and eliminated denoting concepts as
intermediaries between denoting phrases and their denotations by means of his
theory of descriptions. Using firstorder predicate logic, Russell showed in a
broad, though not comprehensive range of cases how denoting phrases could be
eliminated in favor of predicates and quantified variables, for which logically
proper names could be substituted. These were names of objects of acquaintance represented in ordinary language by ‘this’
and ‘that’. Most names, he thought, were disguised definite descriptions.
Similar techniques were applied elsewhere to other kinds of expression e.g.
class names resulting in the more general theory of incomplete symbols. One
important consequence of this was that the ontological commitments of a theory
could be reduced by reformulating the theory to remove expressions that
apparently denoted problematic entities. 2 The theory of incomplete symbols
also helped solve extreme realism’s epistemic problems, namely how to account
for knowledge of terms that do not exist, and for the distinction between true
and false propositions. First, the theory explained how knowledge of a wide
range of items could be achieved by knowledge by acquaintance of a much
narrower range. Second, propositional expressions were treated as incomplete
symbols and eliminated in favor of their constituents and a propositional
attitude by Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment. These innovations
marked the end of Russell’s extreme realism, though he remained a Platonist in
that he included universals among the objects of acquaintance. Russell referred
to all his philosophy after 8 as logical atomism, indicating thereby that
certain categories of items were taken as basic and items in other categories
were constructed from them by rigorous logical means. It depends therefore upon
reduction, which became a key concept in early analytic philosophy. Logical
atomism changed as Russell’s logic developed and as more philosophical
consequences were drawn from its application, but the label is now most often
applied to the modified realism Russell held from 5 to 9. Logic was central to
Russell’s philosophy from 0 onward, and much of his fertility and importance as
a philosopher came from his application of the new logic to old problems. In 0
Russell became a lecturer at Cambridge. There his interests turned to
epistemology. In writing a popular book, Problems of Philosophy 2, he first
came to appreciate the work of the British empiricists, especially Hume and
Berkeley. He held that empirical knowledge is based on direct acquaintance with
sense-data, and that matter itself, of which we have only knowledge by
description, is postulated as the best explanation of sense-data. He soon
became dissatisfied with this idea and proposed instead that matter be
logically constructed out of sensedata and unsensed sensibilia, thereby
obviating dubious inferences to material objects as the causes of sensations. This
proposal was inspired by the successful constructions of mathematical concepts
in Principia. He planned a large work, “Theory of Knowledge,” which was to use
the multiple relation theory to extend his account from acquaintance to belief
and inference Papers, vol. 7. However, the project was abandoned as incomplete
in the face of Vitters’s attacks on the multiple relation theory, and Russell
published only those portions dealing with acquaintance. The construction of
matter, however, went ahead, at least in outline, in Our Knowledge of the
External World 4, though the only detailed constructions were undertaken later
by Carnap. On Russell’s account, material objects are those series of
sensibilia that obey the laws of physics. Sensibilia of which a mind is aware
sense-data provide the experiential basis for that mind’s knowledge of the
physical world. This theory is similar, though not identical, to phenomenalism.
Russell saw the theory as an application of Ockham’s razor, by which postulated
entities were replaced by logical constructions. He devoted much time to
understanding modern physics, including relativity and quantum theory, and in
The Analysis of Matter 7 he incorporated the fundamental ideas of those
theories into his construction of the physical world. In this book he abandoned
sensibilia as fundamental constituents of the world in favor Russell, Bertrand
Arthur William Russell, Bertrand Arthur William 803 803 of events, which were “neutral” because
intrinsically neither physical nor mental. In 6 Russell was dismissed from
Cambridge on political grounds and from that time on had to earn his living by
writing and public lecturing. His popular lectures, “The Philosophy of Logical
Atomism” 8, were a result of this. These lectures form an interim work, looking
back on the logical achievements of 510 and emphasizing their importance for
philosophy, while taking stock of the problems raised by Vitters’s criticisms
of the multiple relation theory. In 9 Russell’s philosophy of mind underwent
substantial changes, partly in response to those criticisms. The changes
appeared in “On Propositions: What They Are and How They Mean” 9 and The
Analysis of Mind 1, where the influence of contemporary trends in psychology,
especially behaviorism, is evident. Russell gave up the view that minds are
among the fundamental constituents of the world, and adopted neutral monism,
already advocated by Mach, James, and the
New Realists. On Russell’s neutral monism, a mind is constituted by a
set of events related by subjective temporal relations simultaneity,
successiveness and by certain special “mnemic” causal laws. In this way he was
able to explain the apparent fact that “Hume’s inability to perceive himself
was not peculiar.” In place of the multiple relation theory Russell identified
the contents of beliefs with images “imagepropositions” and words
“word-propositions”, understood as certain sorts of events, and analyzed truth
qua correspondence in terms of resemblance and causal relations. From 8 to 4
Russell lived in the United States, where he wrote An Inquiry into Meaning and
Truth 0 and his popular A History of Western Philosophy 5. His philosophical
attention turned from metaphysics to epistemology and he continued to work in
this field after he returned in 4 to Cambridge, where he completed his last
major philosophical work, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits 8. The
framework of Russell’s early epistemology consisted of an analysis of knowledge
in terms of justified true belief though it has been suggested that he
unintentionally anticipated Edmund Gettier’s objection to this analysis, and an
analysis of epistemic justification that combined fallibilism with a weak
empiricism and with a foundationalism that made room for coherence. This
framework was retained in An Inquiry and Human Knowledge, but there were two
sorts of changes that attenuated the foundationalist and empiricist elements
and accentuated the fallibilist element. First, the scope of human knowledge
was reduced. Russell had already replaced his earlier Moorean consequentialism
about values with subjectivism. Contrast “The Elements of Ethics,” 0, with,
e.g., Religion and Science, 5, or Human Society in Ethics and Politics, 4.
Consequently, what had been construed as self-evident judgments of intrinsic value
came to be regarded as non-cognitive expressions of desire. In addition,
Russell now reversed his earlier belief that deductive inference can yield new
knowledge. Second, the degree of justification attainable in human knowledge
was reduced at all levels. Regarding the foundation of perceptual beliefs,
Russell came to admit that the object-knowledge “acquaintance with a
sensedatum” was replaced by “noticing a perceptive occurrence” in An Inquiry
that provides the non-inferential justification for a perceptual belief is
buried under layers of “interpretation” and unconscious inference in even the
earliest stages of perceptual processes. Regarding the superstructure of
inferentially justified beliefs, Russell concluded in Human Knowledge that
unrestricted induction is not generally truthpreserving anticipating Goodman’s
“new riddle of induction”. Consideration of the work of Reichenbach and Keynes
on probability led him to the conclusion that certain “postulates” are needed
“to provide the antecedent probabilities required to justify inductions,” and
that the only possible justification for believing these postulates lies, not
in their self-evidence, but in the resultant increase in the overall coherence
of one’s total belief system. In the end, Russell’s desire for certainty went
unsatisfied, as he felt himself forced to the conclusion that “all human
knowledge is uncertain, inexact, and partial. To this doctrine we have not
found any limitation whatever.” Russell’s strictly philosophical writings of 9
and later have generally been less influential than his earlier writings. His
influence was eclipsed by that of logical positivism and ordinary language
philosophy. He approved of the logical positivists’ respect for logic and
science, though he disagreed with their metaphysical agnosticism. But his
dislike of ordinary language philosophy was visceral. In My Philosophical
Development 9, he accused its practitioners of abandoning the attempt to
understand the world, “that grave and important task which philosophy
throughout the ages has hitherto pursued.”
Russian nihilism, a form
of nihilism, a phenomenon mainly of Russia in the 1860s, which, in contrast to
the general cultural nihilism that Nietzsche later criticized in the 0s as a
“dead-end” devaluing of all values, was futureoriented and “instrumental,”
exalting possibility over actuality. Russian nihilists urged the
“annihilation” figurative and
literal of the past and present, i.e.,
of realized social and cultural values and of such values in process of realization,
in the name of the future, i.e., for the sake of social and cultural values yet
to be realized. Bakunin, as early as 1842, had stated the basic nihilist theme:
“the negation of what exists . . . for the benefit of the future which does not
yet exist.” The bestknown literary exemplar of nihilism in Russia is the
character Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons 1862. Its most
articulate spokesman was Dmitri Pisarev 184068, who shared Bazarov’s cultural
anti-Romanticism, philosophical anti-idealism, and unquestioned trust in the
power of natural science to solve social and moral problems. Pisarev
proclaimed, “It is precisely in the [spread-eagled, laboratory] frog that the
salvation . . . of the Russian people is to be found.” And he formulated what
may serve as the manifesto of Russian nihilism: “What can be broken should be
broken; what will stand the blow is fit to live; what breaks into smithereens
is rubbish; in any case, strike right and left, it will not and cannot do any
harm.”
Russian philosophy, the
philosophy produced by Russian thinkers, both in Russia and in the countries to
which they emigrated, from the mideighteenth century to the present. There was
no Renaissance in Russia, but in the early eighteenth century Peter the Great,
in opening a “window to the West,” opened Russia up to Western philosophical
influences. The beginnings of Russian speculation date from that period, in the
dialogues, fables, and poems of the anti-Enlightenment thinker Gregory
Skovoroda 172294 and in the social tracts, metaphysical treatises, and poems of
the Enlightenment thinker Alexander Radishchev 17491802. Until the last quarter
of the nineteenth century the most original and forceful Russian thinkers stood
outside the academy. Since then, both in Russia and in Western exile, a number
of the most important Russian philosophers
including Berdyaev and Lev Shestov 1866 8 have been
professors. The nineteenth-century thinkers, though educated, lacked
advanced degrees. The only professor
among them, Peter Lavrov 18230, taught mathematics and science rather than
philosophy during the 1850s. If we compare Russian philosophy to G. philosophy
of this period, with its galaxy of
professors Wolff, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel, Dilthey the contrast
is sharp. However, if we compare Russian philosophy to English or philosophy, the contrast fades. No professors
of philosophy appear in the line from Francis Bacon through Hobbes, Locke,
Berkeley, Hume, Bentham, and J. S. Mill, to Spencer. And in France Montaigne, Descartes,
Pascal, Rousseau, and Comte were all non-professors. True to their
non-professional, even “amateur” status, Russian philosophers until the late
nineteenth century paid little attention to the more technical disciplines:
logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. They
focused instead on philosophical anthropology, ethics, social and political
philosophy, philosophy of history, and philosophy of religion. In Russia, more
than in any other Western cultural tradition, speculation, fiction, and poetry
have been linked. On the one hand, major novelists such as Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky, and major poets such as Pasternak and Brodsky, have engaged in
wide-ranging philosophical reflection. On the other hand, philosophers such as
Skovoroda, Alexei Khomyakov 180460, and Vladimir Solovyov 18530 were gifted
poets, while thinkers such as Herzen, Konstantin Leontyev 183, and the
anti-Leninist Marxist Alexander Bogdanov 18738 made their literary mark with
novels, short stories, and memoirs. Such Russian thinkers as Vasily Rozanov
18569 and Shestov, although they wrote no belles lettres, were celebrated in
literary circles for their sparkling essayistic and aphoristic styles. Certain
preoccupations of nineteenth-century Russian thinkers especially Pyotr Chaadaev 17941856 during the
1820s and 1830s, the Slavophiles and Westernizers during the 1840s and 1850s,
and the Populists during the 1860s and 1870s
might appear to be distinctive but in fact were not. The controversial
questions of Russia’s relation to Western Europe and of Russell’s paradox
Russian philosophy 805 805 Russia’s
“special path” to modernity have their counterparts in the reflections of
thinkers in Spain “Spain and Europe”, G.y the Sonderweg a term of which the Russian osobyi put’ is a
translation, and Poland “the Polish Question”. The content of Russian
philosophy may be characterized in general terms as tending toward utopianism,
maximalism, moralism, and soteriology. To take the last point first:
Hegelianism was received in Russia in the 1830s not only as an allembracing
philosophical system but also as a vehicle of secular salvation. In the 1860s
Darwinism was similarly received, as was Marxism in the 0s. Utopianism appears
at the historical and sociopolitical level in two of Solovyov’s characteristic
doctrines: his early “free theocracy,” in which the spiritual authority of the
Roman pope was to be united with the secular authority of the Russian tsar; and
his later ecumenical project of reuniting the Eastern Russian Orthodox and
Western Roman Catholic churches in a single “universal [vselenskaia] church”
that would also incorporate the “Protestant principle” of free philosophical
and theological inquiry. Maximalism appears at the individual and religious
level in Shestov’s claim that God, for whom alone “all things are possible,”
can cause what has happened not to have happened and, in particular, can
restore irrecoverable human loss, such as that associated with disease,
deformity, madness, and death. Maximalism and moralism are united at the cosmic
and “scientific-technological” level in Nikolai Fyodorov’s 18293 insistence on
the overriding moral obligation of all men “the sons” to join the common cause
of restoring life to “the fathers,” those who gave them life rather than, as
sanctioned by the “theory of progress,” pushing them, figuratively if not
literally, into the grave. Certain doctrinal emphases and assumptions link
Russian thinkers from widely separated points on the political and ideological
spectrum: 1 Russian philosophers were nearly unanimous in dismissing the
notorious CartesianHumean “problem of other minds” as a nonproblem. Their
convictions about human community and conciliarity sobornost’, whether
religious or secular, were too powerful to permit Russian thinkers to raise
serious doubts as to whether their moaning and bleeding neighbor was “really”
in pain. 2 Most Russian thinkers the
Westernizers were a partial exception viewed
key Western philosophical positions and formulations, from the Socratic “know
thyself” to the Cartesian cogito, as overly individualistic and overly
intellectualistic, as failing to take into account the wholeness of the human
person. 3 Both such anti-Marxists as Herzen with his “philosophy of the act”
and Fyodorov with his “projective” common task and the early Russian Marxists
were in agreement about the unacceptability of the “Western” dichotomy between
thought and action. But when they stressed the unity of theory and practice, a
key question remained: Who is to shape this unity? And what is its form? The
threadbare MarxistLeninist “philosophy” of the Stalin years paid lip service to
the freedom involved in forging such a unity. Stalin in fact imposed crushing
restraints upon both thought and action. Since 2, works by and about the
previously abused or neglected religious and speculative thinkers of Russia’s
past have been widely republished and eagerly discussed. This applies to
Fyodorov, Solovyov, Leontyev, Rozanov, Berdyaev, Shestov, and the Husserlian
Shpet, among others.
Ryle, Gilbert, English
analytic philosopher known especially for his contributions to the philosophy
of mind and his attacks on Cartesianism. His best-known work is the masterpiece
The Concept of Mind 9, an attack on what he calls “Cartesian dualism” and a
defense of a type of logical behaviorism. This dualism he dubs “the dogma of
the Ghost in the Machine,” the Machine being the body, which is physical and
publicly observable, and the Ghost being the mind conceived as a private or
secret arena in which episodes of sense perception, consciousness, and inner
perception take place. A person, then, is a combination of such a mind and a
body, with the mind operating the body through exercises of will called
“volitions.” Ryle’s attack on this doctrine is both sharply focused and
multifarious. He finds that it rests on a category mistake, namely,
assimilating statements about mental processes to the same category as
statements about physical processes. This is a mistake in the logic of mental
statements and mental concepts and leads to the mistaken metaphysical theory
that a person is composed of two separate and distinct though somehow related
entities, a mind and a body. It is true that statements about the physical are
statements about things and their changes. But statements about the mental are
not, and in particular are not about a thing called “the mind.” These two types
of statements do not belong to the same category. To show this, Ryle deploys a
variety of arguments, including arguments alleging the impossibility of causal
relations between mind and body and arguments alleging vicious infinite
regresses. To develop his positive view on the nature of mind, Ryle studies the
uses and hence the logic of mental terms and finds that mental statements tell
us that the person performs observable actions in certain ways and has a
disposition to perform other observable actions in specifiable circumstances.
For example, to do something intelligently is to do something physical in a
certain way and to adjust one’s behavior to the circumstances, not, as the
dogma of the Ghost in the Machine would have it, to perform two actions, one of
which is a mental action of thinking that eventually causes a separate physical
action. Ryle buttresses this position with many acute and subtle analyses of
the uses of mental terms. Much of Ryle’s other work concerns philosophical
methodology, sustaining the thesis which is the backbone of The Concept of Mind
that philosophical problems and doctrines often arise from conceptual confusion,
i.e., from mistakes about the logic of language. Important writings in this
vein include the influential article “Systematically Misleading Expressions”
and the book Dilemmas 4. Ryle was also interested in Grecian philosophy
throughout his life, and his last major work, Plato’s Progress, puts forward
novel hypotheses about changes in Plato’s views, the role of the Academy, the
purposes and uses of Plato’s dialogues, and Plato’s relations with the rulers
of Syracuse.
Saadiah Gaon 882942,
Jewish exegete, philosopher, liturgist, grammarian, and lexicographer. Born in
the Fayyum in Egypt, Saadiah wrote his first Hebrew dictionary by age twenty.
He removed to Tiberias, probably fleeing the backlash of his polemic against
the Karaite biblicist, anti-Talmudic sect. There he mastered the inductive
techniques of semantic analysis pioneered by Muslim MuÅtazilites in defending
their rationalistic monotheism and voluntaristic theodicy. He learned
philologically from the Masoretes and liturgical poets, and philosophically
from the MuÅtazilite-influenced Jewish metaphysician Daud al-Muqammif of Raqqa
in Iraq, and Isaac Israeli of Qayrawan in Tunisia, a Neoplatonizing physician,
with whom the young philosopher attempted a correspondence. But his sense of
system, evidenced in his pioneering chronology, prayerbook, and scheme of
tropes, and nurtured by Arabic versions of Plato but seemingly not much
Aristotle, allowed him to outgrow and outshine his mentors. He came to
prominence by successfully defending the traditional Hebrew calendar, using
astronomical, mathematical, and rabbinic arguments. Called to Baghdad, he
became Gaon Hebrew, ‘Eminence’ or head of the ancient Talmudic academy of
Pumpedita, then nearly defunct. His commentaries on rabbinic property law and
his letters to Jewish communities as far away as Spain refurbished the
authority of the academy, but a controversy with the Exilarch, secular head of
Mesopotamian Jewry, led to his deposition and six years in limbo, deprived of
his judicial authority. He delved into scientific cosmology, tr. many biblical
books into Arabic with philosophic commentaries and thematic introductions, and
around 933 completed The Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions, the
first Jewish philosophical summa. Unusual among medieval works for a lengthy
epistemological introduction, its ten Arabic treatises defend and define
creation, monotheism, human obligation and virtue, theodicy, natural
retribution, resurrection, immortality and recompense, Israel’s redemption, and
the good life. Saadiah argues that no single good suffices for human happiness;
each in isolation is destructive. The Torah prepares the optimal blend of the
appetitive and erotic, procreative, civilizational, ascetic, political,
intellectual, pious, and tranquil. Following al-Rhazi d. 925 or 932, Saadiah
argues that since destruction always overcomes organization in this world,
sufferings will always outweigh pleasures; therefore as in rabbinic and
MuÅtazilite theodicy God must be assumed to right the balances in the hereafter.
Indeed, justice is the object of creation
not simply that the righteous be rewarded but that all should earn their
deserved requital: the very light that is sown for the righteous is the fire
that torments the wicked. But if requital and even recompense must be earned,
this life is much more than an anteroom. Authenticity becomes a value in
itself: the innocent are not told directly that their sufferings are a trial,
or their testing would be invalid. Only by enduring their sufferings without interference
can they demonstrate the qualities that make them worthy of the highest reward.
Movingly reconciled with the Exilarch, Saadiah ended his life as Gaon. His
voluntarism, naturalism, and rationalism laid philosophical foundations for
Maimonides, and his inductive exegesis became a cornerstone of critical
hermeneutics.
Saint Petersburg paradox,
a puzzle about gambling that motivated the distinction between expected return
and expected utility. Daniel Bernoulli published it in a St. Petersburg journal
in 1738. It concerns a gamble like this: it pays $2 if heads appears on the
first toss of a coin, $4 if heads does not appear until the second toss, $8 if
heads does not appear until the third toss, and so on. The expected return from
the gamble is ½2 ! ¼4 ! 1 /88 ! . . . , or 1 ! 1 ! 1 ! ..., i.e., it is
infinite. But no one would pay much for the gamble. So it seems that expected
returns do not govern rational preferences. Bernoulli argued that expected
utilities govern rational preferences. He also held that the utility of wealth
is proportional to the log of the amount of wealth. Given his assumptions, the
gamble has finite 808 S 808 expected
utility, and should not be preferred to large sums of money. However, a
twentieth-century version of the paradox, attributed to Karl Menger,
reconstructs the gamble, putting utility payoffs in place of monetary payoffs,
so that the new gamble has infinite expected utility. Since no one would trade
much utility for the new gamble, it also seems that expected utilities do not
govern rational preferences. The resolution of the paradox is under
debate.
Saint-Simon, Comte de,
title of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy 17601825,
social reformer. An aristocrat by birth, he initially joined the ranks
of the enlightened and liberal bourgeoisie. His Newtonian Letters to an
Inhabitant of Geneva 1803 and Introduction to Scientific Works of the
Nineteenth Century 1808 championed Condorcet’s vision of scientific and
technological progress. With Auguste Comte, he shared a positivistic philosophy
of history: the triumph of science over metaphysics. Written in wartime, The
Reorganization of European Society 1814 urged the creation of a European
parliamentary system to secure peace and unity. Having moved from scientism to
pacifism, Saint-Simon moved further to industrialism. In 1817, under the
influence of two theocratic thinkers, de Maistre and Bonald, Saint-Simon turned
away from classical economic liberalism and repudiated laissez-faire
capitalism. The Industrial System 1820 drafts the program for a hierarchical
state, a technocratic society, and a planned economy. The industrial society of
the future is based on the principles of productivity and cooperation and led
by a rational and efficient class, the industrialists artists, scientists, and
technicians. He argued that the association of positivism with unselfishness,
of techniques of rational production with social solidarity and
interdependency, would remedy the plight of the poor. Industrialism prefigures
socialism, and socialism paves the way for the rule of the law of love, the
eschatological age of The New Christianity 1825. This utopian treatise, which
reveals Saint-Simon’s alternative to reactionary Catholicism and Protestant
individualism, became the Bible of the Saint-Simonians, a sectarian school of
utopian socialists.
Same -- Sameness --
Griceian – One of Grice’s favourite essays ever was Wiggins’s “Sameness and
substance” -- Griceian différance, a
coinage deployed by Derrida in De la Grammatologie 7, where he defines
it as “an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring.”
Différance is polysemic, but its key function is to name the prime condition
for the functioning of all language and thought: differing, the differentiation
of signs from each other that allows us to differentiate things from each
other. Deferring is the process by which signs refer to each other, thus
constituting the self-reference essential to language, without ever capturing
the being or presence that is the transcendent entity toward which it is aimed.
Without the concepts or idealities generated by the iteration of signs, we
could never identify a dog as a dog, could not perceive a dog or any other
thing as such. Perception presupposes language, which, in turn, presupposes the
ideality generated by the repetition of signs. Thus there can be no perceptual
origin for language; language depends upon an “original repetition,” a
deliberate oxymoron that Derrida employs to signal the impossibility of
conceiving an origin of language from within the linguistic framework in which
we find ourselves. Différance is the condition for language, and language is
the condition for experience: whatever meaning we may find in the world is
attributed to the differing/ deferring play of signifiers. The notion of
différance and the correlative thesis that meaning is language-dependent have
been appropriated by radical thinkers in the attempt to demonstrate that
political inequalities are grounded in nothing other than the conventions of
sign systems governing differing cultures.
Sanches, F. c.15511623,
Portuguese born philosopher and physician. Raised in southern France, he took
his medical degree at the of
Montpellier. After a decade of medical practice he was professor of philosophy
at the of Toulouse and later professor
of medicine there. His most important work, Quod nihil sciturThat Nothing Is
Known, 1581, is a classic of skeptical argumentation. Written at the same time
that his cousin, Montaigne, wrote the “Apology for Raimund Sebond,” it devastatingly
criticized the Aristotelian theory of knowledge. He began by declaring that he
did not even know if he knew nothing. Then he examined the Aristotelian view
that science consists of certain knowledge gained by demonstrations from true
definitions. First of all, we do not possess such definitions, since all our
definitions are just arbitrary names of things. The Aristotelian theory of
demonstration is useless, since in syllogistic reasoning the conclusion has to
be part of the evidence for the premises. E.g., how can one know that all men
are mortal unless one knows that Socrates is mortal? Also, anything can be
proven by syllogistic reasoning if one chooses the right premises. This does
not produce real knowledge. Further we cannot know anything through its causes,
since one would have to know the causes of the causes, and the causes of these,
ad infinitum. Sanches also attacked the Platonic theory of knowledge, since
mathematical knowledge is about ideal rather than real objects. Mathematics is
only hypothetical. Its relevance to experience is not known. True science would
consist of perfect knowledge of a thing. Each particular would be understood in
and by itself. Such knowledge can be attained only by God. We cannot study
objects one by one, since they are all interrelated and interconnected. Our
faculties are also not reliable enough. Hence genuine knowledge cannot be
attained by humans. What we can do, using “scientific method” a term first used
by Sanches, is gather careful empirical information and make cautious judgments
about it. His views were well known in the seventeenth century, and may have
inspired the “mitigated skepticism” of Gassendi and others.
sanction, anything whose
function is to penalize or reward. It is useful to distinguish between social
sanctions, legal sanctions, internal sanctions, and religious sanctions. Social
sanctions are extralegal pressures exerted upon the agent by others. For
example, others might distrust us, ostracize us, or even physically attack us,
if we behave in certain ways. Legal sanctions include corporal punishment,
imprisonment, fines, withdrawal of the legal rights to run a business or to
leave the area, and other penalties. Internal sanctions may include not only
guilt feelings but also the sympathetic pleasures of helping others or the
gratified conscience of doing right. Divine sanctions, if there are any, are
rewards or punishments given to us by a god while we are alive or after we die.
There are important philosophical questions concerning sanctions. Should law be
defined as the rules the breaking of which elicits punishment by the state?
Could there be a moral duty to behave in a given way if there were no social
sanctions concerning such behavior? If not, then a conventionalist account of
moral duty seems unavoidable. And, to what extent does the combined effect of
external and internal sanctions make rational egoism or prudence or
self-interest coincide with morality?
Santayana, G.,
philosopher and writer. Born in Spain, he arrived in the United States as a
child, received his education at Harvard, and rose to professor of philosophy
there. He first came to prominence for his view, developed in The Sense of
Beauty 6, that beauty is objectified pleasure. His The Life of Reason 5 vols.,
5, a celebrated expression of his naturalistic vision, traces human creativity
in ordinary life, society, art, religion, and science. He denied that his
philosophy ever changed, but the mature expression of his thought, in
Skepticism and Animal Faith 3 and The Realms of Being 4 vols., 740, is
deliberately ontological and lacks the phenomenological emphasis of the earlier
work. Human beings, according to Santayana, are animals in a material world
contingent to the core. Reflection must take as its primary datum human action
aimed at eating and fleeing. The philosophy of animal faith consists of
disentangling the beliefs tacit in such actions and yields a realism concerning
both the objects of immediate consciousness and the objects of belief.
Knowledge is true belief rendered in symbolic terms. As symbolism, it
constitutes the hauntingly beautiful worlds of the senses, poetry, and
religion; as knowledge, it guides and is tested by successful action. Santayana
had been taught by William James, and his insistence on the primacy of action
suggests a close similarity to the views of Dewey. He is, nevertheless, not a
pragmatist in any ordinary sense: he views nature as the fully formed arena of
human activity and experience as a flow of isolated, private sentience in this alien
world. His deepest sympathy is with Aristotle, though he agrees with Plato
about the mind-independent existence of Forms and with Schopenhauer about the
dimness of human prospects. His mature four-realm ontology turns on the
distinction between essence and matter. Essences are forms of definiteness.
They are infinite in number and encompass everything possible. Their eternity
makes them causally inefficacious: as possibilities, they cannot accomplish
their own actualization. Matter, a surd and formless force, generates the
physical universe by selecting essences for embodiment. Truth is the realm of
being created by the intersection of matter and form: it is the eternal record
of essences that have been, are being, and will be given actuality in the history
of the world. Spirit or consciousness cannot be reduced to the motions of the
physical organism that give rise to it. It is constituted by a sequence of acts
or intuitions whose objects are essences but whose time-spanning, synthetic
nature renders them impotent. Organic selectivity is the source of values.
Accordingly, the good of each organism is a function of its nature. Santayana
simply accepts the fact that some of these goods are incommensurable and the
tragic reality that they may be incompatible, as well. Under favorable
circumstances, a life of reason or of maximal harmonized satisfactions is
possible for a while. The finest achievement of human beings, however, is the
spiritual life in which we overcome animal partiality and thus all valuation in
order to enjoy the intuition of eternal essences. Santayana identifies such
spirituality with the best that religion and sound philosophy can offer. It
does not help us escape finitude and death, but enables us in this short life
to transcend care and to intuit the eternal. Santayana’s exquisite vision has
gained him many admirers but few followers. His system is a self-consistent and
sophisticated synthesis of elements, such as materialism and Platonism, that
have hitherto been thought impossible to reconcile. His masterful writing makes
his books instructive and pleasurable, even if many of his characteristic views
engender resistance among philosophers.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
broadly, the claim that one’s perception, thought, and behavior are influenced
by one’s language. The hypothesis was named after Benjamin Lee Whorf 7 1 and
his teacher Edward Sapir 4 9. We may discern different versions of this claim
by distinguishing degrees of linguistic influence, the highest of which is
complete and unalterable determination of the fundamental structures of
perception, thought, and behavior. In the most radical form, the hypothesis
says that one’s reality is constructed by one’s language and that differently
structured languages give rise to different realities, which are
incommensurable.
Sartre, J.-P. philosopher
and writer, the leading advocate of existentialism during the years following
World War II. The heart of his philosophy was the precious notion of freedom
and its concomitant sense of personal responsibility. He insisted, in an
interview a few years before his death, that he never ceased to believe that
“in the end one is always responsible for what is made of one,” only a slight
revision of his earlier, bolder slogan, “man makes himself.” To be sure, as a
student of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger
and because of his own physical frailty and the tragedies of the
war Sartre had to be well aware of the
many constraints and obstacles to human freedom, but as a Cartesian, he never
deviated from Descartes’s classical portrait of human consciousness as free and
distinct from the physical universe it inhabits. One is never free of one’s
“situation,” Sartre tells us, though one is always free to deny “negate” that
situation and to try to change it. To be human, to be conscious, is to be free
to imagine, free to choose, and responsible for one’s lot in life. As a
student, Sartre was fascinated by Husserl’s new philosophical method,
phenomenology. His first essays were direct responses to Husserl and applications
of the phenomenological method. His essay on The Imagination in 6 established
the groundwork for much of what was to follow: the celebration of our
remarkable freedom to imagine the world other than it is and following Kant the
way that this ability informs all of our experience. In The Transcendence of
the Ego 7 he reconsidered Husserl’s central idea of a “phenomenological
reduction” the idea of examining the essential structures of consciousness as
such and argued following Heidegger that one cannot examine consciousness
without at the same time recognizing the reality of actual objects in the
world. In other words, there can be no such “reduction.” In his novel Nausea 8,
Sartre made this point in a protracted example: his bored and often nauseated narrator
confronts a gnarled chestnut tree in the park and recognizes with a visceral
shock that its presence is simply given and utterly irreducible. In The
Transcendence of the Ego Sartre also reconsiders the notion of the self, which
Husserl and so many earlier philosophers had identified with consciousness. But
the self, Sartre argues, is not “in” consciousness, much less identical to it.
The self is out there “in the world, like the self of another.” In other words,
the self is an ongoing project in the world with other people; it is not simply
self-awareness or self-consciousness as such “I think, therefore I am”. This
separation of self and consciousness and the rejection of the self as simply
self-consciousness provide the framework for Sartre’s greatest philosophical
treatise, L’être et le néant Being and Nothingness, 3. Its structure is
unabashedly Cartesian, consciousness “being-for-itself” or pour soi on the one
side, the existence of mere things “being-in-itself” or en soi on the other.
The phraseology comes from Hegel. But Sartre does not fall into the Cartesian
trap of designating these two types of being as separate “substances.” Instead,
Sartre describes consciousness as “nothing’
“not a thing” but an activity, “a wind blowing from nowhere toward the
world.” Sartre often resorts to visceral metaphors when developing this theme
e.g., “a worm coiled in the heart of being”, but much of what he is arguing is
familiar to philosophical readers in the more metaphor-free work of Kant, who
also warned against the follies “paralogisms” of understanding consciousness as
itself a possible object of consciousness rather than as the activity of
constituting the objects of consciousness. As the lens of a camera can never
see itself and in a mirror only sees a
reflection of itself consciousness can
never view itself as consciousness and is only aware of itself “for itself”
through its experience of objects. Ontologically, one might think of
“nothingness” as “no-thing-ness,” a much less outrageous suggestion than those
that would make it an odd sort of a thing. It is through the nothingness of
consciousness and its activities that negation comes into the world, our
ability to imagine the world other than it is and the inescapable necessity of
imagining ourselves other than we seem to be. And because consciousness is
nothingness, it is not subject to the rules of causality. Central to the
argument of L’être et le néant and Sartre’s insistence on the primacy of human
freedom is his insistence that consciousness cannot be understood in causal
terms. It is always self-determining and, as such, “it always is what it is
not, and is not what it is” a playful
paradox that refers to the fact that we are always in the process of choosing.
Consciousness is “nothing,” but the self is always on its way to being
something. Throughout our lives we accumulate a body of facts that are true of
us our “facticity” but during our lives we remain free to
envision new possibilities, to reform ourselves and to reinterpret our facticity
in the light of new projects and ambitions
our “transcendence.” This indeterminacy means that we can never be
anything, and when we try to establish ourselves as something particular whether a social role policeman, waiter or a
certain character shy, intellectual, cowardly
we are in “bad faith.” Bad faith is erroneously viewing ourselves as
something fixed and settled Sartre utterly rejects Freud and his theory of the
unconscious determination of our personalities and behavior, but it is also bad
faith to view oneself as a being of infinite possibilities and ignore the
always restrictive facts and circumstances within which all choices must be
made. On the one hand, we are always trying to define ourselves; on the other
hand we are always free to break away from what we are, and always responsible
for what we have made of ourselves. But there is no easy resolution or
“balance” between facticity and freedom, rather a kind of dialectic or tension.
The result is our frustrated desire to be God, to be both in-itself and
for-itself. But this is not so much blasphemy as an expression of despair, a
form of ontological original sin, the impossibility of being both free and what
we want to be. Life for Sartre is yet more complicated. There is a third basic
ontological category, on a par with the being-in-itself and being-for-itself
and not derivative of them. He calls it “being-for-others.” To say that it is
not derivative is to insist that our knowledge of others is not inferred, e.g.
by some argument by analogy, from the behavior of others, and we ourselves are
not wholly constituted by our self-determinations and the facts about us.
Sartre gives us a brutal but familiar everyday example of our experience of
being-for-others in what he calls “the look” le regard. Someone catches us “in
the act” of doing something humiliating, and we find ourselves defining
ourselves probably also resisting that definition in their terms. In his Saint
Genet 3, Sartre describes such a conversion of the ten-year-old Jean Genet into
a thief. So, too, we tend to “catch” one another in the judgments we make and
define one another in terms that are often unflattering. But these judgments
become an essential and ineluctible ingredient in our sense of ourselves, and
they too lead to conflicts indeed, conflicts so basic and so frustrating that
in his play Huis clos No Exit, 3 Sartre has one of his characters utter the
famous line, “Hell is other people.” In his later works, notably his Critique
of Dialectical Reason 859, Sartre turned increasingly to politics and, in
particular, toward a defense of Marxism on existentialist principles. This
entailed rejecting materialist determinism, but it also required a new sense of
solidarity or what Sartre had wistfully called, following Heidegger, Mitsein or
“being with others”. Thus in his later work he struggled to find a way of
overcoming the conflict and insularity or the rather “bourgeois” consciousness
he had described in Being and Nothingness. Not surprisingly given his constant
political activities he found it in revolutionary engagement. Consonant with
his rejection of bourgeois selfhood, Sartre turned down the 4 Nobel prize for
literature.
Satisfactoriness-condition,
a state of affairs or “way things are,” most commonly referred to in relation
to something that implies or is implied by it. Let p, q, and r be schematic
letters for declarative sentences; and let P, Q, and R be corresponding
nominalizations; e.g., if p is ‘snow is white’, then P would be ‘snow’s being
white’. P can be a necessary or sufficient condition of Q in any of several
senses. In the weakest sense P is a sufficient condition of Q iff if and only
if: if p then q or if P is actual then Q is actual where the conditional is to be read as “material,”
as amounting merely to not-p & not-q. At the same time Q is a necessary
condition of P iff: if not-q then not-p. It follows that P is a sufficient
condition of Q iff Q is a necessary condition of P. Stronger senses of
sufficiency and of necessity are definable, in terms of this basic sense, as
follows: P is nomologically sufficient necessary for Q iff it follows from the
laws of nature, but not without them, that if p then q that if q then p. P is
alethically or metaphysically sufficient necessary for Q iff it is alethically
or metaphysically necessary that if p then q that if q then p. However, it is
perhaps most common of all to interpret conditions in terms of subjunctive
conditionals, in such a way that P is a sufficient condition of Q iff P would
not occur unless Q occurred, or: if P should occur, Q would; and P is a
necessary condition of Q iff Q would not occur unless P occurred, or: if Q
should occur, P would. -- satisfaction,
an auxiliary semantic notion introduced by Tarski in order to give a recursive
definition of truth for languages containing quantifiers. Intuitively, the
satisfaction relation holds between formulas containing free variables such as
‘Buildingx & Tallx’ and objects or sequences of objects such as the Empire
State Building if and only if the formula “holds of” or “applies to” the
objects. Thus, ‘Buildingx & Tallx’, is satisfied by all and only tall
buildings, and ‘-Tallx1 & Tallerx1, x2’ is satisfied by any pair of objects
in which the first object corresponding to ‘x1’ is not tall, but nonetheless taller
than the second corresponding to ‘x2’. Satisfaction is needed when defining
truth for languages with sentences built from formulas containing free
variables, because the notions of truth and falsity do not apply to these
“open” formulas. Thus, we cannot characterize the truth of the sentences ‘Dx
Buildingx & Tallx’ ‘Some building is tall’ in terms of the truth or falsity
of the open formula ‘Buildingx & Tallx’, since the latter is neither true
nor false. But note that the sentence is true if and only if the formula is
satisfied by some object. Since we can give a recursive definition of the
notion of satisfaction for possibly open formulas, this enables us to use this
auxiliary notion in defining truth. -- satisfiable,
having a common model, a structure in which all the sentences in the set are
true; said of a set of sentences. In modern logic, satisfiability is the
semantic analogue of the syntactic, proof-theoretic notion of consistency, the
unprovability of any explicit contradiction. The completeness theorem for
first-order logic, that all valid sentences are provable, can be formulated in
terms of satisfiability: syntactic consistency implies satisfiability. This
theorem does not necessarily hold for extensions of first-order logic. For any
sound proof system for secondorder logic there will be an unsatisfiable set of
sentences without there being a formal derivation of a contradiction from the
set. This follows from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. One of the central
results of model theory for first-order logic concerns satisfiability: the
compactness theorem, due to Gödel in 6, says that if every finite subset of a
set of sentences is satisfiable the set itself is satisfiable. It follows
immediately from his completeness theorem for first-order logic, and gives a
powerful method to prove the consistency of a set of sentences.
satisfice, to choose or
do the good enough rather than the most or the best. ‘Satisfice’, an obsolete
variant of ‘satisfy’, has been adopted by economist Herbert Simon and others to
designate nonoptimizing choice or action. According to some economists,
limitations of time or information may make it impossible or inadvisable for an
individual, firm, or state body to attempt to maximize pleasure, profits,
market share, revenues, or some other desired result, and satisficing with
respect to such results is then said to be rational, albeit less than ideally
rational. Although many orthodox economists think that choice can and always
should be conceived in maximizing or optimizing terms, satisficing models have
been proposed in economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy. Biologists
have sometimes conceived evolutionary change as largely consisting of “good
enough” or satisficing adaptations to environmental pressures rather than as proceeding
through optimal adjustments to such pressures, but in philosophy, the most
frequent recent use of the idea of satisficing has been in ethics and rational
choice theory. Economists typically regard satisficing as acceptable only where
there are unwanted constraints on decision making; but it is also possible to
see satisficing as entirely acceptable in itself, and in the field of ethics,
it has recently been argued that there may be nothing remiss about moral
satisficing, e.g., giving a good amount to charity, but less than one could
give. It is possible to formulate satisficing forms of utilitarianism on which
actions are morally right even if they contribute merely positively and/or in
some large way, rather than maximally, to overall net human happiness.
Bentham’s original formulation of the principle of utility and Popper’s
negative utilitarianism are both examples of satisficing utilitarianism in this
sense and it should be noted that
satisficing utilitarianism has the putative advantage over optimizing forms of
allowing for supererogatory degrees of moral excellence. Moreover, any moral
view that treats moral satisficing as permissible makes room for moral
supererogation in cases where one optimally goes beyond the merely acceptable.
But since moral satisficing is less than optimal moral behavior, but may be
more meritorious than certain behavior that in the same circumstances would be
merely permissible, some moral satisficing may actually count as
supererogatory. In recent work on rational individual choice, some philosophers
have argued that satisficing may often be acceptable in itself, rather than
merely second-best. Even Simon allows that an entrepreneur may simply seek a
satisfactory return on investment or share of the market, rather than a maximum
under one of these headings. But a number of philosophers have made the further
claim that we may sometimes, without irrationality, turn down the readily
available better in the light of the goodness and sufficiency of what we
already have or are enjoying. Independently of the costs of taking a second
dessert, a person may be entirely satisfied with what she has eaten and, though
willing to admit she would enjoy that extra dessert, turn it down, saying “I’m
just fine as I am.” Whether such examples really involve an acceptable
rejection of the momentarily better for the good enough has been disputed.
However, some philosophers have gone on to say, even more strongly, that
satisficing can sometimes be rationally required and optimizing rationally unacceptable.
To keep on seeking pleasure from food or sex without ever being thoroughly
satisfied with what one has enjoyed can seem compulsive and as such less than
rational. If one is truly rational about such goods, one isn’t insatiable: at
some point one has had enough and doesn’t want more, even though one could
obtain further pleasure. The idea that satisficing is sometimes a requirement
of practical reason is reminiscent of Aristotle’s view that moderation is
inherently reasonable rather than just a
necessary means to later enjoyments and the avoidance of later pain or illness,
which is the way the Epicureans conceived moderation. But perhaps the greatest
advocate of satisficing is Plato, who argues in the Philebus that there must be
measure or limit to our desire for pleasure in order for pleasure to count as a
good thing for us. Insatiably to seek and obtain pleasure from a given source
is to gain nothing good from it. And according to such a view, satisficing
moderation is a necessary precondition of human good and flourishing, rather
than merely being a rational restraint on the accumulation of independently
conceived personal good or well-being.
Saussure, Ferdinand de,
founder of structuralism. His work in semiotics is a major influence on the
later development of structuralist
philosophy, as well as structural anthropology, structuralist literary
criticism, and modern semiology. He pursued studies in linguistics largely
under Georg Curtius at the of Leipzig,
along with such future Junggrammatiker neogrammarians as Leskien and Brugmann.
Following the publication of his important Mémoire sur le système primitif des
voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes 1879, Saussure left for Paris, where
he associated himself with the Société Linguistique and taught comparative
grammar. In 1, he returned to Switzerland to teach Sanskrit, comparative
grammar, and general linguistics at the
of Geneva. His major work, the Course in General Linguistics 6, was
assembled from students’ notes and his original lecture outlines after his
death. The Course in General Linguistics argued against the prevalent
historical and comparative philological approaches to language by advancing
what Saussure termed a scientific model for linguistics, one borrowed in part
from Durkheim. Such a model would take the “social fact” of language la langue
as its object, and distinguish this from the variety of individual speech
events la parole, as well as from the collectivity of speech events and
grammatical rules that form the general historical body of language as such le
langage. Thus, by separating out the unique and accidental elements of
practiced speech, Saussure distinguished language la langue as the objective
set of linguistic elements and rules that, taken as a system, governs the language
use specific to a given community. It was the systematic coherency and
generality of language, so conceived, that inclined Saussure to approach
linguistics principally in terms of its static or synchronic dimension, rather
than its historical or diachronic dimension. For Saussure, the system of
language is a “treasury” or “depository” of signs, and the basic unit of the
linguistic sign is itself two-sided, having both a phonemic component “the
signifier” and a semantic component “the signified”. He terms the former the
“acoustical” or “sound” image which may,
in turn, be represented graphically, in writing
and the latter the “concept” or “meaning.” Saussure construes the
signifier to be a representation of linguistic sounds in the imagination or memory,
i.e., a “psychological phenomenon,” one that corresponds to a specifiable range
of material phonetic sounds. Its distinctive property consists in its being
readily differentiated from other signifiers in the particular language. It is
the function of each signifier, as a distinct entity, to convey a particular
meaning or “signified” concept and this is fixed purely by conventional
association. While the relation between the signifier and signified results in
what Saussure terms the “positive” fact of the sign, the sign ultimately
derives its linguistic value its precise descriptive determination from its
position in the system of language as a whole, i.e., within the paradigmatic
and syntagmatic relations that structurally and functionally differentiate it.
Signifiers are differentially identified; signifiers are arbitrarily associated
with their respective signified concepts; and signs assume the determination
they do only through their configuration within the system of language as a
whole: these facts enabled Saussure to claim that language is largely to be
understood as a closed formal system of differences, and that the study of
language would be principally governed by its autonomous structural
determinations. So conceived, linguistics would be but a part of the study of
social sign systems in general, namely, the broader science of what Saussure
termed semiology. Saussure’s insights would be taken up by the subsequent
Geneva, Prague, and Copenhagen schools of linguistics and by the Russian formalists,
and would be further developed by the structuralists in France and elsewhere,
as well as by recent semiological approaches to literary criticism, social
anthropology, and psychoanalysis.
scepticism: For some reason, Grice was irritated by Wood’s
sobriquet of Russell as a “passionate sceptic”: ‘an oxymoron.” The most
specific essay by Grice on this is an essay he kept after many years, that he
delivered back in the day at Oxford, entitled, “Scepticism and common sense.”
Both were traditional topics at Oxford at the time. Typically, as in the
Oxonian manner, he chose two authors, New-World’s Malcolm’s treatment of
Old-World Moore, and brings in Austin’s ‘ordinary-language’ into the bargain.
He also brings in his own obsession with what an emissor communicates. In this
case, the “p” is the philosopher’s sceptical proposition, such as “That pillar
box is red.” Grice thinks ‘dogmatic’ is the opposite of ‘sceptic,’ and he is
right! Liddell and Scott have “δόγμα,” from “δοκέω,” and which they
render as “that which seems to one, opinion or belief;” Pl.R.538c; “δ. πόλεως
κοινόν;” esp. of philosophical doctrines, Epicur.Nat.14.7; “notion,”
Pl.Tht.158d; “decision, judgement,” Pl. Lg.926d; (pl.); public decree,
ordinance, esp. of Roman
Senatus-consulta, “δ. συγκλήτου” “δ. τῆς
βουλῆς” So note that there is nothing ‘dogmatic’ about ‘dogma,’ as it derives
from ‘dokeo,’ and is rendered as ‘that which seems to one.’ So the keyword
should be later Grecian, and in the adjectival ‘dogmatic.’ Liddell and Scott
have “δογματικός,” which they render as “of or for doctrines, didactic,
[διάλογοι] Quint.Inst.2.15.26, and “of persons, δ. ἰατροί,” “physicians who go
by general principles,” opp. “ἐμπειρικοί and μεθοδικοί,” Dsc.Ther.Praef.,
Gal.1.65; in Philosophy, S.E.M.7.1, D.L.9.70, etc.; “δ. ὑπολήψεις” Id.9.83; “δ.
φιλοσοφία” S.E. P.1.4. Adv. “-κῶς” D.L.9.74, S.E.P.1.197: Comp. “-κώτερον”
Id.M. 6.4. Why is Grice
interested in scepticism. His initial concern, the one that Austin would
authorize, relates to ‘ordinary language.’ What if ‘ordinary language’ embraces
scepticism? What if it doesn’t? Strawso notes that the world of ordinary
language is a world of things, causes, and stuff. None of the good stuff for
the sceptic. what is Grice’s answer to the sceptic’s implicature? The sceptic’s
implicatum is a topic that always fascinated Girce. While Grice groups two
essays as dealing with one single theme, strictly, only this or that
philosopher’s paradox (not all) may count as sceptical. This or that
philosopher’s paradox may well not be sceptical at all but rather dogmatic. In
fact, Grice defines philosophers paradox as anything repugnant to common sense,
shocking, or extravagant ‒ to Malcolms ears, that is! While it is,
strictly, slightly odd to quote this as a given date just because, by a stroke
of the pen, Grice writes that date in the Harvard volume, we will follow
his charming practice. This is vintage Grice. Grice always takes the
sceptics challenge seriously, as any serious philosopher should. Grices
takes both the sceptics explicatum and the scepticss implicatum as
self-defeating, as a very affront to our idea of rationality, conversational or
other. V: Conversations with a sceptic: Can he be slightly more conversational
helpful? Hume’ sceptical attack is partial, and targeted only towards
practical reason, though. Yet, for Grice, reason is one. You cannot
really attack practical or buletic reason without attacking theoretical or
doxastic reason. There is such thing as a general rational acceptance, to use
Grice’s term, that the sceptic is getting at. Grice likes to play with the idea
that ultimately every syllogism is buletic or practical. If, say, a syllogism
by Eddington looks doxastic, that is because Eddington cares to omit the
practical tail, as Grice puts it. And Eddington is not even a philosopher, they
say. Grice is here concerned with a Cantabrigian topic popularised by
Moore. As Grice recollects, Some like Witters, but
Moore’s my man. Unlike Cambridge analysts such as Moore, Grice sees
himself as a linguistic-turn Oxonian analyst. So it is only natural that Grice
would connect time-honoured scepticism of Pyrrhos vintage, and common sense
with ordinary language, so mis-called, the elephant in Grices room. Lewis
and Short have “σκέψις,” f. σκέπτομαι, which they render as “viewing,
perception by the senses, ἡ διὰ τῶν ὀμμάτων ςκέψις, Pl. Phd. 83a;
observation of auguries; also as examination, speculation, consideration, τὸ
εὕρημα πολλῆς σκέψιος; βραχείας ςκέψις; ϝέμειν ςκέψις take thought of a
thing; ἐνθεὶς τῇ τέχνῃ ςκέψις; ςκέψις ποιεῖσθαι; ςκέψις προβέβληκας;
ςκέψις λόγων; ςκέψις περί τινος inquiry into, speculation on a thing;
περί τι Id. Lg. 636d;ἐπὶ σκέψιν τινὸς ἐλθεῖν; speculation, inquiry,ταῦτα
ἐξωτερικωτέρας ἐστὶ σκέψεως; ἔξω τῆς νῦν ςκέψεως; οὐκ οἰκεῖα τῆς παρούσης
ςκέψις; also hesitation, doubt, esp. of the Sceptic or Pyrthonic philosophers,
AP 7. 576 (Jul.); the Sceptic philosophy, S. E. P. 1.5; οἱ ἀπὸ τῆς
ςκέψεως, the Sceptics, ib. 229. in politics, resolution, decree, συνεδρίον
Hdn. 4.3.9, cf. Poll. 6.178. If scepticism attacks common sense and fails,
Grice seems to be implicating, that ordinary language philosophy is a good
antidote to scepticism. Since what language other than ordinary language does
common sense speak? Well, strictly, common sense doesnt speak. The man in the
street does. Grice addresses this topic in a Mooreian way in a later essay,
also repr. in Studies, Moore and philosophers paradoxes, repr. in Studies.
As with his earlier Common sense and scepticism, Grice tackles Moores and
Malcolms claim that ordinary language, so-called, solves a few of philosophers
paradoxes. Philosopher is Grices witty way to generalise over your
common-or-garden, any, philosopher, especially of the type he found eccentric,
the sceptic included. Grice finds this or that problem in this overarching
Cantabrigian manoeuvre, as over-simplifying a pretty convoluted
terrain. While he cherishes Austins Some like Witters, but Moores MY man!
Grice finds Moore too Cantabrigian to his taste. While an Oxonian thoroughbred,
Grice is a bit like Austin, Some like Witters, but Moores my man, with this or
that caveat. Again, as with his treatment of Descartes or Locke, Grice is
hardly interested in finding out what Moore really means. He is a philosopher,
not a historian of philosophy, and he knows it. While Grice agrees with Austins
implicature that Moore goes well above Witters, if that is the expression (even
if some like him), we should find the Oxonian equivalent to Moore. Grice would
not Names Ryle, since he sees him, and his followers, almost every day. There
is something apostolic about Moore that Grice enjoys, which is just as well,
seeing that Moore is one of the twelve. Grice found it amusing that the
members of The Conversazione Society would still be nickNamesd apostles when
their number exceeded the initial 12. Grice spends some time exploring what
Malcolm, a follower of Witters, which does not help, as it were, has to say
about Moore in connection with that particularly Oxonian turn of phrase, such
as ordinary language is. For Malcolms Moore, a paradox by philosopher
[sic], including the sceptic, arises when philosopher [sic], including the
sceptic, fails to abide by the dictates of ordinary language. It might merit
some exploration if Moore’s defence of common sense is against: the sceptic may
be one, but also the idealist. Moore the realist, armed with ordinary language
attacks the idealists claim. The idealist is sceptical of the realists claim.
But empiricist idealism (Bradley) has at Oxford as good pedigree as empiricist
realism (Cook Wilson). Malcolm’s simplifications infuriate Grice, and ordinary
language has little to offer in the defense of common sense realism against
sceptical empiricist idealism. Surely the ordinary man says ridiculous, or
silly, as Russell prefers, things, such as Smith is lucky, Departed spirits
walk along this road on their way to Paradise, I know there are infinite stars,
and I wish I were Napoleon, or I wish that I had
been Napoleon, which does not mean that the utterer wishes that
he were like Napoleon, but that he wishes that he had lived
not in the his century but in the XVIIIth century. Grice is being specific
about this. It is true that an ordinary use of language, as Malcolm
suggests, cannot be self-contradictory unless the ordinary use of language is
defined by stipulation as not self-contradictory, in which case an appeal to
ordinary language becomes useless against this or that paradox by Philosopher.
I wish that I had been Napoleon seems to involve nothing but an ordinary use of
language by any standard but that of freedom from absurdity. I wish
that I had been Napoleon is not, as far as Grice can see, philosophical, but
something which may have been said and meant by numbers of ordinary
people. Yet, I wish that I had been Napoleon is open to the suspicion of
self-contradictoriness, absurdity, or some other kind of
meaninglessness. And in this context suspicion is all Grice needs. By
uttering I wish that I had been Napoleon U hardly means the same as he
would if he uttered I wish I were like Napoleon. I wish that I had been
Napoleon is suspiciously self-contradictory, absurd, or meaningless, if, as
uttered by an utterer in a century other than the XVIIIth century, say, the
utterer is understood as expressing the proposition that the utterer wishes
that he had lived in the XVIIIth century, and not in his century, in which case
he-1 wishes that he had not been him-1? But blame it on the
buletic. That Moore himself is not too happy with Malcolms criticism can
be witnessed by a cursory glimpse at hi reply to Malcolm. Grice is totally
against this view that Malcolm ascribes to Moore as a view that is too broad to
even claim to be true. Grices implicature is that Malcolm is appealing to
Oxonian turns of phrase, such as ordinary language, but not taking proper
Oxonian care in clarifying the nuances and stuff in dealing with, admittedly, a
non-Oxonian philosopher such as Moore. When dealing with Moore, Grice is not
necessarily concerned with scepticism. Time is unreal, e.g. is hardly a sceptic
utterance. Yet Grice lists it as one of Philosophers paradoxes. So, there are
various to consider here. Grice would start with common sense. That is what he
does when he reprints this essay in WOW, with his attending note in both the
preface and the Retrospective epilogue on how he organizes the themes and
strands. Common sense is one keyword there, with its attending realism.
Scepticism is another, with its attending empiricist idealism. It is intriguing
that in the first two essays opening Grices explorations in semantics and
metaphysics it seems its Malcolm, rather than the dryer Moore, who interests
Grice most. While he would provide exegeses of this or that dictum by Moore,
and indeed, Moore’s response to Malcolm, Grice seems to be more concerned with
applications of his own views. Notably in Philosophers paradoxes. The fatal
objection Grice finds for the paradox propounder (not necessarily a sceptic,
although a sceptic may be one of the paradox propounders) significantly rests
on Grices reductive analysis of meaning that
as ascribed to this or that utterer U. Grice elaborates on circumstances
that hell later take up in the Retrospective epilogue. I find myself not
understanding what I mean is dubiously acceptable. If meaning, Grice claims, is
about an utterer U intending to get his addressee A to believe that U ψ-s that
p, U must think there is a good chance that A will recognise what he is
supposed to believe, by, perhaps, being aware of the Us practice or by a supplementary
explanation which might come from U. In which case, U should not be meaning
what Malcolm claims U might mean. No utterer should intend his addressee to
believe what is conceptually impossible, or incoherent, or blatantly false
(Charles Is decapitation willed Charles Is death.), unless you are Queen in
Through the Looking Glass. I believe five impossible things before breakfast,
and I hope youll soon get the proper training to follow suit. Cf. Tertulian,
Credo, quia absurdum est. Admittedly, Grice edits the Philosophers paradoxes
essay. It is only Grices final objection which is repr. in WOW, even if he
provides a good detailed summary of the previous sections. Grice appeals to
Moore on later occasions. In Causal theory, Grice lists, as a third
philosophical mistake, the opinion by Malcolm that Moore did not know how to
use knowin a sentence. Grice brings up the same example again in Prolegomena.
The use of factive know of Moore may well be a misuse. While at Madison,
Wisconsin, Moore lectures at a hall eccentrically-built with indirect lighting
simulating sun rays, Moore infamously utters, I know that there is a window
behind that curtain, when there is not. But it is not the factiveness Grice is
aiming at, but the otiosity Malcolm misdescribes in the true, if baffling, I
know that I have two hands. In Retrospective epilogue, Grice uses M to
abbreviate Moore’s fairy godmother – along with G (Grice), A (Austin), R (Ryle)
and Q (Quine)! One simple way to approach Grices quandary with Malcolm’s
quandary with Moore is then to focus on know. How can Malcolm claim that Moore
is guilty of misusing know? The most extensive exploration by Grice on know is
in Grices third James lecture (but cf. his seminar on Knowledge and belief, and
his remarks on some of our beliefs needing to be true, in Meaning
revisited. The examinee knows that the battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815.
Nothing odd about that, nor about Moores uttering I know that these are my
hands. Grice is perhaps the only one of the Oxonian philosophers of Austins
play group who took common sense realsim so seriously, if only to crticise
Malcoms zeal with it. For Grice, common-sense realism = ordinary language,
whereas for the typical Austinian, ordinary language = the language of the man
in the street. Back at Oxford, Grice uses Malcolm to contest the usual
criticism that Oxford ordinary-language philosophers defend common-sense
realist assumptions just because the way non-common-sense realist philosopher’s
talk is not ordinary language, and even at Oxford. Cf. Flews reference to
Joness philosophical verbal rubbish in using self as a noun. Grice is
infuriated by all this unclear chatter, and chooses Malcolms mistreatment of
Moore as an example. Grice is possibly fearful to consider Austins claims directly!
In later essays, such as ‘the learned’ and ‘the lay,’ Grice goes back to the
topic criticising now the scientists jargon as an affront to the ordinary
language of the layman that Grice qua philosopher defends. scepticism,
in the most common sense, the refusal to grant that there is any knowledge or
justification. Skepticism can be either partial or total, either practical or
theoretical, and, if theoretical, either moderate or radical, and either of
knowledge or of justification. Skepticism is partial iff if and only if it is
restricted to particular fields of beliefs or propositions, and total iff not
thus restricted. And if partial, it may be highly restricted, as is the
skepticism for which religion is only opium, or much more general, as when not
only is religion called opium, but also history bunk and metaphysics
meaningless. Skepticism is practical iff it is an attitude of deliberately
withholding both belief and disbelief, accompanied perhaps but not necessarily
by commitment to a recommendation for people generally, that they do likewise.
Practical skepticism can of course be either total or partial, and if partial
it can be more or less general. Skepticism is theoretical iff it is a
commitment to the belief that there is no knowledge justified belief of a
certain kind or of certain kinds. Such theoretical skepticism comes in several
varieties. It is moderate and total iff it holds that there is no certain
superknowledge superjustified belief whatsoever, not even in logic or
mathematics, nor through introspection of one’s present experience. It is
radical and total iff it holds that there isn’t even any ordinary knowledge
justified belief at all. It is moderate and partial, on the other hand, iff it
holds that there is no certain superknowledge superjustified belief of a
certain specific kind K or of certain specific kinds K1, . . . , Kn less than
the totality of such kinds. It is radical and partial, finally, iff it holds
that there isn’t even any ordinary knowledge justified belief at all of that
kind K or of those kinds K1, . . . , Kn. Grecian skepticism can be traced back
to Socrates’ epistemic modesty. Suppressed by the prolific theoretical
virtuosity of Plato and Aristotle, such modesty reasserted itself in the
skepticism of the Academy led by Arcesilaus and later by Carneades. In this
period began a long controversy pitting Academic Skeptics against the Stoics
Zeno and later Chrysippus, and their followers. Prolonged controversy,
sometimes heated, softened the competing views, but before agreement congealed
Anesidemus broke with the Academy and reclaimed the arguments and tradition of
Pyrrho, who wrote nothing, but whose Skeptic teachings had been preserved by a
student, Timon in the third century B.C.. After enduring more than two
centuries, neoPyrrhonism was summarized, c.200 A.D., by Sextus Empiricus
Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Adversus mathematicos. Skepticism thus ended as a
school, but as a philosophical tradition it has been influential long after
that, and is so even now. It has influenced strongly not only Cicero Academica
and De natura deorum, St. Augustine Contra academicos, and Montaigne “Apology
for Raimund Sebond”, but also the great historical philosophers of the Western
tradition, from Descartes through Hegel. Both on the Continent and in the
Anglophone sphere a new wave of skepticism has built for decades, with logical
positivism, deconstructionism, historicism, neopragmatism, and relativism, and
the writings of Foucault knowledge as a mask of power, Derrida deconstruction,
Quine indeterminacy and eliminativism, Kuhn incommensurability, and Rorty
solidarity over objectivity, edification over inquiry. At the same time a
rising tide of books and articles continues other philosophical traditions in
metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, etc. It is interesting to compare the
cognitive disengagement recommended by practical skepticism with the affective
disengagement dear to stoicism especially in light of the epistemological
controversies that long divided Academic Skepticism from the Stoa, giving rise
to a rivalry dominant in Hellenistic philosophy. If believing and favoring are
positive, with disbelieving and disfavoring their respective negative
counterparts, then the magnitude of our happiness positive or unhappiness
negative over a given matter is determined by the product of our
belief/disbelief and our favoring/disfavoring with regard to that same matter.
The fear of unhappiness may lead one stoically to disengage from affective
engagement, on either side of any matter that escapes one’s total control. And
this is a kind of practical affective “skepticism.” Similarly, if believing and
truth are positive, with disbelieving and falsity their respective negative
counterparts, then the magnitude of our correctness positive or error negative
over a given matter is determined by the product of our belief/disbelief and
the truth/falsity with regard to that same matter where the positive or
negative magnitude of the truth or falsity at issue may be determined by some
measure of “theoretical importance,” though alternatively one could just assign
all truths a value of !1 and all falsehoods a value of †1. The fear of error
may lead one skeptically to disengage from cognitive engagement, on either side
of any matter that involves risk of error. And this is “practical cognitive
skepticism.” We wish to attain happiness and avoid unhappiness. This leads to
the disengagement of the stoic. We wish to attain the truth and avoid error.
This leads to the disengagement of the skeptic, the practical skeptic. Each
opts for a conservative policy, but one that is surely optional, given just the
reasoning indicated. For in avoiding unhappiness the stoic also forfeits a
corresponding possibility of happiness. And in avoiding error the skeptic also
forfeits a corresponding possibility to grasp a truth. These twin policies
appeal to conservatism in our nature, and will reasonably prevail in the lives
of those committed to avoiding risk as a paramount objective. For this very
desire must then be given its due, if we judge it rational. Skepticism is
instrumental in the birth of modern epistemology, and modern philosophy, at the
hands of Descartes, whose skepticism is methodological but sophisticated and
well informed by that of the ancients. Skepticism is also a main force, perhaps
the main force, in the broad sweep of Western philosophy from Descartes through
Hegel. Though preeminent in the history of our subject, skepticism since then
has suffered decades of neglect, and only in recent years has reclaimed much
attention and even applause. Some recent influential discussions go so far as
to grant that we do not know we are not dreaming. But they also insist one can
still know when there is a fire before one. The key is to analyze knowledge as
a kind of appropriate responsiveness to its object truth: what is required is
that the subject “track” through his belief the truth of what he believes. S
tracks the truth of P iff: S would not believe P if P were false. Such an
analysis of tracking, when conjoined with the view of knowledge as tracking,
enables one to explain how one can know about the fire even if for all one
knows it is just a dream. The crucial fact here is that even if P logically
entails Q, one may still be able to track the truth of P though unable to track
the truth of Q. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, 1. Many problems arise in
the literature on this approach. One that seems especially troubling is that
though it enables us to understand how contingent knowledge of our surroundings
is possible, the tracking account falls short of enabling an explanation of how
such knowledge on our part is actual. To explain how one knows that there is a
fire before one F, according to the tracking account one presumably would
invoke one’s tracking the truth of F. But this leads deductively almost
immediately to the claim that one is not dreaming: Not D. And this is not
something one can know, according to the tracking account. So how is one to
explain one’s justification for making that claim? Most troubling of all here
is the fact that one is now cornered by the tracking account into making
combinations of claims of the following form: I am quite sure that p, but I
have no knowledge at all as to whether p. And this seems incoherent. A
Cartesian dream argument that has had much play in recent discussions of
skepticism is made explicit by Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical
Scepticism, 4 as follows. One knows that if one knows F then one is not
dreaming, in which case if one really knows F then one must know one is not
dreaming. However, one does not know one is not dreaming. So one does not know
F. Q.E.D. And why does one fail to know one is not dreaming? Because in order
to know it one would need to know that one has passed some test, some empirical
procedure to determine whether one is dreaming. But any such supposed test say, pinching oneself could just be part of a dream, and dreaming
one passes the test would not suffice to show one was not dreaming. However,
might one not actually be witnessing the fire, and passing the test and be doing this in wakeful life, not in a
dream and would that not be compatible
with one’s knowing of the fire and of one’s wakefulness? Not so, according to
the argument, since in order to know of the fire one needs prior knowledge of
one’s wakefulness. But in order to know of one’s wakefulness one needs prior
knowledge of the results of the test procedure. But this in turn requires prior
knowledge that one is awake and not dreaming. And we have a vicious circle. We
might well hold that it is possible to know one is not dreaming even in the
absence of any positive test result, or at most in conjunction with coordinate
not prior knowledge of such a positive indication. How in that case would one
know of one’s wakefulness? Perhaps one would know it by believing it through
the exercise of a reliable faculty. Perhaps one would know it through its
coherence with the rest of one’s comprehensive and coherent body of beliefs.
Perhaps both. But, it may be urged, if these are the ways one might know of one’s
wakefulness, does not this answer commit us to a theory of the form of A below?
A The proposition that p is something one knows believes justifiably if and
only if one satisfies conditions C with respect to it. And if so, are we not
caught in a vicious circle by the question as to how we know what justifies us in believing A itself? This is far from obvious, since the
requirement that we must submit to some test procedure for wakefulness and know
ourselves to test positively, before we can know ourselves to be awake, is
itself a requirement that seems to lead equally to a principle such as A. At
least it is not evident why the proposal of the externalist or of the
coherentist as to how we know we are awake should be any more closely related
to a general principle like A than is the foundationalist? notion that in order
to know we are awake we need epistemically prior knowledge that we test
positive in a way that does not presuppose already acquired knowledge of the
external world. The problem of how to justify the likes of A is a descendant of
the infamous “problem of the criterion,” reclaimed in the sixteenth century and
again in this century by Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 6, 7, and 8 but much
used already by the Skeptics of antiquity under the title of the diallelus.
About explanations of our knowledge or justification in general of the form
indicated by A, we are told that they are inadequate in a way revealed by
examples like the following. Suppose we want to know how we know anything at
all about the external world, and part of the answer is that we know the
location of our neighbor by knowing the location of her car in her driveway.
Surely this would be at best the beginning of an answer that might be
satisfactory in the end if recursive, e.g., but as it stands it cannot be
satisfactory without supplementation. The objection here is based on a
comparison between two appeals: the appeal of a theorist of knowledge to a
principle like A in the course of explaining our knowledge or justification in
general, on one side; and the appeal to the car’s location in explaining our
knowledge of facts about the external world, on the other side. This comparison
is said to be fatal to the ambition to explain our knowledge or justification
in general. But are the appeals relevantly analogous? One important difference
is this. In the example of the car, we explain the presence, in some subject S,
of a piece of knowledge of a certain kind of the external world by appeal to
the presence in S of some other piece of knowledge of the very same kind. So
there is an immediate problem if it is our aim to explain how any knowledge of
the sort in question ever comes to be unless the explication is just beginning,
and is to turn recursive in due course. Now of course A is theoretically
ambitious, and in that respect the theorist who gives an answer of the form of
A is doing something similar to what must be done by the protagonist in our car
example, someone who is attempting to provide a general explanation of how any
knowledge of a certain kind comes about. Nevertheless, there is also an
important difference, namely that the theorist whose aim it is to give a
general account of the form of A need not attribute any knowledge whatsoever to
a subject S in explaining how that subject comes to have a piece of knowledge
or justified belief. For there is no need to require that the conditions C
appealed to by principle A must be conditions that include attribution of any
knowledge at all to the subject in question. It is true that in claiming that A
itself meets conditions C, and that it is this which explains how one knows A,
we do perhaps take ourselves to know A or at least to be justified in believing
it. But if so, this is the inevitable lot of anyone who seriously puts forward
any explanation of anything. And it is quite different from a proposal that
part of what explains how something is known or justifiably believed includes a
claim to knowledge or justified belief of the very same sort. In sum, as in the
case of one’s belief that one is awake, the belief in something of the form of
A may be said to be known, and in so saying one does not commit oneself to
adducing an ulterior reason in favor of A, or even to having such a reason in
reserve. One is of course committed to being justified in believing A, perhaps
even to having knowledge that A. But it is not at all clear that the only way
to be justified in believing A is by way of adduced reasons in favor of A, or
that one knows A only if one adduces strong enough reasons in its favor. For we
often know things in the absence of such adduced reasons. Thus consider one’s
knowledge through memory of which door one used to come into a room that has
more than one open door. Returning finally to A, in its case the explanation of
how one knows it may, once again, take the form of an appeal to the justifying
power of intellectual virtues or of coherence
or both. Recent accounts of the nature of thought and representation
undermine a tradition of wholesale doubt about nature, whose momentum is hard
to stop, and threatens to leave the subject alone and restricted to a solipsism
of the present moment. But there may be a way to stop skepticism early by questioning the possibility of its being
sensibly held, given what is required for meaningful language and thought.
Consider our grasp of observable shape and color properties that objects around
us might have. Such grasp seems partly constituted by our discriminatory
abilities. When we discern a shape or a color we do so presumably in terms of a
distinctive impact that such a shape or color has on us. We are put
systematically into a certain distinctive state X when we are appropriately
related, in good light, with our eyes open, etc., to the presence in our
environment of that shape or color. What makes one’s distinctive state one of
thinking of sphericity rather than something else, is said to be that it is a
state tied by systematic causal relations to skepticism skepticism 849 849 the presence of sphericity in one’s
normal environment. A light now flickers at the end of the skeptic’s tunnel. In
doubt now is the coherence of traditional skeptical reflection. Indeed, our
predecessors in earlier centuries may have moved in the wrong direction when
they attempted a reduction of nature to the mind. For there is no way to make
sense of one’s mind without its contents, and there is no way to make sense of
how one’s mind can have such contents except by appeal to how one is causally
related to one’s environment. If the very existence of that environment is put
in doubt, that cuts the ground from under one’s ability reasonably to
characterize one’s own mind, or to feel any confidence about its contents.
Perhaps, then, one could not be a “brain in a vat.” Much contemporary thought
about language and the requirements for meaningful language thus suggests that
a lot of knowledge must already be in place for us to be able to think
meaningfully about a surrounding reality, so as to be able to question its very
existence. If so, then radical skepticism answers itself. For if we can so much
as understand a radical skepticism about the existence of our surrounding
reality, then we must already know a great deal about that reality. Sceptics, those ancient thinkers who developed
sets of arguments to show either that no knowledge is possible Academic
Skepticism or that there is not sufficient or adequate evidence to tell if any
knowledge is possible. If the latter is the case then these thinkers advocated
suspending judgment on all question concerning knowledge Pyrrhonian Skepticism.
Academic Skepticism gets its name from the fact that it was formulated in
Plato’s Academy in the third century B.C., starting from Socrates’ statement,
“All I know is that I know nothing.” It was developed by Arcesilaus c.268241
and Carneades c.213129, into a series of arguments, directed principally
against the Stoics, purporting to show that nothing can be known. The Academics
posed a series of problems to show that what we think we know by our senses may
be unreliable, and that we cannot be sure about the reliability of our
reasoning. We do not possess a guaranteed standard or criterion for
ascertaining which of our judgments is true or false. Any purported knowledge
claim contains some element that goes beyond immediate experience. If this
claim constituted knowledge we would have to know something that could not
possibly be false. The evidence for the claim would have to be based on our
senses and our reason, both of which are to some degree unreliable. So the
knowledge claim may be false or doubtful, and hence cannot constitute genuine
knowledge. So, the Academics said that nothing is certain. The best we can
attain is probable information. Carneades is supposed to have developed a form
of verification theory and a kind of probabilism, similar in some ways to that
of modern pragmatists and positivists. Academic Skepticism dominated the
philosophizing of Plato’s Academy until the first century B.C. While Cicero was
a student there, the Academy turned from Skepticism to a kind of eclectic philosophy.
Its Skeptical arguments have been preserved in Cicero’s works, Academia and De
natura deorum, in Augustine’s refutation in his Contra academicos, as well as
in the summary presented by Diogenes Laertius in his lives of the Grecian
philosophers. Skeptical thinking found another home in the school of the
Pyrrhonian Skeptics, probably connected with the Methodic school of medicine in
Alexandria. The Pyrrhonian movement traces its origins to Pyrrho of Elis
c.360275 B.C. and his student Timon c.315225 B.C.. The stories about Pyrrho
indicate that he was not a theoretician but a practical doubter who would not
make any judgments that went beyond immediate experience. He is supposed to
have refused to judge if what appeared to be chariots might strike him, and he
was often rescued by his students because he would not make any commitments.
His concerns were apparently ethical. He sought to avoid unhappiness that might
result from accepting any value theory. If the theory was at all doubtful,
accepting it might lead to mental anguish. The theoretical formulation of
Pyrrhonian Skepticism is attributed to Aenesidemus c.100 40 B.C.. Pyrrhonists
regarded dogmatic philosophers and Academic Skeptics as asserting too much, the
former saying that something can be known and the latter that nothing can be
known. The Pyrrhonists suspended judgments on all questions on which there was
any conflicting evidence, including whether or not anything could be known. The
Pyrrhonists used some of the same kinds of arguments developed by Arcesilaus
and Carneades. Aenesidemus and those who followed after him organized the
arguments into sets of “tropes” or ways of leading to suspense of judgment on
various questions. Sets of ten, eight, five, and two tropes appear in the only
surviving writing of the Pyrrhonists, the works of Sextus Empiricus, a
third-century A.D. teacher of Pyrrhonism. Each set of tropes offers suggestions
for suspending judgment about any knowledge claims that go beyond appearances.
The tropes seek to show that for any claim, evidence for and evidence against
it can be offered. The disagreements among human beings, the variety of human
experiences, the fluctuation of human judgments under differing conditions,
illness, drunkenness, etc., all point to the opposition of evidence for and
against each knowledge claim. Any criterion we employ to sift and weigh the
evidence can also be opposed by countercriterion claims. Given this situation,
the Pyrrhonian Skeptics sought to avoid committing themselves concerning any
kind of question. They would not even commit themselves as to whether the
arguments they put forth were sound or not. For them Skepticism was not a
statable theory, but rather an ability or mental attitude for opposing evidence
for and against any knowledge claim that went beyond what was apparent, that
dealt with the non-evident. This opposing produced an equipollence, a balancing
of the opposing evidences, that would lead to suspending judgment on any
question. Suspending judgment led to a state of mind called “ataraxia,”
quietude, peace of mind, or unperturbedness. In such a state the Skeptic was no
longer concerned or worried or disturbed about matters beyond appearances. The
Pyrrhonians averred that Skepticism was a cure for a disease called “dogmatism”
or rashness. The dogmatists made assertions about the non-evident, and then
became disturbed about whether these assertions were true. The disturbance
became a mental disease or disorder. The Pyrrhonians, who apparently were
medical doctors, offered relief by showing the patient how and why he should
suspend judgment instead of dogmatizing. Then the disease would disappear and
the patient would be in a state of tranquillity, the peace of mind sought by
Hellenistic dogmatic philosophers. The Pyrrhonists, unlike the Academic
Skeptics, were not negative dogmatists. The Pyrrhonists said neither that
knowledge is possible nor that it is impossible. They remained seekers, while
allowing the Skeptical arguments and the equipollence of evidences to act as a
purge of dogmatic assertions. The purge eliminates all dogmas as well as
itself. After this the Pyrrhonist lives undogmatically, following natural
inclinations, immediate experience, and the laws and customs of his society,
without ever judging or committing himself to any view about them. In this
state the Pyrrhonist would have no worries, and yet be able to function
naturally and according to law and custom. The Pyrrhonian movement disappeared
during the third century A.D., possibly because it was not considered an alternative
to the powerful religious movements of the time. Only scant traces of it appear
before the Renaissance, when the texts of Sextus and Cicero were rediscovered
and used to formulate a modern skeptical view by such thinkers as Montaigne and
Charron. Refs.: The obvious source is the essay on scepticism in WoW,
but there are allusions in “Prejudices and predilections, and elsewhere, in The
H. P. Grice Papers, BANC
Scheler, M.: G.
phenomenologist, social philosopher, and sociologist of knowledge. Born in
Munich, he studied in Jena; when he returned to Munich in 7 he came in contact
with phenomenology, especially the realist version of the early Husserl and his
Munich School followers. Scheler’s first works were phenomenological studies in
ethics leading to his ultimate theory of value: he described the moral feelings
of sympathy and resentment and wrote a criticism of Kantian formalism and
rationalism, Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Ethics of Value 3. During the
war, he was an ardent nationalist and wrote essays in support of the war that
were also philosophical criticisms of modern culture, opposed to “Anglo-Saxon”
naturalism and rational calculation. Although he later embraced a broader
notion of community, such criticisms of modernity remained constant themes of
his writings. His conversion to Catholicism after the war led him to apply
phenomenological description to religious phenomena and feelings, and he later
turned to themes of anthropology and natural science. The core of Scheler’s
phenomenological method is his conception of the objectivity of essences,
which, though contained in experience, are a priori and independent of the
knower. For Scheler, values are such objective, though non-Platonic, essences.
Their objectivity is intuitively accessible in immediate experience and
feelings, as when we experience beauty in music and do not merely hear certain
sounds. Scheler distinguished between valuations or value perspectives on the
one hand, which are historically relative and variable, and values on the
other, which are independent and invariant. There are four such values, the
hierarchical organization of which could be both immediately intuited and
established by various public criteria like duration and independence:
pleasure, vitality, spirit, and religion. Corresponding to these values are
various personalities who are not creators of value but their discoverers,
historical disclosers, and exemplars: the “artist of consumption,” the hero,
the genius, and the saint. A similar hierarchy of values applies to forms of
society, the highest of which is the church, or a Christian community of
solidarity and love. Scheler criticizes the leveling tendencies of liberalism
for violating this hierarchy, leading to forms of resentment, individualism, and
nationalism, all of which represent the false ordering of values.
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