Eddington -- Einstein –
discussed by Grice in “Eddington’s Two Tables” -- Albert 18795, G.-born physicist, founder of the special and general
theories of relativity and a fundamental contributor to several branches of
physics and to the philosophical analysis and critique of modern physics,
notably of relativity and the quantum theory. Einstein was awarded the Nobel
Prize for physics in 2, “especially for his discovery of the law of the
photoelectric effect.” Born in Ulm in the G. state of Württemberg, Einstein
studied physics at the Polytechnic in Zürich, Switzerland. He was called to
Berlin as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics 4 at the peak of
the G. ultranationalism that surrounded World War I. His reaction was to
circulate an internationalist “Manifesto to Europeans” and to pursue Zionist
and pacifist programs. Following the dramatic confirmation of the general
theory of relativity 9 Einstein became an international celebrity. This fame
also made him the frequent target of G. anti-Semites, who, during one notable
episode, described the theory of relativity as “a Jewish fraud.” In 3 Einstein
left G.y for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Although his life
was always centered on science, he was also engaged in the politics and culture
of his times. He carried on an extensive correspondence whose publication will
run to over forty volumes with both famous and ordinary people, including
significant philosophical correspondence with Cassirer, Reichenbach, Moritz
Schlick, and others. Despite reservations over logical positivism, he was
something of a patron of the movement, helping to secure academic positions for
several of its leading figures. In 9 Einstein signed a letter drafted by the
nuclear physicist Leo Szilard informing President Roosevelt about the prospects
for harnessing atomic energy and warning of the G. efforts to make a bomb.
Einstein did not further participate in the development of atomic weapons, and
later was influential in the movement against them. In 2 he was offered, and
declined, the presidency of Israel. He died still working on a unified field
theory, and just as the founders of the Pugwash movement for nuclear
disarmament adopted a manifesto he had cosigned with Russell. Einstein’s
philosophical thinking was influenced by early exposure to Kant and later study
of Hume and Mach, whose impact shows in the operationalism used to treat time
in his famous 5 paper on special relativity. That work also displays a passion
for unity in science characteristic of nearly all his physical thinking, and
that may relate to the monism of Spinoza, a philosopher whom he read and reread.
Einstein’s own understanding of relativity stressed the invariance of the
space-time interval and promoted realism with regard to the structure of
spacetime. Realism also shows up in Einstein’s work on Brownian motion 5, which
was explicitly motivated by his long-standing interest in demonstrating the
reality of molecules and atoms, and in the realist treatment of light quanta in
his analysis 5 of the photoelectric effect. While he pioneered the development
of statistical physics, especially in his seminal investigations of quantum
phenomena 525, he never broke with his belief in determinism as the only truly
fundamental approach to physical processes. Here again one sees an affinity
with Spinoza. Realism and determinism brought Einstein into conflict with the
new quantum theory 526, whose observer dependence and “flight into statistics”
convinced him that it could not constitute genuinely fundamental physics.
Although influential in its development, he became the theory’s foremost
critic, never contributing to its refinement but turning instead to the program
of unifying the electromagnetic and gravitational fields into one grand,
deterministic synthesis that would somehow make room for quantum effects as
limiting or singular cases. It is generally agreed that his unified field
program was not successful, although his vision continues to inspire other
unification programs, and his critical assessments of quantum mechanics still
challenge the instrumentalism associated with the theory. Einstein’s philosophical
reflections constitute an important chapter in twentieth-century thought. He
understood realism as less a metaphysical doctrine than a motivational program,
and he argued that determinism was a feature of theories rather than an aspect
of the world Einstein, Albert Einstein, Albert 256 256 directly. Along with the unity of
science, other central themes in his thinking include his rejection of
inductivism and his espousal of holism and constructivism or conventionalism,
emphasizing that meanings, concepts, and theories are free creations, not
logically derivable from experience but subject rather to overall criteria of
comprehensibility, empirical adequacy, and logical simplicity. Holism is also
apparent in his acute analysis of the testability of geometry and his rejection
of Poincaré’s geometric conventionalism.
EDUCTUM -- eduction, the
process of initial clarification, as of a phenomenon, text, or argument, that
normally takes place prior to logical analysis. Out of the flux of vague and
confused experiences certain characteristics are drawn into some kind of order
or intelligibility in order that attention can be focused on them Aristotle,
Physics I. These characteristics often are latent, hidden, or implicit. The
notion often is used with reference to texts as well as experience. Thus it
becomes closely related to exegesis and hermeneutics, tending to be reserved
for the sorts of clarification that precede formal or logical analyses.
effective procedure for
the generation of a conversational implicature --, a step-by-step recipe for
computing the values of a function. It determines what is to be done at each
step, without requiring any ingenuity of anyone or any machine executing it.
The input and output of the procedure consist of items that can be processed
mechanically. Idealizing a little, inputs and outputs are often taken to be
strings on a finite alphabet. It is customary to extend the notion to
procedures for manipulating natural numbers, via a canonical notation. Each
number is associated with a string, its numeral. Typical examples of effective
procedures are the standard grade school procedures for addition,
multiplication, etc. One can execute the procedures without knowing anything
about the natural numbers. The term ‘mechanical procedure’ or ‘algorithm’ is
sometimes also used. A function f is computable if there is an effective
procedure A that computes f. For every m in the domain of f, if A were given m
as input, it would produce fm as output. Turing machines are mathematical models
of effective procedures. Church’s thesis, or Turing’s thesis, is that a
function is computable provided there is a Turing machine that computes it. In
other words, for every effective procedure, there is a Turing machine that
computes the same function.
egcrateia: or temperantia.
This is a universal. Strictly, it’s the agent who has the power – Or part of
his soul – the rational soul has the power – hence Grice’s metaphor of the
‘power structure of the soul.’ Grice is interested in the linguistic side to
it. What’s the use of “Don’t p!” if ‘p’ is out of the emissee’s rational
control? Cf. Pears on egcreateia as ‘irrationality,’ if motivated. Cfr mesotes.
the geniality of Grice was to
explore theoretical akrasia. Grice’s genius shows in seeing egcrateia and lack
thereof as marks of virtue. “C hasn’t been to prison yet” He is potentially
dishonest. But you cannot be HONEST if you are NOT potentially DISHONEST. Of
course, it does not paint a good picture of the philosopher why he should be
obsessed with ‘akrasia,’ when Aristotle actually opposed the notion to that of
‘enkrateia,’ or ‘continence.’ Surely a philosopher needs to provide a reductive
analysis of ‘continence,’ first; and the reductive analysis of ‘incontinence’
will follow. Aristotle, as Grice well knew, is being a Platonist here, so by
‘continence,’ he meant a power structure of the soul, with the ‘rational’ soul
containing the pre-rational or non-rational soul (animal soul, and vegetal
soul). And right he was, too! So, Grice's
twist is Έγκράτεια, sic in capitals! Liddell and Scott has it as ‘ἐγκράτεια’
[ρα^],
which they render as “mastery over,”
as used by Plato in The Republic: “ἐ. ἑαυτοῦ,”
meaning ‘self-control’ (Pl. R.390b; ἐ. ἡδονῶν καὶ ἐπιθυμιῶν control over them, ib.430e,
cf. X.Mem.2.1.1, Isoc.1.21;
“περί τι” Arist.EN1149a21,
al. Liddell and Scott go on to give a reference to Grice’s beloved “Eth. Nich.”
(1145b8) II. abs., self-control, X. Mem.1.5.1, Isoc.3.44, Arist. EN.
1145b8, al., LXX Si.18.30, Act.Ap. 24.25,
etc. Richards, an emotivist, as well as
Collingwood (in “Language”) had made a stereotype of the physicist drawing a
formula on the blackboard. “Full of emotion.” So the idea that there is an
UN-emotional life is a fallacy. Emotion pervades the rational life, as does akrasia.
Grice was particularly irritated by the fact that Davidson, who lacked a
background in the humanities and the classics, could think of akrasia as
“impossible”! Grice was never too interested in emotion (or feeling) because
while we do say I feel that the cat is hungry, we also say, Im feeling
byzantine. The concept of emotion needs a philosophical elucidation. Grice was
curious about a linguistic botany for that! Akrasia for Grice covers both
buletic-boulomaic and doxastic versions. The buletic-boulomaic version may be
closer to the concept of an emotion. Grice quotes from Kennys essay on emotion.
But Grice is looking for more of a linguistic botany. As it happens, Kennys
essay has Griceian implicata. One problem Grice finds with emotion is that feel
that sometimes behaves like thinks
that Another is that there is no good
Grecian word for emotio. Kenny, of St. Benets, completed his essay on
emotion under Quinton (who would occasionally give seminars with Grice), and
examined by two members of Grices Play Group: Pears and Gardiner. Kenny
connects an emotion to a feeling, which brings us to Grice on feeling boringly
byzantine! Grice proposes a derivation of akrasia in conditional steps for both
buletic-boulomaic and doxastic akrasia. Liddell
and Scott have “ἐπιθυμία,” which they render as desire, yearning, “ἐ. ἐκτελέσαι”
Hdt.1.32; ἐπιθυμίᾳ by passion, oπρονοίᾳ, generally, appetite, αἱ κατὰ τὸ σῶμα
ἐ. esp. sexual desire, lust, αἱ πρὸς τοὺς παῖδας ἐ.; longing after a thing,
desire of or for it, ὕδατος, τοῦ πιεῖν;” “τοῦ πλέονος;” “τῆς τιμωρίας;” “τῆς μεθ᾽
ὑμῶν πολιτείας;’ “τῆς παρθενίας;’ “εἰς ἐ. τινὸς ἐλθεῖν;’ ἐν ἐ. “τινὸς εἶναι;’
“γεγονέναι;” “εἰς ἐ. τινὸς “ἀφικέσθαι θεάσασθαι;” “ἐ. τινὸς ἐμβαλεῖν τινί;” “ἐ.
ἐμποιεῖν ἔς τινα an inclination towards;” =ἐπιθύμημα, object of desire,
ἐπιθυμίας τυχεῖν;” “ἀνδρὸς ἐ., of woman, “πενήτων ἐ., of sleep. There must be
more to emotion, such as philia, than epithumia! cf. Grice on Aristotle on
philos. What is an emotion? Aristotle, Rhetoric II.1; Konstan “Pathos and
Passion” R. Roberts, “Emotion”; W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion; Simo
Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Aristotle, Rhet.
II.2-12; De An., Eth.N., and Top.; Emotions in Plato and Aristotle; Philosophy
of Emotion; Aristotle and the Emotions, De An. II.12 and III 1-3; De Mem. 1;
Rhet. II.5; Scheiter, “Images, Imagination, and Appearances, V. Caston, Why
Aristotle Needs Imagination” M. Nussbaum, “Aristotle on Emotions and Rational
Persuasion, J. Cooper, “An Aristotelian Theory of Emotion, G. Striker, Emotions
in Context: Aristotles Treatment of the Passions in the Rhetoric and his Moral
Psychology." Essays on Aristotles Rhetoric (J. Dow, Aristotles Theory of
the Emotions, Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle PLATO. Aristotle,
Rhetoric I.10-11; Plato Philebus 31b-50e and Republic IV, D. Frede, Mixed
feelings in Aristotles Rhetoric." Essays on Aristotles Rhetoric, J. Moss,
“Pictures and Passions in Plato”; Protagoras 352b-c, Phaedo 83b-84a, Timaeus 69c
STOICS The Hellenistic philosophers; “The Old Stoic Theory of Emotion” The
Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy, eEmotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic
Agitation to Christian Temptation, Sorabji, Chrysippus Posidonius Seneca: A High-Level
Debate on Emotion. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in
Hellenistic Ethics M. Graver, Preface and Introduction to Cicero on Emotion:
Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 M. Graver, Stoicism and emotion. Tusculan
Disputations 3 Recommended: Graver, Margaret. "Philo of Alexandria and the
Origins of the Stoic Προπάθειαι." Phronesis. Tusculan Disputations; "The
Stoic doctrine of the affections of the soul; The Stoic life: Emotions, duties,
and fate”; Emotion and decision in stoic psychology, The stoics, individual
emotions: anger, friendly feeling, and hatred. Aristotle Rhetoric II.2-3;
Nicomachean Ethics IV.5; Topics 2.7 and 4.5; Konstan, Anger, Pearson, Aristotle
on Desire; Scheiter, Review of Pearsons Aristotle on Desire; S. Leighton,
Aristotles Account of Anger: Narcissism and Illusions of Self‐Sufficiency: The Complex Evaluative
World of Aristotles Angry Man,” Valuing emotions. Aristotle Rhetoric II. 4; Konstan,
“Hatred” Konstan "Aristotle on Anger and the Emotions: the
Strategies of Status." Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen, C.
Rapp, The emotional dimension of friendship: notes on Aristotles account of
philia in Rhetoric II 4” Grice endeavours to give an answer to the
question whether and to what extent philia (friendship), as it is treated by
Aristotle in Rhet. II.4, can be considered a genuine emotion as, for example,
fear and anger are. Three anomalies are identified in the definition and the
account of philia (and of the associated verb philein), which suggest a
negative response to the question. However, these anomalies are analysed and
explained in terms of the specific notes of philia in order to show that
Rhetoric II4 does allow for a consideration of friendship as a genuine
emotion. Seneca, On Anger (De Ira) Seneca, On Anger Seneca, On Anger
(62-96); K. Vogt, “Anger, Present Injustice, and Future Revenge in Senecas De
Ira” FEAR Aristotle, Rhet. II.5; Nicomachean Ethics III.6-9 Aristotles
Courageous Passions, Platos Laws; “Pleasure, Pain, and Anticipation in Platos
Laws, Book I” Konstan, “Fear” PITY Aristotle, Rhetoric II. 8-9; Poetics,
chs. 6, 9-19 ; Konstan, “Pity” E. Belfiore, Tragic pleasures: Aristotle
on plot and emotion, Konstan, Aristotle on the Tragic Emotions, The Soul of
Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama SHAME Aristotle, Rhet. II.6; Nicomachean
Ethics IV.9 Konstan, Shame J. Moss, Shame, Pleasure, and the Divided Soul, B.
Williams, Shame and Necessity. Aristotle investigates two character traits,
continence and incontinence, that are not as blameworthy as the vices but not
as praiseworthy as the virtues. The Grecian expressions are’enkrateia,’
continence, literally mastery, and krasia (“incontinence”; literally, lack of
mastery. An akratic person goes against reason as a result of some pathos
(emotion, feeling”). Like the akratic, an enkratic person experiences a feeling
that is contrary to reason; but unlike the akratic, he acts in accordance with
reason. His defect consists solely in the fact that, more than most people, he
experiences passions that conflict with his rational choice. The akratic person
has not only this defect, but has the further flaw that he gives in to feeling
rather than reason more often than the average person. Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of akrasia:
“propeteia,” or impetuosity and “astheneia, or weakness. The person who is weak
goes through a process of deliberation and makes a choice; but rather than act
in accordance with his reasoned choice, he acts under the influence of a
passion. By contrast, the impetuous person does not go through a process of
deliberation and does not make a reasoned choice; he simply acts under the
influence of a passion. At the time of action, the impetuous person experiences
no internal conflict. But once his act has been completed, he regrets what he
has done. One could say that he deliberates, if deliberation were something
that post-dated rather than preceded action; but the thought process he goes
through after he acts comes too late to save him from error. It is important to bear in mind that when
Aristotle talks about impetuosity and weakness, he is discussing chronic
conditions. The impetuous person is someone who acts emotionally and fails to
deliberate not just once or twice but with some frequency; he makes this error
more than most people do. Because of this pattern in his actions, we would be justified
in saying of the impetuous person that had his passions not prevented him from
doing so, he would have deliberated and chosen an action different from the one
he did perform. The two kinds of
passions that Aristotle focuses on, in his treatment of akrasia, are the
appetite for pleasure and anger. Either can lead to impetuosity and weakness.
But Aristotle gives pride of place to the appetite for pleasure as the passion
that undermines reason. He calls the kind of akrasia caused by an appetite for pleasure
(hedone) “unqualified akrasia”—or, as we might say, akrasia simpliciter, “full
stop.’ Akrasia caused by anger he considers a qualified form of akrasia and
calls it akrasia ‘with respect to anger.’ We thus have these four forms of
akrasia: impetuosity caused by pleasure, impetuosity caused by anger, weakness
caused by pleasure, weakness caused by anger. It should be noticed that
Aristotle’s treatment of akrasia is heavily influenced by Plato’s tripartite
division of the soul. Plato holds that either the spirited part (which houses
anger, as well as other emotions) or the appetitive part (which houses the
desire for physical pleasures) can disrupt the dictates of reason and result in
action contrary to reason. The same threefold division of the soul can be seen
in Aristotles approach to this topic. Although Aristotle characterizes akrasia
and enkrateia in terms of a conflict between reason and feeling, his detailed
analysis of these states of mind shows that what takes place is best described
in a more complicated way. For the feeling that undermines reason contains some
thought, which may be implicitly general. As Aristotle says, anger “reasoning
as it were that one must fight against such a thing, is immediately provoked.
And although in the next sentence he denies that our appetite for pleasure
works in this way, he earlier had said that there can be a syllogism that
favors pursuing enjoyment: “Everything sweet is pleasant, and this is sweet”
leads to the pursuit of a particular pleasure. Perhaps what he has in mind is
that pleasure can operate in either way: it can prompt action unmediated by a
general premise, or it can prompt us to act on such a syllogism. By contrast,
anger always moves us by presenting itself as a bit of general, although hasty,
reasoning. But of course Aristotle does
not mean that a conflicted person has more than one faculty of reason. Rather
his idea seems to be that in addition to our full-fledged reasoning capacity,
we also have psychological mechanisms that are capable of a limited range of
reasoning. When feeling conflicts with reason, what occurs is better described
as a fight between feeling-allied-with-limited-reasoning and full-fledged
reason. Part of us—reason—can remove itself from the distorting influence of
feeling and consider all relevant factors, positive and negative. But another
part of us—feeling or emotion—has a more limited field of reasoning—and
sometimes it does not even make use of it.
Although “passion” is sometimes used as a translation of Aristotles word
pathos (other alternatives are emotion” and feeling), it is important to bear
in mind that his term does not necessarily designate a strong psychological
force. Anger is a pathos whether it is weak or strong; so too is the appetite
for bodily pleasures. And he clearly indicates that it is possible for an
akratic person to be defeated by a weak pathos—the kind that most people would
easily be able to control. So the general explanation for the occurrence of
akrasia cannot be that the strength of a passion overwhelms reason. Aristotle
should therefore be acquitted of an accusation made against him by Austin in a
well-known footnote to ‘A Plea For Excuses.’ Plato and Aristotle, Austin says,
collapsed all succumbing to temptation into losing control of ourselves — a
mistake illustrated by this example. I am very partial to ice cream, and a
bombe is served divided into segments corresponding one to one with the persons
at High Table. I am tempted to help myself to two segments and do so, thus
succumbing to temptation and even conceivably (but why necessarily?) going
against my principles. But do I lose control of myself? Do I raven, do I snatch
the morsels from the dish and wolf them down, impervious to the consternation
of my colleagues? Not a bit of it. We often succumb to temptation with calm and
even with finesse. With this, Aristotle can agree. The pathos for the bombe can
be a weak one, and in some people that will be enough to get them to act in a
way that is disapproved by their reason at the very time of action. What is most remarkable about Aristotle’s
discussion of akrasia is that he defends a position close to that of Socrates.
When he first introduces the topic of akrasia, and surveys some of the problems
involved in understanding this phenomenon, he says that Socrates held that
there is no akrasia, and he describes this as a thesis that clearly conflicts
with the appearances (phainomena). Since he says that his goal is to preserve
as many of the appearances as possible, it may come as a surprise that when he
analyzes the conflict between reason and feeling, he arrives at the conclusion
that in a way Socrates was right after all. For, he says, the person who acts
against reason does not have what is thought to be unqualified knowledge; in a
way he has knowledge, but in a way does not.
Aristotle explains what he has in mind by comparing akrasia to the
condition of other people who might be described as knowing in a way, but not
in an unqualified way. His examples are people who are asleep, mad, or drunk; he
also compares the akratic to a student who has just begun to learn a Subjects,
or an actor on the stage. All of these people, he says, can utter the very
words used by those who have knowledge; but their talk does not prove that they
really have knowledge, strictly speaking.
These analogies can be taken to mean that the form of akrasia that
Aristotle calls weakness rather than impetuosity always results from some
diminution of cognitive or intellectual acuity at the moment of action. The
akratic says, at the time of action, that he ought not to indulge in this
particular pleasure at this time. But does he know or even believe that he
should refrain? Aristotle might be taken to reply: yes and no. He has some
degree of recognition that he must not do this now, but not full recognition.
His feeling, even if it is weak, has to some degree prevented him from
completely grasping or affirming the point that he should not do this. And so
in a way Socrates was right. When reason remains unimpaired and unclouded, its
dictates will carry us all the way to action, so long as we are able to
act. But Aristotles agreement with
Socrates is only partial, because he insists on the power of the emotions to
rival, weaken or bypass reason. Emotion challenges reason in all three of these
ways. In both the akratic and the enkratic, it competes with reason for control
over action; even when reason wins, it faces the difficult task of having to
struggle with an internal rival. Second, in the akratic, it temporarily robs
reason of its full acuity, thus handicapping it as a competitor. It is not
merely a rival force, in these cases; it is a force that keeps reason from
fully exercising its power. And third, passion can make someone impetuous; here
its victory over reason is so powerful that the latter does not even enter into
the arena of conscious reflection until it is too late to influence action.
That, at any rate, is one way of interpreting Aristotle’s statements. But it
must be admitted that his remarks are obscure and leave room for alternative
readings. It is possible that when he denies that the akratic has knowledge in
the strict sense, he is simply insisting on the point that no one should be
classified as having practical knowledge unless he actually acts in accordance
with it. A practical knower is not someone who merely has knowledge of general
premises; he must also have knowledge of particulars, and he must actually draw
the conclusion of the syllogism. Perhaps drawing such a conclusion consists in
nothing less than performing the action called for by the major and minor
premises. Since this is something the akratic does not do, he lacks knowledge;
his ignorance is constituted by his error in action. On this reading, there is
no basis for attributing to Aristotle the thesis that the kind of akrasia he
calls weakness is caused by a diminution of intellectual acuity. His
explanation of akrasia is simply that pathos is sometimes a stronger
motivational force than full-fledged reason.
This is a difficult reading to defend, however, for Aristotle says that
after someone experiences a bout of akrasia his ignorance is dissolved and he
becomes a knower again. In context, that appears to be a remark about the form
of akrasia Aristotle calls weakness rather than impetuosity. If so, he is
saying that when an akratic person is Subjects to two conflicting
influences—full-fledged reason versus the minimal rationality of emotion—his
state of knowledge is somehow temporarily undone but is later restored. Here,
knowledge cannot be constituted by the performance of an act, because that is
not the sort of thing that can be restored at a later time. What can be
restored is ones full recognition or affirmation of the fact that this act has
a certain undesirable feature, or that it should not be performed. Aristotle’s
analysis seems to be that both forms of akrasia — weakness and impetuosity
—share a common structure: in each case, ones full affirmation or grasp of what
one should do comes too late. The difference is that in the case of weakness but
not impetuosity, the akratic act is preceded by a full-fledged rational
cognition of what one should do right now. That recognition is briefly and
temporarily diminished by the onset of a less than fully rational affect. There is one other way in which Aristotle’s
treatment of akrasia is close to the Socratic thesis that what people call
akrasia is really ignorance. Aristotle holds that if one is in the special
mental condition that he calls practical wisdom, then one cannot be, nor will
one ever become, an akratic person. For practical wisdom is present only in
those who also possess the ethical virtues, and these qualities require
complete emotional mastery. Anger and appetite are fully in harmony with
reason, if one is practically wise, and so this intellectual virtue is
incompatible with the sort of inner conflict experienced by the akratic person.
Furthermore, one is called practically wise not merely on the basis of what one
believes or knows, but also on the basis of what one does. Therefore, the sort
of knowledge that is lost and regained during a bout of akrasia cannot be
called practical wisdom. It is knowledge only in a loose sense. The low-level
grasp of the ordinary person of what to do is precisely the sort of thing that
can lose its acuity and motivating power, because it was never much of an
intellectual accomplishment to begin with. That is what Aristotle is getting at
when he compares it with the utterances of actors, students, sleepers, drunks,
and madmen. Grice had witnessed how Hare had suffere to try and deal with how
to combine the geniality that “The language of morals” is with his account of
akrasia. Most Oxonians were unhappy with Hares account of akrasia. Its like, in
deontic logic, you cannot actually deal with akrasia. You need buletics. You
need the desiderative, so that you can oppose what is desired with the duty,
even if both concepts are related. “Akrasia” has a nice Grecian touch about it,
and Grice and Hare, as Lit. Hum., rejoiced in being able to explore what
Aristotle had to say about it. They wouldnt go far beyond Aristotle. Plato and
Aristotle were the only Greek philosophers studied for the Lit. Hum. To venture
with the pre-socratics or the hellenistics (even if Aristotle is one) was not
classy enough! Like Pears in Motivated irrationality, Grice allows that
benevolentia may be deemed beneficentia. If Smith has the good will to give
Jones a job, he may be deemed to have given Jones the job, even if Jones never
get it. In buletic akrasia we must consider the conclusion to be desiring what
is not best for the agents own good, never mind if he refrains from doing what
is not best for his own good. Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor. We
shouldnt be saying this, but we are saying it! Grice prefers akrasia, but
he is happy to use the translation by Cicero, also negative, of this:
incontinentia, as if continentia were a virtue! For Grice, the alleged paradox
of akrasia, both alethic and practical, has to be accounted for by a theory of
rationality from the start, and not be deemed a stumbling block. Grice is
interested in both the common-or-garden buletic-boulomaic version of akrasia,
involving the volitive soul ‒ in term of desirability ‒ and doxastic
akrasia, involing the judicative soul proper ‒ in terms of
probability. Grice considers buletic akrasia and doxastic akrasia ‒ the latter
yet distinct from Moores paradox, p but I dont want to believe that p, in
symbols p and ~ψb-dp. Akarsia, see egcrateia. egcrateia: also spelled
acrasia, or akrasia, Grecian term for weakness of will. Akrasia is a character
flaw, also called incontinence, exhibited primarily in intentional behavior
that conflicts with the agent’s own values or principles. Its contrary is
enkrateia strength of will, continence, self-control. Both akrasia and
enkrateia, Aristotle says, “are concerned with what is in excess of the state
characteristic of most people; for the continent abide by their resolutions
more, and the incontinent less, than most people can” Nicomachean Ethics
1152a2527. These resolutions may be viewed as judgments that it would be best
to perform an action of a certain sort, or better to do one thing than another.
Enkrateia, on that view, is the power kratos to act as one judges best in the
face of competing motivation. Akrasia is a want or deficiency of such power.
Aristotle himself limited the sphere of both states more strictly than is now
done, regarding both as concerned specifically with “pleasures and pains and
appetites and aversions arising through touch and taste” [1150a910].
Philosophers are generally more interested in incontinent and continent actions
than in the corresponding states of character. Various species of incontinent
or akratic behavior may be distinguished, including incontinent reasoning and
akratic belief formation. The species of akratic behavior that has attracted
most attention is uncompelled, intentional action that conflicts with a better
or best judgment consciously held by the agent at the time of action. If, e.g.,
while judging it best not to eat a second piece of pie, you intentionally eat
another piece, you act incontinently
provided that your so acting is uncompelled e.g., your desire for the
pie is not irresistible. Socrates denied that such action is possible, thereby
creating one of the Socratic paradoxes. In “unorthodox” instances of akratic
action, a deed manifests weakness of will even though it accords with the
agent’s better judgment. A boy who decides, against his better judgment, to
participate in a certain dangerous prank, might
owing to an avoidable failure of nerve
fail to execute his decision. In such a case, some would claim, his failure
to act on his decision manifests weakness of will or akrasia. If, instead, he
masters his fear, his participating in the prank might manifest strength of
will, even though his so acting conflicts with his better judgment. The
occurrence of akratic actions seems to be a fact of life. Unlike many such
apparent facts, this one has received considerable philosophical scrutiny for
nearly two and a half millennia. A major source of the interest is clear:
akratic action raises difficult questions about the connection between thought
and action, a connection of paramount importance for most philosophical
theories of the explanation of intentional behavior. Insofar as moral theory
does not float free of evidence about the etiology of human behavior, the tough
questions arise there as well. Ostensible akratic action, then, occupies a
philosophical space in the intersection of the philosophy of mind and moral
theory. Refs.: The main references here are in three folders in two
different series. H. P. Grice, “Akrasia,” The H. P. Grice Papers, S. II, c.
2-ff. 22-23 and S. V, c. 6-f. 32, BANC.
Grice’s ego – “I went to
Oxford. You went to Cambridge. He went to the London School of Economics.”
egocentric particular, a word whose denotation is determined by identity of the
speaker and/or the time, place, and audience of his utterance. Examples are
generally thought to include ‘I,’ ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘this’, ‘that’,
‘now’, ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’. The term ‘egocentric particular’ was
introduced by Russell in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth 0. In an earlier
work, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” Monist, 819, Russell called such
words “emphatic particulars.” Some important questions arise regarding
egocentric particulars. Are some egocentric particulars more basic than others
so that the rest can be correctly defined in terms of them but they cannot be
correctly defined in terms of the rest? Russell thought all egocentric
particulars can be defined by ‘this’; ‘I’, for example, has the same meaning as
‘the biography to which this belongs’, where ‘this’ denotes a sense-datum
experienced by the speaker. Yet, at the same time, ‘this’ can be defined by the
combination ‘what I-now notice’. Must we use at least some egocentric
particulars to give a complete description of the world? Our ability to
describe the world from a speaker-neutral perspective, so that the denotations
of the terms in our description are independent of when, where, and by whom
they are used, depends on our ability to describe the world without using
egocentric particulars. Russell held that egocentric particulars are not needed
in any part of the description of the world.
-- egocentric predicament, each person’s apparently problematic position
as an experiencing subject, assuming that all our experiences are private in
that no one else can have them. Two problems concern our ability to gain
empirical knowledge. First, it is hard to see how we gain empirical knowledge
of what others experience, if all experience is private. We cannot have their
experience to see what it is like, for any experience we have is our experience
and so not theirs. Second, it is hard to see how we gain empirical knowledge of
how the external world is, independently of our experience. All our empirically
justified beliefs seem to rest ultimately on what is given in experience, and
if the empirically given is private, it seems it can only support justified
beliefs about the world as we experience it. A third major problem concerns our
ability to communicate with others. It is hard to see how we describe the world
in a language others understand. We give meaning to some of our words by
defining them by other words that already have meaning, and this process of
definition appears to end with words we define ostensively; i.e., we use them
to name something given in experience. If experiences are private, no one else
can grasp the meaning of our ostensively defined words or any words we use them
to define. No one else can understand our attempts to describe the world. Egoism: cf. H. P. Grice, “The principle of
conversational self-love and the principle of conversational benevolence,” any
view that, in a certain way, makes the self central. There are several
different versions of egoism, all of which have to do with how actions relate
to the self. Ethical egoism is the view that people ought to do what is in
their own selfinterest. Psychological egoism is a view about people’s motives,
inclinations, or dispositions. One statement of psychological egoism says that,
as a matter of fact, people always do what they believe is in their
self-interest and, human nature being what it is, they cannot do otherwise.
Another says that people never desire anything for its own sake except what
they believe is in their own self-interest. Altruism is the opposite of egoism.
Any ethical view that implies that people sometimes ought to do what is in the
interest of others and not in their self-interest can be considered a form of
ethical altruism. The view that, human nature being what it is, people can do
what they do not believe to be in their self-interest might be called
psychological altruism. Different species of ethical and psychological egoism
result from different interpretations of self-interest and of acting from
self-interest, respectively. Some people have a broad conception of acting from
self-interest such that people acting from a desire to help others can be said
to be acting out of self-interest, provided they think doing so will not, on
balance, take away from their own good. Others have a narrower conception of
acting from selfinterest such that one acts from self-interest only if one acts
from the desire to further one’s own happiness or good. Butler identified
self-love with the desire to further one’s own happiness or good and self-interested
action with action performed from that desire alone. Since we obviously have
other particular desires, such as the desires for honor, for power, for
revenge, and to promote the good of others, he concluded that psychological
egoism was false. People with a broader conception of acting from self-interest
would ask whether anyone with those particular desires would act on them if
they believed that, on balance, acting on them would result in a loss of
happiness or good for themselves. If some would, then psychological egoism is
false, but if, given human nature as it is, no one would, it is true even if
self-love is not the only source of motivation in human beings. Just as there
are broader and narrower conceptions of acting from self-interest, there are
broader and narrower conceptions of self-interest itself, as well as subjective
and objective conceptions of self-interest. Subjective conceptions relate a
person’s self-interest solely to the satisfaction of his desires or to what
that person believes will make his life go best for him. Objective conceptions
see self-interest, at least in part, as independent of the person’s desires and
beliefs. Some conceptions of self-interest are narrower than others, allowing
that the satisfaction of only certain desires is in a person’s self-interest,
e.g., desires whose satisfaction makes that person’s life go better for her.
And some conceptions of self-interest count only the satisfaction of idealized
desires, ones that someone would have after reflection about the nature of
those desires and what they typically lead to, as furthering a person’s
self-interest.
See index to all Grice’s books with index – the first three
of them.
Einheitswissenschaft: Used by Grice ironically. While he was totally
ANTI-Einheitwisseschaft, he was ALL for einheitsphilosophie! The phrase is used by Grice in a more causal
way. He uses the expression ‘unity of science’ vis-à-vis the topic of
teleology. Note that ‘einheitswissenschaft,’ literally translates as
unity-science – there is nothing about ‘making’ if one, which is what –fied
implies. The reason why ‘einheitswissenschaft’ was transliterated as ‘unified
science’ was that Neurath thought that ‘unity-science’ would be a yes-yes in
New England, most New Englanders being Unitarians, but they would like to
include Theology there, ‘into the bargain.’ “Die Einheit von
Wissenschaft.” Die Einheit der Wissenschaft und die
neopositivistische Theorie der „Einheitswissenschaft”. O. Neurath, „Einheit der Wissenschaft als
Aufgabe“,Einheitswissenschaft oder Einheit der Wissenschaft?
| Frank F Vierter Internationaler Kongress für Einheit der Wissenschaft, Cambridge 1938
... Einheitswissenschaft als
Basis der Wissenschaftsgeschichte (pp. positivists held that no essential differences in aim and
method exist between the various branches of science. The scientists of all
disciplines should collaborate closely with each other and should unify the
vocabulary of sciences by logical analysis. According to this view, there is no
sharp demarcation
between natural sciences and social sciences.
In particular, to establish universal laws in the social sciences may be
difficult in practice, but it is not impossible in principle. Through Otto
Neurath, this ideal of scientific unity became a program for logical
positivists, who published a series of books in Vienna under the heading
Unified Science. After the dissolution of the Vienna Circle, Neurath renamed
the official journal Erkenntnis as The Journal of Unified Science, and planned
to continue publication of a series of works in the United States under the
general title The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. He thought
that the work would be similar in historical importance to the
eighteenth-century French Encyclopédie under the direction of Diderot.
Unfortunately, this work was never completed, although Carnap and Morris
published some volumes originally prepared for it under the title Foundations
of the Unity of Science. “We have repeatedly pointed out that the formation of
the constructional system as a whole is the task of unified science.” Carnap,
The Logical Structure of the World.
Griceian elenchus, a
cross-examination or refutation. Typically in Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates
has a conversation with someone who claims to have some sort of knowledge, and
Socrates refutes this claim by showing the interlocutor that what he thinks he
knows is inconsistent with his other opinions. This refutation is called an
elenchus. It is not entirely negative, for awareness of his own ignorance is supposed
to spur the interlocutor to further inquiry, and the concepts and assumptions
employed in the refutations serve as the basis for positive Platonic treatments
of the same topic. In contrast, sophistic elenchi are merely eristic: they aim
simply at the refutation of an opponent by any means. Thus, Aristotle calls
fallacies that only appear to be refutations “sophistical elenchi.”
Ellipsis as implicature
-- an expression spoken or written from which semantically or syntactically
essential material has been deleted, usually for conciseness. Elliptical
sentences are often used to answer questions without repeating material
occurring in the questions. For example, the word ‘Lincoln’ may be an answer to
the question of the authorship of the Gettysburg Address or to the question of
the birthplace of George Boole. The single word ‘Lincoln’ can be seen as an
elliptical name when used as an ellipsis of ‘Abraham Lincoln’, and it can be
seen as an elliptical sentence when used as an ellipsis for ‘Abraham Lincoln
wrote the Gettysburg Address’. Other typical elliptical sentences are: ‘Abe is
a father of two [children]’, ‘Ben arrives at twelve [noon]’. A typical ellipsis
that occurs in discussion of ellipses involves citing the elliptical sentences
with the deleted material added in brackets often with ‘sc.’ or ‘scilicet’
instead of also presenting the complete sentence. Ellipsis also occurs above
the sentential level, e.g. where well-known premises are omitted in the course
of argumentation. The word ‘enthymeme’ designates an elliptical argument
expression from which one or more premise-expressions have been deleted. The
élan vital ellipsis 257 257 expression
‘elliptic ambiguity’ designates ambiguity arising from ellipsis.
Emersonian implicature
--, Ralph Waldo 180382, philosophical
essayist, lecturer, and poet, a leading figure in the transcendentalist
movement. He was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. As a young man he
taught school and served as a Unitarian minister 182632. After he resigned his
pastorate in 1832, he traveled to Europe to visit Coleridge, Carlyle, and
Wordsworth. Upon his return, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and began
anew as a public lecturer, essayist, and cultural critic. All the while he
maintained a voluminous correspondence and kept a detailed, evocative journal.
Most of this material has been published, and it casts considerable light on
the depth of his thought, at times more so than his public presentations and
books. His life was pockmarked by personal tragedies, notably the death of his
father when Emerson was eight; the death of his first wife, Ellen, after two
years of marriage; and the death of his oldest son, Waldo, at the age of five.
Such afflictions belie the commonly held assumption that Emerson was a thinker
who did not face the intractable problem of evil. To the contrary, his writings
should be read as a continuing struggle to render the richest possible version
of our situation, given that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”
Although Emerson did not write a systematic work in philosophy, he
unquestionably bequeathed an important philosophical vision and countless
philosophical pieces. Beginning with his concentration on the motif of nature,
its embracing quality, and the rhythms of our inextricable presence within its
activities, Emerson details the “compensatory” ebb and flow of the human
journey. The human soul and nature are related as “print” to “seal,” and yet
nature is not always beneficent. In his essay “Compensation,” emanationism
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 258 258 Emerson
writes that “the value of the universe continues to throw itself into every
point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion,
if the force, so the limitation.” After the acclaim given the publication of
Emerson’s first book, Nature 1836, he began to gather his public lectures, a
presentational medium at which he was riveting, convincing, and inspiring. In
1841 Emerson published his Essays First
Series, which included the lovely piece “Circles,” wherein he follows the blunt
maxim “we grizzle every day” with the healing affirmation that “life is a
series of surprises.” This volume also contains “Self-Reliance,” which
furnished a motto for the self-proclaiming intrepidity of nineteenth-century individualism. The enthusiastic response to
Emerson’s essays enabled him to publish three additional collections within the
decade: Essays Second Series 1844,
Nature, Addresses and Lectures 1849, and Representative Men 1850. These books
and their successors contained lectures, orations, poems, and addresses over a
wide range of topics, philosophical, personal, characterological, travel,
historical, and literary. Emerson’s prose is swift, clear, and epigrammatic,
like a series of written stochastic probes, resulting in a Yankee crazy quilt,
munificent of shape and color. Emerson spoke to be heard and wrote to be read,
especially by the often denigrated “common” person. In fact, during Emerson’s
European lecture tour in 1848, a letter to a London newspaper requested lowering
the admission price so that poorer people could attend, for “to miss him is to
lose an important part of the Nineteenth Century.” Emerson’s deeply democratic
attitude had a reflective philosophical base. He believed that ordinary
experience was epiphanic if we but open ourselves to its virtually infinite
messages. Despite his Brahmanic appearance and demeanor, Emerson was in
continuous touch with ordinary things. He wrote, “Our chief experiences have
been casual.” His belief in the explosive and pedagogical character of ordinary
experience is especially present in his influential oration “The Scholar.” After criticizing thought as thoroughly derivative, he plots
the influences necessary to generate a genuine scholar, paramount among them
nature and the learning of the past, though he cautions us not to be trapped in
excessive retrospection at the expense of “an original relation to the
universe.” It is his discussion of “action” as the third influence on the
scholar that enables him to project his clearest statement of his underlying
philosophical commitment. Without action, “thought can never ripen into truth,”
moreover, “thinking is a partial act,” whereas living is a “total act.”
Expressly opposed to any form of psychological, religious, philosophical, or
behavioral dualism, he counsels us that the spiritual is not set apart, beyond
reach of those who toil in the everyday. Rather, the most profound meanings of
the human condition, “lurk” in the “common,” the “low,” the “familiar,” the
“today.” The influence of the thought of Emerson reaches across class, caste,
genre, and persuasion. Thinkers as diverse as James, Nietzsche, Whitman,
Proust, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law
Olmsted, and Wallace Stevens are among those deeply indebted to Emerson. Yet,
it was Dewey who best caught the enduring bequest of Emerson, writing of “the
final word of Emerson’s philosophy, [as] the identity of Being, unqualified and
immutable, with character.”
Sender and sendee: Emissee: this is crucial.
There’s loads of references on this. Apparently, some philosopher cannot think
of communication without the emissee. But surely Grice loved Virginia Woolf.
“And when she was writing ‘The Hours,’ I’m pretty sure she cared a damn whether
the rest of the world existed!” Let's explore the issue of the UTTERER'S OCCASION-MEANING IN THE
ABSENCE OF A (so-called) AUDIENCE -- or sender without sendee, as it were. There are various
scenarios of utterances by which the utterer or sender is correctly said to
have communicated that so-and-so, such that there is no actual person or set of
persons (or sentient beings) whom the utterer or sender is addressing and in
whom the sender intends to induce a response. The range of these scenarios
includes, or might be thought to include, such items as -- the posting of
a notice, like "Keep out" or "This bridge is
dangerous," -- an entry in a diary, -- the writing of a note to
clarify one's thoughts when working on some problem, -- soliloquizing, --
rehearsing a part in a projected conversation, and -- silent
thinking. At least some of these scenarios are unprovided for in the
reductive analysis so far proposed. The examples which Grice's account
should cover fall into three groups: (a) Utterances for which the utterer
or sender thinks there may (now or later) be an audience or sendee (as when
Grice's son sent a letter to Santa). U may think that some particular
person, e. g. himself at a future date in the case of a diary entry, may (but
also may not) encounter U's utterance.Or U may think that there may or may not
be some person or other who is or will be an auditor or sendee or recipient of
his utterance. (b) An utterances which the utterer knows that it is not to
be addressed to any actual sendee, but which the utterer PRETENDS to address or
send to some particular person or type of person, OR which he thinks of as
being addressed (or sent) to some imagined sendee or type of sendee (as in the
rehearsal of a speech or of his part in a projected conversation, or
Demosthenes or Noel Coward talking to the gulls.(c) An utterances (including
what Occam calls an "internal" utterance) with respect to which the
utterer NEITHER thinks it possible that there may be an actual sendee nor
imagines himself as addressing sending so-and-so to a sendee, but nevertheless
intends his utterance to be such that it would induce a certain sort of
response in a certain perhaps fairly indefinite kind of sendee were it the case
that such a sendee *were* present.In the case of silent thinking the idea of the
presence of a sendee will have to be interpreted 'liberally,' as being the idea
of there being a sendee for a public counter-part of the utterer's internal,
private speech, if there is one. Austin refused to discuss Vitters's
private-language argument.In this connection it is perhaps worth noting that
some cases of verbal thinking (especially the type that Vitters engages in) do
fall outside the scope of Grice's account. When a verbal though
merely passes through Vitters's head (or brain) as distinct from being
"framed" by Vitters, it is utterly inappropriate (even in Viennese)
to talk of Vitters as having communicated so-and-so by "the very thought
of you," to echo Noble. Vitters is, perhaps, in such a case, more like a sendee than a
sender -- and wondering who such an intelligent sender might (or then might
not) be. In any case, to calm the
neo-Wittgensteinians, Grice propose a reductive analysis which surely accounts
for the examples which need to be accounted for, and which will allow as
SPECIAL (if paradigmatic) cases (now) the range of examples in which there is,
and it is known by the utterer that there is, an actual sendee. A
soul-to-soul transfer. This redefinition is relatively informal. Surely Grice could
present a more formal version which would gain in precision at the cost of ease
of comprehension. Let "p" (and k') range over properties of
persons (possible sendees); appropriate substituends for "O" (and i')
will include such diverse expressions as "is a passer-by," "is
a passer-by who sees this notice," "understands the Viennese
cant," "is identical with Vitters." As will be seen,
for Grice to communicate that so-and-so it will have to be possible to identify
the value of "/" (which may be fairly indeterminate) which U has in
mind; but we do not have to determine the range from which U makes a
selection. "U means by uttering x that *iP" is true iff (30) (3f
(3c): I.
U utters x intending x to be such that anyone who has q would think
that (i) x has f (2) f is correlated in way c with M-ing that
p (3) (3 0'): U intends x to be such that anyone who has b' would think,
via thinking (i) and (2), that U4's that p (4) in view of (3), U O's that p;
and II. (operative only for certain substituends for
"*4") U utters x intending that, should there actually be anyone
who has 0, he would via thinking (4), himself a that p; ' and III. It is
not the case that, for some inference-element E, U intends x to be such that
anyone who has 0 will both (i') rely on E in coming to O+ that p and (2') think
that (3k'): Uintends x to be such that anyone who has O' will come to /+ that p
without relying on E. Notes: (1) "i+" is to be read as
"p" if Clause II is operative, and as "think that UO's" if
Clause II is non-operative. (2) We need to use both "i" and
"i'," since we do not wish to require that U should intend his
possible audience to think of U's possible audience under the same description
as U does himself. Explanatory comments: (i) It is essential that the
intention which is specified in Clause II should be specified as U's intention
"that should there be anyone who has 0, he would (will) . . ." rather
than, analogously with Clauses I and II, as U's intention "that x should
be such that, should anyone be 0, he would ... ." If we adopt the latter
specification, we shall be open to an objection, as can be shown with the aid
of an example.Suppose that, Vitters is married, and further, suppose he married
an Englishwoman. Infuriated by an afternoon with his mother-in-law, when he is
alone after her departure, Vitters relieves his feelings by saying, aloud and
passionately, in German:"Do not ye ever comest near me again!"It will
no doubt be essential to Vitters's momentary well-being that Vitters should
speak with the intention that his remark be such that were his mother-in-law
present, assuming as we say, that he married and does have one who, being an
Englishwoman, will most likely not catch the Viennese cant that Vitters is
purposively using, she should however, in a very Griceian sort of way, form the
intention not to come near Vitters again. It would, however, be pretty
unacceptable if it were represented as following from Vitters's having THIS
intention (that his remark be such that, were his mother-in-law be present, she
should form the intnetion to to come near Vitters again) that what Vitters is
communicating (who knows to who) that the denotatum of 'Sie' is never to come
near Vitters again.For it is false that, in the circumstances, Vitters is
communicating that by his remark. Grice's reductive analysis is formulated
to avoid that difficulty. (2) Suppose that in accordance with the
definiens o U
intends x to be such that anyone who is f will think ... , and suppose that the
value of "O" which U has in mind is the property of being identical
with a particular person A. Then it will follow that U intends A to think
. . . ; and given the further condition, fulfilled in any normal (paradigmatic,
standard, typical, default) case, that U intends the sendee to think that the
sendee is the intended sendee, we are assured of the truth of a statement from
which the definiens is inferrible by the rule of existential generalisation
(assuming the legitimacy of this application of existential generalisation to a
statement the expression of which contains such "intensional" verbs
as "intend" and "think"). It can also be shown that,
for any case in which there is an actual sendee who knows that he is the
intended sendee, if the definiens in the standard version is true then the
definiens in the adapted version will be true. If that is so, given the
definition is correct, for any normal case in which there IS an actual sendee
the fulfillment of the definiens will constitute a necessary and sufficient
condition for U's having communicated that *1p.
Sendeeless: ‘audienceless’.
emissum: emissor. A construction out of ex- and ‘missum,’ cf. Grice
on psi-trans-mis-sion. Grice’s utterer, but turned Griceian, To emit, to
translate some Gricism or other. Cf. proffer. emissum. emissor-emissum distinction.
Frequently ignored by Austin. Grice usually formulates it ‘roughly.’ Strawson
for some reason denied the reducibility of the emissum to the emissor. Vide his
footnote in his Inaugural lecture at Oxford. it is a truth implicitly
acknowledged by communication theorists themselves -- this acknowledgement is
is certainly implicit in Grice's distinction between what speakers actually
say, in a favored sense of 'say', and what they imply (see "Utterer's
Meaning, SentenceMeaning and Word-Meaning," in Foundations of Language,
1968) -- that in almost all the things we should count as sentences there is a
substantial central core of meaning which is explicable either in terms of
truth-conditions or in terms of some related notion quite simply derivable from
that of a truth-condition, for example the notion, as we might call it, of a
compliance condition in the case of an imperative sentence or a
fulfillment-condition in the case of an optative. If we suppose, therefore,
that an account can be given of the notion of a truthcondition itself, an
account which is indeed independent of reference to communicationintention,
then we may reasonably think that the greater part of the task of a general
theory of meaning has been accomplished without such reference. So let us see
if we can rephrase the distinction for a one-off predicament. By drawing a
skull, Blackburn communicates to his fellow Pembrokite that there is danger
around. The proposition is ‘There is danger around’. Of the claims, one is
literal; the other metabolical. Blackburn means that there is danger around.
Blackburn communicates that there is danger around, possibly leading to death.
The emissum, Blackburn’s drawing of the skull ‘means’ that there is danger
around. Since the fact that Blackburn communicates that p is diaphanous, we
have yet another way of posing the distinction: Blackburn communicates that
there is danger around. What is communicated by Blackburn – his emissum – is
true. Note that in this diaphanous change from ‘Blackburn communicates that
there is danger around’ and ‘What Blackburn communicates, viz. that there is
danger around, is true’ we have progressed quite a bit. There are ways of
involving ‘true’ in the first stage. Blackburn communicates that there is
danger around, and he communicates something true. In the classical languages,
this is done in the accusative case. emissum.
emit. V. emissor. A good verb used by Grice. It gives us ‘emitter, and it is
more Graeco-Roman than his ‘utterer,’ which Cicero would think a barbarism.
emotum: the emotum, the motum. Grice enjoyed a bit of history of
philosophy. Cf. conatum. And Urmson’s company helped. Urmson produced a
brilliant study of the ‘emotive’ theory of ethics, which is indeed linguistic
and based on Ogden. Diog. Laert. of Zeno of Citium. πρὸς τὸν εἰπόντα,
"πολλοί σου καταγελῶσιν," "ἀλλ ἐγώ," ἔφη, "οὐ κατα-
γελῶμαι; to the question, who is a friend?, Zeno’s answer is, ‘a second self
(alter ego). One direct way to approach friend is via emotion, as
Aristotle did, and found it aporetic as did Grice. Aristotle discusses philia
in Eth. Nich. but it is in Rhet. where he allows for phulia to be an emotion.
Grice was very fortunate to have Hardie as his tutor. He overused Hardies
lectures on Aristotle, too, and instilled them on his own tutees! Grice is
concerned with the rather cryptic view by Aristotle of the friend (philos,
amicus) as the alter ego. In Grices cooperative, concerted, view of
things, a friend in need is a friend indeed! Grice is interested in Aristotle
finding himself in an aporia. In Nicomachean Ethics IX.ix, Aristotle poses the
question whether the happy man will need friends or not. Kosman correctly
identifies this question as asking not whether friends are necessary in order
to achieve eudæmonia, but why we require friends even when we are happy. The
question is not why we need friends to become happy, but why we need friends
when we are happy, since the eudæmon must be self-sufficient. Philia is
required for the flourishing of the life of practical virtue. The solution by
Aristotle to the aporia here, however, points to the requirement of friendships
even for the philosopher, in his life of theoretical virtue. The olution by
Aristotle to the aporia in Nicomachean Ethics IX.ix is opaque, and the corresponding
passage in Eudeiman Ethics VII.xii is scarcely better. Aristotle thinks he has
found the solution to this aporia. We must take two things into consideration,
that life is desirable and also that the good is, and thence that it is
desirable that such a nature should belong to oneself as it belongs to them. If
then, of such a pair of corresponding s. there is always one s. of the
desirable, and the known and the perceived are in general constituted by their
participation in the nature of the determined, so that to wish to perceive ones
self is to wish oneself to be of a certain definite character,—since, then we
are not in ourselves possessed of each such characters, but only in
participation in these qualities in perceiving and knowing—for the perceiver
becomes perceived in that way in respect in which he first perceives, and
according to the way in which and the object which he perceives; and the knower
becomes known in the same way— therefore it is for this reason that one always
desires to live, because one always desires to know; and this is because he
himself wishes to be the object known. emotion, as conceived by philosophers and
psychologists, any of several general types of mental states, approximately
those that had been called “passions” by earlier philosophers, such as
Descartes and Hume. Anger, e.g., is one emotion, fear a second, and joy a
third. An emotion may also be a content-specific type, e.g., fear of an
earthquake, or a token of an emotion type, e.g., Mary’s present fear that an earthquake
is imminent. The various states typically classified as emotions appear to be
linked together only by overlapping family resemblances rather than by a set of
necessary and sufficient conditions. Thus an adequate philosophical or
psychological “theory of emotion” should probably be a family of theories. Even
to label these states “emotions” wrongly suggests that they are all marked by
emotion, in the older sense of mental agitation a metaphorical extension of the
original sense, agitated motion. A person who is, e.g., pleased or sad about
something is not typically agitated. To speak of anger, fear, joy, sadness,
etc., collectively as “the emotions” fosters the assumption which James said he
took for granted that these are just qualitatively distinct feelings of mental
agitation. This exaggerates the importance of agitation and neglects the
characteristic differences, noted by Aristotle, Spinoza, and others, in the
types of situations that evoke the various emotions. One important feature of
most emotions is captured by the older category of passions, in the sense of
‘ways of being acted upon’. In many lanemotion emotion 259 259 guages nearly all emotion adjectives are
derived from participles: e.g., the English words ‘amused’, ‘annoyed’,
‘ashamed’, ‘astonished’, ‘delighted’, ‘embarrassed’, ‘excited’, ‘frightened’,
‘horrified’, ‘irritated’, ‘pleased’, ‘terrified’, ‘surprised’, ‘upset’, and
‘worried’. When we are, e.g., embarrassed, something acts on us, i.e.,
embarrasses us: typically, some situation or fact of which we are aware, such
as our having on unmatched shoes. To call embarrassment a passion in the sense
of a way of being acted upon does not imply that we are “passive” with respect
to it, i.e., have no control over whether a given situation embarrasses us and
thus no responsibility for our embarrassment. Not only situations and facts but
also persons may “do” something to us, as in love and hate, and mere
possibilities may have an effect on us, as in fear and hope. The possibility
emotions are sometimes characterized as “forward-looking,” and emotions that
are responses to actual situations or facts are said to be “backward-looking.”
These temporal characterizations are inaccurate and misleading. One may be
fearful or hopeful that a certain event occurred in the past, provided one is
not certain as to whether it occurred; and one may be, e.g., embarrassed about
what is going to occur, provided one is certain it will occur. In various
passions the effect on us may include involuntary physiological changes,
feelings of agitation due to arousal of the autonomic nervous system,
characteristic facial expressions, and inclinations toward intentional action
or inaction that arise independently of any rational warrant.
Phenomenologically, however, these effects do not appear to us to be alien and
non-rational, like muscular spasms. Rather they seem an integral part of our
perception of the situation as, e.g., an embarrassing situation, or one that
warrants our embarrassment. emotive
conjugation: I went to Oxford; you went to Cambridge; he went to the London
School of Economics”: a humorous verbal conjugation, designed to expose and
mock first-person bias, in which ostensibly the same action is described in
successively more pejorative terms through the first, second, and third persons
e.g., “I am firm, You are stubborn, He is a pig-headed fool”. This example was
used by Russell in the course of a BBC Radio “Brains’ Trust” discussion. It was
popularized later that year when The New Statesman ran a competition for other
examples. An “unprecedented response” brought in 2,000 entries, including: “I
am well informed, You listen to gossip, He believes what he reads in the
paper”; and “I went to Oxford, You went to Cambridge, He went to the London
School of Economics” Russell was educated at Cambridge and later taught
there. -- emotivism, a noncognitivist
metaethical view opposed to cognitivism, which holds that moral judgments
should be construed as assertions about the moral properties of actions,
persons, policies, and other objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates
purport to refer to properties of such objects, that moral judgments or the
propositions that they express can be true or false, and that cognizers can
have the cognitive attitude of belief toward the propositions that moral
judgments express. Noncognitivism denies these claims; it holds that moral
judgments do not make assertions or express propositions. If moral judgments do
not express propositions, the former can be neither true nor false, and moral
belief and moral knowledge are not possible. The emotivist is a noncognitivist
who claims that moral judgments, in their primary sense, express the
appraiser’s attitudes approval or
disapproval toward the object of
evaluation, rather than make assertions about the properties of that object.
Because emotivism treats moral judgments as the expressions of the appraiser’s
pro and con attitudes, it is sometimes referred to as the boohurrah theory of
ethics. Emotivists distinguish their thesis that moral judgments express the
appraiser’s attitudes from the subjectivist claim that they state or report the
appraiser’s attitudes the latter view is a form of cognitivism. Some versions
of emotivism distinguish between this primary, emotive meaning of moral
judgments and a secondary, descriptive meaning. In its primary, emotive
meaning, a moral judgment expresses the appraiser’s attitudes toward the object
of evaluation rather than ascribing properties to that object. But secondarily,
moral judgments refer to those non-moral properties of the object of evaluation
in virtue of which the appraiser has and expresses her attitudes. So if I judge
that your act of torture is wrong, my judgment has two components. Its primary,
emotive sense is to express my disapproval of your act. Its secondary,
descriptive sense is to denote those non-moral properties of your act upon
which I base my disapproval. These are presumably the very properties that make
it an act of torture roughly, a causing
of intense pain in order to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure. By
making emotive meaning primary, emotivists claim to preserve the univocity of
moral language between speakers who employ different criteria of application
for their moral terms. Also, by stressing the intimate connection between moral
judgment and the agent’s non-cognitive attitudes, emotivists claim to capture
the motivational properties of moral judgment. Some emotivists have also
attempted to account for ascriptions of truth to moral judgments by accepting the
redundancy account of ascriptions of truth as expressions of agreement with the
original judgment. The emotivist must think that such ascriptions of truth to
moral judgments merely reflect the ascriber’s agreement in noncognitive
attitude with the attitude expressed by the original judgment. Critics of
emotivism challenge these alleged virtues. They claim that moral agreement need
not track agreement in attitude; there can be moral disagreement without
disagreement in attitude between moralists with different moral views, and
disagreement in attitude without moral disagreement between moralists and
immoralists. By distinguishing between the meaning of moral terms and speakers’
beliefs about the extension of those terms, critics claim that we can account for
the univocity of moral terms in spite of moral disagreement without introducing
a primary emotive sense for moral terms. Critics also allege that the emotivist
analysis of moral judgments as the expression of the appraiser’s attitudes
precludes recognizing the possibility of moral judgments that do not engage or
reflect the attitudes of the appraiser. For instance, it is not clear how
emotivism can accommodate the amoralist
one who recognizes moral requirements but is indifferent to them.
Critics also charge emotivism with failure to capture the cognitive aspects of
moral discourse. Because emotivism is a theory about moral judgment or
assertion, it is difficult for the emotivist to give a semantic analysis of
moral predicates in unasserted contexts, such as in the antecedents of
conditional moral judgments e.g., “If he did wrong, then he ought to be
punished”. Finally, one might want to recognize the truth of some moral
judgments, perhaps in order to make room for the possibility of moral mistakes.
If so, then one may not be satisfied with the emotivist’s appeal to redundancy
or disquotational accounts of the ascription of truth. Emotivism was introduced
by Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic 2d ed., 6 and refined by C. L. Stevenson
in Facts and Values 3 and Ethics and Language 4. Refs.:
There is an essay on “Emotions and akrasia,” but the topic is scattered in
various places, such as Grice’s reply to Davidson on intending. Grice has an
essay on ‘Kant and friendship,’ too, The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
Conversational empathy – principle of conversational empathy
-- Principle
of Conversational Empathy – a term devised by Grice for the expectation a
conversationalist has that his co-partner will honour his conversational goal,
however transitory. imaginative projection into another person’s situation,
especially for vicarious capture of its emotional and motivational qualities.
The term is an English rendering by the Anglo psychologist E. G. Titchener,
1867 7 of the G. Einfühlung, made popular by Theodore Lipps 18514, which also
covered imaginative identification with inanimate objects of aesthetic
contemplation. Under ‘sympathy’, many aspects were earlier discussed by Hume,
Adam Smith, and other Scottish philosophers. Empathy has been considered a
precondition of ethical thinking and a major contributor to social bonding and
altruism, mental state attribution, language use, and translation. The relevant
spectrum of phenomena includes automatic and often subliminal motor mimicry of
the expressions or manifestations of another’s real or feigned emotion, pain,
or pleasure; emotional contagion, by which one “catches” another’s apparent
emotion, often unconsciously and without reference to its cause or “object”;
conscious and unconscious mimicry of direction of gaze, with consequent
transfer of attention from the other’s response to its cause; and conscious or
unconscious role-taking, which reconstructs in imagination with or without
imagery aspects of the other’s situation as the other “perceives” it.
Empedocles, Grecian
preSocratic philosopher who created a physical theory in response to Parmenides
while incorporating Pythagorean ideas of the soul into his philosophy.
Following Parmenides in his rejection of coming-to-be and perishing, he
accounted for phenomenal change by positing four elements his “roots,”
rizomata, earth, empathic solipsism Empedocles 261 261 water, air, and fire. When they mix
together in set proportions they create compound substances such as blood and
bone. Two forces act on the elements, Love and Strife, the former joining the
different elements, the latter separating them. In his cyclical cosmogony the
four elements combine to form the Sphere, a completely homogeneous spherical
body permeated by Love, which, shattered by Strife, grows into a cosmos with
the elements forming distinct cosmic masses of earth, water the seas, air, and
fire. There is controversy over whether Empedocles posits one or two periods
when living things exist in the cycle. On one view there are two periods,
between which intervenes a stage of complete separation of the elements.
Empedocles accepts the Pythagorean view of reincarnation of souls, seeing life
as punishment for an original sin and requiring the expiation of a pious and
philosophical life. Thus the exile and return of the individual soul reflects
in the microcosm the cosmic movement from harmony to division to harmony.
Empedocles’ four elements became standard in natural philosophy down to the
early modern era, and Aristotle recognized his Love and Strife as an early
expression of the efficient cause. Vide
“Italic Griceians” – While in the New World, ‘Grecian philosophy’ is believed
to have happened ‘in Greece,’ Grice was amused that ‘most happened in Italy!’
Empiricism: One of
Grice’s twelve labours -- Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, philosopher, an
empiricist who was considered the great analytical mind of his generation.
Close to Rousseau and Diderot, he stayed within the church. He is closely
perhaps excessively identified with the image of the statue that, in the Traité
des sensations Treatise on Sense Perception, 1754, he endows with the five
senses to explain how perceptions are assimilated and produce understanding cf.
also his Treatise on the Origins of Human Knowledge, 1746. He maintains a
critical distance from precursors: he adopts Locke’s tabula rasa but from his
first work to Logique Logic, 1780 insists on the creative role of the mind as
it analyzes and compares sense impressions. His Traité des animaux Treatise on
Animals, 1755, which includes a proof of the existence of God, considers
sensate creatures rather than Descartes’s animaux machines and sees God only as
a final cause. He reshapes Leibniz’s monads in the Monadologie Monadology,
1748, rediscovered in 0. In the Langue des calculs Language of Numbers, 1798 he
proposes mathematics as a model of clear analysis. The origin of language and
creation of symbols eventually became his major concern. His break with
metaphysics in the Traité des systèmes Treatise on Systems, 1749 has been
overemphasized, but Condillac does replace rational constructs with sense
experience and reflection. His empiricism has been mistaken for materialism,
his clear analysis for simplicity. The “ideologues,” Destutt de Tracy and
Laromiguière, found Locke in his writings. Jefferson admired him. Maine de
Biran, while critical, was indebted to him for concepts of perception and the
self; Cousin disliked him; Saussure saw him as a forerunner in the study of the
origins of language. Empiricism – one of Grice’s twelve labours – This
implicates he saw himself as a Rationalist, rather -- Cordemoy, Géraud de,
philosopher and member of the Cartesian school. His most important work is his
Le discernement du corps et de l’âme en six discours, published in 1666 and
reprinted under slightly different titles a number of times thereafter. Also
important are the Discours physique de la parole 1668, a Cartesian theory of
language and communication; and Une lettre écrite à un sçavant religieux 1668,
a defense of Descartes’s orthodoxy on certain questions in natural philosophy.
Cordemoy also wrote a history of France, left incomplete at his death. Like
Descartes, Cordemoy advocated a mechanistic physics explaining physical
phenomena in terms of size, shape, and local motion, and converse Cordemoy,
Géraud de 186 186 held that minds are
incorporeal thinking substances. Like most Cartesians, Cordemoy also advocated
a version of occasionalism. But unlike other Cartesians, he argued for atomism
and admitted the void. These innovations were not welcomed by other members of
the Cartesian school. But Cordemoy is often cited by later thinkers, such as
Leibniz, as an important seventeenth-century advocate of atomism. Empiricism: one of Grice’s twelve labours --
Cousin, V., philosopher who set out to merge the psychological tradition with the pragmatism
of Locke and Condillac and the inspiration of the Scottish Reid, Stewart and G.
idealists Kant, Hegel. His early courses at the Sorbonne 1815 18, on “absolute”
values that might overcome materialism and skepticism, aroused immense
enthusiasm. The course of 1818, Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien Of the True, the
Beautiful, and the Good, is preserved in the Adolphe Garnier edition of student
notes 1836; other early texts appeared in the Fragments philosophiques Philosophical
Fragments, 1826. Dismissed from his teaching post as a liberal 1820, arrested
in G.y at the request of the police and
detained in Berlin, he was released after Hegel intervened 1824; he was not
reinstated until 1828. Under Louis-Philippe, he rose to highest honors, became
minister of education, and introduced philosophy into the curriculum. His
eclecticism, transformed into a spiritualism and cult of the “juste milieu,”
became the official philosophy. Cousin rewrote his work accordingly and even
succeeded in having Du Vrai third edition, 1853 removed from the papal index.
In 1848 he was forced to retire. He is noted for his educational reforms, as a
historian of philosophy, and for his translations Proclus, Plato, editions
Descartes, and portraits of ladies of seventeenth-century society. Empiricism –
one of Grice’s twelve labours -- empirical decision theory, the scientific
study of human judgment and decision making. A growing body of empirical
research has described the actual limitations on inductive reasoning. By
contrast, traditional decision theory is normative; the theory proposes ideal
procedures for solving some class of problems. The descriptive study of
decision making was pioneered by figures including Amos Tversky, Daniel
Kahneman, Richard Nisbett, and Lee Ross, and their empirical research has
documented the limitations and biases of various heuristics, or simple rules of
thumb, routinely used in reasoning. The representativeness heuristic is a rule
of thumb used to judge probabilities based on the degree to which one class
represents or resembles another class. For example, we assume that basketball
players have a “hot hand” during a particular game producing an uninterrupted string of successful
shots because we underestimate the relative
frequency with which such successful runs occur in the entire population of
that player’s record. The availability heuristic is a rule of thumb that uses
the ease with which an instance comes to mind as an index of the probability of
an event. Such a rule is unreliable when salience in memory misleads; for
example, most people incorrectly rate death by shark attack as more probable
than death by falling airplane parts. For an overview, see D. Kahneman, P.
Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and
Biases, 2. These biases, found in laypeople and statistical experts alike, have
a natural explanation on accounts such as Herbert Simon’s 7 concept of “bounded
rationality.” According to this view, the limitations on our decision making
are fixed in part by specific features of our psychological architecture. This
architecture places constraints on such factors as processing speed and
information capacity, and this in turn produces predictable, systematic errors
in performance. Thus, rather than proposing highly idealized rules appropriate
to an omniscient Laplacean genius more
characteristic of traditional normative approaches to decision theory empirical decision theory attempts to
formulate a descriptively accurate, and thus psychologically realistic, account
of rationality. Even if certain simple rules can, in particular settings,
outperform other strategies, it is still important to understand the causes of
the systematic errors we make on tasks perfectly representative of routine
decision making. Once the context is specified, empirical decision-making
research allows us to study both descriptive decision rules that we follow
spontaneously and normative rules that we ought to follow upon reflection. empiricism from empiric, ‘doctor who relies
on practical experience’, ultimately from Grecian empeiria, ‘experience’, a
type of theory in epistemology, the basic idea behind all examples of the type
being that experience has primacy in human knowledge and justified belief. Because
empiricism is not a single view but a type of view with many different
examples, it is appropriate to speak not just of empiricism but of empiricisms.
Perhaps the most fundamental distinction to be drawn among the various
empiricisms is that between those consisting of some claim about concepts and
those consisting of some empirical empiricism 262 262 claim about beliefs call these, respectively, concept-empiricisms
and belief-empiricisms. Concept-empiricisms all begin by singling out those
concepts that apply to some experience or other; the concept of dizziness,
e.g., applies to the experience of dizziness. And what is then claimed is that
all concepts that human beings do and can possess either apply to some
experience that someone has had, or have been derived from such concepts by
someone’s performing on those concepts one or another such mental operation as
combination, distinction, and abstraction. How exactly my concepts are and must
be related to my experience and to my performance of those mental operations
are matters on which concept-empiricists differ; most if not all would grant we
each acquire many concepts by learning language, and it does not seem plausible
to hold that each concept thus acquired either applies to some experience that one
has oneself had or has been derived from such by oneself. But though
concept-empiricists disagree concerning the conditions for linguistic
acquisition or transmission of a concept, what unites them, to repeat, is the
claim that all human concepts either apply to some experience that someone has
actually had or they have been derived from such by someone’s actually
performing on those the mental operations of combination, distinction, and
abstraction. Most concept-empiricists will also say something more: that the
experience must have evoked the concept in the person having the experience, or
that the person having the experience must have recognized that the concept
applies to his or her experience, or something of that sort. What unites all
belief-empiricists is the claim that for one’s beliefs to possess one or
another truth-relevant merit, they must be related in one or another way to
someone’s experience. Beliefempiricisms differ from each other, for one thing,
with respect to the merit concerning which the claim is made. Some
belief-empiricists claim that a belief does not have the status of knowledge
unless it has the requisite relation to experience; some claim that a belief
lacks warrant unless it has that relation; others claim that a belief is not permissibly
held unless it stands in that relation; and yet others claim that it is not a
properly scientific belief unless it stands in that relation. And not even this
list exhausts the possibilities. Belief-empiricisms also differ with respect to
the specific relation to experience that is said to be necessary for the merit
in question to be present. Some belief-empiricists hold, for example, that a
belief is permissibly held only if its propositional content is either a report
of the person’s present or remembered experience, or the belief is held on the
basis of such beliefs and is probable with respect to the beliefs on the basis
of which it is held. Kant, by contrast, held the rather different view that if
a belief is to constitute empirical knowledge, it must in some way be about
experience. Third, belief-empiricisms differ from each other with respect to
the person to whose experience a belief must stand in the relation specified if
it is to possess the merit specified. It need not always be an experience of
the person whose belief is being considered. It might be an experience of
someone giving testimony about it. It should be obvious that a philosopher
might well accept one kind of empiricism while rejecting others. Thus to ask
philosophers whether they are empiricists is a question void for vagueness. It
is regularly said of Locke that he was an empiricist; and indeed, he was a
concept-empiricist of a certain sort. But he embraced no version whatsoever of
belief-empiricism. Up to this point, ‘experience’ has been used without
explanation. But anyone acquainted with the history of philosophy will be aware
that different philosophers pick out different phenomena with the word; and
even when they pick out the same phenomenon, they have different views as to
the structure of the phenomenon that they call ‘experience.’ The differences on
these matters reflect yet more distinctions among empiricisms than have been
delineated above.
enantiamorphs from
Grecian enantios, ‘opposite’, and morphe, ‘form’, objects whose shapes differ
as do those of a right and left hand. One of a pair of enantiamorphs can be
made to look identical in shape to the other by viewing it in a mirror but not
merely by changing its spatial orientation. Enantiamorphs figure prominently in
the work of Kant, who argued that the existence of enantiamorphic pairs
entailed that Leibnizian relational theories of space were to be rejected in
favor of Newtonian absolutist theories, that some facts about space could be
apprehended empiricism, constructive enantiamorphs 263 263 only by “pure intuition,” and that space
was mind-dependent.
ENCYCLOPÆDIA GRICEIANA --
Encyclopædia Griceiana -- Encyclopedia, in , Encyclopédie; full English title:
Encyclopedia, or a Descriptive Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades.
Launched in 1747 by the Parisian publisher Le Breton, who had secured
d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s editorship, the Encyclopedia was gradually released
from 1751 to 1772, despite a temporary revocation of its royal privilege.
Comprising seventeen folio volumes of 17,818 articles and eleven folio volumes
of 2,885 plates, the work required a staff of 272 contributors, writers, and
engravers. It incorporated the accumulated knowledge and rationalist,
secularist views of the Enlightenment
and prescribed economic, social, and political reforms. Enormously successful,
the work was reprinted with revisions five times before 1789. Contributions
were made by the philosophes Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, d’Holbach,
Naigeon, and Saint-Lambert; the writers Duclos and Marmontel; the theologians
Morellet and Malet; enlightened clerics, e.g. Raynal; explorers, e.g. La
Condamine; natural scientists, e.g. Daubenton; physicians, e.g. Bouillet; the
economists Turgot and Quesnay; engineers, e.g. Perronet; horologists, e.g.
Berthoud; and scores of other experts. “The purpose of an Encyclopedia,” wrote
Diderot, “is to collect the knowledge dispersed on the surface of the earth,
and to unfold its general system” “Encyclopedia,” Vol. 5, 1755. The
Encyclopedia offered the educated reader a comprehensive, systematic, and
descriptive repository of contemporary liberal and mechanical arts. D’Alembert
and Diderot developed a sensationalist epistemology “Preliminary Discourse”
under the influence of Locke and Condillac. They compiled and rationally
classified existing knowledge according to the noetic process memory,
imagination, and reason. Based on the assumption of the unity of theory and
praxis, their approach was positivistic and utilitarian. The Encyclopedists vindicated
experimental reason and the rule of nature, fostered the practice of criticism,
and stimulated the development of new sciences. In religious matters, they
cultivated ambiguity to escape censorship. Whereas most contributors held
either conciliatory or orthodox positions, d’Alembert, Diderot, and d’Holbach
barely concealed their naturalistic and atheistic opinions. Their radicalism
was pervasive. Supernaturalism, obscurantism, and fanaticism were among the
Encyclopedists’ favorite targets. They identified religion with superstition
and theology with black magic; asserted the superiority of natural morality
over theological ethics; demanded religious toleration; and championed human
rights. They innovatively retraced the historical conditions of the development
of modern philosophy. They furthermore pioneered ideas on trade and industry
and anticipated the relevance of historiography, sociology, economics, and
linguistics. As the most ambitious and expansive reference work of its time,
the Encyclopedia crystallized the confidence of the eighteenth-century
bourgeoisie in the capacity of reason to dispel the shadows of ignorance and
improve society.
English futilitarians, The: Bergmann’s pun on H. P. Grice and
J. L. Austin. from futile. Cf. conversational futilitarianism. Can there be a
futilitarian theory of communication? Grice’s! The issue is a complex one. Some
may interpret Grice’s theory as resting “on Kantian grounds.” Not everybody was
present at Grice’s seminars at Oxford on helpfulness, where he discusses the
kind of reasoning that a participant to a conversation will display in assuming
that his co-conversationalist is being conversationally helpful,
conversationally benevolent, conversationally ‘altruist,’ almost, and
conversationally, well, co-operative. So, as to the basis for this. We can
simplify the scenario by using the plural. A conversationalist assumes that his
co-conversationalist is being co-operative on Kantian grounds. What are the
alternatives, if any? One can re-describe “Kantian grounds” as “moral grounds.”
Conversationalists abide with the principle of conversational helpfulness on
Kantian, moral grounds. Kant wrote the “Critique of practical reason,” so Kant
would allow for a rephrase of this as follows. Conversationalists abide with
the principle of conversational helpfulness on practical, indeed moral, grounds
– which is the topic of Grice’s last Kant lecture at Stanford. How to turn a
‘counsel of prudence,’ which is ‘practical’ into something that covers Kant’s
“Kategorische Imperativ.” And then there’s the utilitarian. Utilitarianism IS a
moral theory, or a meta-ethical theory. So one would have to allow for the
possibility that conversationalists abide by the principle of conversational
helpfulness on “utilitarian grounds,” which would be “practical grounds,” AND
“moral grounds,” if not Kantian grounds. In any case, the topic WAS raised, and
indeed, for someone like Grice who wrote on ‘pleasure,’ and ‘happiness,’ it
does not seem futilitarian to see him as a futilitarian. Unfortunately, you
need a serious philosophical background to appreciate all this, since it
touches on the very serious, or ‘deep,’ as Grice would say, “and fascinating,”
suburbia or practicality. But surely the keyword ‘utilitarian’ as per
“conversationalists abide by the principle of conversational helpfulness on
utilitarian grounds” is a possibility. Cf. Grice’s reference to the ‘least
effort,’ and in the Oxford lectures on helpfulness to a conversationalist not
getting involved in “undue effort,” or getting into “unnecessary trouble.”
“Undue effort” is ‘forbidden’ by the desideratum of conversational candour; the
‘unnecessary trouble’ is balanced by the ‘principle of conversational
self-love.’ And I don’t think Kant would ever considered loving himself! Grice
being keen on neuter adjectives, he saw the ‘utile’ at the root of
utilitarianism. There is much ‘of value’ in the old Roman concept of ‘utile.’
Lewis and Short have it as Neutr. absol.: ūtĭle , is, n., what
is useful, the useful: omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci, Hor. A. P.
343: “bonus atque fidus Judex honestum praetulit utili,” id. C. 4, 9, 41:
“utilium tardus provisor,” id. A. P. 164: “sententiae de utilibus honestisque,”
Quint. 3, 8, 13; cf. id. 1, 2, 29. —Ultimately, Grice’s meta-ethics, like Hare’s,
Nowell-Smith’s, Austin’s, Hampshire’s, and Warnock’s derives into a qualified
utilitarianism, with notions of agreeableness and eudaemonia being crucial.
Grice well knows that for Aristotle pleasure is just one out of the three
sources for phulia; the others being profit, and virtue. As an English
utilitarian, or English futilitarian, Grice plays with Griceian
pleasures. Democritus, as Grice remarks, seems to be the earliest
philosopher to have categorically embraced a hedonistic philosophy. Democritus
claims that the supreme goal of life is contentment or cheerfulness, stating
that joy and sorrow are the distinguishing mark of things beneficial and
harmful. The Cyrenaics are an ultra-hedonist Grecoam school of philosophy
founded by Aristippus. Many of the principles of the school were set by his
grandson, Aristippus the Younger, and Theodorus. The Cyrenaic school is one of
the earliest Socratic schools. The Cyrenaics teach that the only intrinsic
‘agathon’ is pleasure ‘hedone,’ which means not just the absence of pain, but a
positively enjoyable momentary sensation. A physical pleasure is stronger than
a pleasure of anticipation or memory. The Cyrenaics do, however, recognize the
value of social obligation, and that pleasure may be gained from altruism. The
Cyrenaic school dies out within a century, and is replaced by
Epicureanism. The Cyrenaics are known for their sceptical epistemology.
The Cyrenaics reduce logic to a basic doctrine concerning the criterion of
truth. The Cyrenaics think that one can only know with certainty his immediate
sense-experience, e. g., that he is having a sweet sensation. But one can know
nothing about the nature of the object that causes this sensation, e.g., that
honey is sweet. The Cyrenaics also deny that we can have knowledge of what the
experience of others are like. All knowledge is immediate sensation. Sensation
is a motion which is purely subjective, and is painful, indifferent or
pleasant, according as it is violent, tranquil or gentle. Further, sensation is
entirely individual and can in no way be described as constituting absolute
objective knowledge. Feeling, therefore, is the only possible criterion of
knowledge and of conduct. The way of being affected is alone knowable. Thus the
sole aim for everyone should be pleasure. Cyrenaicism deduces a single,
universal aim for all which is pleasure. Furthermore, feeling is momentary and
homogeneous. It follows that past and future pleasure have no real existence
for us, and that in present pleasure there is no distinction of kind. Socrates
speaks of the higher pleasure of the intellect. The Cyrenaics denies the
validity of this distinction and say that bodily pleasure (hedone somatike),
being more simple and more intense, is preferable. Momentary pleasure,
preferably of a physical kind, is the only good for a human. However, an action
which gives immediate pleasure can create more than their equivalent of pain.
The wise person should be in control (egcrateia) of pleasure rather than be
enslaved to it, otherwise pain results, and this requires judgement to evaluate
this or that pleasure of life. Regard should be paid to law and custom, because
even though neither law nor custom have an intrinsic value on its own,
violating law or custom leads to an unpleasant penalty being imposed by others.
Likewise, friendship and justice are useful because of the pleasure they
provide. Thus the Cyrenaics believe in the hedonistic value of social obligation
and altruistic behaviour. Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based
upon the teachings of Epicurus, an atomic materialist, following in the steps
of Democritus and Leucippus. Epicurus’s materialism leads him to a general
stance against superstition or the idea of divine intervention. Following
Aristippus, Epicurus believes that the greatest good is to seek modest,
sustainable pleasure in the form of a state of tranquility and freedom from
fear (ataraxia) and absence of bodily pain (aponia) through knowledge of the
workings of the world and the limits of desire. The combination of these two
states, ataraxia and aponia, is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest
form. Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism, insofar as it declares
pleasure as the sole intrinsic good, its conception of absence of pain as the
greatest pleasure and its advocacy of a simple life make it different from
hedonism as it is commonly understood. In the Epicurean view, the highest
pleasure (tranquility and freedom from fear) is obtained by knowledge,
friendship and living a virtuous and temperate life. Epicurus lauds the
enjoyment of a simple pleasure, by which he means abstaining from the bodily
desire, such as sex and the appetite, verging on asceticism. Epicurus argues
that when eating, one should not eat too richly, for it could lead to
dissatisfaction later, such as the grim realization that one could not afford
such delicacies in the future. Likewise, sex could lead to increased lust and
dissatisfaction with the sexual partner. Epicurus does not articulate a broad
system of social ethics that has survived but had a unique version of the
golden rule. It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living
wisely and well and justly, agreeing neither to harm nor be harmed, and it is
impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.
Epicureanism is originally a challenge to Platonism, though later it became the
main opponent of Stoicism. Epicurus and his followers shun politics. After the
death of Epicurus, his school is headed by Hermarchus. Later many Epicurean
societies flourish in the Late Hellenistic era and during the Roman era, such
as those in Antiochia, Alexandria, Rhodes and Ercolano. The poet Lucretius is
its most known Roman proponent. By the end of the Roman Empire, having
undergone attack and repression, Epicureanism has all but died out, and would
be resurrected in the seventeenth century by the atomist Pierre Gassendi. Some
writings by Epicurus have survived. Some scholars consider the epic poem “De
natura rerum” by Lucretius to present in one unified work the core arguments
and theories of Epicureanism. Many of the papyrus scrolls unearthed at the
Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum are Epicurean texts. At least some are
thought to have belonged to the Epicurean Philodemus. Cf. Barnes on
epicures and connoiseurs. Many a controversy arising out of this or that value
judgement is settled by saying, ‘I like it and you don’t, and that s the end of
the matter.’ I am content to adopt this solution of the difficulty on matters
such as food and drink. Even here, though, we admit the existence of epicures
and connoisseurs.Why are we not content to accept the same solution on every
matter where value is concerned? The reason I am not so content lies in the
fact that the action of one man dictated by his approval of something is
frequently incompatible with the action of another man dictated by his approval
of something. This is obviously philosophical, especially for the Grecian
hedonistic Epicureians made popular by Marius and Walter Pater at Oxford. L and
S have "ἡδονή,” also “ἁδονά,” or in a chorus in tragedy, “ἡδονά,”
ultimately from "ἥδομαι,” which they render it as “enjoyment, pleasure,”
“prop. of sensual pleasure.” αἱ τοῦ σώματος or περὶ τὸ σῶμα ἡ.; αἱ κατὰ τὸ σῶμα
ἡ. Plato, Republic, 328d; σωματικαὶ ἡ. Arist. Eth. Nich. 1151a13; αἱ περὶ
πότους καὶ περὶ ἐδωδὰς ἡ. Plato, Republic, 389e; but also ἀκοῆς ἡ; ἡ ἀπὸ τοῦ
εἰδέναι ἡ. Pl. R. 582b; of malicious pleasure, ἡ ἐπὶ τοῖς τῶν φίλων κακοῖς, ἐπὶ
ταῖς λοιδορίαις ἡ.; ἡδονῇ ἡσσᾶσθαι, ἡδοναῖς χαρίζεσθαι, to give way to
pleasure; Pl. Lg. 727c; κότερα ἀληθείη χρήσομαι ἢ ἡδονῆ; shall I speak truly or
so as to humour you? εἰ ὑμῖν ἡδονὴ τοῦ ἡγεμονεύειν; ἡ. εἰσέρχεταί τιϝι εἰ, “one
feels pleasure at the thought that …” ; ἡδονὴν ἔχειν τινός to be satisfied
with; ἡδονὴν ἔχει, φέρει; ἡδονὴ ἰδέσθαι (θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι), of a temple; δαίμοσιν
πρὸς ἡδονήν; ὃ μέν ἐστι πρὸς ἡ.; πρὸς ἡ.
Λέγειν, “to speak so as to please another”; δημηγορεῖν; οὐ πρὸς ἡ. οἱ ἦν τὰ
ἀγγελλόμενα; πάντα πρὸς ἡ. ἀκούοντας; later πρὸς ἡδονῆς εἶναί τινι; καθ᾽ ἡδονὴν
κλύειν; καθ᾽ ἡδονήν ἐστί μοι; καθ᾽ ἡ. τι δρᾶν, ποιεῖν; καθ᾽ ἡδονὰς τῷ δήμῳ τὰ
πράγματα ἐνδιδόναι; ἐν ἡδονῇ ἐστί τινι, it is a pleasure or delight to another;
ἐν ἡδονῇ ἔχειν τινάς, to take pleasure in them; ἐν ἡδονῇ ἄρχοντες, oοἱ λυπηροί;
μεθ᾽ ἡδονῆς; ὑφ᾽ ἡδονῆς; ὑπὸ τῆς ἡ; ἡδονᾷ with pleasure; a pleasure; ἡδοναὶ
τραγημάτων sweetmeats; plural., desires after pleasure, pleasant lusts. In
Ionic philosophers, taste, flavour, usually joined with χροιή. Note that
Aristotle uses somatike hedone. As a Lit. Hum. Oxon., and especially as a
tutee of Hardie at Corpus, Grice is almost too well aware of the centrality of
hedone in Aristotles system. Pleasure is sometimes rendered “placitum,” as in
“ad placitum,” in scholastic philosophy, but that is because scholastic
philosophy is not as Hellenic as it should be. Actually, Grice prefers
“agreeable.” One of Grices requisites for an ascription of eudaemonia (to have
a fairy godmother) precisely has the system of ends an agent chooses to realise
to be an agreeable one. One form or mode of agreeableness, Grice notes, is,
unless counteracted, automatically attached to the attainment of an object of
desire, such attainment being routinely a source of satisfaction. The
generation of such a satisfaction thus provides an independent ground for
preferring one system of ends to another. However, some other mode of
agreeableness, such as e. g. being a source of delight, which is not routinely
associated with the fulfilment of this or that desire, could discriminate,
independently of other features relevant to such a preference, between one
system of ends and another. Further, a system of ends the operation of which is
especially agreeable is stable not only vis-à-vis a rival system, but also
against the somewhat weakening effect of ‘egcrateia,’ incontinence, or akrasia,
if you mustn’t. A disturbing influence, as Aristotle knows from experience, is
more surely met by a principle in consort with a supporting attraction than by
the principle alone. Grices favourite hedonistic implicatum was “please,” as in
“please, please me,” by The Beatles. While Grice
claims to love Kantotle, he cannot hide his greater reverence for Aristotle,
instilled early on at Corpus. An Oxonian need not recite Kant in what during
the Second World War was referred to as the Hun, and while Aristotle was a
no-no at Clifton (koine!), Hardie makes Grice love him. With eudaemonia, Grice
finds a perfect synthetic futilitarian concept to balance his innate analytic
tendencies. There is Grecian eudaemonism and there is Griceian eudaemonism. L
and S are not too helpful. They have “εὐδαιμονία” (Ion. –ιη), which they render
not as happiness, but as “prosperity, good fortune, opulence;” “χρημάτων
προσόδῳ καὶ τῇ ἄλλῃ εὐ.;” of countries; “μοῖρ᾽ εὐδαιμονίας.” In a
second use, the expression is indeed rendered as “true, full happiness;”
“εὐ. οὐκ ἐν βοσκήμασιν οἰκεῖ οὐδ᾽ ἐν χρυσῷ; εὐ. ψυχῆς, oκακοδαιμονίη, cf. Pl.
Def. 412d, Arist. EN 1095a18, sometimes personified as a divinity. There is eudaemonia
and there is kakodaemonia. Of course, Grice’s locus classicus is EN 1095a18,
which is Grice’s fairy godmother, almost. Cf. Austin on agathon and eudaimonia
in Aristotle’s ethics, unearthed by Urmson and Warnock, a response to an essay
by Prichard in “Philosophy” on the meaning of agathon in Aristotle’s ethics.
Pritchard argues that Aristotle regards “agathon” to mean conducive to
“eudaemonia,” and, consequently, that Aristotle maintains that every deliberate
action stems, ultimately, from the desire for eudaemonia. Austin finds fault
with this. First, agathon in Aristotle does not have a single usage, and a
fortiori not the one Pritchard suggests. Second, if one has to summarise the
usage of “agathon” in one phrase, “being desired” cannot fulfil this function,
for there are other objects of desire besides “τό άγαθόν,” even if Davidson
would disagree. Prichard endeavours to specify what Aristotle means by αγαθον.
In some contexts, “agathon” seems to mean simply that being desired or an
ultimate or non‐ultimate end or aim
of a person. In other contexts, “αγαθον” takes on a normative quality. For his
statements to have content, argues Prichard, Aristotle must hold that when we
pursue something of a certain kind, such as an honour, we pursue it as “a
good.” Prichard argues that by "αγαθον" Aristotle actually means,
except in the Nicomachean Ethics, conducive to eudaemonia, and holds that when
a man acts deliberately, he does it from a desire to attain eudaemonia.
Prichard attributes this position to Plato as well, despite the fact that both
thinkers make statements inconsistent with this view of man’s ultimate aim.
Grice takes life seriously: philosophical biology. He even writes an essay
entitled “Philosophy of life,” listed is in PGRICE. Grice bases his thought on
his tutee Ackrill’s Dawes Hicks essay for the BA, who quotes extensively from
Hardie. Grice also reviews that “serious student of Greek philosophy,” Austin,
in his response to Prichard, Grice’s fairy godmother. Much the most plausible
conjecture regarding what Grecian eudaimonia means is that eudaemonia is to be
understood as the name for that state or condition which one’s good dæmon
would, if he could, ensure for one. One’s good dæmon is a being motivated, with
respect to one, solely by concern for one’s eudaemonia, well-being or
happiness. To change the idiom, eudæmonia is the general characterisation of
what a full-time and unhampered fairy godmother would secure for one. Grice is
concerned with the specific system of ends that eudaemonia consists for
Ariskant. Grice borrows, but never returns, some reflections by his fomer
tuttee at St. Johns, Ackrill. Ackrills point is about the etymological basis
for eudaemonia, from eudaemon, the good dæmon, as Grice prefers. Grice thinks
the metaphor should be disimplicated, and taken literally. Grice concludes with
a set of ends that justify our ascription of eudaemonia to the agent. For
Grice, as for Kantotle, telos and eudaemonia are related in subtle ways. For
eudaemonia we cannot deal with just one end, but a system of ends, although
such a system may be a singleton. Grice specifies a subtle way of
characterising end so that a particular ascription of an end may entail an
ascription of eudaemonia. Grice follows the textual criticism of his tutee
Ackrill, in connection with the Socratic point that eudaemonia is literally
related to the eudaemon. In PGRICE Warner explores Grice’s concept of
eudaemonia. Warner is especially helpful with the third difficult Carus lecture
by Grice, a metaphysical defence of absolute value. Warner connects with Grice
in such topics as the philosophy of perception seen in an evolutionary light
and the Kantotelian idea of eudaemonia. In response to Warner’s overview of the
oeuvre of Grice for the festschrift that Warner co-edited with Grandy, Grice
refers to the editors collectively as Richards. While he feels he has to use
“happiness,” Grice is always having Aristotle’s eudaemonia in mind. The
implicatum of Smith is ‘happy’ is more complex than Kantotle thinks. Austen
knew. For Emma, you decide if youre happy. Ultimately, for Grice, the rational
life is the happy life. Grice took life seriously: philosophical biology! Grice
is clear when reprinting the Descartes essay in WOW, where he does quote from
Descartes sources quite a bit, even if he implicates he is no Cartesian scholar
– what Oxonian would? It concerns certainty. And certainty is originally
Cantabrigian (Moore), but also Oxonian, in parts. Ayer says that to know is to
assure that one is certain or sure. So he could connect. Grice will at various
stages of his development play and explore this authoritative voice of
introspection: incorrigibility and privileged access. He surely wants to say
that a declaration of an intention is authoritative. And Grice plays with
meaning, too when provoking Malcolm in a don recollection: Grice: I want you to
bring me a paper tomorrow. Strawson: You mean a newspaper? Grice: No, a
philosophical essay. Strawson: How do you know? Are you certain you mean that?
Grice finds not being certain about what one means Strawsonian and otiose.
Tutees. Grice loved to place himself in the role of the philosophical hack,
dealing with his tutees inabilities, a whole week long – until he could find
refreshment in para-philosophy on the Saturday morning. Now, the logical form
of certain is a trick. Grice would symbolize it as numbering of operators. If
G ψs p, G ψs ψs p, and G ψs ψs ψs p, and so ad
infinitum. This is a bit like certainty. But not quite! When he explores trust,
Grice considers something like a backing for it. But does conclusive evidence
yield certainty? He doesnt think so. Certainty, for Grice should apply to any
psychological attitude, state or stance. And it is just clever of him that when
he had to deliver his BA lecture he chooses ‘intention and uncertainty’ as its
topic, just to provoke. Not surprisingly, the “Uncertainty” piece opens with
the sceptics challenge. And he will not conclude that the intender is certain.
Only that theres some good chance (p ˃0.5) that what he intends will get
through! When there is a will, there is a way, when there is a neo-Prichardian
will-ing, there is a palæo-Griceian way-ing! Perhaps by know Moore means
certain. Grice was amused by the fact that Moore thought that he knew that
behind the curtains at the lecture hall at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, there was a window, when there wasnt. He uses Moores misuse of know –
according to Malcolm – both in Causal theory and Prolegomena. And of course
this relates to the topic of the sceptics implicature, above, with the two
essays Scepticism and Common sense and Moore and Philosophers Paradoxes repr. partially
in WOW. With regard to certainty, it is interesting to compare it, as Grice
does, not so much with privileged access, but with incorrigibility. Do we
not have privileged access to our own beliefs and desires? And, worse
still, may it not be true that at least some of our avowals of our beliefs and
desires are incorrigible? One of Grices problems is, as he puts it,
how to accommodate privileged access and,
maybe, incorrigibility. This or that a second-order state may be, in
some fashion, incorrigible. On the contrary, for Grice, this or that
lower-order, first-order judging is only a matter for privileged
access. Note that while he is happy to allow privileged access to
lower-order souly states, only those who are replicated at a higher-order or
second-order may, in some fashion, be said to count as an incorrigible avowal.
It rains. P judges it rains (privileged access). P judges that P judges that it
rains (incorrigible). The justification is conversational. It rains says the P,
or expresses the P. Grice wants to be able to say that if a P expresses that p,
the P judges2 that p. If the P expresses that it rains, the P
judges that he judges that it rains. In this fashion, his second-order,
higher-order judging is incorrigible, only. Although Grice may allow for it to
be corrected by a third-order judging. It is not required that we should stick
with judging here. Let Smith return the money that he owes to Jones. If P
expresses !p, P ψ-s2 that !p. His second-order, higher-order
buletic state is incorrigible (if ceteris paribus is not corrected by a
third-order buletic or doxastic state). His first-order buletic state is a
matter only of privileged access. For a study of conversation as rational
co-operation this utilitarian revival modifies the standard exegesis of Grice
as purely Kantian, and has him more in agreement with the general Oxonian
meta-ethical scene. Refs.: Under ‘futilitarianism,’ we cover Grice’s views on
‘pleasure’ (he has an essay on “Pleasure,”) and “eudaemonia” (He has an essay
on ‘happiness’); other leads are given under ‘grecianism,’ since this is the
Grecian side to Grice’s Ariskant; for specific essays on ‘pleasure,’ and
‘eudaimonia,’ the keywords ‘pleasure’ and ‘happiness’ are useful. A good source
is the essay on happiness in “Aspects,” which combines ‘eudaemonia’ and
‘agreebleness,’ his futilitarianism turned Kantotelian. BANC.
ens a se Latin,’a being
from itself’, a being that is completely independent and self-sufficient. Since
every creature depends at least upon God for its existence, only God could be
ens a se. In fact, only God is, and he must be. For if God depended on any
other being, he would be dependent and hence not self-sufficient. To the extent
that the ontological argument is plausible, it depends on conceiving of God as
ens a se. In other words, God as ens a se is the greatest conceivable being.
The idea of ens a se is very important in the Monologion and Proslogion of
Anselm, in various works of Duns Scotus, and later Scholastic thought. Ens a se
should be distinguished from ens ex se, according to Anselm in Monologion. Ens
a se is from itself and not “out of itself.” In other words, ens a se does not
depend upon itself for its own existence, because it is supposed to be
dependent on absolutely nothing. Further, if ens a se depended upon itself, it
would cause itself to exist, and that is impossible, according to medieval and
Scholastic philosophers, who took causality to be irreflexive. It is also
transitive and asymmetric. Hence, the medieval idea of ens a se should not be
confused with Spinoza’s idea of causa sui. Later Scholastics often coined
abstract terms to designate the property or entity that makes something to be
what it is, in analogy with forming, say, ‘rigidity’ from ‘rigid’. The Latin
term ‘aseitas’ is formed from the prepositional phrase in ‘ens a se’ in this
way; ‘aseitas’ is tr. into English as ‘aseity’. A better-known example of
forming an abstract noun from a concrete word is ‘haecceitas’ thisness from
‘haec’ this. -- ens rationis Latin, ‘a
being of reason’, a thing dependent for its existence upon reason or thought;
sometimes known as an intentional being. Ens rationis is the contrasting term
for a real being res or ens in re extra animam, such as an individual animal.
Real beings exist independently of thought and are the foundation for truth. A
being of reason depends upon thought or reason for its existence and is an
invention of Enlightenment ens rationis 266
266 the mind, even if it has a foundation in some real being. This
conception requires the idea that there are degrees of being. Two kinds of
entia rationis are distinguished: those with a foundation in reality and those
without one. The objects of logic, which include genera and species, e.g.,
animal and human, respectively, are entia rationis that have a foundation in
reality, but are abstracted from it. In contrast, mythic and fictional objects,
such as a chimera or Pegasus, have no foundation in reality. Blindness and
deafness are also sometimes called entia rationis. -- ens realissimum: used by Grice. Latin,
‘most real being’, an informal term for God that occurs rarely in Scholastic
philosophers. Within Kant’s philosophy, it has a technical sense. It is an
extension of Baumgarten’s idea of ens perfectissimum most perfect being, a
being that has the greatest number of possible perfections to the greatest
degree. Since ens perfectissimum refers to God as the sum of all possibilities
and since actuality is greater than possibility, according to Kant, the idea of
God as the sum of all actualities, that is, ens realissimum, is a preferable
term for God. Kant thinks that human knowledge is “constrained” to posit the
idea of a necessary being. The necessary being that has the best claim to
necessity is one that is completely unconditioned, that is, dependent on
nothing; this is ens realissimum. He sometimes explicates it in three ways: as
the substratum of all realities, as the ground of all realities, and as the sum
of all realities. Ens realissimum is nonetheless empirically invalid, since it
cannot be experienced by humans. It is something ideal for reason, not real in
experience. According to Kant, the ontological argument begins with the concept
of ens realissimum and concludes that an existing object falls under that
concept Critique of Pure Reason, Book II, chapter 3.
entelecheia -- used by Grice in his philosophical psychology
-- from Grecian entelecheia, actuality. Aristotle, who coined both terms,
treats entelecheia as a near synonym of energeia when it is used in this sense.
Entelecheia figures in Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the first
actuality of the natural body On the Soul II.1. This is explained by analogy
with knowledge: first actuality is to knowledge as second actuality is to the
active use of knowledge. ’Entelechy’ is also a technical term in Leibniz for
the primitive active force in every monad, which is combined with primary
matter, and from which the active force, vis viva, is somehow derived. The
vitalist philosopher Hans Driesch used the Aristotelian term in his account of
biology. Life, he held, is an entelechy; and an entelechy is a substantial
entity, rather like a mind, that controls organic processes.
entailment: “entailment” is not as figurative as it sounds: it
inovolves property and limitation -- “Paradoxes of entailment,” “Paradoxes of
implication.” Philo and his teacher. Grice is not sure about ‘implicatum.’ The
quote by Moore, 1919 being:"It might be suggested that we should say
"p ent q" 'means' "p ) q AND this proposition is an instance of
a formal implication, which is not merely true but self-evident, like the laws
of formal logic." This proposed definitions would avoid the paradoxes involved
in Strachey's definition, since such true formal implications as 'All the
persons in this room are more than five years old' are certainly not
self-evident; and, so far as I can see, it may state something which is in fact
true of p and q, whenever and only whenp ent q. I do not myself think that it
gives the meaning of 'p ent q,' since the kind of relation which I see to hold
between the premises and a conclusion of a syllogism seems to me one which is
purely 'objective' in the sense that no psychological term, such as is involved
in the meaning of 'self-evident' is involved in its definition (it it has one).
I am not, however, concerned to dispute that some such definition of "p
ent q" as this may be true." --- and so on. So, it is apparently all
Strachey's fault. This
view as to what φA . ent . ψA means has, for instance, if I understand him
rightly, been asserted by Mr. O. Strachey in Mind, N.S., 93; since he asserts
that, in his opinion, this is what Professor C. I. Lewis means by “φA strictly
implies ψA,” and undoubtedly what Professor Lewis means by this is what I mean
by φA . ent . ψA. And the same view has been frequently suggested (though I do
not know that he has actually asserted it) by Mr. Russell himself (e.g.,
Principia Mathematica, p. 21). I 1903 B. Russell Princ.
Math. ii. 14 How far formal implication is definable in terms
of implication simply, or material implication as it may be called,
is a difficult question. Source : Principles : Chapter III. Implication and Formal Implication.
– Source : Principia, page 7 : "When it is necessary explicitly to
discriminate "implication" [i.e. "if p, then q" ] from
"formal implication," it is called "material implication."
– Source : Principia, page 20 : "When an implication, say ϕx.⊃.ψx, is said to
hold always, i.e. when (x):ϕx.⊃.ψx, we shall say that ϕx formally implies ψx"Many logicians did use ‘implicatum’ not necessarily to mean
‘conversational implicatum,’ but as the result of ‘implicatio’. ‘Implicatio’
was often identified with the Megarian or Philonian ‘if.’ Why? thought that we
probably did need an entailment. The symposium was held in New York with Dana
Scott and R. K. Meyer. The notion had been mis-introduced (according to
Strawson) in the philosophical literature by Moore. Grice is especially
interested in the entailment + implicatum pair. A philosophical expression may
be said to be co-related to an entailment (which is rendered in terms of a
reductive analysis). However, the use of the expression may co-relate to
this or that implicatum which is rendered reasonable in the light of the assumption
by the addressee that the utterer is ultimately abiding by a principle of
conversational helfpulness. Grice thinks many philosophers take an implicatum
as an entailment when they surely shouldnt! Grice was more interested than
Strawson was in the coinage by Moore of entailment for logical consequence. As
an analyst, Grice knew that a true conceptual analysis needs to be reductive
(if not reductionist). The prongs the analyst lists are thus entailments of the
concept in question. Philosophers, however, may misidentify what is an
entailment for an implicature, or vice versa. Initially, Grice was interested
in the second family of cases. With his coinage of disimplicature, Grice
expands his interest to cover the first family of cases, too. Grice remains a
philosophical methodologist. He is not so much concerned with any area or
discipline or philosophical concept per se (unless its rationality), but with
the misuses of some tools in the philosophy of language as committed by some of
his colleagues at Oxford. While entailment, was, for Strawson mis-introduced in
the philosophical literature by Moore, entailment seems to be less involved in
paradoxes than if is. Grice connects the two, as indeed his tutee Strawson did!
As it happens, Strawsons Necessary propositions and entailment statements is
his very first published essay, with Mind, a re-write of an unpublication
unwritten elsewhere, and which Grice read. The relation of consequence may be
considered a meta-conditional, where paradoxes arise. Grices Bootstrap is
a principle designed to impoverish the metalanguage so that the philosopher can
succeed in the business of pulling himself up by his own! Grice then takes a
look at Strawsons very first publication (an unpublication he had written
elsewhere). Grice finds Strawson thought he could provide a simple solution to
the so-called paradoxes of entailment. At the time, Grice and Strawson were
pretty sure that nobody then accepted, if indeed anyone ever did and did make,
the identification of the relation symbolised by the horseshoe with the
relation which Moore calls entailment, p⊃q,
i. e. ~(pΛ~q) is rejected as an analysis of p entails q because it involves
this or that allegedly paradoxical implicatum, as that any false proposition
entails any proposition and any true proposition is entailed by any
proposition. It is a commonplace that Lewiss amendment had consequences
scarcely less paradoxical in terms of the implicata. For if p is impossible,
i.e. self-contradictory, it is impossible that p and ~q. And if q is
necessary, ~q is impossible and it is impossible that p and ~q; i. e., if p
entails q means it is impossible that p and ~q any necessary proposition is
entailed by any proposition and any self-contradictory proposition entails any
proposition. On the other hand, Lewiss definition of entailment (i.e. of the
relation which holds from p to q whenever q is deducible from p) obviously
commends itself in some respects. Now, it is clear that the emphasis laid on
the expression-mentioning character of the intensional contingent statement by
writing pΛ~q is impossible instead of It is impossible that p and ~q does not
avoid the alleged paradoxes of entailment. But it is equally clear that the
addition of some provision does avoid them. One may proposes that one
should use “entails” such that no necessary statement and no negation of a
necessary statement can significantly be said to entail or be entailed by any
statement; i. e. the function p entails q cannot take necessary or self-contradictory
statements as arguments. The expression p entails q is to be used to mean p⊃q is necessary, and neither p nor q is either necessary or
self-contradictory, or pΛ~q is impossible and neither p nor q, nor either of
their contradictories, is necessary. Thus, the paradoxes are avoided. For let
us assume that p1 expresses a contingent, and q1 a necessary, proposition. p1
and ~q1 is now impossible because ~q1 is impossible. But q1 is necessary. So,
by that provision, p1 does not entail q1. We may avoid the paradoxical
assertion that p1 entails q2 as merely falling into the equally paradoxical
assertion that p1 entails q1 is necessary. For: If q is necessary, q is
necessary is, though true, not necessary, but a contingent intensional (Latinate)
statement. This becomes part of the philosophers lexicon: intensĭo, f. intendo,
which L and S render as a stretching out, straining, effort. E. g.
oculorum, Scrib. Comp. 255. Also an intensifying, increase. Calorem suum (sol)
intensionibus ac remissionibus temperando fovet,” Sen. Q. N. 7, 1, 3. The tune:
“gravis, media, acuta,” Censor. 12. Hence:~(q is necessary) is, though
false, possible. Hence “p1Λ~(q1 is necessary)” is, though false, possible.
Hence p1 does NOT entail q1 is necessary. Thus, by adopting the view that an
entailment statement, and other intensional statements, are non-necessary, and
that no necessary statement or its contradictory can entail or be entailed by
any statement, Strawson thinks he can avoid the paradox that a necessary proposition
is entailed by any proposition, and indeed all the other associated paradoxes
of entailment. Grice objected that Strawsons cure was worse than Moores
disease! The denial that a necessary proposition can entail or be entailed by
any proposition, and, therefore, that necessary propositions can be related to
each other by the entailment-relation, is too high a price to pay for the
solution of the paradoxes. And here is where Grices implicature is meant to do
the trick! Or not! When Levinson proposed + for conversationally implicature,
he is thinking of contrasting it with ⊢. But things aint that easy.
Even the grammar is more complicated: By uttering He is an adult, U explicitly
conveys that he is an adult. What U explicitly conveys entails that he is not a
child. What U implies is that he should be treated accordingly. Refs.: One
good reference is the essay on “Paradoxes of entailment,” in the Grice papers;
also his contribution to a symposium for the APA under a separate series, The
H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
enthymeme, an
incompletely stated syllogism, with one premise, or even the conclusion,
omitted. The term sometimes designates incompletely stated arguments of other
kinds. We are expected to supply the missing premise or draw the conclusion if
it is not stated. The result is supposed to be a syllogistic inference. For
example: ‘He will eventually get caught, for he is a thief’; or ‘He will
eventually be caught, for all habitual thieves get caught’. This notion of
enthymeme as an incompletely stated syllogism has a long tradition and does not
seem inconsistent with Aristotle’s own characterization of it. Thus, Peter of
Spain openly declares that an enthymeme is an argument with a single premise
that needs to be reduced to syllogism. But Peter also points out that Aristotle
spoke of enthymeme as “being of ycos and signum,” and he explains that ycos
here means ‘probable proposition’ while signum expresses the necessity of
inference. ‘P, therefore Q’ is an ycos in the sense of a proposition that
appears to be true to all or to many; but insofar as P has virtually a double power,
that of itself and of the proposition understood along with it, it is both
probable and demonstrative, albeit from a different point of view.
Conversational entropy. -- Principle of
Conversational entropy, in physics, a measure of disorder; in information
theory, a measure of “information” in a technical sense. In statistical physics
the number of microstates accessible to the various particles of a large system
of particles such as a cabbage or the air in a room is represented as W.
Accessible microstates might be, for instance, energy levels the various
particles can reach. One can greatly simplify the ens realissimum entropy
267 267 statement of certain laws of
nature by introducing a logarithmic measure of these accessible microstates.
This measure, called entropy, is defined by the formula: SEntropy % df. klnW,
where k is Boltzmann’s constant. When the entropy of a system increases, the
system becomes more random and disordered, in the sense that a larger number of
microstates become available for the system’s particles to enter. If a large
physical system within which exchanges of energy occur is isolated, exchanging
no energy with its environment, the entropy of the system tends to increase and
never decreases. This result of statistical physics is part of the second law
of thermodynamics. In real, evolving physical systems effectively isolated from
their environments, entropy increases and thus aspects of the system’s
organization that depend upon there being only a limited range of accessible
microstates are altered. For example, a cabbage totally isolated in a container
would decay as complicated organic molecules eventually became unstructured in
the course of ongoing exchanges of energy and attendant entropy increases. In
information theory, a state or event is said to contain more information than a
second state or event if the former state is less probable and thus in a sense
more surprising than the latter. Other plausible constraints suggest a
logarithmic measure of information content. Suppose X is a set of alternative
possible states, xi , and pxi is the
probability of each xi 1 X. If state xi has occurred the information content of
that occurrence is taken to be -log2pxi . This function increases as the
probability of xi decreases. If it is unknown which xi will occur, it is
reasonable to represent the expected information content of X as the sum of the
information contents of the alternative states xi weighted in each case by the
probability of the state, giving: This is called the Shannon entropy. Both
Shannon entropy and physical entropy can be thought of as logarithmic measures
of disarray. But this statement trades on a broad understanding of ‘disarray’.
A close relationship between the two concepts of entropy should not be assumed.
Grice on environment –
For Grice, two pirots need to share an environment -- environmental philosophy,
the critical study of concepts defining relations between human beings and
their non-human environment. Environmental ethics, a major component of environmental
philosophy, addresses the normative significance of these relations. The
relevance of ecological relations to human affairs has been recognized at least
since Darwin, but the growing sense of human responsibility for their
deterioration, reflected in books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring 2 and
Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation 5, has prompted the recent upsurge of
interest. Environmental philosophers have adduced a wide variety of human
attitudes and practices to account for the perceived deterioration, including
religious and scientific attitudes, social institutions, and industrial
technology. Proposed remedies typically urge a reorientation or new “ethic”
that recognizes “intrinsic value” in the natural world. Examples include the
“land ethic” of Aldo Leopold 78, which pictures humans as belonging to, rather
than owning, the biotic community “the land”; deep ecology, a stance
articulated by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess b.2, which advocates forms
of identification with the non-human world; and ecofeminism, which rejects
prevailing attitudes to the natural world that are perceived as patriarchal. At
the heart of environmental ethics lies the attempt to articulate the basis of
concern for the natural world. It encompasses global as well as local issues,
and considers the longer-term ecological, and even evolutionary, fate of the
human and non-human world. Many of its practitioners question the
anthropocentric claim that human beings are the exclusive or even central focus
of envelope paradox environmental philosophy 268 268 ethical concern. In thus extending both
the scope and the grounds of concern, it presents a challenge to the stance of
conventional interhuman ethics. It debates how to balance the claims of present
and future, human and non-human, sentient and non-sentient, individuals and
wholes. It investigates the prospects for a sustainable relationship between
economic and ecological systems, and pursues the implications of this
relationship with respect to social justice and political institutions. Besides
also engaging metaethical questions about, for example, the objectivity and
commensurability of values, environmental philosophers are led to consider the
nature and significance of environmental change and the ontological status of
collective entities such as species and ecosystems. In a more traditional vein,
environmental philosophy revives metaphysical debates surrounding the perennial
question of “man’s place in nature,” and finds both precedent and inspiration
in earlier philosophies and cultures.
epistemic deontologism, a
duty-based view of the nature of epistemic justification. A central concern of
epistemology is to account for the distinction between justified and
unjustified beliefs. According to epistemic deontologism, the concept of
justification may be analyzed by using, in a specific sense relevant to the
pursuit of knowledge, terms such as ‘ought’, ‘obligatory’, ‘permissible’, and
‘forbidden’. A subject S is justified in believing that p provided S does not violate
any epistemic obligations those that
arise from the goal of believing what is true and not believing what is false.
Equivalently, S is justified in believing that p provided believing p is from the point of view taken in the pursuit
of truth permissible for S. Among
contemporary epistemologists, this view is held by Chisholm, Laurence BonJour,
and Carl Ginet. Its significance is twofold. If justification is a function of
meeting obligations, then it is, contrary to some versions of naturalistic epistemology,
normative. Second, if the normativity of justification is deontological, the
factors that determine whether a belief is justified must be internal to the
subject’s mind. Critics of epistemic deontologism, most conspicuously Alston,
contend that belief is involuntary and thus cannot be a proper object of
obligations. If, e.g., one is looking out the window and notices that it is
raining, one is psychologically forced to believe that it is raining.
Deontologists can reply to this objection by rejecting its underlying premise:
epistemic obligations require that belief be voluntary. Alternatively, they may
insist that belief is voluntary after all, and thus subject to epistemic
obligations, for there is a means by which one can avoid believing what one
ought not to believe: weighing the evidence, or deliberation. -- epistemic logic, the logical investigation
of epistemic concepts and statements. Epistemic concepts include the concepts
of knowledge, reasonable belief, justification, evidence, certainty, and
related notions. Epistemic logic is usually taken to include the logic of
belief or doxastic logic. Much of the recent work on epistemic logic is based
on the view that it is a branch of modal logic. In the early 0s von Wright
observed that the epistemic notions verified known to be true, undecided, and
falsified are related to each other in the same way as the alethic modalities
necessary, contingent, and impossible, and behave logically in analogous ways.
This analogy is not surprising in view of the fact that the meaning of modal
concepts is often explained epistemically. For example, in the 0s Peirce
defined informational possibility as that “which in a given state of
information is not perfectly known not to be true,” and called informationally
necessary “that which is perfectly known to be true.” The modal logic of
epistemic and doxastic concepts was studied systematically by Hintikka in his
pioneering Knowledge and Belief2, which applied to the concepts of knowledge
and belief the semantical method the method of modal sets that he had used
earlier for the investigation of modal logic. In this approach, the truth of
the proposition that a knows that p briefly Kap in a possible world or
situation u is taken to mean that p holds in all epistemic alternatives of u;
these are understood as worlds compatible with what a knows at u. If the
relation of epistemic alternativeness is reflexive, the principle ‘KapPp’ only
what is the case can be known is valid, and the assumption that the
alternativeness relation is transitive validates the so-called KK-thesis, ‘Kap
P Ka Ka p’ if a knows that p, a knows that a knows that p; these two
assumptions together make the logic of knowledge similar to an S4-type modal
logic. If the knowledge operator Ka and the corresponding epistemic possibility
operator Pa are added to quantification theory with identity, it becomes
possible to study the interplay between quantifiers and epistemic operators and
the behavior of individual terms in epistemic contexts, and analyze such locutions
as ‘a knows who what b some F is’. The problems of epistemic logic in this area
are part of the general problem of giving a coherent semantical account of
propositional attitudes. If a proposition p is true in all epistemic
alternatives of a given world, so are all logical consequences of p; thus the
possible-worlds semantics of epistemic concepts outlined above leads to the
result that a person knows all logical consequences of what he knows. This is a
paradoxical conclusion; it is called the problem of logical omniscience. The
solution of this problem requires a distinction between different levels of
knowledge for example, between tacit and
explicit knowledge. A more realistic model of knowledge can be obtained by
supplementing the basic possible-worlds account by an analysis of the processes
by which the implicit knowledge can be activated and made explicit. Modal
epistemic logics have found fruitful applications in the recent work on
knowledge representation and in the logic and semantics of questions and
answers in which questions are interpreted as requests for knowledge or
“epistemic imperatives.” -- epistemic
principle, a principle of rationality applicable to such concepts as knowledge,
justification, and reasonable belief. Epistemic principles include the
principles of epistemic logic and principles that relate different epistemic
concepts to one another, or epistemic concepts to nonepistemic ones e.g.,
semantic concepts. Epistemic concepts include the concepts of knowledge,
reasonable belief, justification, epistemic probability, and other concepts
that are used for the purpose of assessing the reasonableness of beliefs and
knowledge claims. Epistemic principles can be formulated as principles
concerning belief systems or information systems, i.e., systems that
characterize a person’s possible doxastic state at a given time; a belief
system may be construed as a set of accepted propositions or as a system of
degrees of belief. It is possible to distinguish two kinds of epistemic
principles: a principles concerning the rationality of a single belief system,
and b principles concerning the rational changes of belief. The former include
the requirements of coherence and consistency for beliefs and for
probabilities; such principles may be said to concern the statics of belief
systems. The latter principles include various principles of belief revision
and adjustment, i.e., principles concerning the dynamics of belief
systems. -- epistemic privacy, the relation
a person has to a proposition when only that person can have direct or
non-inferential knowledge of the proposition. It is widely thought that people
have epistemic privacy with respect to propositions about certain of their own
mental states. According to this view, a person can know directly that he has
certain thoughts or feelings or sensory experiences. Perhaps others can also
know that the person has these thoughts, feelings, or experiences, but if they
can it is only as a result of inference from propositions about the person’s
behavior or physical condition. --
epistemic regress argument, an argument, originating in Aristotle’s Posterior
Analytics, aiming to show that knowledge and epistemic justification have a
two-tier structure as described by epistemic foundationalism. It lends itself
to the following outline regarding justification. If you have any justified
belief, this belief occurs in an evidential chain including at least two links:
the supporting link i.e., the evidence and the supported link i.e., the
justified belief. This does not mean, however, that all evidence consists of
beliefs. Evidential chains might come in any of four kinds: circular chains,
endless chains, chains ending in unjustified beliefs, and chains anchored in
foundational beliefs that do not derive their justification from other beliefs.
Only the fourth, foundationalist kind is defensible as grounding knowledge and
epistemic justification. Could all justification be inferential? A belief, B1,
is inferentially justified when it owes its justification, at least in part, to
some other belief, B2. Whence the justification for B2? If B2 owes its
justification to B1, we have a troublesome circle. How can B2 yield
justification or evidence for B1, if B2 owes its evidential status to B1? On
the other hand, if B2 owes its justification to another belief, B3, and B3 owes
its justification to yet another belief, B4, and so on ad infinitum, we have a
troublesome endless regress of justification. Such a regress seems to deliver
not actual justification, but at best merely potential justification, for the
belief at its head. Actual finite humans, furthermore, seem not to be able to
comprehend, or to possess, all the steps of an infinite regress of
justification. Finally, if B2 is itself unjustified, it evidently will be unable
to provide justification for B1. It seems, then, that the structure of
inferential justification does not consist of either circular justification,
endless regresses of justification, or unjustified starter-beliefs. We have
foundationalism, then, as the most viable account of evidential chains, so long
as we understand it as the structural view that some beliefs are justified
non-inferentially i.e., without deriving justification from other beliefs, but
can nonetheless provide justification for other beliefs. More precisely, if we
have any justified beliefs, we have some foundational, non-inferentially
justified beliefs. This regress argument needs some refinement before its full
force can be appreciated. With suitable refinement, however, it can seriously
challenge such alternatives to foundationalism as coherentism and
contextualism. The regress argument has been a key motivation for
foundationalism in the history of epistemology.
-- epistemology from Grecian episteme, ‘knowledge’, and logos,
‘explanation’, the study of the nature of knowledge and justification;
specifically, the study of a the defining features, b the substantive
conditions or sources, and c the limits of knowledge and justification. The
latter three categories are represented by traditional philosophical
controversy over the analysis of knowledge and justification, the sources of
knowledge and justification e.g., rationalism versus empiricism, and the
viability of skepticism about knowledge and justification. Kinds of knowledge.
Knowledge can be either explicit or tacit. Explicit knowledge is self-conscious
in that the knower is aware of the relevant state of knowledge, whereas tacit
knowledge is implicit, hidden from self-consciousness. Much of our knowledge is
tacit: it is genuine but we are unaware of the relevant states of knowledge,
even if we can achieve awareness upon suitable reflection. In this regard,
knowledge resembles many of our psychological states. The existence of a
psychological state in a person does not require the person’s awareness of that
state, although it may require the person’s awareness of an object of that
state such as what is sensed or perceived. Philosophers have identified various
species of knowledge: for example, propositional knowledge that something is so,
non-propositional knowledge of something e.g., knowledge by acquaintance, or by
direct awareness, empirical a posteriori propositional knowledge, nonempirical
a priori propositional knowledge, and knowledge of how to do something.
Philosophical controversy has arisen over distinctions between such species,
for example, over i the relations between some of these species e.g., does
knowing-how reduce to knowledge-that?, and ii the viability of some of these
species e.g., is there really such a thing as, or even a coherent notion of, a
priori knowledge?. A primary concern of classical modern philosophy, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the extent of our a priori knowledge
relative to the extent of our a posteriori knowledge. Such rationalists as
Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza contended that all genuine knowledge of the
real world is a priori, whereas such empiricists as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
argued that all such knowledge is a posteriori. In his Critique of Pure Reason
1781, Kant sought a grand reconciliation, aiming to preserve the key lessons of
both rationalism and empiricism. Since the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, a posteriori knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that
depends for its supporting ground on some specific sensory or perceptual
experience; and a priori knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that
does not depend for its supporting ground on such experience. Kant and others
have held that the supporting ground for a priori knowledge comes solely from
purely intellectual processes called “pure reason” or “pure understanding.”
Knowledge of logical and mathematical truths typically serves as a standard
case of a priori knowledge, whereas knowledge of the existence or presence of
physical objects typically serves as a standard case of a posteriori knowledge.
A major task for an account of a priori knowledge is the explanation of what
the relevant purely intellectual processes are, and of how they contribute to
non-empirical knowledge. An analogous task for an account of a posteriori
knowledge is the explanation of what sensory or perceptual experience is and
how it contributes to empirical knowledge. More fundamentally, epistemologists
have sought an account of propositional knowledge in general, i.e., an account
of what is common to a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Ever since Plato’s
Meno and Theaetetus c.400 B.C., epistemologists have tried to identify the
essential, defining components of knowledge. Identifying these components will
yield an analysis of knowledge. A prominent traditional view, suggested by
Plato and Kant among others, is that propositional knowledge that something is
so has three individually necessary and jointly sufficient components:
justification, truth, and belief. On this view, propositional knowledge is, by
definition, justified true belief. This is the tripartite definition that has
come to be called the standard analysis. We can clarify it by attending briefly
to each of its three conditions. The belief condition. This requires that
anyone who knows that p where ‘p’ stands for any proposition or statement must
believe that p. If, therefore, you do not believe that minds are brains say,
because you have not considered the matter at all, then you do not know that
minds are brains. A knower must be psychologically related somehow to a
proposition that is an object of knowledge for that knower. Proponents of the
standard analysis hold that only belief can provide the needed psychological
relation. Philosophers do not share a uniform account of belief, but some
considerations supply common ground. Beliefs are not actions of assenting to a
proposition; they rather are dispositional psychological states that can exist
even when unmanifested. You do not cease believing that 2 ! 2 % 4, for example,
whenever your attention leaves arithmetic. Our believing that p seems to
require that we have a tendency to assent to p in certain situations, but it
seems also to be more than just such a tendency. What else believing requires
remains highly controversial among philosophers. Some philosophers have opposed
the belief condition of the standard analysis on the ground that we can accept,
or assent to, a known proposition without actually believing it. They contend
that we can accept a proposition even if we fail to acquire a tendency,
required by believing, to accept that proposition in certain situations. On
this view, acceptance is a psychological act that does not entail any
dispositional psychological state, and such acceptance is sufficient to relate
a knower psychologically to a known proposition. However this view fares, one
underlying assumption of the standard analysis seems correct: our concept of
knowledge requires that a knower be psychologically related somehow to a known
proposition. Barring that requirement, we shall be hard put to explain how
knowers psychologically possess their knowledge of known propositions. Even if
knowledge requires belief, belief that p does not require knowledge that p,
since belief can typically be false. This observation, familiar from Plato’s
Theaetetus, assumes that knowledge has a truth condition. On the standard
analysis, if you know that p, then it is true that p. If, therefore, it is
false that minds are brains, then you do not know that minds are brains. It is
thus misleading to say, e.g., that astronomers before Copernicus knew that the
earth is flat; at best, they justifiably believed that they knew this. The
truth condition. This condition of the standard analysis has not attracted any
serious challenge. Controversy over it has focused instead on Pilate’s vexing
question: What is truth? This question concerns what truth consists in, not our
ways of finding out what is true. Influential answers come from at least three
approaches: truth as correspondence i.e., agreement, of some specified sort,
between a proposition and an actual situation; truth as coherence i.e.,
interconnectedness of a proposition with a specified system of propositions;
and truth as pragmatic cognitive value i.e., usefulness of a proposition in
achieving certain intellectual goals. Without assessing these prominent
approaches, we should recognize, in accord with the standard analysis, that our
concept of knowledge seems to have a factual requirement: we epistemology
epistemology 274 274 genuinely know that p only if it is the
case that p. The pertinent notion of “its being the case” seems equivalent to
the notion of “how reality is” or “how things really are.” The latter notion
seems essential to our notion of knowledge, but is open to controversy over its
explication. The justification condition. Knowledge is not simply true belief.
Some true beliefs are supported only by lucky guesswork and hence do not
qualify as knowledge. Knowledge requires that the satisfaction of its belief condition
be “appropriately related” to the satisfaction of its truth condition. This is
one broad way of understanding the justification condition of the standard
analysis. More specifically, we might say that a knower must have adequate
indication that a known proposition is true. If we understand such adequate
indication as a sort of evidence indicating that a proposition is true, we have
reached the traditional general view of the justification condition:
justification as evidence. Questions about justification attract the lion’s
share of attention in contemporary epistemology. Controversy focuses on the
meaning of ‘justification’ as well as on the substantive conditions for a
belief’s being justified in a way appropriate to knowledge. Current debates about
the meaning of ‘justification’ revolve around the question whether, and if so
how, the concept of epistemic knowledge-relevant justification is normative.
Since the 0s Chisholm has defended the following deontological
obligation-oriented notion of justification: the claim that a proposition, p,
is epistemically justified for you means that it is false that you ought to
refrain from accepting p. In other terms, to say that p is epistemically
justified is to say that accepting p is epistemically permissible at least in the sense that accepting p is
consistent with a certain set of epistemic rules. This deontological construal
enjoys wide representation in contemporary epistemology. A normative construal
of justification need not be deontological; it need not use the notions of
obligation and permission. Alston, for instance, has introduced a
non-deontological normative concept of justification that relies mainly on the
notion of what is epistemically good from the viewpoint of maximizing truth and
minimizing falsity. Alston links epistemic goodness to a belief’s being based
on adequate grounds in the absence of overriding reasons to the contrary. Some
epistemologists shun normative construals of justification as superfluous. One
noteworthy view is that ‘epistemic justification’ means simply ‘evidential
support’ of a certain sort. To say that p is epistemically justifiable to some
extent for you is, on this view, just to say that p is supportable to some
extent by your overall evidential reasons. This construal will be non-normative
so long as the notions of supportability and an evidential reason are
nonnormative. Some philosophers have tried to explicate the latter notions
without relying on talk of epistemic permissibility or epistemic goodness. We
can understand the relevant notion of “support” in terms of non-normative
notions of entailment and explanation or, answering why-questions. We can
understand the notion of an “evidential reason” via the notion of a
psychological state that can stand in a certain truth-indicating support
relation to propositions. For instance, we might regard nondoxastic states of
“seeming to perceive” something e.g., seeming to see a dictionary here as
foundational truth indicators for certain physical-object propositions e.g.,
the proposition that there is a dictionary here, in virtue of those states
being best explained by those propositions. If anything resembling this
approach succeeds, we can get by without the aforementioned normative notions
of epistemic justification. Foundationalism versus coherentism. Talk of
foundational truth indicators brings us to a key controversy over
justification: Does epistemic justification, and thus knowledge, have
foundations, and if so, in what sense? This question can be clarified as the
issue whether some beliefs can not only a have their epistemic justification
non-inferentially i.e., apart from evidential support from any other beliefs,
but also b provide epistemic justification for all justified beliefs that lack
such non-inferential justification. Foundationalism gives an affirmative answer
to this issue, and is represented in varying ways by, e.g., Aristotle,
Descartes, Russell, C. I. Lewis, and Chisholm. Foundationalists do not share a
uniform account of non-inferential justification. Some construe non-inferential
justification as self-justification. Others reject literal self-justification
for beliefs, and argue that foundational beliefs have their non-inferential
justification in virtue of evidential support from the deliverances of non-belief
psychological states, e.g., perception “seem-ing-to-perceive” states, sensation
“seeming-to-sense” states, or memory “seeming-toremember” states. Still others
understand noninferential justification in terms of a belief’s being “reliably
produced,” i.e., caused and sustained by some non-belief belief-producing
process or source e.g., perception, memory, introspection that tends to produce
true rather than false beliefs. This last view takes the causal source of a
belief to be crucial to its justification. Unlike Descartes, contemporary
foundationalists clearly separate claims to non-inferential, foundational
justification from claims to certainty. They typically settle for a modest
foundationalism implying that foundational beliefs need not be indubitable or
infallible. This contrasts with the radical foundationalism of Descartes. The
traditional competitor to foundationalism is the coherence theory of
justification, i.e., epistemic coherentism. This is not the coherence
definition of truth; it rather is the view that the justification of any belief
depends on that belief’s having evidential support from some other belief via
coherence relations such as entailment or explanatory relations. Notable
proponents include Hegel, Bosanquet, and Sellars. A prominent contemporary
version of epistemic coherentism states that evidential coherence relations
among beliefs are typically explanatory relations. The rough idea is that a
belief is justified for you so long as it either best explains, or is best
explained by, some member of the system of beliefs that has maximal explanatory
power for you. Contemporary coherentism is uniformly systemic or holistic; it
finds the ultimate source of justification in a system of interconnected
beliefs or potential beliefs. One problem has troubled all versions of
coherentism that aim to explain empirical justification: the isolation
argument. According to this argument, coherentism entails that you can be
epistemically justified in accepting an empirical proposition that is incompatible
with, or at least improbable given, your total empirical evidence. The key
assumption of this argument is that your total empirical evidence includes
non-belief sensory and perceptual awareness-states, such as your feeling pain
or your seeming to see something. These are not belief-states. Epistemic
coherentism, by definition, makes justification a function solely of coherence
relations between propositions, such as propositions one believes or accepts.
Thus, such coherentism seems to isolate justification from the evidential
import of non-belief awareness-states. Coherentists have tried to handle this
problem, but no resolution enjoys wide acceptance. Causal and contextualist
theories. Some contemporary epistemologists endorse contextualism regarding epistemic
justification, a view suggested by Dewey, Vitters, and Kuhn, among others. On
this view, all justified beliefs depend for their evidential support on some
unjustified beliefs that need no justification. In any context of inquiry,
people simply assume the acceptability of some propositions as starting points
for inquiry, and these “contextually basic” propositions, though lacking
evidential support, can serve as evidential support for other propositions.
Contextualists stress that contextually basic propositions can vary from
context to context e.g., from theological inquiry to biological inquiry and
from social group to social group. The main problem for contextualists comes
from their view that unjustified assumptions can provide epistemic justification
for other propositions. We need a precise explanation of how an unjustified
assumption can yield evidential support, how a non-probable belief can make
another belief probable. Contextualists have not given a uniform explanation
here. Recently some epistemologists have recommended that we give up the
traditional evidence condition for knowledge. They recommend that we construe
the justification condition as a causal condition. Roughly, the idea is that
you know that p if and only if a you believe that p, b p is true, and c your
believing that p is causally produced and sustained by the fact that makes p
true. This is the basis of the causal theory of knowing, which comes with
varying details. Any such causal theory faces serious problems from our knowledge
of universal propositions. Evidently, we know, for instance, that all
dictionaries are produced by people, but our believing that this is so seems
not to be causally supported by the fact that all dictionaries are humanly
produced. It is not clear that the latter fact causally produces any beliefs.
Another problem is that causal theories typically neglect what seems to be
crucial to any account of the justification condition: the requirement that
justificational support for a belief be accessible, in some sense, to the
believer. The rough idea is that one must be able to access, or bring to
awareness, the justification underlying one’s beliefs. The causal origins of a
belief are, of course, often very complex and inaccessible to a believer.
Causal theories thus face problems from an accessibility requirement on
justification. Internalism regarding justification preserves an accessibility
requirement on what confers justification, whereas epistemic externalism
rejects this requirement. Debates over internalism and exepistemology
epistemology 276 276 ternalism abound
in current epistemology, but internalists do not yet share a uniform detailed
account of accessibility. The Gettier problem. The standard analysis of knowledge,
however elaborated, faces a devastating challenge that initially gave rise to
causal theories of knowledge: the Gettier problem. In 3 Edmund Gettier
published a highly influential challenge to the view that if you have a
justified true belief that p, then you know that p. Here is one of Gettier’s
counterexamples to this view: Smith is justified in believing the false
proposition that i Jones owns a Ford. On the basis of i, Smith infers, and thus
is justified in believing, that ii either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in
Barcelona. As it happens, Brown is in Barcelona, and so ii is true. So,
although Smith is justified in believing the true proposition ii, Smith does
not know ii. Gettier-style counterexamples are cases where a person has
justified true belief that p but lacks knowledge that p. The Gettier problem is
the problem of finding a modification of, or an alternative to, the standard
analysis that avoids difficulties from Gettier-style counterexamples. The
controversy over the Gettier problem is highly complex and still unsettled. Many
epistemologists take the lesson of Gettier-style counterexamples to be that
propositional knowledge requires a fourth condition, beyond the justification,
truth, and belief conditions. No specific fourth condition has received
overwhelming acceptance, but some proposals have become prominent. The
so-called defeasibility condition, e.g., requires that the justification
appropriate to knowledge be “undefeated” in the general sense that some
appropriate subjunctive conditional concerning defeaters of justification be
true of that justification. For instance, one simple defeasibility fourth
condition requires of Smith’s knowing that p that there be no true proposition,
q, such that if q became justified for Smith, p would no longer be justified
for Smith. So if Smith knows, on the basis of his visual perception, that Mary
removed books from the library, then Smith’s coming to believe the true
proposition that Mary’s identical twin removed books from the library would not
undermine the justification for Smith’s belief concerning Mary herself. A
different approach shuns subjunctive conditionals of that sort, and contends
that propositional knowledge requires justified true belief that is sustained
by the collective totality of actual truths. This approach requires a detailed
account of when justification is undermined and restored. The Gettier problem
is epistemologically important. One branch of epistemology seeks a precise
understanding of the nature e.g., the essential components of propositional
knowledge. Our having a precise understanding of propositional knowledge
requires our having a Gettier-proof analysis of such knowledge. Epistemologists
thus need a defensible solution to the Gettier problem, however complex that
solution is. Skepticism. Epistemologists debate the limits, or scope, of
knowledge. The more restricted we take the limits of knowledge to be, the more
skeptical we are. Two influential types of skepticism are knowledge skepticism
and justification skepticism. Unrestricted knowledge skepticism implies that no
one knows anything, whereas unrestricted justification skepticism implies the
more extreme view that no one is even justified in believing anything. Some
forms of skepticism are stronger than others. Knowledge skepticism in its
strongest form implies that it is impossible for anyone to know anything. A
weaker form would deny the actuality of our having knowledge, but leave open
its possibility. Many skeptics have restricted their skepticism to a particular
domain of supposed knowledge: e.g., knowledge of the external world, knowledge
of other minds, knowledge of the past or the future, or knowledge of
unperceived items. Such limited skepticism is more common than unrestricted
skepticism in the history of epistemology. Arguments supporting skepticism come
in many forms. One of the most difficult is the problem of the criterion, a
version of which has been stated by the sixteenth-century skeptic Montaigne:
“To adjudicate [between the true and the false] among the appearances of
things, we need to have a distinguishing method; to validate this method, we
need to have a justifying argument; but to validate this justifying argument,
we need the very method at issue. And there we are, going round on the wheel.”
This line of skeptical argument originated in ancient Greece, with epistemology
itself. It forces us to face this question: How can we specify what we know
without having specified how we know, and how can we specify how we know
without having specified what we know? Is there any reasonable way out of this
threatening circle? This is one of the most difficult epistemological problems,
and a cogent epistemology must offer a defensible solution to epistemology
epistemology 277 277 it. Contemporary
epistemology still lacks a widely accepted reply to this urgent problem
erfahrung, Grice used the
German, ‘since I find it difficult to translate.” G. term tr. into English,
especially since Kant, as ‘experience’. Kant does not use it as a technical
term; rather, it indicates that which requires explanation through more
precisely drawn technical distinctions such as those among ‘sensibility’,
‘understanding’, and ‘reason’. In the early twentieth century, Husserl
sometimes distinguishes between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, the former indicating
experience as capable of being thematized and methodically described or
analyzed, the latter experience as “lived through” and never fully available to
analysis. Such a distinction occasionally reappears in later texts of
phenomenology and existentialism.
erigena, John Scotus – a
Mediaeval Griceian -- also called John the Scot, Eriugena, and Scottigena
c.81077, Irish-born scholar and theologian. He taught grammar and dialectics at
the court of Charles the Bald near Laon from 845 on. In a controversy in 851,
John argued that there was only one predestination, to good, since evil was
strictly nothing. Thus no one is compelled to evil by God’s foreknowledge,
since, strictly speaking, God has no foreknowledge of what is not. But his
reliance on dialectic, his Origenist conception of the world as a place of
education repairing the damage done by sin, his interest in cosmology, and his
perceived Pelagian tendencies excited opposition. Attacked by Prudentius of
Troyes and Flores of Lyons, he was condemned at the councils of Valencia 855
and Langres 859. Charles commissioned him to translate the works of
Pseudo-Dionysius and the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor from the Grecian.
These works opened up a new world, and John followed his translations with
commentaries on the Gospel of John and Pseudo-Dionysius, and then his chief
work, the Division of Nature or Periphyseon 82666, in the Neoplatonic
tradition. He treats the universe as a procession from God, everything real in
nature being a trace of God, and then a return to God through the presence of
nature in human reason and man’s union with God. John held that the nature of
man is not destroyed by union with God, though it is deified. He was condemned
for pantheism at Paris in 1210. J.Lo. eristic, the art of controversy, often involving
fallacious but persuasive reasoning. The ancient Sophists brought this art to a
high level to achieve their personal goal. They may have found their material
in the “encounters” in the Erfahrung eristic 279 279 law courts as well as in daily life. To
enhance persuasion they endorsed the use of unsound principles such as hasty
generalizations, faulty analogies, illegitimate appeal to authority, the post
hoc ergo propter hoc i.e., “after this, therefore because of this” and other
presumed principles. Aristotle exposed eristic argumentation in his Sophistical
Refutations, which itself draws examples from Plato’s Euthydemus. From this
latter work comes the famous example: ‘That dog is a father and that dog is
his, therefore that dog is his father’. What is perhaps worse than its obvious
invalidity is that the argument is superficially similar to a sound argument
such as ‘This is a table and this is brown, therefore this is a brown table’.
In the Sophistical Refutations Aristotle undertakes to find procedures for
detection of bad arguments and to propose rules for constructing sound
arguments.
erlebnis, G. Grice used
the German term, “since I find it difficult to translate” -- term for
experience used in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century G. philosophy.
Erlebnis denotes experience in all its direct immediacy and lived fullness. It
contrasts with the more typical G. word Erfahrung, denoting ordinary experience
as mediated through intellectual and constructive elements. As immediate,
Erlebnis eludes conceptualization, in both the lived present and the
interiority of experience. As direct, Erlebnis is also disclosive and
extraordinary: it reveals something real that otherwise escapes thinking.
Typical examples include art, religion, and love, all of which also show the
anti-rationalist and polemical uses of the concept. It is especially popular
among the Romantic mystics like Novalis and the anti-rationalists Nietzsche and
Bergson, as well as in phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, and existentialism. As
used in post-Hegelian G. philosophy, the term describes two aspects of
subjectivity. The first concerns the epistemology of the human sciences and of
phenomenology. Against naturalism and objectivism, philosophers appeal to the
ineliminable, subjective qualities of experience to argue that interpreters
must understand “what it is like to be” some experiencing subject, from the
inside. The second use of the term is to denote extraordinary and interior
experiences like art, religion, freedom, and vital energy. In both cases, it is
unclear how such experience could be identified or known in its immediacy, and
much recent G. thought, such as Heidegger and hermeneutics, rejects the
concept.
erotetic, in the strict
sense, pertaining to questions. Erotetic logic is the logic of questions.
Different conceptions of questions yield different kinds of erotetic logic. A
Platonistic approach holds that questions exist independently of
interrogatives. For P. Tichý, a question is a function on possible worlds, the right
answer being the value of the function at the actual world. Erotetic logic is
the logic of such functions. In the epistemic-imperative approach of L. Bqvist,
Hintikka, et al., one begins with a system for epistemic sentences and embeds
this in a system for imperative sentences, thus obtaining sentences of the form
‘make it the case that I know . . .’ and complex compounds of such sentences.
Certain ones of these are defined to be interrogatives. Then erotetic logic is
the logic of epistemic imperatives and the conditions for satisfaction of these
imperatives. In the abstract interrogative approach of N. Belnap, T. Kubigski,
and many others, one chooses certain types of expression to serve as
interrogatives, and, for each type, specifies what expressions count as answers
of various kinds direct, partial, . . .. On this approach we may say that
interrogatives express questions, or we may identify questions with
interrogatives, in Erklärung erotetic 280
280 which case the only meaning that an interrogative has is that it has
the answers that it does. Either way, the emphasis is on interrogatives, and
erotetic logic is the logic of systems that provide interrogatives and specify
answers to them. In the broad sense, ‘erotetic’ designates what pertains to utterance-and-response.
In this sense erotetic logic is the logic of the relations between 1 sentences
of many kinds and 2 the expressions that count as appropriate replies to them.
This includes not only the relations between question and answer but also, e.g.,
between assertion and agreement or denial, command and report of compliance or
refusal, and for many types of sentence S between S and various corrective
replies to S e.g., denial of the presupposition of S. Erotetic logics may
differ in the class of sentences treated, the types of response counted as
appropriate, the assignment of other content presupposition, projection, etc.,
and other details.
eschatologicum: Possibly related to Latin ‘summum,
‘as in ‘summum genus,’ and ‘summun bonum. From Greek, 5. in the Logic of Arist.,
τὰ ἔ. are the last or lowest species, Metaph.1059b26, or individuals,
ib.998b16, cf. AP0.96b12, al.; “τὸ ἔ. ἄτομον” Metaph.1058b10. b. ὁ ἔ. ὅρος the
minor term of a syllogism, EN1147b14. c. last step in geom. analysis or
ultimate condition of action, “τὸ ἔ. ἀρχὴ τῆς πράξεως” de An.433a16. II. Adv.
-τως to the uttermost, exceedingly, “πῦρ ἐ. καίει” Hp.de Arte8; “ἐ.
διαμάχεσθαι” Arist.HA613a11 ; “ἐ. φιλοπόλεμος” X.An.2.6.1 ; “φοβοῦμαί σ᾽ ἐ.”
Men.912, cf. Epicur.Ep. 1p.31U. b. -τως διακεῖσθαι to be at the last extremity,
Plb.1.24.2, D.S.18.48 ; “ἔχειν” Ev.Marc.5.23 ; “ἀπορεῖν” Phld.Oec.p.72J. 2. so
ἐς τὸ ἔ.,=ἐσχάτως, Hdt.7.229; “εἰς τὰ ἔ.” X.HG5.4.33 ; “εἰς τὰ ἔ. μάλα”
Id.Lac.1.2 ; “τὸ ἔ.” finally, in the end, Pl.Grg.473c ; but, τὸ ἔ. what is
worst of all, ib.508d. Why ontology is not enough. The philosopher needs to
PLAY with cross-categorial barriers. He is an eschatologist. Socrates was.
being and good, for Aristotle and Grice cover all. Good was a favourite of
Moore and Hare, as Barnes was well aware! Like Barnes, Grice dislikes Prichards
analysis of good. He leans towards the emotion-based approach by Ogden. If
Grice, like Humpty Dumpty, opposes the Establishment with his meaning
liberalism (what a word means is what I mean by uttering it), he certainly
should be concerned with category shifts. Plus, Grice was a closet Platonist.
As Plato once remarked, having the ability to see horses but not horsehood
(ἱππότης) is a mark of stupidity – rendered by Liddell and Scott as
“horse-nature, the concept of horse” (Antisth. et Pl. ap. Simp.in
Cat.208.30,32, Sch.AristId.p.167F). Grice would endure the flinty experience of
giving joint seminars at Oxford with Austin on the first two books of
Aristotles Organon, Categoriae, and De Int. Grice finds the use of a category, κατηγορία,
by Aristotle a bit of a geniality. Aristotle is using legalese, from kata,
against, on, and agoreuô [ἀγορεύω], speak in public), and uses it to
designate both the prosecution in a trial and the attribution in a
logical proposition, i. e., the questions that must be asked with regard to a
Subjects, and the answers that can be given. As a representative of the
linguistic turn in philosophy, Grice is attracted to the idea that a category
can thus be understood variously, as applying to the realm of reality
(ontology), but also to the philosophy of language (category of expression) and
to philosophical psychology (category of representation). Grice kept his
explorations on categories under two very separate, shall we say, categories:
his explorations with Austin (very serious), and those with Strawson (more
congenial). Where is Smiths altruism? Nowhere to be seen. Should we say it is
idle (otiose) to speak of altruism? No, it is just an attribute, which, via
category shift, can be made the Subjects of your sentence, Strawson. It is not spatio-temporal,
though, right. Not really. ‒ I do not particularly like your trouser
words. The essay is easy to date since Grice notes that Strawson reproduced
some of the details in his Individuals, which we can very well date. Grice
thought Aristotle was the best! Or at any rate almost as good as Kantotle!
Aristotle saw Categoriæ, along with De Int. as part of his Organon.
However, philosophers of language tend to explore these topics without a
consideration of the later parts of the Organon dealing with the syllogism, the
tropes, and the topics ‒ the boring bits! The reason Grice is attracted to the
Aristotelian category (as Austin and Strawson equally were) is that category
allows for a linguistic-turn reading. Plus, its a nice, pretentious (in the Oxonian
way) piece of philosophical jargon! Aristotle couldnt find category in the
koine, so he had to coin it. While meant by Aristotle in a primarily
ontological way, Oxonian philosophers hasten to add that a category of
expression, as Grice puts it, is just as valid a topic for philosophical
exploration. His tutee Strawson will actually publish a book on Subjects and
predicate in grammar! (Trivial, Strawson!). Grice will later add an
intermediary category, which is the Subjects of his philosophical psychology.
As such, a category can be construed ontologically, or representationally: the
latter involving philosophical psychological concepts, and expressions
themselves. For Aristotle, as Grice and Austin, and Grice and Strawson, were
well aware as they educated some of the poor at Oxford (Only the poor learn at
Oxford ‒ Arnold), there are (at least ‒ at most?) ten categories. Grice
doesnt (really) care about the number. But the first are important. Actually
the very first: theres substantia prima, such as Grice. And then theres
substantia secunda, such as Grices rationality. The essentia. Then there are
various types of attributes. But, as Grice sharply notes, even substantia
secunda may be regarded as an attribute. Grices favourite game with Strawson
was indeed Category Shift, or Subjects-ification, as Strawson preferred.
Essence may be introduced as a sub-type of an attribute. We would have
substantia prima AND attribute, which in turn gets divided into essential, the
izzing, and non-essential, the hazzing. While Austin is not so fun to play
with, Strawson is. Smith is a very altruist person. Where is his altruism?
Nowhere to be seen, really. Yet we may sensically speak of Smiths altruism. It
is just a matter of a category shift. Grice scores. Grice is slightly
disappointed, but he perfectly understands, that Strawson, who footnotes Grice
as the tutor from whom I never ceased to learn about logic in Introduction to
logical lheory, fails to acknowledge that most of the research in Strawsons
Individuals: an essay in descriptive (not revisionary) metaphysics derives from
the conclusions reached at his joint philosophical investigations at joint
seminars with Grice. Grice later elaborates on this with Code, who is keen on
Grices other game, the hazz and the hazz not, the izz. But then tutor from whom
I never ceased to learn about metaphysics sounds slightlier clumsier, as far as
the implicature goes. Categories, the Grice-Myro theory of identity, Relative
identity, Grice on =, identity, notes, with Myro, metaphysics, philosophy, with
Code, Grice izz Grice – or izz he? The idea that = is unqualified requires
qualification. Whitehead and Russell ignored this. Grice and Myro didnt. Grice
wants to allow for It is the case that a = b /t1 and it is not the case that a
= b /t2. The idea is intuitive, but philosophers of a Leibnizian bent are too
accustomed to deal with = as an absolute. Grice applies this to human vs.
person. A human may be identical to a person, but cease to be so. Indeed,
Grices earlier attempt to produce a reductive analsysis of I may be seen as
remedying a circularity he detected in Locke about same. Cf. Wiggins, Sameness
and substance. Grice makes Peano feel deeply Griceian, as Grice lists his =
postulates, here for consideration. And if you wondered why Grice prefers
Latinate individuum to the Grecian. The Grecian is “ἄτομον,” in logic, rendered
by L and S as ‘individual, of terms,’ Pl. Sph. 229d; of the εἶδος or forma,
Arist. Metaph.1034a8, de An. 414b27.2. individual, Id. APo. 96b11, al.: as a
subst., τό ἄτομον, Id. Cat. 1b6, 3a38, Metaph.1058a18 (pl.), Plot. 6.2.2,
al. subst.; latinised from Grecian. Lewis and Short have “indīvĭdŭum,” an atom,
indivisible particle: ex illis individuis, unde omnia Democritus gigni
affirmat, Cic. Ac. 2, 17 fin.: ne individuum quidem, nec quod dirimi distrahive
non possit, id. N. D. 3, 12, 29. Note the use of individuum in alethic
modalities for necessity and possibility, starting with (11). ⊢ (α izzes α). This would be the
principle of non-contradiction or identity. Grice applies it to war: War is
war, as yielding a most peculiar implicature. (α izzes β ∧ β izzes γ) ⊃ α izzes γ. This above is
transitivity, which is crucial for Grices tackling of Reids counterexample to
Locke (and which according to Flew in Locke on personal identity was predated
by Berkeley. α hazzes β ⊃ ~(α izzes β). Or, what is accidental is not essential.
Grice allows that what is essential is accidental is, while misleading,
true. ⊢ α
hazzes β ⊃⊂ (∃x)(α hazzes x ∧ x izzes β) ⊢ (∀β)(β izzes a universalium ⊃ β izzes a forma). This above
defines a universalium as a forma, or eidos. (α hazzes β ∧ α izzes a particular) ⊃ (∃γ).(γ≠α ∧ α izzes β) ⊢ α izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ ((β izzes α) ∨ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x izzes α) ⊢ α izzes essentially predicable
of β ⊃⊂ β
izzes α ⊢ α
izzes non-essentially/accidentally predicable of β ⊃⊂ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x izzes α) α = β ⊃⊂ α izzes β ∧ β izzes α ⊢ α izzes an individuum ⊃⊂ □(∀β)(β izzes α ⊃ α izzes β) ⊢ α izzes a particular ⊃⊂ □(∀β)(α izzes predicable of β ⊃ (α izzes β ∧ β izzes α)); α izzes a
universalium ⊃⊂ ◊(∃β)(α izzes predicable of α ∧ ~(α izzes β ∧ β izzes α) ⊢ α izzes some-thing ⊃ α izzes an individuum. ⊢ α izzes a forma ⊃ (α izzes some-thing ∧ α izzes a universalium)
16. ⊢ α izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ (β izzes α) ∨ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x izzes α) ⊢ α izzes essentially predicable
of α ⊢ α
izzes accidentally predicable of β ⊃ α ≠ β; ~(α izzes accidentally predicable of β) ⊃ α ≠ β 20. α izzes a
particular ⊃ α izzes an individuum. ⊢ α izzes a particular ⊃ ~(∃x)(x ≠ α ∧ x izzes α) 22. ⊢~ (∃x).(x izzes a particular ∧ x izzes a forma) α izzes a
forma ⊃ ~(∃x)(x ≠ α ∧ x izzes α) x izzes a particular ⊃ ~(∃β)(α izz β) ⊢ α izzes a forma ⊃ ((α izzes predicable of
β ∧ α ≠ β) ⊃ β hazz α); α izzes a
forma ∧ β
izzes a particular ⊃ (α izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ β hazz A) ⊢ (α izzes a particular ∧ β izzes a universalium ∧ β izzes predicable of α) ⊃ (∃γ)(α ≠ γ ∧ γ izzes essentially predicable
of α) ⊢ (∃x) (∃y)(x izzes a particular ∧ y izzes a universalium ∧ y izzes predicable of x ⊃ ~(∀x)(x izzes a universalium ∧ x izzes some-thing); (∀β)(β izzes a universalium ⊃ β izzes some-thing) ⊢ α izzes a particular) ⊃ ~∃β.(α ≠ β ∧ β izzes essentially predicable
of α); (α izzes predicable of β ∧ α ≠ β)⊃ α izzes non-essentially or accidentally predicable of
β. The use of this or that doxastic modality, necessity and possibility,
starting above, make this a good place to consider one philosophical mistake
Grice mentions in “Causal theory.” What is actual is not also possible. Cf.
What is essential is also accidental. He is criticising a contemporary, if
possible considered dated in the New World, form of ordinary-language
philosophy, where the philosopher detects a nuance, and embarks risking
colliding with the facts, rushing ahead to exploit it before he can clarify it!
Grice liked to see his explorations on = as belonging to metaphysics, as the
s. on his Doctrines at the Grice
Collection testifies. While Grice presupposes the use of = in his treatment of
the king of France, he also explores a relativisation of =. His motivation was
an essay by Wiggins, almost Aristotelian in spirit, against Strawsons criterion
of space-time continuancy for the identification of the substantia prima. Grice
wants to apply = to cases were the time continuancy is made explicit. This
yields that a=b in scenario S, but that it may not be the case that a = b in a
second scenario S. Myro had an occasion to expand on Grices views in his
contribution on the topic for PGRICE. Myro mentions his System Ghp, a highly
powerful/hopefully plausible version of Grices System Q, in gratitude to to Grice.
Grice explored also the logic of izzing and hazzing with Code. Grice and Myro
developed a Geach-type of qualified identity. The formal aspects were developed
by Myro, and also by Code. Grice discussed Wigginss Sameness and substance,
rather than Geach. Cf. Wiggins and Strawson on Grice for the BA. At Oxford,
Grice was more or less given free rein to teach what he wanted. He found the
New World slightly disconcerting at first. At Oxford, he expected his tutees to
be willing to read the classics in the vernacular Greek. His approach to
teaching was diagogic, as Socratess! Even in his details of izzing and hazzing.
Greek enough to me!, as a student recalled! correspondence with Code, Grice
sees in Code an excellent Aristotelian. They collaborated on an exploration of
Aristotles underlying logic of essential and non-essential predication, for
which they would freely use such verbal forms as izzing and hazing, izzing and
hazzing, Code on the significance of the middle book in Aristotles Met. ,
Aristotle, metaphysics, the middle book. Very middle. Grice never knew
what was middle for Aristotle, but admired Code too much to air this! The
organisation of Aristotle’s metaphysics was a topic of much concern for
Grice. With Code, Grice coined izzing and hazzing to refer to essential
and non-essential attribution. Izzing and hazzing, “Aristotle on the
multiplicity of being” (henceforth, “Aristotle”) PPQ, Aristotle on
multiplicity, “The Pacific Philosophical Quarterly” (henceforth,
“PPQ,” posthumously ed. by Loar, Aristotle, multiplicity, izzing, hazzing,
being, good, Code. Grice offers a thorough discussion of Owens treatment of
Aristotle as leading us to the snares of ontology. Grice distinguishes between
izzing and hazzing, which he thinks help in clarifying, more axiomatico, what
Aristotle is getting at with his remarks on essential versus non-essential
predication. Surely, for Grice, being, nor indeed good, should not
be multiplied beyond necessity, but izzing and hazzing are already
multiplied. The Grice Papers contains drafts of the essay eventually
submitted for publication by Loar in memoriam Grice. Note that the Grice Papers
contains a typically Griceian un-publication, entitled Aristotle and
multiplicity simpliciter. Rather than Aristotle on, as the title for the
PPQ piece goes. Note also that, since its multiplicity simpliciter, it
refers to Aristotle on two key ideas: being and the good. As Code notes in
his contribution to PGRICE, Grice first presents his thoughts on izzing and hazzing
publicly at Vancouver. Jones has developed the axiomatic treatment favoured by
Grice. For Grice there is multiplicity in both being and good (ton
agathon), both accountable in terms of conversational implicata, of course. If
in Prolegomena, Grice was interested in criticising himself, in essays of
historical nature like these, Grice is seeing Aristotles Athenian dialectic as
a foreshadow of the Oxonian dialectic, and treating him as an equal. Grice is
yielding his razor: senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.
But then Aristotle is talking about the multiplicity of is and is
good. Surely, there are ways to turn Aristotle into the monoguist
he has to be! There is a further item in the Grice collection that
combines Aristotle on being with Aristotle on good, which is relevant in
connection with this. Aristotle on being and good
(ἀγαθόν). Aristotle, being, good (agathon), ἀγαθός. As from this f.,
the essays are ordered alphabetically, starting with Aristotle, Grice will
explore Aristotle on being or is and good (ἀγαθός) in explorations with Code.
Grice comes up with izzing and hazzing as the two counterparts to Aristotles
views on, respectively, essential and non-essential predication. Grices views
on Aristotle on the good (strictly, there is no need to restrict Arisstotles
use to the neuter form, since he employs ἀγαθός) connect with Grices
Aristotelian idea of eudaemonia, that he explores elsewhere. Strictly:
Aristotle on being and the good. If that had been Grices case, he would have
used the definite article. Otherwise, good may well translate as masculine,
ἀγαθός ‒the agathetic implicatum. He plays with Dodgson, cabbages and
kings. For what is a good cabbage as opposed to a cabbage? It does not
require very sharp eyes, but only our willingness to use the eyes one has, to
see that speech is permeated with the notion of purpose. To say what a
certain kind of thing is is only too frequently partly to say that it is
for. This feature applies to talk of, e. g., ships, shoes, sailing wax,
and kings; and, possibly and perhaps most excitingly, it extends even to
cabbages! Although Grice suspects Urmson might disagree. v. Grice on
Urmsons apples. Grice at his jocular best. If he is going to be a Kantian,
he will. He uses Kantian jargon to present his theory of conversation. This he
does only at Harvard. The implicature being that talking of vaguer assumptions
of helpfulness would not sound too convincing. So he has the maxim, the
super-maxim, and the sub-maxim. A principle and a maxim is Kantian enough. But
when he actually echoes Kant, is when he introduces what he later calls the
conversational categories – the keyword here is conversational category, as
categoria is used by Aristotle and Kant ‒ or Kantotle. Grice surely
knew that, say, his Category of Conversational Modality had nothing to do with
the Kantian Category of Modality. Still, he stuck with the idea of four
categories (versus Aristotles ten, eight or seven, as the text you consult may
tell you): category of conversational quantity (which at Oxford he had
formulated in much vaguer terms like strength and informativeness and
entailment), the category of conversational quality (keyword: principle of
conversational trust), and the category of conversational relation, where again
Kants relation has nothing to do with the maxim Grice associates with this
category. In any case, his Kantian joke may be helpful when considering the
centrality of the concept category simpliciter that Grice had to fight with
with his pupils at Oxford – he was lucky to have Austin and Strawson as co-lecturers!
Grice was irritated by L and S defining kategoria as category. I guess I knew
that. He agreed with their second shot, predicable. Ultimately, Grices concern
with category is his concern with person, or prote ousia, as used by Aristotle,
and as giving a rationale to Grices agency-based approach to the philosophical
enterprise. Aristotle used kategorein in the sense of to predicate,
assert something of something, and kategoria. The prote ousia is
exemplified by o tis anthropos. It is obvious that Grice wants to approach
Aristotles semantics and Aristotles metaphysics at one fell swoop. Grice reads
Aristotles Met. , and finds it understandable. Consider the adjective French
(which Aristotle does NOT consider) ‒ as it occurs in phrases such as Michel
Foucault is a French citizen. Grice is not a French citizen. Michel
Foucault once wrote a nice French poem. Urmson once wrote a nice French
essay on pragmatics. Michel Foucault was a French professor. Michel
Foucault is a French professor. Michel Foucault is a French professor of
philosophy. The following features are perhaps significant. The appearance
of the adjective French, or Byzantine, as the case might be ‒ cf. I’m
feeling French tonight. In these phrases is what Grice has as adjunctive rather
than conjunctive, or attributive. A French poem is not necessarily something
which combines the separate features of being a poem and being French, as a
tall philosopher would simply combine the features of being tall and of being a
philosopher. French in French poem, occurs adverbially. French
citizen standardly means citizen of France. French poem standardly means poem
in French. But it is a mistake to suppose that this fact implies that there is
this or that meaning, or, worse, this or that Fregeian sense, of the expression
French. In any case, only metaphorically or metabolically can we say that
French means this or that or has sense. An utterer means. An utterer makes
sense. Cf. R. Pauls doubts about capitalizing major. French means, and
figuratively at that, only one thing, viz. of or pertaining to France. And
English only means of or pertaining to England. French may be what
Grice (unfollowing his remarks on The general theory of context) call
context-sensitive. One might indeed say, if you like, that while French
means ‒ or means only this or that, or that its only sense is this or that,
French still means, again figuratively, a variety of things. French
means-in-context of or pertaining to France. Symbolise that
as expression E means-in-context that p. Expression E means-in-context C2 that
p2. Relative to Context C1 French means of France;
as in the phrase French citizen. Relative to context C2, French
means in the French language, as in the
phrase, French poem ‒ whereas history does not behave, like this. Whether
the focal item is a universal or a particular is, contra Aristotle, quite
irrelevant to the question of what this or that related adjective means, or
what its sense is. The medical art is no more what an utterer means when he
utters the adjective medical, as is France what an utterer means by the
adjective French. While the attachment of this or that context may suggest an
interpretation in context of this or that expression as uttered by the utterer
U, it need not be the case that such a suggestion is indefeasible. It
might be e.g. that French poem would have to mean, poem composed in French,
unless there were counter indications, that brings the utterer and the
addressee to a different context C3. In which case, perhaps
what the utterer means by French poem is poem composed by a French competitor
in this or that competition. For French professor there would be two
obvious things an utterer might mean. Disambiguation will depend on the
wider expression-context or in the situational context attaching to
the this or that circumstance of utterance. Eschatology. Some like Hegel, but
Collingwoods *my* man! ‒ Grice. Grice participated in two
consecutive evenings of the s. of programmes on metaphysics organised by Pears.
Actually, charming Pears felt pretentious enough to label the meetings to be
about the nature of metaphysics! Grice ends up discussing, as he should,
Collingwood on presupposition. Met.
remained a favourite topic for Grices philosophical explorations, as it
is evident from his essay on Met. , Philosophical Eschatology, and Platos
Republic, repr. in his WOW . Possibly Hardie is to blame, since he hardly
tutored Grice on metaphysics! Grices two BBC lectures are typically dated in
tone. It was the (good ole) days when philosophers thought they could educate
the non-elite by dropping Namess like Collingwood and stuff! The Third
Programme was extremely popular, especially among the uneducated ones at
London, as Pears almost put it, as it was a way for Londoners to get to know
what is going on down at Oxford, the only place an uneducated (or educated, for
that matter) Londoner at the time was interested in displaying some interest
about! I mean, Johnson is right: if a man is tired of the nature of
metaphysics, he is tired of life! Since the authorship is Grice, Strawson, and
Pears, Met. , in Pears, The Nature of Met., The BBC Third Programme, it is
somewhat difficult to identify what paragraphs were actually read by Grice (and
which ones by Pears and which ones by Strawson). But trust the sharp Griceian
to detect the correct implicature! There are many (too many) other items
covered by these two lectures: Kant, Aristotle, in no particular order. And in
The Grice Collection, for that matter, that cover the field of metaphysics. In
the New World, as a sort of tutor in the graduate programme, Grice was expected
to cover the discipline at various seminars. Only I dislike discipline! Perhaps
his clearest exposition is in the opening section of his Met. , philosophical
eschatology, and Platos Republic, repr. in his WOW , where he states, bluntly
that all you need is metaphysics! metaphysics,
Miscellaneous, metaphysics notes, Grice would possible see metaphysics as a
class – category figuring large. He was concerned with the methodological
aspects of the metaphysical enterprise, since he was enough of a relativist to
allow for one metaphysical scheme to apply to one area of discourse (one of
Eddingtons tables) and another metaphysical scheme to apply to another
(Eddingtons other table). In the third programme for the BBC Grice especially
enjoyed criticising John Wisdoms innovative look at metaphysics as a bunch of
self-evident falsehoods (Were all alone). Grice focuses on Wisdom on the
knowledge of other minds. He also discusses Collingwoods presuppositions, and
Bradley on the reality-appearance distinction. Grices reference to Wisdom was
due to Ewings treatment of Wisdom on metaphysics. Grices main motivation here
is defending metaphysics against Ayer. Ayer thought to win more Oxonian
philosophers than he did at Oxford, but he was soon back in London. Post-war
Oxford had become conservative and would not stand to the nonsense of Ayers
claiming that metaphysics is nonsense, especially, as Ayers implicature also
was, that philosophy is nonsense! Perhaps the best summary of Griceian
metaphysics is his From Genesis to Revelations: a new discourse on metaphysics.
It’s an ontological answer that one must give to Grices metabolic operation
from utterers meaning to expression meaning, Grice had been interested in the
methodology of metaphysics since his Oxford days. He counts as one
memorable experience in the area his participation in two episodes for the BBC
Third Programme on The nature of metaphysics with the organiser, Pears, and his
former tutee, Strawson on the panel. Grice was particularly keen on
Collingwoods views on metaphysical presuppositions, both absolute and
relative! Grice also considers John Wisdoms view of the metaphysical
proposition as a blatant falsehood. Grice considers Bradleys Hegelian metaphysics
of the absolute, in Appearance and reality. Refs.: While Grice’s choice was
‘eschatology,’ as per WoW, Essay, other keywords are useful, notably
“metaphysics,” “ontology,” “theorizing,” and “theory-theory,” in The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
Essentia -- essentialism,
a metaphysical theory that objects have essences and that there is a
distinction between essential and non-essential or accidental predications.
Different issues have, however, been central in debates about essences and
essential predication in different periods in the history of philosophy. In our
own day, it is commitment to the notion of de re modality that is generally
taken to render a theory essentialist; but in the essentialist tradition
stemming from Aristotle, discussions of essence and essential predication focus
on the distinction between what an object is and how it is. According to
Aristotle, the universals that an ordinary object instantiates include some
that mark it out as what it is and others that characterize it in some way but
do not figure in an account of what it is. In the Categories, he tells us that
while the former are said of the object, the latter are merely present in it;
and in other writings, he distinguishes between what he calls kath hauto or per
se predications where these include the predication of what-universals and kata
sumbebekos or per accidens predications where these include the predication of
how-universals. He concedes that universals predicated of an object kath hauto
are necessary to that object; but he construes the necessity here as
derivative. It is because a universal marks out an entity, x, as what x is and
hence underlies its being the thing that it is that the universal is
necessarily predicated of x. The concept of definition is critically involved
in Aristotle’s essentialism. First, it is the kind infima species under which an object falls or one of the
items genus or differentia included in the definition of that kind that is
predicated of the object kath hauto. But, second, Aristotle’s notion of an
essence just is the notion of the ontological correlate of a definition. The
term in his writings we translate as ‘essence’ is the expression to ti ein
einai the what it is to be. Typically, the expression is followed by a
substantival expression in the dative case, so that the expressions denoting
essences are phrases like ‘the what it is to be for a horse’ and ‘the what it
is to be for an oak tree’; and Aristotle tells us that, for any kind, K, the
what it is to be for a K just is that which we identify when we provide a
complete and accurate definition of K. Now, Aristotle holds that there is
definition only of universals; and this commits him to the view that there are
no individual essences. Although he concedes that we can provide definitions of
universals from any of his list of ten categories, he gives pride of place to
the essences of universals from the category of substance. Substance-universals
can be identified without reference to essences from other categories, but the
essences of qualities, quantities, and other non-substances can be defined only
by reference to the essences of substances. In his early writings, Aristotle
took the familiar particulars of common sense things like the individual man
and horse of Categories V to be the primary substances; and in these writings
it is the essences we isolate by defining the kinds or species under which
familiar particulars fall that are construed as the basic or paradigmatic
essences. However, in later writings, where ordinary particulars are taken to
be complexes of matter and form, it is the substantial forms of familiar
particulars that are the primary substances, so their essences are the primary
or basic essences; and a central theme in Aristotle’s most mature writings is
the idea that the primary substances and their essences are necessarily one and
the same in number. error theory essentialism 281 281 The conception of essence as the
ontological correlate of a definition
often called quiddity persists
throughout the medieval tradition; and in early modern philosophy, the idea
that the identity of an object is constituted by what it is plays an important
role in Continental rationalist thinkers. Indeed, in the writings of Leibniz,
we find the most extreme version of traditional essentialism. Whereas Aristotle
had held that essences are invariably general, Leibniz insisted that each
individual has an essence peculiar to it. He called the essence associated with
an entity its complete individual concept; and he maintained that the individual
concept somehow entails all the properties exemplified by the relevant
individual. Accordingly, Leibniz believed that an omniscient being could, for
each possible world and each possible individual, infer from the individual
concept of that individual the whole range of properties exemplified by that
individual in that possible world. But, then, from the perspective of an
omniscient being, all of the propositions identifying the properties the
individual actually exhibits would express what Aristotle called kath hauto
predications. Leibniz, of course, denied that our perspective is that of an
omniscient being; we fail to grasp individual essences in their fullness, so
from our perspective, the distinction between essential and accidental predications
holds. While classical rationalists espoused a thoroughgoing essentialism, the
Aristotlelian conceptions of essence and definition were the repeated targets
of attacks by classical British empiricists. Hobbes, e.g., found the notion of
essence philosophically useless and insisted that definition merely displays
the meanings conventionally associated with linguistic expressions. Locke, on
the other hand, continued to speak of essences; but he distinguished between
real and nominal essences. As he saw it, the familiar objects of common sense
are collections of copresent sensible ideas to which we attach a single name
like ‘man’ or ‘horse’. Identifying the ideas constitutive of the relevant
collection gives us the nominal essence of a man or a horse. Locke did not deny
that real essences might underlie such collections, but he insisted that it is
nominal rather than real essences to which we have epistemic access. Hume, in
turn, endorsed the idea that familiar objects are collections of sensible
ideas, but rejected the idea of some underlying real essence to which we have
no access; and he implicitly reinforced the Hobbesian critique of Aristotelian
essences with his attack on the idea of de re necessities. So definition merely
expresses the meanings we conventionally associate with words, and the only
necessity associated with definition is linguistic or verbal necessity. From
its origins, the twentieth-century analytic tradition endorsed the classical
empiricist critique of essences and the Humean view that necessity is merely
linguistic. Indeed, even the Humean concession that there is a special class of
statements true in virtue of their meanings came into question in the forties
and fifties, when philosophers like Quine argued that it is impossible to provide
a noncircular criterion for distinguishing analytic and synthetic statements.
So by the late 0s, it had become the conventional wisdom of philosophers in the
Anglo- tradition that both the notion of a real essence and the derivative idea
that some among the properties true of an object are essential to that object
are philosophical dead ends. But over the past three decades, developments in
the semantics of modal logic have called into question traditional empiricist
skepticism about essence and modality and have given rise to a rebirth of
essentialism. In the late fifties and early sixties, logicians like Kripke,
Hintikka, and Richard Montague showed how formal techniques that have as their
intuitive core the Leibnizian idea that necessity is truth in all possible
worlds enable us to provide completeness proofs for a whole range of
nonequivalent modal logics. Metaphysicians seized on the intuitions underlying
these formal methods. They proposed that we take the picture of alternative
possible worlds seriously and claimed that attributions of de dicto modality
necessity and possibility as they apply to propositions can be understood to
involve quantification over possible worlds. Thus, to say that a proposition,
p, is necessary is to say that for every possible world, W, p is true in W; and
to say that p is possible is to say that there is at least one possible world,
W, such that p is true in W. These metaphysicians went on to claim that the
framework of possible worlds enables us to make sense of de re modality.
Whereas de dicto modality attaches to propositions taken as a whole, an
ascription of de re modality identifies the modal status of an object’s
exemplification of an attribute. Thus, we speak of Socrates as being
necessarily or essentially rational, but only contingently snub-nosed.
Intuitively, the essential properties of an object are those it could not have
lacked; whereas its contingent properties are properties it exemplifies but
could have failed to exemplify. The “friends of possible worlds” insisted that
we can make perfectly good sense of this intuitive distinction if we say that
an object, x, exhibits a property, P, essentially just in case x exhibits P in
the actual world and in every possible world in which x exists and that x
exhibits P merely contingently just in case x exhibits P in the actual world,
but there is at least one possible world, W, such that x exists in W and fails
to exhibit P in W. Not only have these neo-essentialists invoked the Leibnizian
conception of alternative possible worlds in characterizing the de re
modalities, many have endorsed Leibniz’s idea that each object has an
individual essence or what is sometimes called a haecceity. As we have seen,
the intuitive idea of an individual essence is the idea of a property an object
exhibits essentially and that no other object could possibly exhibit; and
contemporary essentialists have fleshed out this intuitive notion by saying
that a property, P, is the haecceity or individual essence of an object, x,
just in case 1 x exhibits P in the actual world and in all worlds in which x
exists and 2 there is no possible world where an object distinct from x
exhibits P. And some defenders of individual essences like Plantinga have
followed Leibniz in holding that the haecceity of an object provides a complete
concept of that object, a property such that it entails, for every possible
world, W, and every property, P, either the proposition that the object in
question has P in W or the proposition that it fails to have P in W. Accordingly,
they agree that an omniscient being could infer from the individual essence of
an object a complete account of the history of that object in each possible
world in which it exists.
Ethos -- Philosophical
ethology – phrase used by Grice for his creature construction routine. ethical
constructivism, a form of anti-realism about ethics which holds that there are
moral facts and truths, but insists that these facts and truths are in some way
constituted by or dependent on our moral beliefs, reactions, or attitudes. For
instance, an ideal observer theory that represents the moral rightness and
wrongness of an act in terms of the moral approval and disapproval that an
appraiser would have under suitably idealized conditions can be understood as a
form of ethical constructivism. Another form of constructivism identifies the
truth of a moral belief with its being part of the appropriate system of
beliefs, e.g., of a system of moral and nonmoral beliefs that is internally
coherent. Such a view would maintain a coherence theory of moral truth. Moral
relativism is a constructivist view that allows for a plurality of moral facts
and truths. Thus, if the idealizing conditions appealed to in an ideal observer
theory allow that different appraisers can have different reactions to the same
actions under ideal conditions, then that ideal observer theory will be a
version of moral relativism as well as of ethical constructivism. Or, if
different systems of moral beliefs satisfy the appropriate epistemic conditions
e.g. are equally coherent, then the truth or falsity of particular moral
beliefs will have to be relativized to different moral systems or codes. --
ethical objectivism, the view that the objects of the most basic concepts of
ethics which may be supposed to be values, obligations, duties, oughts, rights,
or what not exist, or that facts about them hold, objectively and that
similarly worded ethical statements by different persons make the same factual
claims and thus do not concern merely the speaker’s feelings. To say that a
fact is objective, or that something has objective existence, is usually to say
that its holding or existence is not derivative from its being thought to hold
or exist. In the Scholastic terminology still current in the seventeenth
century ‘objective’ had the more or less contrary meaning of having status only
as an object of thought. In contrast, fact, or a thing’s existence, is
subjective if it holds or exists only in the sense that it is thought to hold
or exist, or that it is merely a convenient human posit for practical purposes.
A fact holds, or an object exists, intersubjectively if somehow its
acknowledgment is binding on all thinking subjects or all subjects in some
specified group, although it does not hold or exist independently of their
thinking about it. Some thinkers suppose that intersubjectivity is all that can
ever properly be meant by objectivity. Objectivism may be naturalist or
non-naturalist. The naturalist objectivist believes that values, duties, or
whatever are natural phenomena detectable by introspection, perception, or
scientific inference. Thus values may be identified with certain empirical
qualities of anybody’s experience, or duties with empirical facts about the
effects of action, e.g. as promoting or hindering social cohesion. The
non-naturalist objectivist eschewing what Moore called the naturalistic fallacy
believes that values or obligations or whatever items he thinks most basic in
ethics exist independently of any belief about them, but that their existence is
not a matter of any ordinary fact detectable in the above ways but can be
revealed to ethical intuition as standing in a necessary but not analytic
relation to natural phenomena. ‘Ethical subjectivism’ usually means the
doctrine that ethical statements are simply reports on the speaker’s feelings
though, confusingly enough, such statements may be objectively true or false.
Perhaps it ought to mean the doctrine that nothing is good or bad but thinking
makes it so. Attitude theories of morality, for which such statements express,
rather than report upon, the speaker’s feelings, are also, despite the
objections of their proponents, sometimes called subjectivist. In a more
popular usage an objective matter of fact is one on which all reasonable
persons can be expected to agree, while a matter is subjective if various
alternative opinions can be accepted as reasonable. What is subjective in this
sense may be quite objective in the more philosophical sense in question
above. -- ethics, the philosophical
study of morality. The word is also commonly used interchangeably with
‘morality’ to mean the subject matter of this study; and sometimes it is used
more narrowly to mean the moral principles of a particular tradition, group, or
individual. Christian ethics and Albert Schweitzer’s ethics are examples. In
this article the word will be used exclusively to mean the philosophical study.
Ethics, along with logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, is one of the main
branches of philosophy. It corresponds, in the traditional division of the
field into formal, natural, and moral philosophy, to the last of these
disciplines. It can in turn be divided into the general study of goodness, the
general study of right action, applied ethics, metaethics, moral psychology,
and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. These divisions are not sharp, and
many important studies in ethics, particularly those that examine or develop
whole systems of ethics, are interdivisional. Nonetheless, they facilitate the
identification of different problems, movements, and schools within the
discipline. The first two, the general study of goodness and the general study
of right action, constitute the main business of ethics. Correlatively, its
principal substantive questions are what ends we ought, as fully rational human
beings, to choose and pursue and what moral principles should govern our
choices and pursuits. How these questions are related is the discipline’s
principal structural question, and structural differences among systems of
ethics reflect different answers to this question. In contemporary ethics, the
study of structure has come increasingly to the fore, especially as a
preliminary to the general study of right action. In the natural order of
exposition, however, the substantive questions come first. Goodness and the
question of ends. Philosophers have typically treated the question of the ends
we ought to pursue in one of two ways: either as a question about the
components of a good life or as a question about what sorts of things are good in
themselves. On the first way of treating the question, it is assumed that we
naturally seek a good life; hence, determining its components amounts to
determining, relative to our desire for such a life, what ends we ought to
pursue. On the second way, no such assumption about human nature is made;
rather it is assumed that whatever is good in itself is worth choosing or
pursuing. The first way of treating the question leads directly to the theory
of human well-being. The second way leads directly to the theory of intrinsic
value. The first theory originated in ancient ethics, and eudaimonia was the
Grecian word for its subject, a word usually tr. ‘happiness,’ but sometimes tr.
‘flourishing’ in order to make the question of human well-being seem more a matter
of how well a person is doing than how good he is feeling. These alternatives
reflect the different conceptions of human well-being that inform the two major
views within the theory: the view that feeling good or pleasure is the essence
of human well-being and the view that doing well or excelling at things worth
doing is its essence. The first view is hedonism in its classical form. Its
most famous exponent among the ancients was Epicurus. The second view is
perfectionism, a view that is common to several schools of ancient ethics. Its
adherents include Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Among the moderns, the
best-known defenders of classical hedonism and perfectionism are respectively
J. S. Mill and Nietzsche. Although these two views differ on the question of
what human well-being essentially consists in, neither thereby denies that the
other’s answer has a place in a good human life. Indeed, mature statements of
each typically assign the other’s answer an ancillary place. Thus, hedonism, as
expounded by Epicurus, takes excelling at things worth doing exercising one’s intellectual powers and
moral virtues in exemplary and fruitful ways, e.g. as the tried and true means to experiencing
life’s most satisfying pleasures. And perfectionism, as developed in Aristotle’s
ethics, underscores the importance of pleasure
the deep satisfaction that comes from doing an important job well,
e.g. as a natural concomitant of
achieving excellence in things that matter. The two views, as expressed in
these mature statements, differ not so much in the kinds of activities they
take to be central to a good life as in the ways they explain the goodness of
such a life. The chief difference between them, then, is philosophical rather
than prescriptive. The second theory, the theory of intrinsic value, also has
roots in ancient ethics, specifically, Plato’s theory of Forms. But unlike
Plato’s theory, the basic tenets of which include certain doctrines about the
reality and transcendence of value, the theory of intrinsic value neither
contains nor presupposes any metaphysical theses. At issue in the theory is
what things are good in themselves, and one can take a position on this issue
without committing oneself to any thesis about the reality or unreality of
goodness or about its transcendence or immanence. A list of the different
things philosophers have considered good in themselves would include life,
happiness, pleasure, knowledge, virtue, friendship, beauty, and harmony. The
list could easily be extended. An interest in what constitutes the goodness of
the various items on the list has brought philosophers to focus primarily on
the question of whether something unites them. The opposing views on this
question are monism and pluralism. Monists affirm the list’s unity; pluralists
deny it. Plato, for instance, was a monist. He held that the goodness of
everything good in itself consisted in harmony and therefore each such thing
owed its goodness to its being harmonious. Alternatively, some philosophers
have proposed pleasure as the sole constituent of goodness. Indeed, conceiving
of pleasure as a particular kind of experience or state of consciousness, they
have proposed this kind of experience as the only thing good in itself and
characterized all other good things as instrumentally good, as owing their
goodness to their being sources of pleasure. Thus, hedonism too can be a
species of monism. In this case, though, one must distinguish between the view
that it is one’s own experiences of pleasure that are intrinsically good and the
view that anyone’s experiences of pleasure, indeed, any sentient being’s
experiences of pleasure, are intrinsically good. The former is called by
Sidgwick egoistic hedonism, the latter universal hedonism. This distinction can
be made general, as a distinction between egoistic and universal views of what
is good in itself or, as philosophers now commonly say, between agent-relative
and agent-neutral value. As such, it indicates a significant point of
disagreement in the theory of intrinsic value, a disagreement in which the
seeming arbitrariness and blindness of egoism make it harder to defend. In
drawing this conclusion, however, one must be careful not to mistake these
egoistic views for views in the theory of human well-being, for each set of
views represents a set of alternative answers to a different question. One must
be careful, in other words, not to infer from the greater defensibility of
universalism vis-à-vis egoism that universalism is the predominant view in the
general study of goodness. Right action. The general study of right action
concerns the principles of right and wrong that govern our choices and
pursuits. In modern ethics these principles are typically given a jural
conception. Accordingly, they are understood to constitute a moral code that
defines the duties of men and women who live together in fellowship. This
conception of moral principles is chiefly due to the influence of Christianity
in the West, though some of its elements were already present in Stoic ethics.
Its ascendancy in the general study of right action puts the theory of duty at
the center of that study. The theory has two parts: the systematic exposition
of the moral code that defines our duties; and its justification. The first
part, when fully developed, presents complete formulations of the fundamental
principles of right and wrong and shows how they yield all moral duties. The
standard model is an axiomatic system in mathematics, though some philosophers
have proposed a technical system of an applied science, such as medicine or
strategy, as an alternative. The second part, if successful, establishes the
authority of the principles and so validates the code. Various methods and
criteria of justification are commonly used; no single one is canonical.
Success in establishing the principles’ authority depends on the soundness of
the argument that proceeds from whatever method or criterion is used. One
traditional criterion is implicit in the idea of an axiomatic system. On this
criterion, the fundamental principles of right and wrong are authoritative in
virtue of being self-evident truths. That is, they are regarded as comparable
to axioms not only in being the first principles of a deductive system but also
in being principles whose truth can be seen immediately upon reflection. Use of
this criterion to establish the principles’ authority is the hallmark of
intuitionism. Once one of the dominant views in ethics, its position in the
discipline has now been seriously eroded by a strong, twentieth-century tide of
skepticism about all claims of self-evidence. Currently, the most influential
method of justification consistent with using the model of an axiomatic system
to expound the morality of right and wrong draws on the jural conception of its
principles. On this method, the principles are interpreted as expressions of a
legislative will, and accordingly their authority derives from the sovereignty
of the person or collective whose will they are taken to express. The oldest
example of the method’s use is the divine command theory. On this theory, moral
principles are taken to be laws issued by God to humanity, and their authority
thus derives from God’s supremacy. The theory is the original Christian source
of the principles’ jural conception. The rise of secular thought since the
Enlightenment has, however, limited its appeal. Later examples, which continue
to attract broad interest and discussion, are formalism and contractarianism.
Formalism is best exemplified in Kant’s ethics. It takes a moral principle to
be a precept that satisfies the formal criteria of a universal law, and it
takes formal criteria to be the marks of pure reason. Consequently, moral
principles are laws that issue from reason. As Kant puts it, they are laws that
we, as rational beings, give to ourselves and that regulate our conduct insofar
as we engage each other’s rational nature. They are laws for a republic of
reason or, as Kant says, a kingdom of ends whose legislature comprises all
rational beings. Through this ideal, Kant makes intelligible and forceful the
otherwise obscure notion that moral principles derive their authority from the
sovereignty of reason. Contractarianism also draws inspiration from Kant’s
ethics as well as from the social contract theories of Locke and Rousseau. Its
fullest and most influential statement appears in the work of Rawls. On this
view, moral principles represent the ideal terms of social cooperation for
people who live together in fellowship and regard each other as equals.
Specifically, they are taken to be the conditions of an ideal agreement among
such people, an agreement that they would adopt if they met as an assembly of
equals to decide collectively on the social arrangements governing their
relations and reached their decision as a result of open debate and rational
deliberation. The authority of moral principles derives, then, from the
fairness of the procedures by which the terms of social cooperation would be
arrived at in this hypothetical constitutional convention and the assumption
that any rational individual who wanted to live peaceably with others and who
imagined himself a party to this convention would, in view of the fairness of
its procedures, assent to its results. It derives, that is, from the
hypothetical consent of the governed. Philosophers who think of a moral code on
the model of a technical system of an applied science use an entirely different
method of justification. In their view, just as the principles of medicine
represent knowledge about how best to promote health, so the principles of right
and wrong represent knowledge about how best to promote the ends of morality.
These philosophers, then, have a teleological conception of the code. Our
fundamental duty is to promote certain ends, and the principles of right and
wrong organize and direct our efforts in this regard. What justifies the
principles, on this view, is that the ends they serve are the right ones to
promote and the actions they prescribe are the best ways to promote them. The
principles are authoritative, in other words, in virtue of the wisdom of their
prescriptions. Different teleological views in the theory of duty correspond to
different answers to the question of what the right ends to promote are. The
most common answer is happiness; and the main division among the corresponding
views mirrors the distinction in the theory of intrinsic value between egoism
and universalism. Thus, egoism and universalism in the theory of duty hold,
respectively, that the fundamental duty of morality is to promote, as best as
one can, one’s own happiness and that it is to promote, as best as one can, the
happiness of humanity. The former is ethical egoism and is based on the ideal
of rational self-love. The latter is utilitarianism and is based on the ideal
of rational benevolence. Ethical egoism’s most famous exponents in modern
philosophy are Hobbes and Spinoza. It has had few distinguished defenders since
their time. Bentham and J. S. Mill head the list of distinguished defenders of
utilitarianism. The view continues to be enormously influential. On these
teleological views, answers to questions about the ends we ought to pursue
determine the principles of right and wrong. Put differently, the general study
of right action, on these views, is subordinate to the general study of
goodness. This is one of the two leading answers to the structural question
about how the two studies are related. The other is that the general study of
right action is to some extent independent of the general study of goodness. On
views that represent this answer, some principles of right and wrong, notably
principles of justice and honesty, prescribe actions even though more evil than
good would result from doing them. These views are deontological. Fiat justitia
ruat coelum captures their spirit. The opposition between teleology and
deontology in ethics underlies many of the disputes in the general study of
right action. The principal substantive and structural questions of ethics
arise not only with respect to the conduct of human life generally but also
with respect to specific walks of life such as medicine, law, journalism,
engineering, and business. The examination of these questions in relation to
the common practices and traditional codes of such professions and occupations
has resulted in the special studies of applied ethics. In these studies, ideas
and theories from the general studies of goodness and right action are applied
to particular circumstances and problems of some profession or occupation, and
standard philosophical techniques are used to define, clarify, and organize the
ethical issues found in its domain. In medicine, in particular, where rapid
advances in technology create, overnight, novel ethical problems on matters of
life and death, the study of biomedical ethics has generated substantial interest
among practitioners and scholars alike. Metaethics. To a large extent, the
general studies of goodness and right action and the special studies of applied
ethics consist in systematizing, deepening, and revising our beliefs about how
we ought to conduct our lives. At the same time, it is characteristic of
philosophers, when reflecting on such systems of belief, to examine the nature
and grounds of these beliefs. These questions, when asked about ethical
beliefs, define the field of metaethics. The relation of this field to the
other studies is commonly represented by taking the other studies to constitute
the field of ethics proper and then taking metaethics to be the study of the
concepts, methods of justification, and ontological assumptions of the field of
ethics proper. Accordingly, metaethics can proceed from either an interest in
the epistemology of ethics or an interest in its metaphysics. On the first
approach, the study focuses on questions about the character of ethical
knowledge. Typically, it concentrates on the simplest ethical beliefs, such as
‘Stealing is wrong’ and ‘It is better to give than to receive’, and proceeds by
analyzing the concepts in virtue of which these beliefs are ethical and
examining their logical basis. On the second approach, the study focuses on
questions about the existence and character of ethical properties. Typically,
it concentrates on the most general ethical predicates such as goodness and
wrongfulness and considers whether there truly are ethical properties represented
by these predicates and, if so, whether and how they are interwoven into the
natural world. The two approaches are complementary. Neither dominates the
other. The epistemological approach is comparative. It looks to the most
successful branches of knowledge, the natural sciences and pure mathematics,
for paradigms. The former supplies the paradigm of knowledge that is based on
observation of natural phenomena; the latter supplies the paradigm of knowledge
that seemingly results from the sheer exercise of reason. Under the influence
of these paradigms, three distinct views have emerged: naturalism, rationalism,
and noncognitivism. Naturalism takes ethical knowledge to be empirical and
accordingly models it on the paradigm of the natural sciences. Ethical concepts,
on this view, concern natural phenomena. Rationalism takes ethical knowledge to
be a priori and accordingly models it on the paradigm of pure mathematics.
Ethical concepts, on this view, concern morality understood as something
completely distinct from, though applicable to, natural phenomena, something
whose content and structure can be apprehended by reason independently of
sensory inputs. Noncognitivism, in opposition to these other views, denies that
ethics is a genuine branch of knowledge or takes it to be a branch of knowledge
only in a qualified sense. In either case, it denies that ethics is properly
modeled on science or mathematics. On the most extreme form of noncognitivism,
there are no genuine ethical concepts; words like ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, and
‘evil’ have no cognitive meaning but rather serve to vent feelings and
emotions, to express decisions and commitments, or to influence attitudes and
dispositions. On less extreme forms, these words are taken to have some
cognitive meaning, but conveying that meaning is held to be decidedly secondary
to the purposes of venting feelings, expressing decisions, or influencing
attitudes. Naturalism is well represented in the work of Mill; rationalism in
the works of Kant and the intuitionists. And noncognitivism, which did not
emerge as a distinctive view until the twentieth century, is most powerfully
expounded in the works of C. L. Stevenson and Hare. Its central tenets,
however, were anticipated by Hume, whose skeptical attacks on rationalism set
the agenda for subsequent work in metaethics. The metaphysical approach is
centered on the question of objectivity, the question of whether ethical
predicates represent real properties of an external world or merely apparent or
invented properties, properties that owe their existence to the perception,
feeling, or thought of those who ascribe them. Two views dominate this
approach. The first, moral realism, affirms the real existence of ethical
properties. It takes them to inhere in the external world and thus to exist
independently of their being perceived. For moral realism, ethics is an
objective discipline, a discipline that promises discovery and confirmation of
objective truths. At the same time, moral realists differ fundamentally on the
question of the character of ethical properties. Some, such as Plato and Moore,
regard them as purely intellective and thus irreducibly distinct from empirical
properties. Others, such as Aristotle and Mill, regard them as empirical and
either reducible to or at least supervenient on other empirical properties. The
second view, moral subjectivism, denies the real existence of ethical
properties. On this view, to predicate, say, goodness of a person is to impose
some feeling, impulse, or other state of mind onto the world, much as one
projects an emotion onto one’s circumstances when one describes them as
delightful or sad. On the assumption of moral subjectivism, ethics is not a
source of objective truth. In ancient philosophy, moral subjectivism was
advanced by some of the Sophists, notably Protagoras. In modern philosophy,
Hume expounded it in the eighteenth century and Sartre in the twentieth
century. Regardless of approach, one and perhaps the central problem of
metaethics is how value is related to fact. On the epistemological approach,
this problem is commonly posed as the question of whether judgments of value
are derivable from statements of fact. Or, to be more exact, can there be a
logically valid argument whose conclusion is a judgment of value and all of whose
premises are statements of fact? On the metaphysical approach, the problem is
commonly posed as the question of whether moral predicates represent properties
that are explicable as complexes of empirical properties. At issue, in either
case, is whether ethics is an autonomous discipline, whether the study of moral
values and principles is to some degree independent of the study of observable
properties and events. A negative answer to these questions affirms the
autonomy of ethics; a positive answer denies ethics’ autonomy and implies that
it is a branch of the natural sciences. Moral psychology. Even those who affirm
the autonomy of ethics recognize that some facts, particularly facts of human
psychology, bear on the general studies of goodness and right action. No one
maintains that these studies float free of all conception of human appetite and
passion or that they presuppose no account of the human capacity for voluntary
action. It is generally recognized that an adequate understanding of desire, emotion,
deliberation, choice, volition, character, and personality is indispensable to
the theoretical treatment of human well-being, intrinsic value, and duty.
Investigations into the nature of these psychological phenomena are therefore
an essential, though auxiliary, part of ethics. They constitute the adjunct
field of moral psychology. One area of particular interest within this field is
the study of those capacities by virtue of which men and women qualify as moral
agents, beings who are responsible for their actions. This study is especially
important to the theory of duty since that theory, in modern philosophy,
characteristically assumes a strong doctrine of individual responsibility. That
is, it assumes principles of culpability for wrongdoing that require, as
conditions of justified blame, that the act of wrongdoing be one’s own and that
it not be done innocently. Only moral agents are capable of meeting these
conditions. And the presumption is that normal, adult human beings qualify as
moral agents whereas small children and nonhuman animals do not. The study then
focuses on those capacities that distinguish the former from the latter as
responsible beings. The main issue is whether the power of reason alone
accounts for these capacities. On one side of the issue are philosophers like
Kant who hold that it does. Reason, in their view, is both the pilot and the
engine of moral agency. It not only guides one toward actions in conformity
with one’s duty, but it also produces the desire to do one’s duty and can
invest that desire with enough strength to overrule conflicting impulses of
appetite and passion. On the other side are philosophers, such as Hume and
Mill, who take reason to be one of several capacities that constitute moral
agency. On their view, reason works strictly in the service of natural and
sublimated desires, fears, and aversions to produce intelligent action, to
guide its possessor toward the objects of those desires and away from the
objects of those fears. It cannot, however, by itself originate any desire or
fear. Thus, the desire to act rightly, the aversion to acting wrongly, which
are constituents of moral agency, are not products of reason but are instead
acquired through some mechanical process of socialization by which their objects
become associated with the objects of natural desires and aversions. On one
view, then, moral agency consists in the power of reason to govern behavior,
and being rational is thus sufficient for being responsible for one’s actions.
On the other view, moral agency consists in several things including reason,
but also including a desire to act rightly and an aversion to acting wrongly
that originate in natural desires and aversions. On this view, to be
responsible for one’s actions, one must not only be rational but also have
certain desires and aversions whose acquisition is not guaranteed by the
maturation of reason. Within moral psychology, one cardinal test of these views
is how well they can accommodate and explain such common experiences of moral
agency as conscience, weakness, and moral dilemma. At some point, however, the
views must be tested by questions about freedom. For one cannot be responsible
for one’s actions if one is incapable of acting freely, which is to say, of
one’s own free will. The capacity for free action is thus essential to moral
agency, and how this capacity is to be explained, whether it fits within a
deterministic universe, and if not, whether the notion of moral responsibility
should be jettisoned, are among the deepest questions that the student of moral
agency must face. What is more, they are not questions to which moral
psychology can furnish answers. At this point, ethics descends into
metaphysics. ethnography, an open-ended
family of techniques through which anthropologists investigate cultures; also,
the organized descriptions of other cultures that result from this method.
Cultural anthropology ethnology is based primarily on fieldwork through which
anthropologists immerse themselves in the life of a local culture village,
neighborhood and attempt to describe and interpret aspects of the culture.
Careful observation is one central tool of investigation. Through it the
anthropologist can observe and record various features of social life, e.g.
trading practices, farming techniques, or marriage arrangements. A second
central tool is the interview, through which the researcher explores the
beliefs and values of members of the local culture. Tools of historical
research, including particularly oral history, are also of use in ethnography,
since the cultural practices of interest often derive from a remote point in
time. ethnology, the comparative and
analytical study of cultures; cultural anthroplogy. Anthropologists aim to
describe and interpret aspects of the culture of various social groups e.g., the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari,
rice villages of the Chin. Canton Delta, or a community of physicists at
Livermore Laboratory. Topics of particular interest include religious beliefs, linguistic
practices, kinship arrangements, marriage patterns, farming technology, dietary
practices, gender relations, and power relations. Cultural anthropology is
generally conceived as an empirical science, and this raises several
methodological and conceptual difficulties. First is the role of the observer.
The injection of an alien observer into the local culture unavoidably disturbs
that culture. Second, there is the problem of intelligibility across cultural
systems radical translation. One goal of
ethnographic research is to arrive at an interpretation of a set of beliefs and
values that are thought to be radically different from the researcher’s own
beliefs and values; but if this is so, then it is questionable whether they can
be accurately tr. into the researcher’s conceptual scheme. Third, there is the
problem of empirical testing of ethnographic interpretations. To what extent do
empirical procedures constrain the construction of an interpretation of a given
cultural milieu? Finally, there is the problem of generalizability. To what extent
does fieldwork in one location permit anthropologists to generalize to a larger
context other villages, the dispersed
ethnic group represented by this village, or this village at other times? ethnomethodology, a phenomenological approach
to interpreting everyday action and speech in various social contexts. Derived
from phenomenological sociology and introduced by Harold Garfinkel, the method
aims to guide research into meaningful social practices as experienced by
participants. A major objective of the method is to interpret the rules that
underlie everyday activity and thus constitute part of the normative basis of a
given social order. Research from this perspective generally focuses on mundane
social activities e.g., psychiatrists
evaluating patients’ files, jurors deliberating on defendants’ culpability, or
coroners judging causes of death. The investigator then attempts to reconstruct
an underlying set of rules and ad hoc procedures that may be taken to have
guided the observed activity. The approach emphasizes the contextuality of
social practice the richness of unspoken
shared understandings that guide and orient participants’ actions in a given
practice or activity.
eudaemonism from Grecian
eudaimonia, ‘happiness’, ‘flourishing’, the ethical doctrine that happiness is
the ultimate justification for morality. The ancient Grecian philosophers
typically begin their ethical treatises with an account of happiness, and then
argue that the best way to achieve a happy life is through the cultivation and
exercise of virtue. Most of them make virtue or virtuous activity a constituent
of the happy life; the Epicureans, however, construe happiness in terms of
pleasure, and treat virtue as a means to the end of pleasant living. Ethical
eudaimonism is sometimes combined with psychological eudaimonism i.e., the view that all free, intentional
action is aimed ultimately at the agent’s happiness. A common feature of
ancient discussions of ethics, and one distinguishing them from most modern
discussions, is the view that an agent would not be rationally justified in a
course of action that promised less happiness than some alternative open to
him. Hence it seems that most of the ancient theories are forms of egosim. But
the ancient theories differ from modern versions of egoism since, according to
the ancients, at least some of the virtues are dispositions to act from
primarily other-regarding motives: although the agent’s happiness is the
ultimate justification of virtuous action, it is not necessarily what motivates
such action. Since happiness is regarded by most of the ancients as the
ultimate end that justifies our actions, their ethical theories seem
teleological; i.e., right or virtuous action is construed as action that
contributes to or maximizes the good. But appearances are again misleading, for
the ancients typically regard virtuous action as also valuable for its own sake
and hence constitutive of the agent’s happiness.
Event – used by Grice in
“Actions and Events,” -- anything that happens; an occurrence. Two fundamental
questions about events, which philosophers have usually treated together, are:
1 Are there events?, and 2 If so, what is their nature? Some philosophers
simply assume that there are events. Others argue for that, typically through finding
semantic theories for ordinary claims that apparently concern the fact that
some agent has done something or that some thing has changed. Most philosophers
presume that the events whose existence is proved by such arguments are
abstract particulars, “particulars” in the sense that they are non-repeatable
and spatially locatable, “abstract” in the sense that more than one event can
occur simultaneously in the same place. The theories of events espoused by
Davidson in his causal view, Kim though his view may be unstable in this
respect, Jonathan Bennett, and Lawrence Lombard take them to be abstract
particulars. However, Chisholm takes Euler diagram event 292 292 events to be abstract universals; and
Quine and Davidson in his later view take them to be concrete particulars. Some
philosophers who think of events as abstract particulars tend to associate the
concept of an event with the concept of change; an event is a change in some
object or other though some philosophers have doubts about this and others have
denied it outright. The time at which an event, construed as a particular,
occurs can be associated with the shortest time at which the object, which is
the subject of that event, changes from the having of one property to the
having of another, contrary property. Events inherit whatever spatial locations
they have from the spatial locations, if any, of the things that those events
are changes in. Thus, an event that is a change in an object, x, from being F
to being G, is located wherever x is at the time it changes from being F to
being G. Some events are those of which another event is composed e.g., the
sinking of a ship seems composed of the sinkings of its parts. However, it also
seems clear that not every group of events comprises another; there just is no
event composed of a certain explosion on Venus and my birth. Any adequate
theory about the nature of events must address the question of what properties,
if any, such things have essentially. One issue is whether the causes or
effects of events are essential to those events. A second is whether it is
essential to each event that it be a change in the entity it is in fact a
change in. A third is whether it is essential to each event that it occur at
the time at which it in fact occurs. A chief component of a theory of events is
a criterion of identity, a principle giving conditions necessary and sufficient
for an event e and an event eH to be one and the same event. Quine holds that
events may be identified with the temporal parts of physical objects, and that
events and physical objects would thus share the same condition of identity:
sameness of spatiotemporal location. Davidson once proposed that events are
identical provided they have the same causes and effects. More recently,
Davidson abandoned this position in favor of Quine’s. Kim takes an event to be
the exemplification of a property or relation by an object or objects at a
time. This idea has led to his view that an event e is the same as an event eH
if and only if e and eH are the exemplifications of the same property by the
same objects at the same time. Lombard’s view is a variation on this account,
and is derived from the idea of events as the changes that physical objects
undergo when they alter.
evolutionary Grice --
Darwinism, the view that biological species evolve primarily by means of chance
variation and natural selection. Although several important scientists prior to
Charles Darwin 180982 had suggested that species evolve and had provided
mechanisms for that evolution, Darwin was the first to set out his mechanism in
sufficient detail and provide adequate empirical grounding. Even though Darwin
preferred to talk about descent with modification, the term that rapidly came
to characterize his theory was evolution. According to Darwin, organisms vary
with respect to their characteristics. In a litter of puppies, some will be
bigger, some will have longer hair, some will be more resistant to disease,
etc. Darwin termed these variations chance, not because he thought that they were
in any sense “uncaused,” but to reject any general correlation between the
variations that an organism might need and those it gets, as Lamarck had
proposed. Instead, successive generations of organisms become adapted to their
environments in a more roundabout way. Variations occur in all directions. The
organisms that happen to possess the characteristics necessary to survive and
reproduce proliferate. Those that do not either die or leave fewer offspring.
Before Darwin, an adaptation was any trait that fits an organism to its
environment. After Darwin, the term came to be limited to just those useful
traits that arose through natural selection. For example, the sutures in the
skulls of mammals make parturition easier, but they are not adaptations in an
evolutionary sense because Danto, Arthur Coleman Darwinism 204 204 they arose in ancestors that did not
give birth to live young, as is indicated by these same sutures appearing in
the skulls of egg-laying birds. Because organisms are integrated systems,
Darwin thought that adaptations had to arise through the accumulation of
numerous, small variations. As a result, evolution is gradual. Darwin himself
was unsure about how progressive biological evolution is. Organisms certainly
become better adapted to their environments through successive generations, but
as fast as organisms adapt to their environments, their environments are likely
to change. Thus, Darwinian evolution may be goal-directed, but different
species pursue different goals, and these goals keep changing. Because heredity
was so important to his theory of evolution, Darwin supplemented it with a
theory of heredity pangenesis. According
to this theory, the cells throughout the body of an organism produce numerous
tiny gemmules that find their way to the reproductive organs of the organism to
be transmitted in reproduction. An offspring receives variable numbers of
gemmules from each of its parents for each of its characteristics. For
instance, the male parent might contribute 214 gemmules for length of hair to
one offspring, 121 to another, etc., while the female parent might contribute
54 gemmules for length of hair to the first offspring and 89 to the second. As
a result, characters tend to blend. Darwin even thought that gemmules themselves
might merge, but he did not think that the merging of gemmules was an important
factor in the blending of characters. Numerous objections were raised to
Darwin’s theory in his day, and one of the most telling stemmed from his
adopting a blending theory of inheritance. As fast as natural selection biases
evolution in a particular direction, blending inheritance neutralizes its
effects. Darwin’s opponents argued that each species had its own range of
variation. Natural selection might bias the organisms belonging to a species in
a particular direction, but as a species approached its limits of variation,
additional change would become more difficult. Some special mechanism was
needed to leap over the deep, though possibly narrow, chasms that separate
species. Because a belief in biological evolution became widespread within a
decade or so after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, the
tendency is to think that it was Darwin’s view of evolution that became
popular. Nothing could be further from the truth. Darwin’s contemporaries found
his theory too materialistic and haphazard because no supernatural or
teleological force influenced evolutionary development. Darwin’s contemporaries
were willing to accept evolution, but not the sort advocated by Darwin.
Although Darwin viewed the evolution of species on the model of individual
development, he did not think that it was directed by some internal force or
induced in a Lamarckian fashion by the environment. Most Darwinians adopted
just such a position. They also argued that species arise in the space of a
single generation so that the boundaries between species remained as discrete
as the creationists had maintained. Ideal morphologists even eliminated any
genuine temporal dimension to evolution. Instead they viewed the evolution of
species in the same atemporal way that mathematicians view the transformation
of an ellipse into a circle. The revolution that Darwin instigated was in most
respects non-Darwinian. By the turn of the century, Darwinism had gone into a
decided eclipse. Darwin himself remained fairly open with respect to the
mechanisms of evolution. For example, he was willing to accept a minor role for
Lamarckian forms of inheritance, and he acknowledged that on occasion a new
species might arise quite rapidly on the model of the Ancon sheep. Several of
his followers were less flexible, rejecting all forms of Lamarckian inheritance
and insisting that evolutionary change is always gradual. Eventually Darwinism
became identified with the views of these neo-Darwinians. Thus, when Mendelian
genetics burst on the scene at the turn of the century, opponents of Darwinism
interpreted this new particulate theory of inheritance as being incompatible
with Darwin’s blending theory. The difference between Darwin’s theory of
pangenesis and Mendelian genetics, however, did not concern the existence of
hereditary particles. Gemmules were as particulate as genes. The difference lay
in numbers. According to early Mendelians, each character is controlled by a
single pair of genes. Instead of receiving a variable number of gemmules from
each parent for each character, each offspring gets a single gene from each
parent, and these genes do not in any sense blend with each other. Blue eyes
remain as blue as ever from generation to generation, even when the gene for
blue eyes resides opposite the gene for brown eyes. As the nature of heredity
was gradually worked out, biologists began to realize that a Darwinian view of
evolution could be combined with Mendelian genetics. Initially, the founders of
this later stage in the development of neoDarwinism exhibited considerable
variation in Darwinism Darwinism 205
205 their beliefs about the evolutionary process, but as they strove to
produce a single, synthetic theory, they tended to become more Darwinian than
Darwin had been. Although they acknowledged that other factors, such as the
effects of small numbers, might influence evolution, they emphasized that
natural selection is the sole directive force in evolution. It alone could
explain the complex adaptations exhibited by organisms. New species might arise
through the isolation of a few founder organisms, but from a populational
perspective, evolution was still gradual. New species do not arise in the space
of a single generation by means of “hopeful monsters” or any other
developmental means. Nor was evolution in any sense directional or progressive.
Certain lineages might become more complex for a while, but at this same time,
others would become simpler. Because biological evolution is so opportunistic,
the tree of life is highly irregular. But the united front presented by the
neo-Darwinians was in part an illusion. Differences of opinion persisted, for
instance over how heterogeneous species should be. No sooner did neo-Darwinism
become the dominant view among evolutionary biologists than voices of dissent
were raised. Currently, almost every aspect of the neo-Darwinian paradigm is
being challenged. No one proposes to reject naturalism, but those who view
themselves as opponents of neo-Darwinism urge more important roles for factors
treated as only minor by the neo-Darwinians. For example, neoDarwinians view
selection as being extremely sharp-sighted. Any inferior organism, no matter
how slightly inferior, is sure to be eliminated. Nearly all variations are
deleterious. Currently evolutionists, even those who consider themselves
Darwinians, acknowledge that a high percentage of changes at the molecular
level may be neutral with respect to survival or reproduction. On current
estimates, over 95 percent of an organism’s genes may have no function at all.
Disagreement also exists about the level of organization at which selection can
operate. Some evolutionary biologists insist that selection occurs primarily at
the level of single genes, while others think that it can have effects at
higher levels of organization, certainly at the organismic level, possibly at
the level of entire species. Some biologists emphasize the effects of
developmental constraints on the evolutionary process, while others have
discovered unexpected mechanisms such as molecular drive. How much of this
conceptual variation will become incorporated into Darwinism remains to be
seen. Evolutionary griceianism --
evolutionary epistemology, a theory of knowledge inspired by and derived from
the fact and processes of organic evolution the term was coined by the social
psychologist Donald Campbell. Most evolutionary epistemologists subscribe to
the theory of evolution through natural selection, as presented by Darwin in
the Origin of Species 1859. However, one does find variants, especially one
based on some kind of neoLamarckism, where the inheritance of acquired
characters is central Spencer endorsed this view and another based on some kind
of jerky or “saltationary” evolutionism Thomas Kuhn, at the end of The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, accepts this idea. There are two
approaches to evolutionary epistemology. First, one can think of the
transformation of organisms and the processes driving such change as an analogy
for the growth of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge. “Darwin’s
bulldog,” T. H. Huxley, was one of the first to propose this idea. He argued
that just as between organisms we have a struggle for existence, leading to the
selection of the fittest, so between scientific ideas we have a struggle
leading to a selection of the fittest. Notable exponents of this view today
include Stephen Toulmin, who has worked through the analogy in some detail, and
David Hull, who brings a sensitive sociological perspective to bear on the
position. Karl Popper identifies with this form of evolutionary epistemology,
arguing that the selection of ideas is his view of science as bold conjecture
and rigorous attempt at refutation by another name. The problem with this
analogical type of evolutionary epistemology lies in the disanalogy between the
raw variants of biology mutations, which are random, and the raw variants of
science new hypotheses, which are very rarely random. This difference probably
accounts for the fact that whereas Darwinian evolution is not genuinely
progressive, science is or seems to be the paradigm of a progressive
enterprise. Because of this problem, a second set of epistemologists inspired
by evolution insist that one must take the biology literally. This evidence of
the senses evolutionary epistemology 294
294 group, which includes Darwin, who speculated in this way even in his
earliest notebooks, claims that evolution predisposes us to think in certain
fixed adaptive patterns. The laws of logic, e.g., as well as mathematics and
the methodological dictates of science, have their foundations in the fact that
those of our would-be ancestors who took them seriously survived and
reproduced, and those that did not did not. No one claims that we have innate
knowledge of the kind demolished by Locke. Rather, our thinking is channeled in
certain directions by our biology. In an update of the biogenetic law,
therefore, one might say that whereas a claim like 5 ! 7 % 12 is
phylogenetically a posteriori, it is ontogenetically a priori. A major division
in this school is between the continental evolutionists, most notably the late
Konrad Lorenz, and the Anglo-Saxon supporters, e.g. Michael Ruse. The former
think that their evolutionary epistemology simply updates the critical
philosophy of Kant, and that biology both explains the necessity of the
synthetic a priori and makes reasonable belief in the thing-in-itself. The
latter deny that one can ever get that necessity, certainly not from biology,
or that evolution makes reasonable a belief in an objectively real world,
independent of our knowing. Historically, these epistemologists look to Hume
and in some respects to the pragmatists,
especially William James. Today, they acknowledge a strong family resemblance
to such naturalized epistemologists as Quine, who has endorsed a kind of
evolutionary epistemology. Critics of this position, e.g. Philip Kitcher,
usually strike at what they see as the soft scientific underbelly. They argue
that the belief that the mind is constructed according to various innate
adaptive channels is without warrant. It is but one more manifestation of
today’s Darwinians illicitly seeing adaptation everywhere. It is better and
more reasonable to think knowledge is rooted in culture, if it is
person-dependent at all. A mark of a good philosophy, like a good science, is
that it opens up new avenues for research. Although evolutionary epistemology
is not favored by conventional philosophers, who sneer at the crudities of its
frequently nonphilosophically trained proselytizers, its supporters feel
convinced that they are contributing to a forward-moving philosophical research
program. As evolutionists, they are used to things taking time to succeed. --
evolutionary psychology, the subfield of psychology that explains human
behavior and cultural arrangements by employing evolutionary biology and
cognitive psychology to discover, catalog, and analyze psychological
mechanisms. Human minds allegedly possess many innate, special-purpose, domain-specific
psychological mechanisms modules whose development requires minimal input and
whose operations are context-sensitive, mostly automatic, and independent of
one another and of general intelligence. Disagreements persist about the
functional isolation and innateness of these modules. Some evolutionary
psychologists compare the mind with its
specialized modules to a Swiss army
knife. Different modules substantially constrain behavior and cognition
associated with language, sociality, face recognition, and so on. Evolutionary
psychologists emphasize that psychological phenomena reflect the influence of
biological evolution. These modules and associated behavior patterns assumed
their forms during the Pleistocene. An evolutionary perspective identifies
adaptive problems and features of the Pleistocene environment that constrained
possible solutions. Adaptive problems often have cognitive dimensions. For
example, an evolutionary imperative to aid kin presumes the ability to detect
kin. Evolutionary psychologists propose models to meet the requisite cognitive
demands. Plausible models should produce adaptive behaviors and avoid
maladaptive ones e.g., generating too
many false positives when identifying kin. Experimental psychological evidence
and social scientific field observations aid assessment of these proposals.
These modules have changed little. Modern humans manage with primitive
hunter-gatherers’ cognitive equipment amid the rapid cultural change that
equipment produces. The pace of that change outstrips the ability of biological
evolution to keep up. Evolutionary psychologists hold, consequently, that: 1
contrary to sociobiology, which appeals to biological evolution directly,
exclusively evolutionary explanations of human behavior will not suffice; 2
contrary to theories of cultural evolution, which appeal to biological
evolution analogically, it is at least possible that no cultural arrangement
has ever been adaptive; and 3 contrary to social scientists, who appeal to some
general conception of learning or socialization to explain cultural
transmission, specialized psychological evolutionary ethics evolutionary
psychology 295 295 mechanisms
contribute substantially to that process.
existential
generalization, a rule of inference admissible in classical quantification
theory. It allows one to infer an existentially quantified statement DxA from
any instance A a/x of it. Intuitively, it allows one to infer ‘There exists a
liar’ from ‘Epimenides is a liar’. It is equivalent to universal instantiation the rule that allows one to infer any
instance A a/x of a universally quantified statement ExA from ExA. Intuitively,
it allows one to infer ‘My car is valuable’ from ‘Everything is valuable’. Both
rules can also have equivalent formulations as axioms; then they are called
specification ExA / A a/x and particularization Aa/x / DxA. All of these
equivalent principles are denied by free logic, which only admits weakened
versions of them. In the case of existential generalization, the weakened
version is: infer DxA from Aa/x & E!a. Intuitively: infer ‘There exists a
liar’ from ‘Epimenides is a liar and Epimenides exists’. existential import, a commitment to the
existence of something implied by a sentence, statement, or proposition. For
example, in Aristotelian logic though not in modern quantification theory, any
sentence of the form ‘All F’s are G’s’ implies ‘There is an F that is a G’ and
is thus said to have as existential import a commitment to the existence of an
F that is a G. According to Russell’s theory of descriptions, sentences
containing definite descriptions can likewise have existential import since
‘The F is a G’ implies ‘There is an F’. The presence of singular terms is also
often claimed to give rise to existential commitment. Underlying this notion of
existential import is the idea long
stressed by W. V. Quine that ontological
commitment is measured by existential sentences statements, propositions of the
form Dv f. existential instantiation, a
rule of inference admissible in classical quantification theory. It allows one
to infer a statement A from an existentially quantified statement DxB if A can
be inferred from an instance Ba/x of DxB, provided that a does not occur in
either A or B or any other premise of the argument if there are any.
Intuitively, it allows one to infer a contradiction C from ‘There exists a
highest prime’ if C can be inferred from ‘a is a highest prime’ and a does not
occur in C. Free logic allows for a stronger form of this rule: with the same
provisions as above, A can be inferred from DxB if it can be inferred from Ba/x
& E!a. Intuitively, it is enough to infer ‘There is a highest natural
number’ from ‘a is a highest prime and a exists’. existentialism, a philosophical and literary
movement that came to prominence in Europe, particularly in France, immediately
after World War II, and that focused on the uniqueness of each human individual
as distinguished from abstract universal human qualities. Historians differ as
to antecedents. Some see an existentialist precursor in Pascal, whose
aphoristically expressed Catholic fideism questioned the power of rationalist
thought and preferred the God of Scripture to the abstract “God of the
philosophers.” Many agree that Kierkegaard, whose fundamentally similar but
Protestant fideism was based on a profound unwillingness to situate either God
or any individual’s relationship with God within a systematic philosophy, as
Hegel had done, should be exact similarity existentialism 296 296 considered the first modern existentialist,
though he too lived long before the term emerged. Others find a
proto-existentialist in Nietzsche, because of the aphoristic and
anti-systematic nature of his writings, and on the literary side, in
Dostoevsky. A number of twentiethcentury novelists, such as Franz Kafka, have
been labeled existentialists. A strong existentialist strain is to be found in
certain other theist philosophers who have written since Kierkegaard, such as
Lequier, Berdyaev, Marcel, Jaspers, and Buber, but Marcel later decided to
reject the label ‘existentialist’, which he had previously employed. This
reflects its increasing identification with the atheistic existentialism of
Sartre, whose successes, as in the novel Nausea, and the philosophical work
Being and Nothingness, did most to popularize the word. A mass-audience
lecture, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” which Sartre to his later regret
allowed to be published, provided the occasion for Heidegger, whose early
thought had greatly influenced Sartre’s evolution, to take his distance from
Sartre’s existentialism, in particular for its self-conscious concentration on
human reality over Being. Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, written in reply to
a admirer, signals an important turn in
his thinking. Nevertheless, many historians continue to classify Heidegger as
an existentialist quite reasonably,
given his early emphasis on existential categories and ideas such as anxiety in
the presence of death, our sense of being “thrown” into existence, and our
temptation to choose anonymity over authenticity in our conduct. This
illustrates the difficulty of fixing the term ‘existentialism’. Other thinkers of the time, all acquaintances of
Sartre’s, who are often classified as existentialists, are Camus, Simone de
Beauvoir, and, though with less reason, Merleau-Ponty. Camus’s novels, such as
The Stranger and The Plague, are cited along with Nausea as epitomizing the
uniqueness of the existentialist antihero who acts out of authenticity, i.e.,
in freedom from any conventional expectations about what so-called human nature
a concept rejected by Sartre supposedly requires in a given situation, and with
a sense of personal responsibility and absolute lucidity that precludes the
“bad faith” or lying to oneself that characterizes most conventional human
behavior. Good scholarship prescribes caution, however, about superimposing too
many Sartrean categories on Camus. In fact the latter, in his brief
philosophical essays, notably The Myth of Sisyphus, distinguishes
existentialist writers and philosophers, such as Kierkegaard, from absurdist
thinkers and heroes, whom he regards more highly, and of whom the mythical
Sisyphus condemned eternally by the gods to roll a huge boulder up a hill
before being forced, just before reaching the summit, to start anew is the
epitome. Camus focuses on the concept of the absurd, which Kierkegaard had used
to characterize the object of his religious faith an incarnate God. But for
Camus existential absurdity lies in the fact, as he sees it, that there is
always at best an imperfect fit between human reasoning and its intended
objects, hence an impossibility of achieving certitude. Kierkegaard’s leap of
faith is, for Camus, one more pseudo-solution to this hard, absurdist reality.
Almost alone among those named besides Sartre who himself concentrated more on
social and political thought and became indebted to Marxism in his later years,
Simone de Beauvoir 886 unqualifiedly accepted the existentialist label. In The
Ethics of Ambiguity, she attempted, using categories familiar in Sartre, to
produce an existentialist ethics based on the recognition of radical human
freedom as “projected” toward an open future, the rejection of inauthenticity,
and a condemnation of the “spirit of seriousness” akin to the “spirit of
gravity” criticized by Nietzsche whereby individuals identify themselves wholly
with certain fixed qualities, values, tenets, or prejudices. Her feminist
masterpiece, The Second Sex, relies heavily on the distinction, part
existentialist and part Hegelian in inspiration, between a life of immanence,
or passive acceptance of the role into which one has been socialized, and one
of transcendence, actively and freely testing one’s possibilities with a view
to redefining one’s future. Historically, women have been consigned to the
sphere of immanence, says de Beauvoir, but in fact a woman in the traditional
sense is not something that one is made, without appeal, but rather something
that one becomes. The Sartrean ontology of Being and Nothingness, according to
which there are two fundamental asymmetrical “regions of being,”
being-in-itself and being-for-itself, the latter having no definable essence
and hence, as “nothing” in itself, serving as the ground for freedom,
creativity, and action, serves well as a theoretical framework for an
existentialist approach to human existence. Being and Nothingness also names a
third ontological region, being-for-others, but that may be disregarded here.
However, it would be a mistake to treat even Sartre’s existentialist insights,
much less those of others, as dependent on this ontology, to which he himself
made little direct existentialism existentialism 297 297 reference in his later works. Rather, it
is the implications of the common central claim that we human beings exist
without justification hence “absurdly” in a world into which we are “thrown,”
condemned to assume full responsibility for our free actions and for the very
values according to which we act, that make existentialism a continuing
philosophical challenge, particularly to ethicists who believe right choices to
be dictated by our alleged human essence or nature.
Grice on explanatory
versus justificatory reasons -- early 15c., explanen, "make (something) clear in the mind, to make
intelligible," from Latin explanare "to
explain, make clear, make plain," literally "make level,
flatten," from ex "out"
(see ex-) + planus "flat" (from
PIE root *pele- (2)
"flat; to spread"). The spelling was altered by influence of plain. Also see plane (v.2). In 17c.,
occasionally used more literally, of the unfolding of material things: Evelyn
has buds that "explain into leaves" ["Sylva, or, A discourse of
forest-trees, and the propagation of timber in His Majesties dominions,"
1664]. Related: Explained; explaining; explains. To explain (something)
away "to deprive of significance by explanation, nullify or
get rid of the apparent import of," generally with an adverse implication,
is from 1709. I think we may
find, in our talk about reasons, three main kinds of case. (1) The first is
that class of cases exemplified by the use of such a sentence as "The
reason why the bridge collapsed was that the girders were made of
cellophane". Variant forms would be exemplified in "The (one) reason
for the collapse of the bridge was that . . ." and "The fact that the
girders were made of cellophane was the (one) reason for the collapse of the
bridge (why the bridge collapsed)", and so on. This type of case includes
cases in which that for which the (a) reason is being given is an action. We
can legitimately use such a sentence form as "The reason why he resigned
his office (for his resigning his office) was that p"; and, so far as I
can see, the same range of variant forms will be available. I shall take as
canonical (paradigmatic) for this type of case (type (1)) the form "The
(a) reason why A was (is) that B". The significant features of a type (1)
case seem to me to include the following. (a) The canonical form is 'factive'
both with respect to A and to B. If I use it, I imply both that it is true that
A and that it is true that B. (b) If the reason why A was that B, then B is the
explanation of its being the case that A; and if one reason why A was (that) B,
then B is one explanation of its being the case that A, and if there are other
explanations (as it is implicated that there are, or may be) then A is
overdetermined; and (finally) if a part of the reason why A was that B, then B
is a part of the explanation of A's being so. This feature is not unconnected
with the previous one; if B is the explanation of A, then both B and A must be
facts; and if one fact is a reason for another fact, then it looks as if the
connection between them must be that the first explains the second. (c) In
some, but not all, cases in which the reason why A was that B, we can speak of
B as causing, or being the cause of, A (A's being the case). If the reason why
the bridge collapsed was that the girders were made of cellophane, then we can
say that the girders' being made of cellophane caused the bridge to collapse
(or, at least, caused it to collapse when the bus drove onto it). But not end
p.37 in all cases; it might be true that the reason why X took offence was that
all Tibetans are specially sensitive to comments on their appearance, though it
is very dubious whether it would be proper to describe the fact, or
circumstance, that all Tibetans have this particular sensitivity as the cause
of, or as causing, X to take offence. However, it may well be true that if B
does cause A, then the (or a) reason why A is that B. (d) The canonical form
employs 'reason' as a count-noun; it allows us to speak (for example) of the
reason why A, of there being more than one reason why A, and so on. But for
type (1) cases we have, at best, restricted licence to use variants in which
'reason' is used as a massnoun. "There was considerable reason why the
bridge collapsed (for the bridge collapsing)" and "The weakness of
the girders was some reason why the bridge collapsed" are oddities; so is
"There was good reason why the bridge collapsed", though "There
was a good reason why the bridge collapsed" is better; but "There was
(a) bad reason why the bridge collapsed" is terrible. The discomforts
engendered by attempts to treat 'reason' as a mass-noun persist even when A specifies an
action; "There was considerable reason why he resigned his office" is
unhappy, though one would not object to, for example, "There was
considerable reason for him to resign his office", which is not a type (1)
case. (e) Relativization to a person is, I think, excluded, unless (say) the
relativizing 'for X' means "in X's opinion", as in "for me, the
reason why the bridge collapsed was . . .". Again, this feature persists
even when A specifies an action: "For him, the reason why he resigned was
. . ." and "The reason for him why he resigned was . . ." are
both unnatural (for different reasons). I shall call type (1) cases
"reasons why" or "explanatory reasons" – for
etymologically, they make something ‘plain’ – out of nothing, almost – vide
Latin explanare – but never IM-planare – and in any case, not to be confused
with what Carnap calls an ‘explication’! (2) The cases which I am allocating to
type (2) are a slightly less tidy family than those of type (1). Examples are:
"The fact that they were a day late was some (a)reason for thinking that
the bridge had collapsed." "The fact that they were a day late was a
reason for postponing the conference." We should particularly notice the
following variants and allied examples (among others): end p.38 That they were
a day late was reason to think that the bridge had collapsed. There was no
reason why the bridge should have collapsed. The fact that they were so late
was a (gave) good reason for us to think that . . . He had reason to think that
. . . (to postpone . . .) but he seemed unaware of the fact. The fact that they
were so late was a reason for wanting (for us to want) to postpone the meeting.
I shall take as the paradigmatic form for type (2) "That B was (a) reason
(for X) to A", where "A" may conceal a psychological verb like
"think", "want", or "decide", or may specify an
action. Salient features seem to me to include the following. (a) Unlike type
(1), where there is double factivity, the paradigmatic form is non-factive with
respect to A, but factive with respect to B; with regard to B, however,
modifications are available which will cancel factivity; for example, "If
it were (is) the case that B, that would be a reason to A." (b) In
consonance with the preceding feature, it is not claimed that B explains A
(since A may not be the case), nor even that if A were the case B would explain
it (since someone who actually does the action or thinks the thought specified
by A may not do so because of B). It is, however, in my view (though some might
question my view) claimed that B is a justification (final or provisional) for
doing, wanting, or thinking whatever is specified in A. The fact that B goes at
least some way towards making it the case that an appropriate person or persons
should (or should have) fulfil (fulfilled) A. (c) The word "cause" is
still appropriate, but in a different grammatical construction from that used
for type (1). In Example (1), the fact that they were so late is not claimed to
cause anyone to think that the bridge had collapsed, but it is claimed to be
(or to give) cause to think just that. (d) Within type (2), 'reason' may be
treated either as a count-noun or as a mass-noun. Indeed, the kinds of case
which form type (2) seem to be the natural habitat of 'reason' as a mass-noun.
A short version of an explanation of this fact (to which I was helped end p.39
by George Myro) seems to me to be that (i) there are no degrees of explanation:
there may be more than one explanation, and something may be a part (but only a
part) of the explanation, but a set of facts either does explain something or
it does not. There are, however, degrees of justification (justifiability); one
action or belief may be more justifiable, in a given situation, than another
(there may be a better case for it). (ii) Justifiability is not just a matter
of the number of supporting considerations, but rather of their combined weight
(together with their outweighing the considerations which favour a rival action
or belief). So a mass-term is needed, together with specifications of degree or
magnitude. (e) That B may plainly be a reason for a person or people to A;
indeed, when no person is mentioned or implicitly referred to, it is very
tempting to suppose that it is being claimed that the fact that B would be a
reason for anyone, or any normal person, to A. One might call type (2) cases "justificatory reasons" or
"reasons for (to)". (3) Examples: John's reason for thinking Samantha
to be a witch was that he had suddenly turned into a frog. John's reason for
wanting Samantha to be thrown into the pond was that (he thought that) she was
a witch. John's reason for denouncing Samantha was that she kept turning him
into a frog. John's reason for denouncing Samantha was to protect himself
against recurrent metamorphosis. If X's reason for doing (thinking) A was that
B, it follows that X A-ed because B (because X knew (thought) that B). If X's
reason for doing (wanting, etc.) A was to B, it follows that X A-ed in order to
(so as to) B. The sentence form "X had several reasons for A-ing, such as
that (to) B" falls, in my scheme, under type (3), unlike the seemingly
similar sentence "X had reason to A, since B", which I locate under
type (2). The paradigmatic form I take as being "X's reason(s) for A-ing
was that B (to B)". Salient features of type (3) cases should be fairly
obvious. end p.40 (a) In type (3) cases reasons may be either of the form that
B or of the form to B. If they are of the former sort, then the paradigmatic
form is doubly factive, factive with respect both to A and to B. It is always
factive with respect to A (A-ing). When it is factive with respect to B,
factivity may be cancelled by inserting "X thought that" before B.
(b) Type (3) reasons are "in effect explanatory". If X's reason for
A-ing was that (to) B, X's thinking that B (or wanting to B) explains his
A-ing. The connection between type (3) reasons being, in effect, explanatory,
and their factivity is no doubt parallel to the connection which obtains for
type (1) reasons. I reserve the question of the applicability of
"cause" to a special concluding comment. (c) So far as I can see,
"reason" cannot, in type (3) cases, be treated as a mass-noun. This
may be accounted for by the explanatory character of reasons of this type. We
can, however, here talk of reasons as being bad; X's reasons for A-ing may be
weak or appalling. In type (2) cases, we speak of there being little reason, or
even no reason, to A. But in type (3) cases, since X's reasons are explanatory
of his actions or thoughts, they have to exist. (I doubt if this is the full
story, but it will have to do for the moment.) (d) Of their very nature, type
(3) reasons are relative to persons. Because of their hybrid nature (they seem,
as will in a moment, I hope, emerge, in a way to partake of the character both
of type (1) and of type (2)) one might call them
"Justificatory-Explanatory" reasons. Strawson said my explanation
required an explanation. ex-plāno ,
āvi, ātum, 1, v. a. * I. Lit., to flatten or spread out: “suberi cortex in
denos pedes undique explanatus,” Plin. 16, 8, 13, § 34.— II. Trop., of speech,
to make plain or clear, to explain (class.: “syn.: explico, expono,
interpretor): qualis differentia sit honesti et decori, facilius intelligi quam
explanari potest,” Cic. Off. 1, 27, 94; cf. Quint. 5, 10, 4: “rem latentem
explicare definiendo, obscuram explanare interpretando, etc.,” Cic. Brut. 42,
152: “explanare apertiusque dicere aliquid,” id. Fin. 2, 19, 60: “docere et
explanare,” id. Off. 1, 28, 101: “aliquid conjecturā,” id. de Or. 2, 69, 280:
“rem,” id. Or. 24, 80: “quem amicum tuum ais fuisse istum, explana mihi,” Ter.
Ph. 2, 3, 33: “de cujus hominis moribus pauca prius explananda sunt, quam
initium narrandi faciam,” Sall. C. 4, 5.—Pass. impers.: “juxta quod flumen, aut
ubi fuerit, non satis explanatur,” Plin. 6, 23, 26, § 97.— 2. To utter
distinctly: “et ille juravit, expressit, explanavitque verba, quibus, etc.,”
Plin. Pan. 64, 3.—Hence, explānātus , a, um, P. a. (acc. to II.), plain,
distinct (rare): “claritas in voce, in lingua etiam explanata vocum impressio,”
i. e. an articulate pronunciation, Cic. Ac. 1, 5, 19: parum explanatis vocibus
sermo praeruptus, Sen. de Ira, 1, 1, 4.—Adv. ex-plānāte , plainly, clearly,
distinctly: “scriptum,” Gell. 16, 8, 3.—Comp.: “ut definire rem cum
explanatius, tum etiam uberius (opp. presse et anguste),” Cic. Or. 33, 117.
explicatum. At Oxford, nobody was interested
in the explication. That’s too explicit. It was, being English, all about the
‘innuendo,’ the ‘understatement,’ the implication. The first Oxonian was C. K.
Grant, with his ‘pragmatic implication.’ Then came Nowell-Smith with his
‘contextual implication.’ Urmson was there with his ‘implied’ claims. And
Strawson was saying that ‘the king of France is not bald’ implies that thereis
a king of France. So, it was enough, Grice thought! We have to analyse what we
imply by imply, or at least what _I_ do. He thought publishing was always
vulgar. But when he was invited for one of those popularisations, when he was
invited to contribute to a symposium on a topic of his choice – he chose “The
causal theory of perception” and dedicates an ‘extensum excursus’ on
‘implication.’ The conclusion is simple: “The pillar box seems red” implies.
And implies a LOT. So much so that neo-Wittgensteinians were saying that what
Grice implies is part of what Grice is committed in terms of ‘satisfactoriness’
of what he is expressing. Not so! What Grice implies is, surely, that the
pillar box may not be red. But surely he can cancel that EXPLICITLY “The pillar
box seems red and is red.” So, what he implies is not part of what he
explicitly commits in terms of value satisfactoriness. In terms of value
satisfactoriness, Grice distinguishes between the subperceptual (“The pillar
box seems red”) and the perceptual proper (“Grice perceives that the pillar box
is red”). The causal theory merely states that “Grice perceives that the pillar
box is red” (a perceptum for the subperceptum, “the pillar box seems red”) if
and only if, first, the pillar box is
red; second, the subperceptum: the pillar box seems red; and third and last,
the fact that the pillar box is red CAUSES the pillar box seeming red. None of
that is explicit, but none of it is implicit. It is merely a philosophical
reductive analysis which has cleared away an unnecessary implication out of the
picture. The philosopher, involved in conceptual analysis, has freed from the
‘pragmatic implication’ and can provide, for his clearly stated ‘analysans,’
three different prongs which together constitute the necessary and sufficient
conditions – the analysandum. And his problem is resolved. Grice’s cavalier
attitude towards the explicit is obvious in the way he treats “Wilson is a
great man,” versus “the prime minister is a great man” “I don’t care if I’m not
sure if I want to say that an emissor of (i) and an emissor of (ii) have put
forward, in an explicit fashion, the same proposition. His account of
‘disambiguation’ is meant even more jocularly. He knows that in the New World,
they spell ‘vice’ as ‘vyse’ – So Wilson
being in the grip of a vyse is possibly the same thing put forward as the prime
minister being caught in the grip of either a carpenter’s tool or a sort of
something like a sin – if not both. (Etymologically, ‘vice’ and ‘vice’ are
cognate, since they are ‘violent’ things – cf. violence. While ‘implicare’
developed into vulgar Engish as ‘employ,’ “it’s funny explicature did not
develop into ‘exploy.’”A logical construction is an explication. A reductive
analysis is an explication. Cf. Grice on Reductionism as a bete noire,
sometimes misquoted as Reductivism. Grice used both ‘explanation’ and
‘explication’, so one has to be careful. When he said that he looked for a theory
that would explain conversation or the implicatum, he did not mean explication.
What is the difference, etymologically, between
explicate and explain? Well, explain is from ‘explanare,’ which gives
‘explanatum.’Trop., of speech, to make plain or clear, to explain
(class.:“syn.: explico, expono, interpretor): qualis differentia sit honesti et
decori, facilius intelligi quam explanari potest,” Cic.Off. 1, 27, 94; cf.
Quint. 5, 10, 4: “rem latentem explicare definiendo, obscuram explanare
interpretando, etc.,” Cic. Brut. 42, 152: “explanare apertiusque dicere
aliquid,” id. Fin. 2, 19, 60: “docere et explanare,” id. Off. 1, 28, 101:
“aliquid conjecturā,” id. de Or. 2, 69, 280: “rem,” id. Or. 24, 80: “quem
amicum tuum ais fuisse istum, explana mihi,” Ter. Ph. 2, 3, 33: “de cujus
hominis moribus pauca prius explananda sunt, quam initium narrandi faciam,” Sall.
C. 4, 5.—Pass.impers.: “juxta quod flumen, aut ubi fuerit, non satis
explanatur,” Plin. 6, 23, 26, § 97.—2. To utter distinctly: “et ille juravit,
expressit, explanavitque verba, quibus, etc.,” Plin. Pan. 64, 3.Hence,
explānātus , a, um, P. a. (acc. to II.), plain, distinct (rare): “claritas in
voce, in lingua etiam explanata vocum impressio,” i. e. an articulate
pronunciation, Cic. Ac. 1, 5, 19: parum explanatis vocibus sermo praeruptus,
Sen. de Ira, 1, 1, 4. Adv. ex-plānāte , plainly, clearly, distinctly:
“scriptum,” Gell. 16, 8, 3.—Comp.: “ut definire rem cum explanatius, tum etiam
uberius (opp. presse et anguste),” Cic. Or. 33, 117.Cr. Occam. M. O. R. the
necessity is explanatory necessity. Senses or conventional implicatata (not
reachable by ‘argument’) and Strawson do not explain. G. A. Paul does not
explain. Unlike Austin, who was in love with a taxonomy, Grice loved an
explanation. “Ἀρχὴν δὲ τῶν πάντων ὕδωρ ὑπεστήσατο, καὶ τὸν κόσμον ἔμψυχον καὶ
δαιμόνων πλήρη. “Arkhen de ton panton hudor hupestesato.” Thales’s doctrine is
that water is the universal primary substance, and that the world is animate
and full of divinities. “Ἀλλὰ Θαλῆς μὲν ὁ τῆς τοιαύτης ἀρχηγὸς φιλοσοφίας ὕδωρ
φησὶν εἶναι (διὸ καὶ τὴν γῆν ἐφ᾽ ὕδατος ἀπεφήνατο εἶναι), λαβὼν ἴσως τὴν ὑπόληψιν
ταύτην ἐκ τοῦ πάντων ὁρᾶν τὴν τροφὴν ὑγρὰν οὖσαν καὶ αὐτὸ τὸ θερμὸν ἐκ τούτου
γιγνόμενον καὶ τούτῳ ζῶν (τὸ δ᾽ ἐξ οὗ γίγνεται, τοῦτ᾽ ἐστὶν ἀρχὴ πάντων) – διά
τε δὴ τοῦτο τὴν ὑπόληψιν λαβὼν ταύτην καὶ διὰ τὸ πάντων τὰ σπέρματα τὴν φύσιν
ὑγρὰν ἔχειν, τὸ δ᾽ ὕδωρ ἀρχὴν τῆς φύσεως εἶναι τοῖς ὑγροῖς. εἰσὶ δέ τινες οἳ
καὶ τοὺς παμπαλαίους καὶ πολὺ πρὸ τῆς νῦν γενέσεως καὶ πρώτους θεολογήσαντας
οὕτως οἴονται περὶ τῆς φύσεως ὑπολαβεῖν‧ Ὠκεανόν τε γὰρ καὶ Τηθὺν ἐποίησαν
τῆς γενέσεως πατέρας [Hom. Ξ 201], καὶ τὸν ὅρκον τῶν θεῶν ὕδωρ, τὴν καλουμένην
ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν Στύγα τῶν ποιητῶν‧ τιμιώτατον μὲν γὰρ τὸ πρεσβύτατον,
ὅρκος δὲ τὸ τιμιώτατόν ἐστιν. εἰ μὲν οὖν [984a] ἀρχαία τις αὕτη καὶ παλαιὰ
τετύχηκεν οὖσα περὶ τῆς φύσεως ἡ δόξα, τάχ᾽ ἂν ἄδηλον εἴη, Θαλῆς μέντοι λέγεται
οὕτως ἀποφήνασθαι περὶ τῆς πρώτης αἰτίας. (Ἵππωνα γὰρ οὐκ ἄν τις ἀξιώσειε
θεῖναι μετὰ τούτων διὰ τὴν εὐτέλειαν αὐτοῦ τῆς διανοίας)‧ Ἀναξιμένης
δὲ ἀέρα καὶ Διογένης πρότερον ὕδατος καὶ μάλιστ᾽ ἀρχὴν τιθέασι τῶν ἁπλῶν
σωμάτων.” De caelo: “Οἱ δ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ὕδατος κεῖσθαι [sc. τὴν γὴν]. τοῦτον γὰρ
ἀρχαιότατον παρειλήφαμεν τὸν λόγον, ὅν φασιν εἰπεῖν Θαλῆν τὸν Μιλήσιον, ὡς διὰ
τὸ πλωτὴν εἶναι μένουσαν ὥσπερ ξύλον ἤ τι τοιοῦτον ἕτερον (καὶ γὰρ τούτων ἐπ᾽
ἀέρος μὲν οὐθὲν πέφυκε μένειν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ὕδατος), ὥσπερ οὐ τὸν αὐτὸν λόγον ὄντα
περὶ τῆς γῆς καὶ τοῦ ὕδατος τοῦ ὀχοῦντος τὴν γῆν‧ οὐδὲ γὰρ τὸ ὕδωρ πέφυκε μένειν
μετέωρον, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπί τινός [294b] ἐστιν. ἔτι δ᾽ ὥσπερ ἀὴρ ὕδατος κουφότερον, καὶ
γῆς ὕδωρ‧ ὥστε πῶς οἷόν τε τὸ κουφότερον κατωτέρω κεῖσθαι τοῦ
βαρυτέρου τὴν φύσιν; ἔτι δ᾽ εἴπερ ὅλη πέφυκε μένειν ἐφ᾽ ὕδατος, δῆλον ὅτι καὶ
τῶν μορίων ἕκαστον [αὐτῆς]‧ νῦν δ᾽ οὐ φαίνεται τοῦτο
γιγνόμενον, ἀλλὰ τὸ τυχὸν μόριον φέρεται εἰς βυθόν, καὶ θᾶττον τὸ μεῖζον. The
problem of the nature of matter, and its transformation into the myriad things
of which the universe is made, engaged the natural philosophers, commencing
with Thales. For his hypothesis to be credible, it was essential that he could
explain how all things could come into being from water, and return ultimately
to the originating material. It is inherent in Thaless hypotheses that water
had the potentiality to change to the myriad things of which the universe is
made, the botanical, physiological, meteorological and geological states. In
Timaeus, 49B-C, Plato had Timaeus relate a cyclic process. The passage
commences with that which we now call “water” and describes a theory which was
possibly that of Thales. Thales would have recognized evaporation, and have
been familiar with traditional views, such as the nutritive capacity of mist
and ancient theories about spontaneous generation, phenomena which he may have
observed, just as Aristotle believed he, himself had, and about which Diodorus
Siculus, Epicurus (ap. Censorinus, D.N. IV.9), Lucretius (De Rerum Natura) and
Ovid (Met. I.416-437) wrote. When Aristotle reported Thales’s pronouncement
that the primary principle is water, he made a precise statement: Thales says
that it [the nature of things] is water, but he became tentative when he
proposed reasons which might have justified Thaless decision. Thales’s
supposition may have arisen from observation. It is Aristotle’s opinion that
Thales may have observed, that the nurture of all creatures is moist, and that
warmth itself is generated from moisture and lives by it; and that from which
all things come to be is their first principle. Then, Aristotles tone changed
towards greater confidence. He declared: Besides this, another reason for the
supposition would be that the semina of all things have a moist nature. In
continuing the criticism of Thales, Aristotle wrote: That from which all things
come to be is their first principle (Metaph. 983 b25). Simple metallurgy had been practised long
before Thales presented his hypotheses, so Thales knew that heat could return
metals to a liquid state. Water exhibits sensible changes more obviously than
any of the other so-called elements, and can readily be observed in the three
states of liquid, vapour and ice. The understanding that water could generate
into earth is basic to Thaless watery thesis. At Miletus it could readily be
observed that water had the capacity to thicken into earth. Miletus stood on
the Gulf of Lade through which the Maeander river emptied its waters. Within
living memory, older Milesians had witnessed the island of Lade increasing in
size within the Gulf, and the river banks encroaching into the river to such an
extent that at Priene, across the gulf from Miletus the warehouses had to be
rebuilt closer to the waters edge. The ruins of the once prosperous city-port of
Miletus are now ten kilometres distant from the coast and the Island of Lade
now forms part of a rich agricultural plain. There would have been opportunity
to observe other areas where earth generated from water, for example, the
deltas of the Halys, the Ister, about which Hesiod wrote (Theogony, 341), now
called the Danube, the Tigris-Euphrates, and almost certainly the Nile. This
coming-into-being of land would have provided substantiation of Thaless
doctrine. To Thales water held the potentialities for the nourishment and
generation of the entire cosmos. Aëtius attributed to Thales the concept that
even the very fire of the sun and the stars, and indeed the cosmos itself is
nourished by evaporation of the waters (Aëtius, Placita). It is not known how Thales explained his
watery thesis, but Aristotle believed that the reasons he proposed were
probably the persuasive factors in Thaless considerations. Thales gave no role
to the Olympian gods. Belief in generation of earth from water was not proven
to be wrong until A.D. 1769 following experiments of Antoine Lavoisier, and
spontaneous generation was not disproved until the nineteenth century as a
result of the work of Louis Pasteur.The first philosophical explanation of the
world was speculative not practical. has its intelligibility in being
identified with one of its parts (the world is water). First philosophical
explanation for Universe human is rational and the world in independent; He
said the arché is water; Monist: He believed reality is one Thales of Miletus, first philosophical
explanation of the origin and nature of justice (and Why after all, did a Thales is Water.” Without the millions of species
that make up the biosphere, and the billions of interactions between them that
go on day by day,.Oddly, Grice had spent some time on x-questions in the Kant
lectures. And why is an x-question. A philosophical explanation of
conversation. A philosophical explanation of implicature. Description vs.
explanation. Grice quotes from Fisher, Never contradict. Never explain.
Taxonomy, is worse than explanation, always. Grice is exploring the
taxonomy-description vs. explanation dichotomy. He would often criticise
ordinary-language philosopher Austin for spending too much valuable time on
linguistic botany, without an aim in his head. Instead, his inclination, a
dissenting one, is to look for the big picture of it all, and disregard a
piece-meal analysis. Conversation is a good example. While Austin would
Subjectsify Language (Linguistic Nature), Grice rather places rationality
squarely on the behaviour displayed by utterers as they make conversational
moves that their addressees will judge as rational along specific
lines. Observation of the principle of conversational helpfulness is
rational (reasonable) along the following lines: anyone who cares about the two
goals which are central to conversation, viz. giving and receiving information,
and influencing and being influenced by others, is expected to have an interest
in taking part in a conversation which will only be profitable (if not
possible) under the assumption that it is conducted along the lines of the
principle of conversational helpfulness. Grice is not interested in
conversation per se, but as a basis for a theory that explains the mistakes
ordinary-language philosophers are making. The case of What is known to be the
case is not believed to be the case. EXPLICATUM -- “to
understand” – to explain -- Dilthey, W. philosopher and historian whose main
project was to establish the conditions of historical knowledge, much as Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason had for our knowledge of nature. He studied theology,
history, and philosophy at Heidelberg and Berlin and in 2 accepted the chair
earlier held by Hegel at the of Berlin.
Dilthey’s first attempt at a critique of historical reason is found in the
Introduction to the Human Sciences 3, the last in the Formation of the
Historical World in the Human Sciences 0. He is also a recognized contributor
to hermeneutics, literary criticism, and worldview theory. His Life of
Schleiermacher and essays on the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Hegel are
model works of Geistesgeschichte, in which philosophical ideas are analyzed in
relation to their social and cultural milieu. Dilthey holds that life is the
ultimate nexus of reality behind which we cannot go. Life is viewed, not
primarily in biological terms as in Nietzsche and Bergson, but as the
historical totality of human experience. The basic categories whereby we
reflect on life provide the background for the epistemological categories of
the sciences. According to Dilthey, Aristotle’s category of acting and
suffering is rooted in prescientific experience, which is then explicated as
the category of efficacy or influence Wirkung in the human sciences and as the
category of cause Ursache in the natural sciences. Our understanding of
influence in the human sciences is less removed from the full reality of life
than are the causal explanations arrived at in the natural sciences. To this
extent the human sciences can claim a priority over the natural sciences.
Whereas we have direct access to the real elements of the historical world
psychophysical human beings, the elements of the natural world are merely
hypothetical entities such as atoms. The natural sciences deal with outer experiences,
while the human sciences are based on inner experience. Inner experience is
reflexive and implicitly self-aware, but need not be introspective or
explicitly self-conscious. In fact, we often have inner experiences of the same
objects that outer experience is about. An outer experience of an object
focuses on its physical properties; an inner experience of it on our felt
responses to it. A lived experience Erlebnis of it includes both. The
distinction between the natural and the human sciences is also related to the
methodological difference between explanation and understanding. The natural
sciences seek causal explanations of nature
connecting the discrete representations of outer experience through
hypothetical generalizations. The human sciences aim at an understanding
Verstehen that articulates the typical structures of life given in lived
experience. Finding lived experience to be inherently connected and meaningful,
Dilthey opposed traditional atomistic and associationist psychologies and developed
a descriptive psychology that Husserl recognized as anticipating
phenomenological psychology. In Ideas 4 Dilthey argued that descriptive
psychology could provide a neutral foundation for the other human sciences, but
in his later hermeneutical writings, which influenced Heidegger and Hans-Georg
Gadamer, he rejected the possibility of a foundational discipline or method. In
the Formation, he asserted that all the human sciences are interpretive and
mutually dependent. Hermeneutically conceived, understanding is a process of
interpreting the “objectifications of life,” the external expressions of human
experience and activity. The understanding of others is mediated by these
common objectifications and not immediately available through empathy Einfühlung.
Moreover, to fully understand myself I must interpret the expressions of my
life just as I interpret the expressions of others. Whereas the natural
sciences aim at ever broader generalizations, the human sciences place equal
weight on understanding individuality and universality. Dilthey regarded
individuals as points of intersection of the social and cultural systems in
which they participate. Any psychological contribution to understanding human
life must be integrated into this more public framework. Although universal
laws of history are rejected, particular human sciences can establish
uniformities limited to specific social and cultural systems. In a set of
sketches 1 supplementing the Formation, Dilthey further developed the
categories of life in relation to the human sciences. After analyzing formal
categories such as the partwhole relation shared by all the sciences, he
distinguished the real categories of the human sciences from those of the
natural sciences. The most important human science categories are value,
purpose, and meaning, but they by no means exhaust the concepts needed to
reflect on the ultimate sense of our existence. Such reflection receives its
fullest expression in a worldview Weltanschauung, such as the worldviews
developed in religion, art, and philosophy. A worldview constitutes an overall
perspective on life that sums up what we know about the world, how we evaluate
it emotionally, and how we respond to it volitionally. Since Dilthey
distinguished three exclusive and recurrent types of worldview naturalism e.g.,
Democritus, Hume, the idealism of freedom e.g., Socrates, Kant, and objective
idealism e.g., Parmenides, Hegel he is
often regarded as a relativist. But Dilthey thought that both the natural and
the human sciences could in their separate ways attain objective truth through
a proper sense of method. Metaphysical formulations of worldviews are relative
only because they attempt an impossible synthesis of all truth. Explicatum --
explanation, an act of making something intelligible or understandable, as when
we explain an event by showing why or how it occurred. Just about anything can
be the object of explanation: a concept, a rule, the meaning of a word, the
point of a chess move, the structure of a novel. However, there are two sorts
of things whose explanation has been intensively discussed in philosophy:
events and human actions. Individual events, say the collapse of a bridge, are
usually explained by specifying their cause: the bridge collapsed because of
the pressure of the flood water and its weakened structure. This is an example
of causal explanation. There usually are indefinitely many causal factors
responsible for the occurrence of an event, and the choice of a particular
factor as “the cause” appears to depend primarily on contextual considerations.
Thus, one explanation of an automobile accident may cite the icy road
condition; another the inexperienced driver; and still another the defective
brakes. Context may determine which of these and other possible explanations is
the appropriate one. These explanations of why an event occurred are sometimes
contrasted with explanations of how an event occurred. A “how” explanation of
an event consists in an informative description of the process that has led to
the occurrence of the event, and such descriptions are likely to involve
descriptions of causal processes. The covering law model is an influential
attempt to represent the general form of such explanations: an explanation of
an event consists in “subsuming,” or “covering,” it under a law. When the
covering law is deterministic, the explanation is thought to take the form of a
deductive argument: a statement the
explanandum describing the event to be
explained is logically derived from the explanans the law together with statements of
antecedent conditions. Thus, we might explain why a given rod expanded by
offering this argument: ‘All metals expand when heated; this rod is metallic
and it was heated; therefore, it expanded’. Such an explanation is called a
deductive-nomological explanation. On the other hand, probabilistic or
statistical laws are thought to yield statistical explanations of individual
events. Thus, the explanation of the contraction of a contagious disease on the
basis of exposure to a patient with the disease may take the form of a
statistical explanation. Details of the statistical model have been a matter of
much controversy. It is sometimes claimed that although explanations, whether
in ordinary life or in the sciences, seldom conform fully to the covering law
model, the model nevertheless represents an ideal that all explanations must
strive to attain. The covering law model, though influential, is not
universally accepted. Human actions are often explained by being “rationalized’ i.e., by citing the agent’s beliefs and
desires and other “intentional” mental states such as emotions, hopes, and
expectations that constitute a reason for doing what was done. You opened the
window because you wanted some fresh air and believed that by opening the window
you could secure this result. It has been a controversial issue whether such
rationalizing explanations are causal; i.e., whether they invoke beliefs and
desires as a cause of the action. Another issue is whether existential polarity
explanation 298 298 these “rationalizing” explanations must
conform to the covering law model, and if so, what laws might underwrite such
explanations. Refs.: One good source is the
“Prejudices and predilections.” Also the first set of ‘Logic and conversation.”
There is also an essay on the ‘that’ versus the ‘why.’ The H. P. Grice Papers,
BANC.
exportation 1 In
classical logic, the principle that A 8 B / C is logically equivalent to A / B
/ C. 2 The principle A 8 B P C P A P B P C, which relevance logicians hold to
be fallacious when ‘P’ is read as ‘entails’. 3 In discussions of propositional
attitude verbs, the principle that from ‘a Vs that b is an f’ one may infer ‘a
Vs f-hood of b’, where V has its relational transparent sense. For example,
exportation in sense 3 takes one from ‘Ralph believes that Ortcutt is a spy’ to
‘Ralph believes spyhood of Ortcutt’, wherein ‘Ortcutt’ can now be replaced by a
bound variable to yield ‘Dx Ralph believes spyhood of x’.
expositum -- exponible.
In medieval logic, exponible propositions were those that needed to be
expounded, i.e., elaborated in order to make clear their true logical form. A
modern example might be: ‘Giorgione was so called because of his size’, which
has a misleading form, suggesting a simple predication, whereas it really
means, ‘Giorgione was called “Giorgione” because of his size’. Medieval
examples were: ‘Every man except Socrates is running’, expounded as ‘Socrates
is not running and every man other than Socrates is running’; and ‘Only
Socrates says something true’, uttered by, say, Plato, which Albert of Saxony
claims should be expounded not only as ‘Socrates says something true and no one
other than Socrates says something true’, but needs a third clause, ‘Plato says
something false’. This last example brings out an important aspect of exponible
propositions, namely, their use in sophisms. Sophismatic treatises were a
common medieval genre in which metaphysical and logical issues were approached
dialectically by their application in solving puzzle cases. Another important
ingredient of exponible propositions was their containing a particular term,
sometimes called the exponible term; attention on such terms was focused in the
study of syncategorematic expressions, especially in the thirteenth century.
However, note that such exponible terms could only be expounded in context, not
by an explicit definition. Syncategorematic terms that produced exponible
propositions were terms such as ‘twice’, ‘except’, ‘begins’ and ‘ceases’, and
‘insofar as’ e.g. ‘Socrates insofar as he is rational is risible’.
expressum: At one time,
Oxford was all about the Croceans! It all changed! The oppositum is the
impressum, or sense-datum. In a functionalist model, you have perceptual INPUT
and behavioural OUTPUT, the expressum. In between, the black box of the soul. Darwin,
Eckman. Drawing a skull meaning there is
danger. cf. impressum. Inside out. Expression of Impressions. As an empiricist,
Grice was into ‘impress.’ But it’s always good to have a correlatum. Grice
liked an abbreviation, especially because he loved subscripts. So, he starts to
analyse the ‘ordinary-language’ philosohper’s mistake by using a few symbols:
there’s the phrase, or utterance, and there’s the expression, for which Grice
uses ‘e’ for a ‘token,’ and ‘E’ for a type. So, suppose we are considering
Hart’s use of ‘carefully.’ ‘Carefully’ would be the ‘expression,’ occurring
within an utterance. Surely, since Grice uses ‘expression’ in that way, he also
uses to say what Hart is doing, Hart is expressing. Grice notes that
‘expressing’ may be too strong. Hart is expressing the belief THAT if you utter
an utterance containing the ‘expression’ ‘carefully,’ there is an implicatum to
the effect that the agent referred to is taking RATIONAL steps towards
something. IRRATIONAL behaviour does not count as ‘careful’ behaviour. Grice
uses the same abbreviations in discussing philosophy as the ‘conceptual
analysis’ of this or that expression. It is all different with Ogden,
Collingwood, and Croce, that Collingwood loved! "Ideas, we may say generally, are
symbols, as serving to express some actual moment or phase of experience and
guiding towards fuller actualization of what is, or seems to be, involved in
its existence or MEANING . That no idea is ever wholly adequate MEANS that the
suggestiveness of experience is inexhaustible" Forsyth, English
Philosophy, 1910, . Thus the significance of sound, the meaning of an utterance
is here identical with the active response to surroundings and with the natural
expression of emotions According to Husserl, the function of expression is only
directly and immediately adapted to what is usually described as the meaning
(Bedeutung) or the sense (Sinn) of the speech or parts of speech. Only because
the meaning associated with a wordsowid expresses something, is that word-sound
called 'expres- sion' (Ideen, p. 256 f). "Between the ,nearnng and the
what is meant, or what it expresses, there exists an essential relation,
because the meaning is the expression of the meant through its own content
(Gehalt) What is meant (dieses Bedeutete) lies in the 'object' of the thought
or speech. We must therefore distinguish these three-Word, Meaning, Object
"1 Geyser, Gp cit p z8 PDF compression, OCR, web optimization using a
watermarked evaluation copy of CVISION PDFCompresso These complexities are
mentioned here to show how vague are most of the terms which are commonly
thought satisfactory in this topic. Such a word as 'understand' is, unless
specially treated, far too vague to serve except provisionally or at levels of
discourse where a real understanding of the matter (in the reference sense) is
not possible. The multiple functions of speech will be classified and discussed
in the following chapter. There it will be seen that the expression of the
speaker's intention is one of the five regular language functions. Grice hated
Austin’s joke, the utteratum, “I use ‘utterance’ only as equivalent to
'utteratum;' for 'utteratio' I use ‘the issue of an utterance,’” so he needed
something for ‘what is said’ in general, not just linguistic, ‘what is
expressed,’ what is explicitly conveyed,’ ex-prĭmo , pressi, pressum, 3, v. a.
premo. express (mostly poet. and in postAug. prose; “freq. in the elder Pliny):
(faber) et ungues exprimet et molles imitabitur aere capillos,” Hor. A. P. 33;
cf.: “alicujus furorem ... verecundiae ruborem,” Plin. 34, 14, 40, § 140:
“expressa in cera ex anulo imago,” Plaut. Ps. 1, 1, 54: “imaginem hominis gypso
e facie ipsa,” Plin. 35, 12, 44, § 153; cf.: “effigiem de signis,” id. ib.:
“optime Herculem Delphis et Alexandrum, etc.,” id. 34, 8, 19, § 66 et saep.:
“vestis stricta et singulos artus exprimens,” exhibiting, showing, Tac. G. 17:
“pulcher aspectu sit athleta, cujus lacertos exercitatio expressit,” has well
developed, made muscular, Quint. 8, 3, 10.
Extensionalism: one of
the twelve labours of H. P. Grice -- a family of ontologies and semantic
theories restricted to existent entities. Extensionalist ontology denies that
the domain of any true theory needs to include non-existents, such as fictional,
imaginary, and impossible objects like Pegasus the winged horse or round
squares. Extensionalist semantics reduces meaning and truth to set-theoretical
relations between terms in a language and the existent objects, standardly
spatiotemporal and abstract entities, that belong to the term’s extension. The
extension of a name is the particular existent denoted by the name; the
extension of a predicate is the set of existent objects that have the property
represented by the predicate. The sentence ‘All whales are mammals’ is true in
extensionalist semantics provided there are no whales that are not mammals, no
existent objects in the extension of the predicate ‘whale’ that are not also in
the extension of ‘mammal’. Linguistic contexts are extensional if: i they make
reference only to existent objects; ii they support substitution of
codesignative terms referring to the same thing, or of logically equivalent
propositions, salva veritate without loss of truthvalue; and iii it is
logically valid to existentially quantify conclude that There exists an object
such that . . . etc. objects referred to within the context. Contexts that do
not meet these requirements are intensional, non-extensional, or referentially
opaque. The implications of extensionalism, associated with the work of Frege,
Russell, Quine, and mainstream analytic philosophy, are to limit its
explanations of mind and meaning to existent objects and material-mechanical
properties and relations describable in an exclusively extensional idiom.
Extensionalist semantics must try to analyze away apparent references to
nonexistent objects, or, as in Russell’s extensionalist theory of definite
descriptions, to classify all such predications as false. Extensionalist
ontology in the philosophy of mind must eliminate or reduce propositional
attitudes or de dicto mental states, expressed in an intensional idiom, such as
‘believes that ————’, ‘fears that ————’, and the like, usually in favor of
extensional characterizations of neurophysiological states. Whether extensionalist
philosophy can satisfy these explanatory obligations, as the thesis of
extensionality maintains, is controversial.
Stabilitatum – stabilire -- Establishment
– Grice speaks of the Establishment twice. Once re: Gellner: non-Establishment
criticizing the English Establishment. Second: to refute Lewis. Something can
be ‘established’ and not be conventional. “Surely Lewis should know the
Graeco-Roman root of establish to figure that out!” stăbĭlĭo , īvi, ītum (sync.
I.imperf. stabilibat, Enn. Ann. 44), 4, v. a. stabilis, to make firm,
steadfast, or stable; to fix, stay, establish (class.; esp. in the trop.
sense). I. Lit.: semita nulla pedem stabilibat, Enn. ap. Cic. Div. 1, 20, 40
(Ann. v. 44 Vahl.): “eo stabilita magis sunt,” Lucr. 3, 202; cf.: confirmandi
et stabiliendi causā singuli ab infimo solo pedes terrā exculcabantur, * Caes.
B. G. 7, 73: “vineas,” Col. 4, 33, 1: “loligini pedes duo, quibus se velut
ancoris stabiliunt,” Plin. 9, 28, 44, § 83.— II. Trop.: regni stabilita scamna
solumque, Enn. ap. Cic. Div. 1, 48 fin. (Ann. v. 99 Vahl.): “alicui regnum
suom,” Plaut. Am. 1, 1, 39; cf.: libertatem civibus, Att. ap. Cic. Sest. 58,
123: “rem publicam (opp. evertere),” Cic. Fin. 4, 24, 65; so, “rem publicam,”
id. Sest. 68, 143: “leges,” id. Leg. 1, 23, 62: “nisi haec urbs stabilita tuis
consiliis erit,” id. Marcell. 9, 29: “matrimonia firmiter,” id. Rep. 6, 2, 2:
pacem, concordiam, Pseud.-Sall. Rep. Ordin. 1 fin. (p. 267 Gerl.): “res Capuae
stabilitas Romana disciplina,” Liv. 9, 20: “nomen equestre in consulatu
(Cicero),” Plin. 33, 2, 8, § 34: “(aegrum) ad retinendam patientiam,” to
strengthen, fortify him, Gell. 12, 5, 3. While Grice’s play with ‘estaablished’
is in the second metabolical stage of his programme – where ‘means’ applies to
things other than the emissor, surely metaphorically – he is allowing that
‘estabalish’ may be used in the one-off predicament. By drawing a skull, U is
establishing a procedure. Grice notably wants to make ‘established’ a weaker
variant of ‘conventional.’ So that x, whatever, may be ‘established’ but not
‘conventional.’ In fact, it can be argued that to establish you have to do it
at least once. Cfr. ‘settled. ‘Greenwich, Conn., settled in 1639.’
‘Established’ Surely it would be obtuse to say that Greenwich, Conn. Was
“conventionalized”.
farquharsonism – Grice enjoyed reading Cook Wilson, and was grateful to A
S L Farquharson for making that possible.
Fechner – as a
philosophical psychologist, Grice had to read the boring Fechner! Gustav
Theodor 180187, G. physicist and philosopher whose Elemente der Psychophysik
1860; English translation, 6 inaugurated experimental psychology. Obsessed with
the mindbody problem, Fechner advanced an identity theory in which every object
is both mental and physical, and in support invented psychophysics the “exact science of the functional
relations . . . between mind and body.” Fechner began with the concept of the
limen, or sensory threshold. The absolute threshold is the stimulus strength R,
Reiz needed to create a conscious sensation S, and the relative threshold is
the strength that must be added to a stimulus for a just noticeable difference
jnd to be perceived. E. H. Weber 17951878 had shown that a constant ratio held
between relative threshold and false cause, fallacy of Fechner, Gustav Theodor
304 304 stimulus magnitude, Weber’s
law: DR/R % k. By experimentally determining jnd’s for pairs of stimulus
magnitudes such as weights, Fechner formulated his “functional relation,” S % k
log R, Fechner’s law, an identity equation of mind and matter. Later
psychophysicists replaced it with a power law, R % kSn, where n depends on the
kind of stimulus. The importance of psychophysics to psychology consisted in
its showing that quantification of experience was possible, and its providing a
general paradigm for psychological experimentation in which controlled stimulus
conditions are systematically varied and effects observed. In his later years,
Fechner brought the experimental method to bear on aesthetics Vorschule der
Aesthetik, 1876.
Ferguson, Adam --
Scottish philosopher and historian. His main theme was the rise and fall of
virtue in individuals and societies. In his most important work, An Essay on
the History of Civil Society 1766, he argued that human happiness of which
virtue is a constituent is found in pursuing social goods rather than private
ends. Ferguson thought that ignoring social goods not only prevented social
progress but led to moral corruption and political despotism. To support this
he used classical texts and travelers’ writings to reconstruct the history of
society from “rude nations” through barbarism to civilization. This allowed him
to express his concern for the danger of corruption inherent in the increasing
selfinterest manifested in the incipient commercial civilization of his day. He
attempted to systematize his moral philosophy in The Principles of Moral and
Social Science 1792. J.W.A. Fermat’s last theorem.
Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas
-- G. materialist philosopher and critic of religion. He provided the major
link between Hegel’s absolute idealism and such later theories of historical
materialism as those of Marx and other “young or new Hegelians.” Feuerbach was
born in Bavaria and studied theology, first at Heidelberg and then Berlin,
where he came under the philosophical influence of Hegel. He received his
doctorate in 1828 and, after an early publication severely critical of
Christianity, retired from official G. academic life. In the years between 1836
and 1846, he produced some of his most influential works, which include
“Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” 1839, The Essence of Christianity
1841, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future 1843, and The Essence of
Religion 1846. After a brief collaboration with Marx, he emerged as a popular
champion of political liberalism in the revolutionary period of 1848. During
the reaction that followed, he again left public life and died dependent upon
the support of friends. Feuerbach was pivotal in the intellectual history of
the nineteenth century in several respects. First, after a half-century of
metaphysical system construction by the G. idealists, Feuerbach revived, in a
new form, the original Kantian project of philosophical critique. However,
whereas Kant had tried “to limit reason in order to make room for faith,”
Feuerbach sought to demystify both faith and reason in favor of the concrete
and situated existence of embodied human consciousness. Second, his “method” of
“transformatory criticism” directed, in
the first instance, at Hegel’s philosophical pronouncements was adopted by Marx and has retained its
philosophical appeal. Briefly, it suggested that “Hegel be stood on his feet”
by “inverting” the subject and predicate in Hegel’s idealistic pronouncements.
One should, e.g., rewrite “The individual is a function of the Absolute” as
“The Absolute is a function of the individual.” Third, Feuerbach asserted that
the philosophy of G. idealism was ultimately an extenuation of theology, and
that theology was merely religious consciousness systematized. But since
religion itself proves to be merely a “dream of the human mind,” metaphysics,
theology, and religion can be reduced to “anthropology,” the study of concrete
embodied human consciousness and its cultural products. The philosophical
influence of Feuerbach flows through Marx into virtually all later historical
materialist positions; anticipates the existentialist concern with concrete
embodied human existence; and serves as a paradigm for all later approaches to
religion on the part of the social sciences.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb
-- G. philosopher. He was a proponent of an uncompromising system of
transcendental idealism, the Wissenschaftslehre, which played a key role in the
development of post-Kantian philosophy. Born in Saxony, Fichte studied at Jena
and Leipzig. The writings of Kant led him to abandon metaphysical determinism
and to embrace transcendental idealism as “the first system of human freedom.”
His first book, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung “Attempt at a Critique
of all Revelations,” 1792, earned him a reputation as a brilliant exponent of
Kantianism, while his early political writings secured him a reputation as a
Jacobin. Inspired by Reinhold, Jacobi, Maimon, and Schulze, Fichte rejected the
“letter” of Kantianism and, in the lectures and writings he produced at Jena
179499, advanced a new, rigorously systematic presentation of what he took to
be its Ferguson, Adam Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 307 307 “spirit.” He dispensed with Kant’s
things-inthemselves, the original duality of faculties, and the distinction
between the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental analytic. By
emphasizing the unity of theoretical and practical reason in a way consistent
with “the primacy of practical reason,” Fichte sought to establish the unity of
the critical philosophy as well as of human experience. In Ueber den Begriff
der Wissenschaftslehre “On the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre,” 1794 he
explained his conception of philosophy as “the science of science,” to be
presented in a deductive system based on a self-evident first principle. The
basic “foundations” of this system, which Fichte called Wissenschaftslehre
theory of science, were outlined in his Grundlage der gesamten
Wissenschaftslehre “Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre,” 179495 and
Grundriß der Eigentümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre in Rücksicht auf das
theoretische Vermögen “Outline of the Distinctive Character of the
Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty,” 1795 and then,
substantially revised, in his lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo
179699. The “foundational” portion of the Wissenschaftslehrelinks our
affirmation of freedom to our experience of natural necessity. Beginning with
the former “the I simply posits itself”, it then demonstrates how a freely
self-positing subject must be conscious not only of itself, but also of
“representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity” and hence of an
objective world. Fichte insisted that the essence of selfhood lies in an active
positing of its own self-identity and hence that self-consciousness is an
auto-productive activity: a Tathandlung or “fact/act.” However, the I can posit
itself only as limited; in order for the originally posited act of “sheer
self-positing” to occur, certain other mental acts must occur as well, acts
through which the I posits for itself an objective, spatiotemporal world, as
well as a moral realm of free, rational beings. The I first posits its own
limited condition in the form of “feeling” occasioned by an inexplicable Anstob
or “check” upon its own practical striving, then as a “sensation,” then as an
“intuition” of a thing, and finally as a “concept.” The distinction between the
I and the not-I arises only in these reiterated acts of self-positing, a
complete description of which thus amounts to a “genetic deduction” of the
necessary conditions of experience. Freedom is thereby shown to be possible
only in the context of natural necessity, where it is limited and finite. At
the same time “our freedom is a theoretical determining principle of our
world.” Though it must posit its freedom “absolutely” i.e., schlechthin or “for no reason” a genuinely free agent can exist only as a
finite individual endlessly striving to overcome its own limits. After
establishing its “foundations,” Fichte extended his Wissenschaftslehre into
social and political philosophy and ethics. Subjectivity itself is essentially
intersubjective, inasmuch as one can be empirically conscious of oneself only
as one individual among many and must thus posit the freedom of others in order
to posit one’s own freedom. But for this to occur, the freedom of each
individual must be limited; indeed, “the concept of right or justice Recht is
nothing other than the concept of the coexistence of the freedom of several rational/sensuous
beings.” The Grundlage des Naturrechts “Foundations of Natural Right,” 179697
examines how individual freedom must be externally limited if a community of
free individuals is to be possible, and demonstrates that a just political
order is a demand of reason itself, since “the concept of justice or right is a
condition of self-consciousness.” “Natural rights” are thus entirely
independent of moral duties. Unlike political philosophy, which purely concerns
the public realm, ethics, which is the subject of Das System der Sittenlehre
“The System of Ethical Theory,” 1798, concerns the inner realm of conscience.
It views objects not as given to consciousness but as produced by free action,
and concerns not what is, but what ought to be. The task of ethics is to
indicate the particular duties that follow from the general obligation to
determine oneself freely the categorical imperative. Before Fichte could extend
the Wissenschaftslehre into the philosophy of religion, he was accused of
atheism and forced to leave Jena. The celebrated controversy over his alleged
atheism the Atheismusstreit was provoked by “Ueber den Grund unseres Glaubens
in einer göttliche Weltregierung” “On the Basis of our Belief in a Divine
Governance of the World,” 1798, in which he sharply distinguished between
philosophical and religious questions. While defending our right to posit a
“moral world order,” Fichte insisted that this order does not require a
personal deity or “moral lawgiver.” After moving to Berlin, Fichte’s first
concern was to rebut the charge of atheism and to reply to the indictment of
philosophy as “nihilism” advanced in Jacobi’s Open Letter to Fichte 1799. This
was the task of Die Bestimmung des Menschen “The Vocation of Man,” 1800. During
the occupation, he delivered Reden an
die deutsche Nation “Addresses to the G. Nation,” 1808, which proposed a
program of national education and attempted to kindle G. patriotism. The other
publications of his Berlin years include a foray into political economy, Der
geschlossene Handelstaat “The Closed Commercial State,” 1800; a speculative
interpretation of human history, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtiges Zeitalters
“The Characteristics of the Present Age,” 1806; and a mystically tinged
treatise on salvation, Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben “Guide to the Blessed
Life,” 1806. In unpublished private lectures he continued to develop radically
new versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. Fichte’s substantial influence was not
limited to his well-known influence on Schelling and Hegel both of whom
criticized the “subjectivism” of the early Wissenschaftslehre. He is also
important in the history of G. nationalism and profoundly influenced the early
Romantics, especially Novalis and Schlegel. Recent decades have seen renewed
interest in Fichte’s transcendental philosophy, expecially the later,
unpublished versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. This century’s most significant
contribution to Fichte studies, however, is the ongoing publication of the
first critical edition of his complete works.
Ficino, Marsilio --
Neoplatonic philosopher who played a leading role in the cultural life of
Florence. Ordained a priest in 1473, he hoped to draw people to Christ by means
of Platonism. It was through Ficino’s translation and commentaries that the works
of Plato first became accessible to the Latin-speaking West, but the impact of
Plato’s work was considerably affected by Ficino’s other interests. He accepted
Neoplatonic interpretations of Plato, including those of Plotinus, whom he tr.;
and he saw Plato as the heir of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical Egyptian sage
and supposed author of the hermetic corpus, which he tr. early in his career.
He embraced the notion of a prisca theologia, an ancient wisdom that
encapsulated philosophic and religious truth, was handed on to Plato, and was
later validated by the Christian revelation. The most popular of his original
works was Three Books on Life 1489, which contains the fullest Renaissance
exposition of a theory of magic, based mainly on Neoplatonic sources. He
postulated a living cosmos in which the World-Soul is linked to the world-body
by spirit. This relationship is mirrored in man, whose spirit or astral body
links his body and soul, and the resulting correspondence between microcosm and
macrocosm allows both man’s control of natural objects through magic and his
ascent to knowledge of God. Other popular works were his commentary on Plato’s
Symposium 1469, which presents a theory of Platonic love; and his Platonic
Theology 1474, in which he argues for the immortality of the soul.
fiction, in the widest
usage, whatever contrasts with what is a matter of fact. As applied to works of
fiction, however, this is not the appropriate contrast. For a work of fiction,
such as a historical novel, might turn out to be true regarding its historical
subject, without ceasing to be fiction. The correct contrast of fiction is to
non-fiction. If a work of fiction might turn out to be true, how is ‘fiction’
best defined? According to some philosophers, such as Searle, the writer of
nonfiction performs illocutionary speech acts, such as asserting that
such-and-such occurred, whereas the writer of fiction characteristically only
pretends to perform these illocutionary acts. Others hold that the core idea to
which appeal should be made is that of making-believe or imagining certain
states of affairs. Kendall Walton Mimesis as Make-Believe, 0, for instance,
holds that a work of fiction is to be construed in terms of a prop whose
function is to serve in games of make-believe. Both kinds of theory allow for
the possibility that a work of fiction might turn out to be true.
Fidanza -- Bonaventura,
Saint c.122174, theologian. Born
Giovanni di Fidanza in Bagnorea, Tuscany, he was educated at Paris, earning a
master’s degree in arts and a doctorate in theology. He joined the Franciscans
about 1243, while still a student, and was elected minister general of the
order in 1257. Made cardinal bishop of Albano by Pope Gregory X in 1274,
Bonaventure helped organize the Second Ecumenical Council of Lyons, during the
course of which he died, in July 1274. He was canonized in 1482 and named a
doctor of the church in 1587. Bonaventure wrote and preached extensively on the
relation between philosophy and theology, the role of reason in spiritual and
religious life, and the extent to which knowledge in God is obtainable by the
“wayfarer.” His basic position is nicely expressed in De reductione artium ad
theologiam “On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology”: “the manifold wisdom of
God, which is clearly revealed in sacred scripture, lies hidden in all
knowledge and in all nature.” He adds, “all divisions of knowledge are
handmaids of theology.” But he is critical of those theologians who wish to
sever the connection between faith and reason. As he argues in another famous
work, Itinerarium mentis ad deum “The Mind’s Journey unto God,” 1259, “since,
relative to our life on earth, the world is itself a ladder for ascending to
God, we find here certain traces, certain images” of the divine hand, in which
God himself is mirrored. Although Bonaventure’s own philosophical outlook is
Augustinian, he was also influenced by Aristotle, whose newly available works
he both read and appreciated. Thus, while upholdBonaventure, Saint Bonaventure,
Saint 94 94 ing the Aristotelian ideas
that knowledge of the external world is based on the senses and that the mind
comes into existence as a tabula rasa, he also contends that divine
illumination is necessary to explain both the acquisition of universal concepts
from sense images, and the certainty of intellectual judgment. His own
illuminationist epistemology seeks a middle ground between, on the one hand,
those who maintain that the eternal light is the sole reason for human knowing,
providing the human intellect with its archetypal and intelligible objects,
and, on the other, those holding that the eternal light merely influences human
knowing, helping guide it toward truth. He holds that our intellect has certain
knowledge when stable; eternal archetypes are “contuited by us [a nobis
contuita],” together with intelligible species produced by its own fallible
powers. In metaphysics, Bonaventure defends exemplarism, the doctrine that all
creation is patterned after exemplar causes or ideas in the mind of God. Like
Aquinas, but unlike Duns Scotus, he argues that it is through such ideas that
God knows all creatures. He also adopts the emanationist principle that
creation proceeds from God’s goodness, which is self-diffusive, but differs
from other emanationists, such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, in arguing
that divine emanation is neither necessary nor indirect i.e., accomplished by
secondary agents or intelligences. Indeed, he sees the views of these Islamic
philosophers as typical of the errors bound to follow once Aristotelian
rationalism is taken to its extreme. He is also well known for his
anti-Aristotelian argument that the eternity of the world something even Aquinas following Maimonides
concedes as a theoretical possibility is
demonstrably false. Bonaventure also subscribes to several other doctrines
characteristic of medieval Augustinianism: universal hylomorphism, the thesis,
defended by Ibn Gabirol and Avicenna among others, that everything other than
God is composed of matter and form; the plurality of forms, the view that
subjects and predicates in the category of substance are ordered in terms of
their metaphysical priority; and the ontological view of truth, according to
which truth is a kind of rightness perceived by the mind. In a similar vein, Bonaventure
argues that knowledge ultimately consists in perceiving truth directly, without
argument or demonstration. Bonaventure also wrote several classic works in the
tradition of mystical theology. His bestknown and most popular mystical work is
the aforementioned Itinerarium, written in 1259 on a pilgrimage to La Verna,
during which he beheld the six-winged seraph that had also appeared to Francis
of Assisi when Francis received the stigmata. Bonaventure outlines a
seven-stage spiritual journey, in which our mind moves from first considering
God’s traces in the perfections of irrational creatures, to a final state of
peaceful repose, in which our affections are “transferred and transformed into
God.” Central to his writings on spiritual life is the theme of the “three
ways”: the purgative way, inspired by conscience, which expels sin; the
illuminative way, inspired by the intellect, which imitates Christ; and the
unitive way, inspired by wisdom, which unites us to God through love.
Bonaventure’s writings most immediately influenced the work of other medieval
Augustinians, such as Matthew of Aquasparta and John Peckham, and later,
followers of Duns Scotus. But his modern reputation rests on his profound
contributions to philosophical theology, Franciscan spirituality, and mystical
thought, in all three of which he remains an authoritative source.
field theory, a theory
that proceeds by assigning values of physical quantities to the points of
space, or of space-time, and then lays down laws relating these values. For
example, a field theory might suppose a value for matter density, or a
temperature for each space-time point, and then relate these values, usually in
terms of differential equations. In these examples there is at least the tacit
assumption of a physical substance that fills the relevant region of
space-time. But no such assumption need be made. For instance, in Ficino,
Marsilio field theory 309 309 Maxwell’s
theory of the electromagnetic field, each point of space-time carries a value
for an electric and a magnetic field, and these values are then governed by
Maxwell’s equations. In general relativity, the geometry e.g., the curvature of
space-time is itself treated as a field, with lawlike connections with the
distribution of energy and matter. Formulation in terms of a field theory
resolves the problem of action at a distance that so exercised Newton and his
contemporaries. We often take causal connection to require spatial contiguity.
That is, for one entity to act causally on another, the two entities need to be
contiguous. But in Newton’s description gravitational attraction acts across
spatial distances. Similarly, in electrostatics the mutual repulsion of
electric charges is described as acting across spatial distances. In the times
of both Newton and Maxwell numerous efforts to understand such action at a
distance in terms of some space-filling mediating substance produced no viable
theory. Field theories resolve the perplexity. By attributing values of
physical quantities directly to the space-time points one can describe
gravitation, electrical and magnetic forces, and other interactions without
action at a distance or any intervening physical medium. One describes the
values of physical quantities, attributed directly to the space-time points, as
influencing only the values at immediately neighboring points. In this way the
influences propagate through space-time, rather than act instantaneously across
distances or through a medium. Of course there is a metaphysical price: on such
a description the space-time points themselves take on the role of a kind of
dematerialized ether. Indeed, some have argued that the pervasive role of field
theory in contemporary physics and the need for space-time points for a
field-theoretic description constitute a strong argument for the existence of
the space-time points. This conclusion contradicts “relationalism,” which
claims that there are only spatiotemporal relations, but no space-time points
or regions thought of as particulars. Quantum field theory appears to take on a
particularly abstract form of field theory, since it associates a quantum
mechanical operator with each space-time point. However, since operators
correspond to physical magnitudes rather than to values of such magnitudes, it
is better to think of the field-theoretic aspect of quantum field theory in
terms of the quantum mechanical amplitudes that it also associates with the
space-time points.
figure-ground, the
discrimination of an object or figure from the context or background against
which it is set. Even when a connected region is grouped together properly, as
in the famous figure that can be seen either as a pair of faces or as a vase,
it is possible to interpret the region alternately as figure and as ground.
This fact was originally elaborated in 1 by Edgar Rubin 6 1. Figureground
effects and the existence of other ambiguous figures such as the Necker cube
and the duckrabbit challenged the prevailing assumption in classical theories
of perception maintained, e.g., by J. S.
Mill and H. von Helmholtz that complex
perceptions could be understood in terms of primitive sensations constituting
them. The underdetermination of perception by the visual stimulus, noted by
Berkeley in his Essay of 1709, takes account of the fact that the retinal image
is impoverished with respect to threedimensional information. Identical
stimulation at the retina can result from radically different distal sources.
Within Gestalt psychology, the Gestalt, or pattern, was recognized to be
underdetermined by constituent parts available in proximal stimuli. M.
Wertheimer 03 observed in 2 that apparent motion could be induced by viewing a
series of still pictures in rapid succession. He concluded that perception of
the whole, as involving movement, was fundamentally different from the
perception of the static images of which it is composed. W. Köhler An example
of visual reversal from Edgar Rubin: the object depicted can be seen
alternately as a vase or as a pair of faces. The reversal occurs whether there
is a black ground and white figure or white figure and black ground. figure
figure ground 310 310 77 observed that there was no figure
ground articulation in the retinal image, and concluded that inherently
ambiguous stimuli required some autonomous selective principles of perceptual
organization. As subsequently developed by Gestalt psychologists, form is taken
as the primitive unit of perception. In philosophical treatments, figureground
effects are used to enforce the conclusion that interpretation is central to
perception, and that perceptions are no more than hypotheses based on sensory
data.
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