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Tuesday, June 9, 2020

H. P. Grice, "IMPLICATVRA" -- in twelve volumes, vol. VII.



determinatum: There’s the determinatum and there’s the indeeterminatum – “And then there’s ‘indeterminacy.”” “A determinatum is like a definitum, in that a ‘term’ is like the ‘end’ – “Thus, I am a Mercian, from Harborne.” “The Mericans were thus called because the lived at the end of England.” “Popper, who doesn’t know the first thing about this, prefers, ‘demarcatum’, which is cognate with “mercian.’” Grice was always cautious and self-apologetic. “I’m not expecting that you’ll find this to be a complete theory of implication, but that was not my goal, and the endeavour should be left for another day, etc.” But consider the detail into which he, like any other philosopher before, went when it came to what he called the ‘catalyst’ tests or ideas or tests or ideas for the implicaturum. In “Causal Theory” there are FOUR ideas. It is good to revise the treatment in “Causal.” He proposes two ideas with the first two examples and two further ideas with the two further examples. Surely his goal is to apply the FOUR ideas to his own example of the pillar box. Grice notes re: “You have not ceased eating iron” – the cxample is “a stock case of what is sometimes called " prcsupposition " and it is often held that here 1he truth of what is irnplicd is a necessary condition of the original statement's beirrg cither true or false.” So the first catalyst in the first published version concerns the value, or satisfactory value. This will be retained and sub-grouped in Essay II. “It is often held” Implicture: but often not, and trust me I won’t. “that here the truth of what is implied [implicated in the negative, entailed in the affirmative] is a necessary condition of the original statement's being either true or false.” So the first catalyst in the first published version concerns the value, or satisfactory value. This will be retained and sub-grouped in Essay II. “This might be disputed, but it is at least arguable that it is so, and its being arguable might be enough to distinguish this type of case from others.” So he is working on a ‘distinctive feature’ model. And ‘feature’ is exactly the expression he uses in Essay II. He is looking for ‘distinctive features’ for this or that implication. When phonologists speak of ‘distinctive feature’ they are being philosophical or semioticians.“I shall however for convenience assume that the common view mentioned is correct.”“This consideration clearly distinguishes “you have not ceased eating iron” from [a case of a conventional implicaturum] “poor BUT honest.”“Even if the implied proposition were false, i.e. if there were no reason in the world to contrast poverty with honesty either in general or in her case, the original statement COULD still be false.” “She [is]  poor but she [is] honest” would be false if for example she were rich and dishonest.”“One might perhaps be less comfortable about assenting to its TRUTH if the implied contrast did not in fact obtain; but the possibility of falsity is enough for the immediate purpose.”“My next experiment [test, litmus idea – that he’ll apply as one of the criteria to provide distinctive features for this or that implicaturum, with a view to identify the nature of the animal that a conversational implicaturum is] on these examples is to ask what it is in each case which could properly be said to be the vehicle of implication (to do the implying).”In Essay II, since he elaborates this at an earlier stage than when he is listing the distinctive features, he does not deal much. It is understood that in Essay II by the time he is listing the distinctive features, the vehicle is the UTTERER. But back in “Causal,” he notes: “There are AT LEAST FOUR candidates, not necessarily mutually exclusive.”“Supposing someone to have ‘uttered’ one or other of [the] sample sentences, we may ask whether the vehicle of implication would be (FIRST) WHAT the emissor communicated (or asserted or stated or explicitly conveyed), or (SECOND) the emissor himself ("Surely you’re not  implying that ….’ ) or (THIRD) the utterance  (FOURTH) his communicating, or explicitly conveying that (or again his explicitly conveying that in that way); or possibly some plurality of these items.”“As regards the first option for the vehicle, ‘what the emissor has explicitly conveyed,’ Grice takes it that “You have not ceased eating iron” and “Poor but honest” may differ.It seems correct for Grice to say in the case of “eating iron” that indeed it is the case that it is what he emissor explicitly conveys which implies that Smith has been eating iron.On the other hand, Grice feels it would be ‘incorrect,’ or improper, or bad, or unnatural or artificial, to say in the case of “poor but honest” that it is the case. Rather it is NOT the case that  it is WHAT the emissor explicitly conveys which implies that there is a contrast between, e. g., honesty and poverty.”“A sub-test on which Grice would rely is the following.If accepting that the conventional implicaturum holds (contrast between honesty and poverty) involves the emissor in accepting an hypothetical or conditional ‘if p, q,’ where 'p’ represents the original statement (“She [is] poor and she [is] honest) and 'q' represents what is implied (“There is a contrast between honesty and poverty”), it is the case that it is what the emissor explicitly conveys which is a (or the) vehicle of implication. If that chain of acceptances does not hold, it is not. To apply this rule to the “eat iron” and “poor but honest”, if the emissor accepts the implication alleged to hold in the case of “eat iron”, I should feel COMPELLED (forced, by the force of entailment) to accept the conditional or hypothetical "If you have not ceased eating iron, you may have never started.”[In “Causal,” Grice has yet not stressed the asymmetry between the affirmative and the negative in alleged cases of presupposition. When, due to the success of his implicaturum, he defines the presuppositum as a form of implicaturum, he does stress the asymmetry: the entailment holds for the affirmative, and the implicaturum for the negative). On the other hand, when it comes to a CONVENTIONAL implicaturum (“poor but honest”) if the emissor accepted the alleged implication in the case of “poor but honest”, I should NOT feel compelled to accept the conditional or hypothetical "If she was poor but honest, there is some contrast between poverty and honesty, or between her poverty and her honesty." Which would yield that in the presuppositum case, we have what is explicitly conveyed as a vehicle, but not in the case of the conventional implicaturum.The rest of the candidates (Grice lists four and allows for a combination) can be dealt with more cursorily.As regards OPTION II (second):Grice should be inclined to say with regard to both “eat iron” and “poor but honest” that the emissor could be said to have implied whatever it is that is irnplied.As regards Option III (third: the utterance): In the case of “poor but honest” it seems fairly clear that the utterance could be said, if metabolically, and animistically, to ‘imply’ a contrast.It is much less clear whether in the case of “eat iron” the utterance could be said to ‘imply’ that Smith has been eating iron.As for option IV, in neither case would it be evidently appropriate (correct, natural) to speak of the emissor’s explicitly conveying that, or of his explicitly conveying that in that way, as ‘implying’ what is implied. A third catalyst idea with which Grice wish to assail my two examples is really a TWIN idea, or catalyst, or test [That’s interesting – two sides of the same coin] that of the detachability or cancellability of the implication. Consider “eat iron.”One cannot find an alternative utterance which could be used to assert explicitly just what the utterance “Smith has not ceased from eating iron" might be used to convey explicitly, such that when this alternative utterance is used the implication that Smith never started eating iron is absent. Any way of (or any utterance uttered with a view to) conveying explicitly what is explicitly conveyed in (1) involves the implication in question. Grice expresses this fact – which he mentioned in seminars, but this is the first ‘popularisation’ -- by saying that in the case of (l) the implication is NOT detachable FROM what is asserted (or simpliciter, is not detachable). Furthermore, and here comes the twin of CANCELLABILITY: one cannot take any form of words for which both what is asserted and what is implied is the same as for (l), AND THEN ADD a further clause withholding commitment from what would otherwise be implied, with the idea of ANNULLING THE IMPLICATURUM *without* ANNULLING annulling the EXPLICITUM.  One cannot intelligibly say " Smith has left off beating his wife but I do not mean to imply that he has been beating her." But one surely can intelligibly say, “You have not ceased eating iron because you never started.”While Grice uses “Smith,” the sophisma (or Griceisma) was meant in the second person, to test the tutee’s intelligence (“Have you stopped beating your dog?”). The point is that the tutee will be offended – whereas he shouldn’t, and answer, “I never started, and I never will.”Grice expresses this fact by saying that in the case of ‘eat iron’ the implication is not cancellable or annullable (without cancelling or annulling the assertion). If we turn to “poor but honest” we find, Grice thinks, that there is quite a strong case for saying that here the implication IS detachable. Therc sccms quite a good case for maintaining that if, instead of saying " She is poor but she is honcst " I were to say, alla Frege, without any shade, " She is poor AND she is honcst", I would assert just what I would havc asscrtcct ii I had used thc original senterrce; but there would now be no irnplication of a contrast between e.g', povery and honesty. Of course, this is not a philosophical example, and it would be good to revise what Frege thought about ‘aber.’ By the time Grice is lecturing “Causal Theory” he had lectured for the Logic Paper for Strawson before the war, so Whitehead and Russell are in the air.Surely in Anglo-Saxon, the contrast is maintained, since ‘and’ means ‘versus.’“She is poor contra her being honest.”Oddly, the same contrariety is present in Deutsche, that Frege speaks, with ‘UND.”It’s different with Roman “et.” While Grecian ‘kai,’ even Plato thought barbaric!The etymology of ‘by-out’ yields ‘but.’So Grice is thinking that he can have a NEUTRAL conjoining – but ‘and’ has this echo of contrariety, which is still present in ‘an-swer, i. e. and-swear, to contradict. Perhaps a better neutral version would be. Let’s start with the past version and then the present tense version.“She was pooo-ooor, she was honest, and her parents were the same, till she met a city feller, and she lost her honest name.”In terms of the concepts CHOSEN, the emissor wants to start the ditty with pointing to the fact that she is poor – this is followed by stating that she is honest. There’s something suspicious about that.I’m sure a lady may feel offended without the ‘and’ OR ‘but’ – just the mere ‘succession’ or conjoining of ‘poor’ as pre-ceding the immediate ‘honest’ ‘triggers’ an element of contrast. The present tense seems similar: “She is poooor, she is honest, and her parents are the same, but she’ll meet a city feller, and she’ll lose her honest name.”The question whether, in thre case of ‘poor but honest,’ the implication is cancellable, is slightly more cornplex, which shouldn’t if the catalysts are thought of as twins.There is a way in which we may say that it is not cancellable, or annullable.Imagine a Tommy marching  and screaming: “She is poor but she is honest,”“HALT!” the sargent shouts.The Tommy catches the implicaturum:“though of course, sir, I do not mean to imply, sir, that there is any contrast, sir, between her poverty, sir, and her honesty, sir.”As Grice notes, this would be a puzzling and eccentric thing for a Tommy to engage in.And though the sargent might wish to quarrel with the tommy (Atkins – Tommy Atkins is the name”), an Oxonian philosopher should NOT go so far as to say that the tommy’s utterance is unintelligible – or as Vitters would say, ‘nunsense.’The sargent should rather suppose, or his lieutenant, since he knows more, that private Tommy Atkins has adopted a “most pecooliar” way of conveying the news that she was poor and honest.The sargent’s argument to the lieu-tenant:“Atkins says he means no disrespect, sir, but surely, sir, just conjoining poverty and honesty like that makes one wonder.”“Vitters: this is a Cockney song! You’re reading too much into it!”“Cockney? And why the citty feller, then – aren’t Cockneys citty fellers. I would rather, sir, think it is what Sharp would call a ‘sharp’ folk, sir, song, sir.’ The fourth and last test Grice imposes on his examples is to ask whether we would be inclined to regard the fact that the appropriate (or corresponding, since they are hardly appropriate – either of them! – Grice changes the tune as many Oxford philosophers of ordinary language do when some female joins the Union) implication is present as being a matter of the, if we may be metabolic and animistic, ‘meaning’ of some particular word or phrase occurring in the sentences in question. Grice is aware and thus grants that this may not be always a very clear or easy question to answer.Nevertheless, Grice risks the assertion that we would be fairly happy and contented to say that, as regards ‘poor but honest,’ the fact that the implication obtains is a matter of the ‘meaning’ of 'but ' – i. e. what Oxonians usually mean when they ‘but.’So far as “he has not ceased from…’ is concerned we should have at least some inclination to say that the presence of the implication is a matter of the, metabolically, ‘meaning’ of some of the words in the sentence, but we should be in some difficulty when it came to specifying precisely which this word, or words are, of which this is true. Well, it’s semantics. Why did Roman think that it was a good thing to create a lexeme, ‘cease.’“Cease” means “stop,” or ‘leave off.”It is not a natural verb, like ‘eat.’A rational creature felt the need to have this concept: ‘stop,’ ‘leave off,’ ‘cease.’The communication-function it serves is to indicate that SOMETHING has been taken place, and then this is no longer the case.“The fire ceased,” one caveman said to his wife.The wife snaps back – this is the Iron Age:“Have you ceased eating iron, by the way, daa:ling?”“I never started!”So it’s the ‘cease’ locution that does the trick – or equivalents, i.e. communication devices by which this or that emissor explicitly convey more or less the same thing: a halting of some activity.Surely the implication has nothing to do with the ‘beat’ and the ‘wife.’After third example (‘beautiful handwriting) introduced, Grice goes back to IDEA OR TEST No. 1 (the truth-value thing). Grice notes that it is plain that there is no case at all for regarding the truth of what is implied here (“Strawson is hopeless at philosophy”) as a pre-condition of the truth or falsity of what the tutor has asserted.A denial of the truth of what is implied would have no bearing at all on whether what I have asserted is true or false. So ‘beautiful handwring’ is much closer to ‘poor but honest’ than ‘cease eating iron’ in this respect. Next, as for the vehicle we have the at least four options and possible combinations.The emissor, the tutor, could certainly be said to have implied that Strawson is hopeless (provided that this is what the tutor intended to ‘get across’) and the emissor’s, the tutor’s explicitly saying that (at any rate the emissor’s saying that and no more) is also certainly a vehicle of implication. On the other hand the emissor’s words and what the emissor explicitly conveys are, Grice thinks, not naturally here characterised as the ‘vehicle’ of implication. “Beautiful handwriting” thus differs from BOTH “don’t cease eating iron” and “poor but honest” – so the idea is to have a table alla distinctive features, with YES/NO questions answered for each of the four implication, and the answers they get.As for the third twin, the result is as expected: The implication is cancellable but not detachable. And it looks as if Grice created the examples JUST to exemplify those criteria.If the tutor adds, 'I do not of course mean to imply that Strawson is no good at philosophy” the whole utterance is intelligible and linguistically impeccable, even though it may be extraordinary tutorial behaviour – at the other place, not Oxford --.The tutor can no longer be said to have, or be made responsible for having implied that Strawson was no good, even though perhaps that is what Grice’s colleagues might conclude to be the case if Grice had nothing else to say. The implication is not however, detachable.Any other way of making, in the same context of utterance, just the assertion I have made would involve the same implication.“His calligraphy is splendid and he is on time.”“Calligraphy splendid,” Ryle objected. “That’s slightly oxymoronic, Grice – ‘kallos agathos’”Finally, for TEST No. 4, ‘meaning’ of expression? The fact that the implication holds is surely NOT a matter of any particular word or phrase within the sentence which I have uttered.It is just the whole sentence. Had he gone tacit and say,“Beautiful handwriting!”Rather than“He has beautiful handwriting.”The implication SEEMS to be a matter of two particular words: the handwriting word, viz. ‘handwriting.’ And the ‘beautiful’ word, i. e. ‘beautiful.’Any lexeme expressing same concept, ‘Calligraphy unique!’would do the trick because this is damn by faint praise, or suggestio falsi, suppressio veri. So in this respect “Beautiful handwring” is certainly different from “Poor but honest” and, possibly different from “Don’t cease to eat iron!”One obvious fact should be mentioned before one passes to the fourth example (“kitchen or bedroom”).This case of implication is unlike the others in that the utterance of the sentence "Strawson has beautiful handwriting" does not really STANDARDLY involve the implication here attributed to it (but cf. “We should have lunch together sometime” meaning “Get lost” – as Grice said, “At Oxford, that’s the standard – that’s what the ‘expression’ “means”); it requires a special context (that it should be uttered at Collections) to attach the implication to its utterance. More generally: it requires a special scenario (one should avoid the structuralist Derrideian ‘context’ cf. Grice, “The general theory of context”). If back in the house, Mrs. Grice asks, “He has beautiful handwriting,” while not at Collections, the implicaturum would hold. Similarly at the “Lamb and Flag,” or “Bird and Baby.”But one gets Grice’s point. The scenario is one where Strawson is being assessed or evaluated AS A PHILOSOPHER. Spinoza’s handwriting was, Stuart Hampshire said, “terrible – which made me wonder at first whether I should actually waste my time with him.”After fourth and last example is introduced (“kitchen or bedroom”): in the case of the Test No. I (at least four possible vehicles) one can produce a strong argument in favour of holding that the fulfllment of the implication of the speaker's ignorance (or that he is introducing “or” on grounds other than Whitehead’s and Russell’s truth-functional ones) is not a precaution (or precondition) of the truth or falsity of the disjunctive statement. Suppose that the emissor KNOWS that his wife IS in the KITCHEN, that the house has only two rooms, and no passages. Even though the utterer knows that his wife is in the kitchen (as per given), the utterer can certainly still say truly (or rather truthfully) "She is IN THE HOUSE.”SCENARIOA: Where is your wife? ii. Where in your house is your wife?B: i. In the kitchen. ii. In the bedroom. iiia. She’s in the house, don’t worry – she’s in the house, last time I checked. iii. In the HOUSE (but inappropriate if mentioned in the question – unless answered: She’s not. iv. In the kitchen or in the bedroom (if it is common ground that the house only has two rooms there are more options) vi. v. I’m a bachelor.  vi. If she’s not in the bedroom, she is in the kitchen. vii. If she’s not in the kitchen, she’s in the bedroom. viii. Verbose but informative: “If she’s not in the bedroom she’s in the kitchen, and she’s not in the kitchen” Or consider By uttering “She is in the house,” the utterer is answering in a way that he is merely not being as informative as he could bc if need arose.  But the true proposition [cf. ‘propositional complex’] that his wife is IN THE HOUSE together with the true proposition that ‘THE HOUSE’ consists entirely of a ‘kitchen’ and a ‘bedroom,’ ENTAIL or yield the proposition that his wife is in the kitchen or in the bedroom. But IF to express the proposition p (“My wife is in the house, that much I can tell”) in certain circumstances (a house consisting entirely of a kitchen and a bedroom – an outback bathroom which actually belongs to the neighbour – cf. Blenheim) would be to speak truly, and p (“My wife is, do not worry, in the house”) togelher with another true proposition – assumed to be common ground, that the house consists entirely of a kitchen and a bedroom -- entails q (“My wife is in the kitchen OR in the bedroom”), surely to express what is entailed (“My wife is in the kitchen or in the bedroom”) in the same circvmstances must be, has to be to speak truly.  So we have to take it that the disjunctive statement – “kitchen or bedroom” -- does not fail to be TRUE or FALSE if the implied ignorance (or the implied consideration that the utterer is uttering ‘or’ on grounds other than the truth-functional ones that ‘introduce’ “or” for Gentzen) is in fact not realized, i. e. it is false. Secondly, as for Test No. 2 (the four or combo vehicles), Grice thinks it is fairly clear that in this case, as in the case of “beautiful handwriting”, we could say that the emissor had implies that he did not know (or that his ground is other than truth-functional – assuming that he takes the questioner to be interested in the specific location – i. e. to mean, “where IN THE HOUSE is your wife?”) and also that his conveying explicilty that (or his conveying explicitly that rather than something else, viz, in which room or where in the house she is, or ‘upstairs,’ or ‘downstairs,’ or ‘in the basement,’ or ‘in the attic,’ ‘went shopping,’ ‘at the greengrocer’ – ‘she’s been missing for three weeks’) implied that he did not know in which one of the two selected rooms his wife is ‘resident’ (and that he has grounds other than Gentzen’s truth-functional ones for the introduction of ‘or.’). Thirdly, the implication (‘kitchen or bedroom’) is in a way non-detachable, in that if in a given context the utterance of the disjunctive sentence would involve the implication that the emissor did not know in which room his his wife was (or strictly, that the emissor is proceeding along non-truth-functional grounds for the introduction of ‘or,’ or even more strictly still, that the emissor has grounds other than truth-functional for the uttering of the disjunction), this implication would also be involved in the utterance of any other form of words which would make the same disjunctive assertion (e.g., "Look, knowing her, the alternatives are she is either preparing some meal in the kitchen or snoozing in the bedroom;” “One of the following things is the case, I’m pretty confident. First thing: she is in the kitchen, since she enjoys watching the birds from the kitchen window. Second thing: she is in the bedroom, since she enjoys watching birds from the bedroom window.” Etymologically, “or” is short for ‘other,’ meaning second. So a third possibility: “I will be Anglo-Saxon: First, she is the kitchen. Second, she is in the bedroom.” “She is in the kitchen UNLESS she is in the bedroom”“She is in the kitchen IF SHE IS NOT in the bedroom.”“Well, it is not the case that she is in the KITCHEN *AND* in the bedroom, De Morgan!” She is in the kitchen, provided she is not in the bedroom” “If she is not in the kitchen, she is in the bedroom” “Bedroom, kitchen; one of the two.” “Kitchen, bedroom; check both just in case.”“Sleeping; alternatively, cooking – you do the maths.”“The choices are: bedroom and kitchen.”“My choices would be: bedroom and kitchen.”“I would think: bedroom? … kitchen?”“Disjunctively, bedroom – kitchen – kitchen – bedroom.”“In alternation: kitchen, bedroom, bedroom, kitchen – who cares?”“Exclusively, bedroom, kitchen.”ln another possible way, however, the implication could perhaps bc said to BE indeed detachable: for there will be some contexts of utterance (as Firth calls them) in which the ‘normal’ implication (that the utterer has grounds other than truth-functional for the utterance of a disjunction) will not hold.Here, for the first time, Grice brings a different scenario for ‘or’:“Thc Secretary of the Aristotelian Society, announcing ‘Our coming symposium will be in Oxford OR not take place at all” perhaps does not imply that he is has grounds other than truth-functional for the utterance of the disjunction. He is just being wicked, and making a bad-taste joke. This totally extraneous scenario points to the fact that the implication of a disjunction is cancellable.Once we re-apply it to the ‘Where in the hell in your house your wife is? I hear the noise, but can’t figure!’ Mutatis mutandi with the Secretary to The Aristotelian Socieety, a man could say, “My wife is in the kitchen or in the bedroorn.”in circumstances in which the implication (that the man has grounds other than truth-functional for the uttering of the disjunction) would normally be present, but he is not being co-operative – since one doesn’t HAVE to be co-operative (This may be odd, that one appeals to helpfulness everywhere but when it comes to the annulation!).So the man goes on, “Mind you, I am not saying that I do not know which.”This is why we love Grice. Why I love Grice. One would never think of finding that sort of wicked English humour in, say Strawson. Strawson yet says that Grice should ‘let go.’ But to many, Grice is ALWAYS humorous, and making philosophy fun, into the bargain, if that’s not the same thing. Everybody else at the Play Group (notably the ones Grice opposed to: Strawson, Austin, Hare, Hampshire, and Hart) would never play with him. Pears, Warnock, and Thomson would!“Mind you, I am not saying that I do not know which.”A: Where in the house is your wife? I need to talk to her.B: She is in the kitchen – or in the bedroom. I know where she is – but since you usually bring trouble, I will make you decide so that perhaps like Buridan’s ass, you find the choice impossible and refrain from ‘talking’ (i. e. bringing bad news) to her.A: Where is your wife? B: In the kitchen or in the bedroom. I know where she is. But I also know you are always saying that you know my wife so well. So, calculate, by the time of the day – it’s 4 a.m – where she could be. A: Where is your wife? B: In the bedroom or in the kitchen. I know where she is – but remember we were reading Heidegger yesterday? He says that a kitchen is where one cooks, and a bedroom is where one sleeps. So I’ll let you decide if Heidegger has been refuted, should you find her sleeping in the kitchen, or cooking in the bedroom.A: Where is your wife? B: In the kitchen or the bedroom. I know where she is. What you may NOT know, is that we demolished the separating wall. We have a loft now. So all I’ll say is that she may be in both!  All this might be unfriendly, unocooperative, and perhaps ungrammatical for Austen [Grice pronounced the surname so that the Aristotelian Society members might have a doubt] – if not Vitters, but, on the other hand, it would be a perfectly intelligible thing for a (married) man to say. We may not even GO to bachelors. Finally, the fact that the utterance of the disjunctive sentence normally or standardly or caeteris paribus involves the implication of the emissor's ignorance of the truth-values of the disjuncts (or more strictly, the implication of the emissor’s having grounds other than truth-functional for the uttering of the disjunctive) is, I should like to say, to be ‘explained’ – and Grice is being serious here, since Austin never cared to ‘explain,’ even if he could -- by reference to a general principle governing – or if that’s not too strong, guiding – conversation, at least of the cooperative kind the virtues of which we are supposed to be exulting to our tuttees. Exactly what this principle we should not go there. To explain why the implicaturum that the emissor is having grounds other than truth-functional ones for the utterance of a disjunction one may appeal to the emissor being rational, assuming his emissee to be rational, and abiding by something that Grice does NOT state in the imperative form, but using what he calls a Hampshire modal (Grice divides the modals as Hampshire: ‘should,’ the weakest, ‘ought’ the Hare modal, the medium, and ‘must,’ Grice, the stronges)"One, a man, a rational man, should not make conversational move communicating ‘p’ which may be characterised (in strict terms of entailment) as weaker (i.e. poor at conversational fortitude) rather than a stronger (better at conversational fortitude) one unless there is a good reason for so doing." So Gentzen is being crazey-basey if he thinks:p; therefore, p or q.For who will proceed like that?“Or” is complicated, but so is ‘if.’ The Gentzen differs from the evaluation assignemt:‘p or q’ is 1 iff p is 1 or q is 1. When we speak of ‘truth-functional’ grounds it is this assignment above we are referring to.Of courseif p, p or q [a formulation of the Gentzen introduction]is a TAUTOLOGY [which is what makes the introduction a rule of inference].In terms of entailment P Or Q (independently)  Is stronger than ‘p v q’ In that either p or q entail ‘p or q’ but the reverse is not true. Grice says that he first thought of the pragmatic rule in terms of the theory of perception, and Strawson hints at this when he says in the footnote to “Introduction to Logical theory” that the rule was pointed out by his tutor in the Logic Paper, Grice, “in a different connection.” The logic paper took place before the war, so this is early enough in Grice’s career – so the ghosts of Whitehead and Russell were there! We can call the above ‘the principle of conversational fortitude.’ This is certainly not an adequate formulation but will perhaps be good enough for Grice’s purpose in “Causal.” On the assumption that such a principle as this is of general application, one can DRAW or infer or explain the conclusion that the utterance of a disjunctive sentence would imply that the emissor has grounds other than truth-functional for the uttering of a disjunctum, given that, first, the obvious reason for not making a statemcnt which there is some call on one to make VALIDLY is that one is not in a position (or entitled) to make it, and given, second, the logical ‘fact’ that each disjunct entails the disjunctive, but not vice versa; which being so, each disjunct is stronger (bears more conversational ‘fortitude’) than the disjunctive. If the outline just given is on the right lines, Grice would wish to say, we have a reason for REFUSING (as Strawson would not!) in the case of “kitchen or bedroom” to regard the implication of the emissor having grounds other than truth-functional for the uttering of the disjunctive as being part of the ‘meaning’ (whatever that ‘means’) of 'or' – but I should doublecheck with O. P. Wood – he’s our man in ‘or’ – A man who knows about the logical relation between a disjunction and each disjunct, i. e. a man who has at least BROWSED Whitehead and Russell – and diregards Bradley’s exclusivist account -- and who also ‘knew,’ qua Kantian rational agent, about the alleged general principle or guiding conversational, could work out for hirnself, surely, that a disjunctive utterance would involve the implication which it does in fact involve. Grice insists, however, that his aim in discussing this last point – about the principle of conversational fortitude EXPLAING the generation of the implicaturum -- has been merelyto indicate the position I would wish to take up, and not to argue scriously in favour of it. Grice’s main purpose in the excursus on implication was to introduce four ideas or catalysts, or tesets – TEST No. I: truth-value; TEST No. 2: Vehicle out of four; Test No. 3/Twin Test: Annulation and Non-Detachment (is there a positive way to express this – non-detached twins as opposed to CONJOINT twins), and Test No. 4 – ‘Meaning’ of expression? -- of which Grice then goes to make some use re: the pillar box seeming red.; and to provide some conception of the ways in which each of the four tests apply or fail to apply to various types of implication. By the numbering of it, it seems that by the time of Essay II he has, typically, added an extra. It’s FIVE catalysts now, but actually, since he has two of the previous tests all rolled up in one, it is SIX CATALSTS. He’ll go back to them in Essay IV (“Indicative conditionals” with regard to ‘if’), and in Presupposition and Conversational (with regard to Example I here: “You have not ceased eating iron”). Implicaturum.He needs those catalysts. Why? It seems like he is always thinking that someone will challenge him! This is Grice: “We can now show that, it having been stipulated as being what it is, a conversational implicaturum must possess certain distinctive features, they are six. By using distinctive feature Grice is serious. He wants each of the six catalysts to apply to each type of ‘implicaturum’, so that a table can be constructed. With answers yes/no. Or rather here are some catalyst ideas which will help us to determine or individuate. Six tests for implicaturum as it were. SO THESE FEATURES – six of them – apply to three of the examples – not the ‘poor but honest’ – but the “you have not ceased eating iron,” “Beautiful handwriting,” and “Kitchen or bedroom.”First test – nothing about the ‘twin’ – it’s ANNULATION or CANCELLABILITY – as noted in “Causal Theory” – for two of the examples (‘beautiful handwriting’ and ‘kitchen or bedroom’ and NEGATIVE version of “You don’t cease to eat iron”) and the one of the pillar box – He adds a qualifier now: the annulation should best be IMPLICIT. But for the fastidious philosopher, he allows for an EXPLICITATION which may not sound grammatical enough to Austen (pronounced to rhyme with the playgroup master, or the kindergarten’s master). To assume the presence of a conversational implicaturum, the philosopher (and emissee) has to assume that the principle of conversational co-operation (and not just conversational fortitude) is being observed.However, it is mighty possible to opt out of this and most things at Oxford, i. e. the observation of this principle of conversational cooperation (or the earlier principle of conversational fortitude).It follows then that now we CAN EXPLAIN WHY CANCELLABILITY IS A DISTINCTIVE FEATURE. He left it to be understood in “Causal.”It follows then, deductively, that an implicaturum can be canceled (or annulled) in a particular case. The conversational implicaturum may be, drearily – but if that’s what the fastidious philosopher axes -- explicitly canceled, if need there be, by the addition of a clause by which the utterer states or implies that he opts out (e. g. “The pillar box seems red but it is.” “Where is your wife?” “My lips are sealed”). Then again the conversational implicaturum may be contextually (or implicitly) canceled, as Grice prefers (e. g. to a very honest person, who knows I disbelieve the examiner exists, “The loyalty examiner won’t be summoning you at any rate”). The utterance that usually would carry an implicaturum is used on an occasion that makes it clear or obvious that the utterer IS opting out without having to bore his addressee by making this obviousness explicit. SECOND DISTINCTIVE FEATURE: CONJOINING, i.e. non-detachability.There is a second litmus test or catalyst idea.Insofar as the calculation that a implicaturum is present requires, besides contextual and background information only an intuitive rational knowledge or understanding or processing of what has been explicitly conveyed (‘are you playing squash? B shows bandaged leg) (or the, shall we say, ‘conventional’ ‘arbitrary’ ‘commitment’ of the utterance), and insofar as the manner or style, of FORM, rather than MATTER, of expression should play at best absolutely no role in the calculation, it is NOT possible to find another way of explicitly conveying or putting forward the same thing, the same so-and-so (say that q follows from p) which simply ‘lacks’ the unnecessary implicaturum in question -- except [will his excluders never end?] where some special feature of the substituted version [this other way which he says is not conceivable] is itself relevant to the determination of the implicaturum (in virtue of this or that conversational maxims pertaining to the category of conversational mode. THIS BIG CAVEAT makes you wonder that Grice regretted making fun of Kant. By adopting jocularly the four conversational categories, he now finds himself in having to give an excuse or exception for those implicatura generated by a flout to what he earlier referred to as the ‘desideratum of conversational clarity,’ and which he jocularly rephrased as a self-defeating maxim, ‘be perspicuous [sic], never mind perspicacious!’If we call this feature, as Grice does in “Causal Theory,” ‘non-detachability’ (or conjoining)– in that the implicaturum cannot be detached or disjointed from any alternative expression that makes the same point -- one may expect the implicaturum carried by this or that locution to have a high degree of non-detachability. ALTERNATIVES FOR “NOT” Not, it is not the case, it is false that. There’s nothing unique about ‘not’.ALTERNATIVES FOR “AND” and, nothing, furthermore, but. There isnothing unique about ‘and’ALTERNATIVES FOR “OR”: One of the following is true. There is nothing unique about ‘or’ALTERNATIVES FOR “IF” Provided. ‘There is nothing unique about ‘if’ALTERNATIVES FOR “THE” – There is at least one and at most one. And it exists. (existence and uniqueness). There is nothing unique about ‘the’.THIS COVERS STRAWSON’S first problem.What about the other English philosophers?AUSTIN – on ‘voluntarily’ ALTERNATIVES to ‘voluntarily,’ with the will, willingly, intentionally. Nothing unique about ‘voluntarily.’STRAWSON on ‘true’ – it is the case, redundance theory, nothing. Nothing unique about ‘true’HART ON good. To say that ‘x is commendable’ is to recommend x. Nothing unique about ‘good.’HART on ‘carefully.’ Da Vinci painted Mona Lisa carefully, with caution, with precaution. Nothing unique about ‘carefully.’THIRD LITMUS TEST or idea and ATTENDING THIRD  DISTINCTIVE FEATURE. THIRD DISTINCTIVE FEATURE is in the protasis of the conditional.The implicaturum depends on the explicatum or explicitum, and a fortiori, the implicaturum cannot INVOLVE anything that the explicatum involves – There is nothing about what an emissor explicitly conveys about “or” or a disjunctum in general, which has to do with the emissor having grounds other than truth-functional for the utterance of a disjunctum.The calculation of the presence of an implicaturum presupposes an initial knowledge, or grasping, or understanding, or taking into account of the ‘conventional’ force (not in Austin’s sense, but translating Latin ‘vis’) of the expression the utterance of which carries the implicaturum.A conversational implicaturum will be a condition (but not a truth-condition), i. e. a condition that is NOT, be definition, on risk of circularity of otiosity, included in what the emissor explicitly conveys, i. e. the original specification of the expression's ‘conventional’ or arbitrary forceIf I’m saying that ‘seems’ INVOLVES, as per conventional force, ‘doubt or denial,’what’s my point? If Strawson is right that ‘if’ has the conventional force of conventionally committing the utterer with the belief that q follows from p, why bother? And if that were so, how come the implicaturum is still cancellable?Though it may not be impossible for what starts life, so to speak, as a conversational implicaturum to become conventionalized, to suppose that this is so in a given case would require special justification. (Asking Lewis). So, initially at least, a conversational implicaturum is, by definition and stipulation, not part of the sense, truth-condition, conventional force, or part of what is explicitly conveyed or put forward, or ‘meaning’ of the expression to the employment of which the impicatum attaches. FOURTH LITMUS TEST or catalyst idea. Mentioned in “Causal theory” YIELDS THE FOUTH DISICTINVE FEATURE and the FIFTH distinctive feature.FOURTH DISTINCTIVE FEATURE: in the protasis of the conditional – truth value.The alethic value – conjoined with the test about the VEHICLE --. He has these as two different tests – and correspondingly two distinctive features in “Causal”. The truth of a conversational implicaturum is not required by (is not a condition for) the truth of what is said or explicitly conveyed (what is said or explicated – the explicatum or explicitum, or what is explicitly conveyed or communicated) may be true -- what is implicated may be false – that he has beautiful handwriting, that q follows from p, that the utterer is ENDORSING what someone else said, that the utterer is recommending x, that the person who is said to act carefully has taken precaution), FIFTH DISTINCTIVE FEATURE: vehicle – this is the FOURTH vehicle of the four he mentions in “Causal”: ‘what the emissor explicitly conveys,’ ‘the emissor himself,’ the emissor’s utterance, and fourth, the emissor’s explicitly conveying, or explicitly conveying it that way --. The apodosis of the conditional – or inferrability schema, since he uses ‘since,’ rather than ‘if,’ i. e. ‘GIVEN THAT p, q. Or ‘p; therefore, q’. The implicaturum is NOT carried by what is said or the EXPLICATUM or EXPLICITUM, or is explicitly conveyed, but only by the ‘saying’ or EXPLICATING or EXPLICITING of what is said or of the explicatum or explicitum, or by 'putting it that way.’The fifth and last litmus test or catalyst idea YIELDS A SIXTH DISTINCTIVE FEATURE:Note that he never uses ‘first, second, etc.’ just the numerals, which in a lecture format, are not visible!SIXTH DISTINCTIVE FEATURE: INDETERMINACY. Due to the open character of the reasoning – and the choices available to fill the gap of the content of the propositional attitude that makes the conversational rational:“He is potentially dishonest.” “His colleagues are treacherous”Both implicatura possible for “He hasn’t been to prison at his new job at the bank – yet.”Since, to calculate a conversational implicaturum is to calculate what has to be supposed in order to preserve the supposition that the utterer is a rational, benevolent, altruist agent, and that the principle of conversational cooperation is being observed, and since there may be various possible specific explanations or alternatives that fill the gap here – as to what is the content of the psychological attitude to be ascribed to the utterer, a list of which may be open, or open-ended, the conversational implicaturum in such cases will technically be an open-ended disjunction of all such specific explanations, which may well be infinitely non-numerable. Since the list of these IS open, the implicaturum will have just the kind of INDETERMINACY or lack of determinacy that an implicaturum appears in most cases to possess. indeterminacy of translation, a pair of theses derived, originally, from a thought experiment regarding radical translation first propounded by Quine in Word and Object (1960) and developed in his Ontological Relativity (1969), Theories and Things (1981), and Pursuit of Truth (1990). Radical translation is an imaginary context in which a field linguist is faced with the challenge of translating a hitherto unknown language. Furthermore, it is stipulated that the linguist has no access to bilinguals and that the language to be translated is historically unrelated to that of the linguist. Presumably, the only data the linguist has to go on are the observable behaviors of incompleteness indeterminacy of translation 422 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 422 native speakers amid the publicly observable objects of their environment. (1) The strong thesis of indeterminacy, indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences as wholes, is the claim that in the context of radical translation a linguist (or linguists) could construct a number of manuals for translating the (natives’) source language into the (linguists’) target language such that each manual could be consistent with all possible behavior data and yet the manuals could diverge with one another in countless places in assigning different target-language sentences (holophrastically construed) as translations of the same source-language sentences (holophrastically construed), diverge even to the point where the sentences assigned have conflicting truth-values; and no further data, physical or mental, could single out one such translation manual as being the uniquely correct one. All such manuals, which are consistent with all the possible behavioral data, are correct. (2) The weak thesis of indeterminacy, indeterminacy of reference (or inscrutability of reference), is the claim that given all possible behavior data, divergent target-language interpretations of words within a source-language sentence could offset one another so as to sustain different targetlanguage translations of the same source-language sentence; and no further data, physical or mental, could single out one such interpretation as the uniquely correct one. All such interpretations, which are consistent with all the possible behavioral data, are correct. This weaker sort of indeterminacy takes two forms: an ontic form and a syntactic form. Quine’s famous example where the source-language term ‘gavagai’ could be construed either as ‘rabbit’, ‘undetached rabbit part’, ‘rabbithood’, etc. (see Word and Object), and his proxy function argument where different ontologies could be mapped onto one another (see Ontological Relativity, Theories and Things, and Pursuit of Truth), both exemplify the ontic form of indeterminacy of reference. On the other hand, his example of the Japanese classifier, where a particular three-word construction of Japanese can be translated into English such that the third word of the construction can be construed with equal justification either as a term of divided reference or as a mass term (see Ontological Relativity and Pursuit of Truth), exemplifies the syntactic form of indeterminacy of reference.

indexical: Bradley’s thisness, and whatness – “Grice is improving on Scotus: Aristotle’s tode ti is exactly Bradley’s thisness whatness – and more familiar to the English ear than Scotus feminine ‘haecceitas.’” “Russell, being pretentious, call Bradley’s “thisness” and “thatness,” but not “whatness” – as a class of the ‘egocentric particular’ --  a type of expression whose semantic value is in part determined by features of the context of utterance, and hence may vary with that context. Among indexicals are the personal pronouns, such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’; demonstratives, such as ‘this’ and ‘that’; temporal expressions, such as ‘now’, ‘today’, ‘yesterday’; and locative expressions, such as ‘here’, ‘there’, etc. Although classical logic ignored indexicality, many recent practitioners, following Richard Montague, have provided rigorous theories of indexicals in the context of formal semantics. Perhaps the most plausible and thorough treatment of indexicals is by David Kaplan, a prominent philosopher of language and logic whose long-unpublished “Demonstratives” was especially influential; it eventually appeared in J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, eds., Themes from Kaplan. Kaplan argues persuasively that indexical singular terms are directly referential and a species of rigid designator. He also forcefully brings out a crucial lesson to be learned from indexicals, namely, that there are two types of meaning, which Kaplan calls “content” and “character.” A sentence containing an indexical, such as ‘I am hungry’, can be used to say different things in different contexts, in part because of the different semantic contributions made by ‘I’ in these contexts. Kaplan calls a term’s contribution to what is said in a context the term’s content. Though the content of an indexical like ‘I’ varies with its context, it will nevertheless have a single meaning in the language, which Kaplan calls the indexical’s character. This character may be conceived as a rule of function that assigns different contents to the indexical in different contexts.
implicaturum: in his Oxford seminars. Grice: “I distinguish between the ‘implicaturum’ and the ‘implicaturum.’” “The ‘implicaturum’ corresponds to Moore’s entailment.” “For the ‘pragmatic-type’ of thing, one should use ‘implicaturum.’” “The –aturum’ form is what at Clifton I learned as the future, and a ‘future’ twist it has, since it refers to the future.” “ ‘Implicaturum esse’ is, strictly, the infinitivum futurum, made out of the ‘esse’ plus the ‘indicaturum.’ We loved these things at Clifton!”
indicatum. “oριστική,” “oristike,” – The Roman ‘indicatum’ is a composite of ‘in’ plus ‘dicatum.’ The Romans were never sure about this. Literally for the Greeks it’s the ‘definitive’ – ‘horistike’ klesis, inclinatio or modus animae affectationem demonstrans indefinitivus – While indefinitivus is the transliteration, the Romans also used ‘finitivus’ ‘finitus,’ and ‘indicativus’ and ‘pronuntiativus’. ‘Grice distinguishes between the indicative mode and the informational mode. One can hardly inform oneself. Yet one can utter an utterance in the indicative mode without it being in what he calls the informational sub-mode. It’s interesting that Grice thinks he has to distinguish between the ‘informational’ and the mere ‘indicative.’ Oddly when he sets the goal to which ‘co-operation’ leads, it’s the informing/being informed, influencing/being influenced. Surely he could have simplified that by, as he later will, psi-transmission, whatever. So the emissor INDICATES, even in an imperative utterance, what his will is. All moves are primarily ‘exhibitive,’ (and the function of the mode is to EXPRESS the corresponding attitude). Only some moves are ‘protreptic.’ Grice was well aware, if perhaps not TOO aware, since Austin was so secretive, about Austin on the ‘perlocution.’ Because Austin wanted to deprieve the act from the cause of the act. Thus, Austin’s communicative act may have a causal intention, leading to this or that effect – but that would NOT be part of the philosopher’s interest. Suppose !p; whether the order is successful and Smith does get a job he is promised, it hardly matters to Kant, Austin, or Grice. Interestingly, ‘indicatum’ has the same root as ‘dic-‘, to say – but surely you don’t need to say to indicate, as in Grice’s favourite indicative mood: a hand wave signaling that the emissor knows the route or is about to leave the emissee.
directum. “Searle thought he was being witty when adapting my implicaturum to what he called an Indirect Austinian thing. Holdcroft was less obvious!” – Grice. – indirectum -- indirect discourse, also called oratio obliqua, the use of words to report what others say, but without direct quotation. When one says “John said, ‘Not every doctor is honest,’ “ one uses the words in one’s quotation directly – one uses direct discourseto make an assertion about what John said. Accurate direct discourse must get the exact words. But in indirect discourse one can use other words than John does to report what he said, e.g., “John said that some physicians are not honest.” The words quoted here capture the sense of John’s assertion (the proposition he asserted). By extension, ‘indirect discourse’ designates the use of words in reporting beliefs. One uses words to characterize the proposition believed rather than to make a direct assertion. When Alice says, “John believes that some doctors are not honest,” she uses the words ‘some doctors are not honest’ to present the proposition that John believes. She does not assert the proposition. By contrast, direct discourse, also called oratio recta, is the ordinary use of words to make assertions. Grice struggled for years as to what the ‘fundamentum distinctionis’ is between the central and the peripheric communicatum. He played with first-ground versus second-ground. He played with two different crtieria: formal/material, and dictive-non-dictive. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Holdcroft on direct and indirect communication.”
discernibile – “There’s the discernible and the indiscernible, and Leibniz was a bit of a genius in focusing on the second!” – Grice. indiscernibility: of identicals, the principle that if A and B are identical, there is no difference between A and B: everything true of A is true of B, and everything true of B is true of A; A and B have just the same properties; there is no property such that A has it while B lacks it, or B has it while A lacks it. A tempting formulation of this principle, ‘Any two things that are identical have all their properties in common’, verges on nonsense; for two things are never identical. ‘A is numerically identical with B’ means that A and B are one and the same. A and B have just the same properties because A, that is, B, has just the properties that it has. This principle is sometimes called Leibniz’s law. It should be distinguished from its converse, Leibniz’s more controversial principle of the identity of indiscernibles. A contraposed form of the indiscernibility of identicals – call it the distinctness of discernibles – reveals its point in philosophic dialectic. If something is true of A that is not true of B, or (to say the same thing differently) if something is true of B that is not true of A, then A and B are not identical; they are distinct. One uses this principle to attack identity claims. Classical arguments for dualism attempt to find something true of the mind that is not true of anything physical. For example, the mind, unlike everything physical, is indivisible. Also, the existence of the mind, unlike the existence of everything physical, cannot be doubted. This last argument shows that the distinctness of discernibles requires great care of application in intentional contexts. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Definite descriptions in Leibniz and in the vernacular.”
individuum: versus the dividuum – or divisum. Cicero’s attempt to translate ‘a-tomon.’ In metaphysics, a process whereby a universal, e.g., cat, becomes instantiated in an individual – also called a particular e.g., Minina; (2) in epistemology, a process whereby a knower discerns an individual, e.g., someone discerns Minina. The double understanding of individuation raises two distinct problems: identifying the causes of metaphysical individuation, and of epistemological individuation. In both cases the causes are referred to as the principle of individuation. Attempts to settle the metaphysical and epistemological problems of individuation presuppose an understanding of the nature of individuality. Individuality has been variously interpreted as involving one or more of the following: indivisibility, difference, division within a species, identity through time, impredicability, and non-instantiability. In general, theories of individuation try to account variously for one or more of these. Individuation may apply to both substances (e.g., Minina) and their features (e.g., Minina’s fur color), generating two different sorts of theories. The theories of the metaphysical individuation of substances most often proposed identify six types of principles: a bundle of features (Russell); space and/or time (Boethius); matter (Aristotle); form (Averroes); a decharacterized, sui generis component called bare particular (Bergmann) or haecceity (Duns Scotus); and existence (Avicenna). Sometimes several principles are combined. For example, for Aquinas the principle of individuation is matter under dimensions (materia signata). Two sorts of objections are often brought against these views of the metaphysical individuation of substances. One points out that some of these theories violate the principle of acquaintance,since they identify as individuators entities for which there is no empirical evidence. The second argues that some of these theories explain the individuation of substances in terms of accidents, thus contradicting the ontological precedence of substance over accident. The two most common theories of the epistemological individuation of substances identify spatiotemporal location and/or the features of substances as their individuators; we know a thing as an individual by its location in space and time or by its features. The objections that are brought to bear against these theories are generally based on the ineffectiveness of those principles in all situations to account for the discernment of all types of individuals. The theories of the metaphysical individuation of the features of substances fall into two groups. Some identify the substance itself as the principle of individuation; others identify some feature(s) of the substance as individuator(s). Most accounts of the epistemological individuation of the features of substances are similar to these views. The most common objections to the metaphysical theories of the individuation of features attempt to show that these theories are either incomplete or circular. It is argued, e.g., that an account of the individuation of features in terms of substance is incomplete because the individuation of the substance must also be accounted for: How would one know what tree one sees, apart from its features? However, if the substance is individuated by its features, one falls into a vicious circle. Similar points are made with respect to the epistemological theories of the individuation of features. Apart from the views mentioned, some philosophers hold that individuals are individual essentially (per se), and therefore that they do not undergo individuation. Under those conditions either there is no need for a metaphysical principle of individuation (Ockham), or else the principle of individuation is identified as the individual entity itself (Suárez).
inductum: in the narrow sense, inference to a generalization from its instances; (2) in the broad sense, any ampliative inference – i.e., any inference where the claim made by the conclusion goes beyond the claim jointly made by the premises. Induction in the broad sense includes, as cases of particular interest: argument by analogy, predictive inference, inference to causes from signs and symptoms, and confirmation of scientific laws and theories. The narrow sense covers one extreme case that is not ampliative. That is the case of mathematical induction, where the premises of the argument necessarily imply the generalization that is its conclusion. Inductive logic can be conceived most generally as the theory of the evaluation of ampliative inference. In this sense, much of probability theory, theoretical statistics, and the theory of computability are parts of inductive logic. In addition, studies of scientific method can be seen as addressing in a less formal way the question of the logic of inductive inference. The name ‘inductive logic’ has also, however, become associated with a specific approach to these issues deriving from the work of Bayes, Laplace, De Morgan, and Carnap. On this approach, one’s prior probabilities in a state of ignorance are determined or constrained by some principle for the quantification of ignorance and one learns by conditioning on the evidence. A recurrent difficulty with this line of attack is that the way in which ignorance is quantified depends on how the problem is described, with different logically equivalent descriptions leading to different prior probabilities. Carnap laid down as a postulate for the application of his inductive logic that one should always condition on one’s total evidence. This rule of total evidence is usually taken for granted, but what justification is there for it? Good pointed out that the standard Bayesian analysis of the expected value of new information provides such a justification. Pure cost-free information always has non-negative expected value, and if there is positive probability that it will affect a decision, its expected value is positive. Ramsey made the same point in an unpublished manuscript. The proof generalizes to various models of learning uncertain evidence. A deductive account is sometimes presented indubitability induction 425 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 425 where induction proceeds by elimination of possibilities that would make the conclusion false. Thus Mill’s methods of experimental inquiry are sometimes analyzed as proceeding by elimination of alternative possibilities. In a more general setting, the hypothetico-deductive account of science holds that theories are confirmed by their observational consequences – i.e., by elimination of the possibilities that this experiment or that observation falsifies the theory. Induction by elimination is sometimes put forth as an alternative to probabilistic accounts of induction, but at least one version of it is consistent with – and indeed a consequence of – probabilistic accounts. It is an elementary fact of probability that if F, the potential falsifier, is inconsistent with T and both have probability strictly between 0 and 1, then the probability of T conditional on not-F is higher than the unconditional probability of T. In a certain sense, inductive support of a universal generalization by its instances may be a special case of the foregoing, but this point must be treated with some care. In the first place, the universal generalization must have positive prior probability. (It is worth noting that Carnap’s systems of inductive logic do not satisfy this condition, although systems of Hintikka and Niiniluoto do.) In the second place, the notion of instance must be construed so the “instances” of a universal generalization are in fact logical consequences of it. Thus ‘If A is a swan then A is white’ is an instance of ‘All swans are white’ in the appropriate sense, but ‘A is a white swan’ is not. The latter statement is logically stronger than ‘If A is a swan then A is white’ and a complete report on species, weight, color, sex, etc., of individual A would be stronger still. Such statements are not logical consequences of the universal generalization, and the theorem does not hold for them. For example, the report of a man 7 feet 11¾ inches tall might actually reduce the probability of the generalization that all men are under 8 feet tall. Residual queasiness about the foregoing may be dispelled by a point made by Carnap apropos of Hempel’s discussion of paradoxes of confirmation. ‘Confirmation’ is ambiguous. ‘E confirms H’ may mean that the probability of H conditional on E is greater than the unconditional probability of H, in which case deductive consequences of H confirm H under the conditions set forth above. Or ‘E confirms H’ may mean that the probability of H conditional on E is high (e.g., greater than .95), in which case if E confirms H, then E confirms every logical consequence of H. Conflation of the two senses can lead one to the paradoxical conclusion that E confirms E & P and thus P for any statement, P.
inductivism: “A philosophy of science invented by Popper and P. K. Feyerabend as a foil for their own views. Why, I must just have well invented ‘sensism’ as a foil for my theory of implicaturum!” -- According to inductivism, a unique a priori inductive logic enables one to construct an algorithm that will compute from any input of data the best scientific theory accounting for that data.
inductum: Not deductum, -- nor abductum -- epapoge, Grecian term for ‘induction’. Especially in the logic of Aristotle, epagoge is opposed to argument by syllogism. Aristotle describes it as “a move from particulars to the universal.” E.g., premises that the skilled navigator is the best navigator, the skilled charioteer the best charioteer, and the skilled philosopher the best philosopher may support the conclusion by epagoge that those skilled in something are usually the best at it. Aristotle thought it more persuasive and clearer than the syllogistic method, since it relies on the senses and is available to all humans. The term was later applied to dialectical arguments intended to trap opponents. R.C. epicheirema, a polysyllogism in which each premise represents an enthymematic argument; e.g., ‘A lie creates disbelief, because it is an assertion that does not correspond to truth; flattery is a lie, because it is a conscious distortion of truth; therefore, flattery creates disbelief’. Each premise constitutes an enthymematic syllogism. Thus, the first premise could be expanded into the following full-fledged syllogism: ‘Every assertion that does not correspond to truth creates disbelief; a lie is an assertion that does not correspond to truth; therefore a lie creates disbelief’. We could likewise expand the second premise and offer a complete argument for it. Epicheirema can thus be a powerful tool in oral polemics, especially when one argues regressively, first stating the conclusion with a sketch of support in terms of enthymemes, and then  if challenged to do so  expanding any or all of these enthymemes into standard categorical syllogisms.
illatum: A form of the conjugation Grice enjoyed was “inferentia,” cf essentia, sententia, prudentia, etc.. – see illatum -- Cf. illatio. Consequentia. Implicatio. Grice’s implicaturum and what the emissor implicates as a variation on the logical usage.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
infima species (Latin, ‘lowest species’), a species that is not a genus of any other species. According to the theory of classification, division, and definition that is part of traditional or Aristotelian logic, every individual is a specimen of some infima species. An infima species is a member of a genus that may in turn be a species of a more inclusive genus, and so on, until one reaches a summum genus, a genus that is not a species of a more inclusive genus. Socrates and Plato are specimens of the infima specis human being (mortal rational animal), which is a species of the genus rational animal, which is a species of the genus animal, and so on, up to the summum genus substance. Whereas two specimens of animal – e.g., an individual human and an individual horse – can differ partly in their essential characteristics, no two specimens of the infima species human being can differ in essence.
infinite-off predicament, or ∞-off predicament.

infinitum: “What is not finite.” “I know that there are infinitely many stars” – an example of a stupid thing to say by the man in the street. apeiron, Grecian term meaning ‘the boundless’ or ‘the unlimited’, which evolved to signify ‘the infinite’. Anaximander introduced the term to philosophy by saying that the source of all things was apeiron. There is some disagreement about whether he meant by this the spatially antinomy apeiron unbounded, the temporally unbounded, or the qualitatively indeterminate. It seems likely that he intended the term to convey the first meaning, but the other two senses also happen to apply to the spatially unbounded. After Anaximander, Anaximenes declared as his first principle that air is boundless, and Xenophanes made his flat earth extend downward without bounds, and probably outward horizontally without limit as well. Rejecting the tradition of boundless principles, Parmenides argued that “what-is” must be held within determinate boundaries. But his follower Melissus again argued that what-is must be boundless  in both time and space  for it can have no beginning or end. Another follower of Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, argued that if there are many substances, antinomies arise, including the consequences that substances are both limited and unlimited apeira in number, and that they are so small as not to have size and so large as to be unlimited in size. Rejecting monism, Anaxagoras argued for an indefinite number of elements that are each unlimited in size, and the Pythagorean Philolaus made limiters perainonta and unlimiteds apeira the principles from which all things are composed. The atomists Leucippus and Democritus conceived of a boundless universe, partly full of an infinite number of atoms and partly void; and in the universe are countless apeiroi worlds. Finally Aristotle arrived at an abstract understanding of the apeiron as “the infinite,” claiming to settle paradoxes about the boundless by allowing for real quantities to be infinitely divisible potentially, but not actually Physics III.48. The development of the notion of the apeiron shows how Grecian philosophers evolved ever more abstract philosophical ideas from relatively concrete conceptions.  Infinity -- Grice thougth that “There are infinitely many stars” was a stupid thing to say -- diagonal procedure, a method, originated by Cantor, for showing that there are infinite sets that cannot be put in one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers i.e., enumerated. For example, the method can be used to show that the set of real numbers x in the interval 0 ‹ x m 1 is not enumerable. Suppose x0, x1, x2, . . . were such an enumeration x0 is the real correlated with 0; x1, the real correlated with 1; and so on. Then consider the list formed by replacing each real in the enumeration with the unique non-terminating decimal fraction representing it: The first decimal fraction represents x0; the second, x1; and so on. By diagonalization we select the decimal fraction shown by the arrows: and change each digit xnn, taking care to avoid a terminating decimal. This fraction is not on our list. For it differs from the first in the tenths place, from the second in the hundredths place, and from the third in the thousandths place, and so on. Thus the real it represents is not in the supposed enumeration. This contradicts the original assumption. The idea can be put more elegantly. Let f be any function such that, for each natural number n, fn is a set of natural numbers. Then there is a set S of natural numbers such that n 1 S S n 2 fn. It is obvious that, for each n, fn & S.  Infinity -- eternal return, the doctrine that the same events, occurring in the same sequence and involving the same things, have occurred infinitely many times in the past and will occur infinitely many times in the future. Attributed most notably to the Stoics and Nietzsche, the doctrine is antithetical to philosophical and religious viewpoints that claim that the world order is unique, contingent in part, and directed toward some goal. The Stoics interpret eternal return as the consequence of perpetual divine activity imposing exceptionless causal principles on the world in a supremely rational, providential way. The world, being the best possible, can only be repeated endlessly. The Stoics do not explain why the best world cannot be everlasting, making repetition unnecessary. It is not clear whether Nietzsche asserted eternal return as a cosmological doctrine or only as a thought experiment designed to confront one with the authenticity of one’s life: would one affirm that life even if one were consigned to live it over again without end? On either interpretation, Nietzsche’s version, like the Stoic version, stresses the inexorability and necessary interconnectedness of all things and events, although unlike the Stoic version, it rejects divine providence.  infinitary logic, the logic of expressions of infinite length. Quine has advanced the claim that firstorder logic (FOL) is the language of science, a position accepted by many of his followers. Howinferential justification infinitary logic 428 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 428 ever, many important notions of mathematics and science are not expressible in FOL. The notion of finiteness, e.g., is central in mathematics but cannot be expressed within FOL. There is no way to express such a simple, precise claim as ‘There are only finitely many stars’ in FOL. This and related expressive limitations in FOL seriously hamper its applicability to the study of mathematics and have led to the study of stronger logics. There have been various approaches to getting around the limitations by the study of so-called strong logics, including second-order logic (where one quantifies over sets or properties, not just individuals), generalized quantifiers (where one adds quantifiers in addition to the usual ‘for all’ and ‘there exists’), and branching quantifiers (where notions of independence of variables is introduced). One of the most fruitful methods has been the introduction of idealized “infinitely long” statements. For example, the above statement about the stars would be formalized as an infinite disjunction: there is at most one star, or there are at most two stars, or there are at most three stars, etc. Each of these disjuncts is expressible in FOL. The expressive limitations in FOL are closely linked with Gödel’s famous completeness and incompleteness theorems. These results show, among other things, that any attempt to systematize the laws of logic is going to be inadequate, one way or another. Either it will be confined to a language with expressive limitations, so that these notions cannot even be expressed, or else, if they can be expressed, then an attempt at giving an effective listing of axioms and rules of inference for the language will fall short. In infinitary logic, the rules of inference can have infinitely many premises, and so are not effectively presentable. Early work in infinitary logic used cardinality as a guide: whether or not a disjunction, conjunction, or quantifier string was permitted had to do only with the cardinality of the set in question. It turned out that the most fruitful of these logics was the language with countable conjunctions and finite strings of first-order quantifiers. This language had further refinements to socalled admissible languages, where more refined set-theoretic considerations play a role in determining what counts as a formula. Infinitary languages are also connected with strong axioms of infinity, statements that do not follow from the usual axioms of set theory but for which one has other evidence that they might well be true, or at least consistent. In particular, compact cardinals are infinite cardinal numbers where the analogue of the compactness theorem of FOL generalizes to the associated infinitary language. These cardinals have proven to be very important in modern set theory. During the 1990s, some infinitary logics played a surprising role in computer science. By allowing arbitrarily long conjunctions and disjunctions, but only finitely many variables (free or bound) in any formula, languages with attractive closure properties were found that allowed the kinds of inductive procedures of computer science, procedures not expressible in FOL. -- infinite regress argument, a distinctively philosophical kind of argument purporting to show that a thesis is defective because it generates an infinite series when either (form A) no such series exists or (form B) were it to exist, the thesis would lack the role (e.g., of justification) that it is supposed to play. The mere generation of an infinite series is not objectionable. It is misleading therefore to use ‘infinite regress’ (or ‘regress’) and ‘infinite series’ equivalently. For instance, both of the following claims generate an infinite series: (1) every natural number has a successor that itself is a natural number, and (2) every event has a causal predecessor that itself is an event. Yet (1) is true (arguably, necessarily true), and (2) may be true for all that logic can say about the matter. Likewise, there is nothing contrary to logic about any of the infinite series generated by the suppositions that (3) every free act is the consequence of a free act of choice; (4) every intelligent operation is the result of an intelligent mental operation; (5) whenever individuals x and y share a property F there exists a third individual z which paradigmatically has F and to which x and y are somehow related (as copies, by participation, or whatnot); or (6) every generalization from experience is inductively inferable from experience by appeal to some other generalization from experience. What Locke (in the Essay concerning Human Understanding) objects to about the theory of free will embodied in (3) and Ryle (in The Concept of Mind) objects to about the “intellectualist leginfinite, actual infinite regress argument 429 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 429 end” embodied in (4) can therefore be only that it is just plain false as a matter of fact that we perform an infinite number of acts of choice or operations of the requisite kinds. In effect their infinite regress arguments are of form A: they argue that the theories concerned must be rejected because they falsely imply that such infinite series exist. Arguably the infinite regress arguments employed by Plato (in the Parmenides) regarding his own theory of Forms and by Popper (in the Logic of Scientific Discovery) regarding the principle of induction proposed by Mill, are best construed as having form B, their objections being less to (5) or (6) than to their epistemic versions: (5*) that we can understand how x and y can share a property F only if we understand that there exists a third individual (the “Form” z) which paradigmatically has F and to which x and y are related; and (6*) that since the principle of induction must itself be a generalization from experience, we are justified in accepting it only if it can be inferred from experience by appeal to a higherorder, and justified, inductive principle. They are arguing that because the series generated by (5) and (6) are infinite, the epistemic enlightenment promised by (5*) and (6*) will forever elude us. When successful, infinite regress arguments can show us that certain sorts of explanation, understanding, or justification are will-o’-thewisps. As Passmore has observed (in Philosophical Reasoning) there is an important sense of ‘explain’ in which it is impossible to explain predication. We cannot explain x’s and y’s possession of the common property F by saying that they are called by the same name (nominalism) or fall under the same concept (conceptualism) any more than we can by saying that they are related to the same form (Platonic realism), since each of these is itself a property that x and y are supposed to have in common. Likewise, it makes no sense to try to explain why anything at all exists by invoking the existence of something else (such as the theist’s God). The general truths that things exist, and that things may have properties in common, are “brute facts” about the way the world is. Some infinite regress objections fail because they are directed at “straw men.” Bradley’s regress argument against the pluralist’s “arrangement of given facts into relations and qualities,” from which he concludes that monism is true, is a case in point. He correctly argues that if one posits the existence of two or more things, then there must be relations of some sort between them, and then (given his covert assumption that these relations are things) concludes that there must be further relations between these relations ad infinitum. Bradley’s regress misfires because a pluralist would reject his assumption. Again, some regress arguments fail because they presume that any infinite series is vicious. Aquinas’s regress objection to an infinite series of movers, from which he concludes that there must be a prime mover, involves this sort of confusion. -- infinity, in set theory, the property of a set whereby it has a proper subset whose members can be placed in one-to-one correspondence with all the members of the set, as the even integers can be so arranged in respect to the natural numbers by the function f(x) = x/2, namely: Devised by Richard Dedekind in defiance of the age-old intuition that no part of a thing can be as large as the thing, this set-theoretical definition of ‘infinity’, having been much acclaimed by philosophers like Russell as a model of conceptual analysis that philosophers were urged to emulate, can elucidate the putative infinity of space, time, and even God, his power, wisdom, etc. If a set’s being denumerable – i.e., capable of having its members placed in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers – can well appear to define much more simply what the infinity of an infinite set is, Cantor exhibited the real numbers (as expressed by unending decimal expansions) as a counterexample, showing them to be indenumerable by means of his famous diagonal argument. Suppose all the real numbers between 0 and 1 are placed in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, thus: Going down the principal diagonal, we can construct a new real number, e.g., .954 . . . , not found in the infinite “square array.” The most important result in set theory, Cantor’s theorem, is denied its full force by the maverick followers infinity infinity 430 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 430 of Skolem, who appeal to the fact that, though the real numbers constructible in any standard axiomatic system will be indenumerable relative to the resources of the system, they can be seen to be denumerable when viewed from outside it. Refusing to accept the absolute indenumerability of any set, the Skolemites, in relativizing the notion to some system, provide one further instance of the allure of relativism. More radical still are the nominalists who, rejecting all abstract entities and sets in particular, might be supposed to have no use for Cantor’s theorem. Not so. Assume with Democritus that there are infinitely many of his atoms, made of adamant. Corresponding to each infinite subset of these atoms will be their mereological sum or “fusion,” namely a certain quantity of adamant. Concrete entities acceptable to the nominalist, these quantities can be readily shown to be indenumerable. Whether Cantor’s still higher infinities beyond F1 admit of any such nominalistic realization remains a largely unexplored area. Aleph-zero or F0 being taken to be the transfinite number of the natural numbers, there are then F1 real numbers (assuming the continuum hypothesis), while the power set of the reals has F2 members, and the power set of that F3 members, etc. In general, K2 will be said to have a greater number (finite or transfinite) of members than K1 provided the members of K1 can be put in one-to-one correspondence with some proper subset of K2 but not vice versa. Skepticism regarding the higher infinities can trickle down even to F0, and if both Aristotle and Kant, the former in his critique of Zeno’s paradoxes, the latter in his treatment of cosmological antinomies, reject any actual, i.e. completed, infinite, in our time Dummett’s return to verificationism, as associated with the mathematical intuitionism of Brouwer, poses the keenest challenge. Recognition-transcendent sentences like ‘The total number of stars is infinite’ are charged with violating the intersubjective conditions required for a speaker of a language to manifest a grasp of their meaning.
Strawson, or Grice’s favourite informalist: THE INFORMALISTS – A Group under which Grice situated his post-generational Strawson and his pre-generational Ryle. informal fallacy, an error of reasoning or tactic of argument that can be used to persuade someone with whom you are reasoning that your argument is correct when really it is not. The standard treatment of the informal fallacies in logic textbooks draws heavily on Aristotle’s list, but there are many variants, and new fallacies have often been added, some of which have gained strong footholds in the textbooks. The word ‘informal’ indicates that these fallacies are not simply localized faults or failures in the given propositions (premises and conclusion) of an argument to conform to a standard of semantic correctness (like that of deductive logic), but are misuses of the argument in relation to a context of reasoning or type of dialogue that an arguer is supposed to be engaged in. Informal logic is the subfield of logical inquiry that deals with these fallacies. Typically, informal fallacies have a pragmatic (practical) aspect relating to how an argument is being used, and also a dialectical aspect, pertaining to a context of dialogue – normally an exchange between two participants in a discussion. Both aspects are major concerns of informal logic. Logic textbooks classify informal fallacies in various ways, but no clear and widely accepted system of classification has yet become established. Some textbooks are very inventive and prolific, citing many different fallacies, including novel and exotic ones. Others are more conservative, sticking with the twenty or so mainly featured in or derived from Aristotle’s original treatment, with a few widely accepted additions. The paragraphs below cover most of these “major” or widely featured fallacies, the ones most likely to be encountered by name in the language of everyday educated conversation. The genetic fallacy is the error of drawing an inappropriate conclusion about the goodness or badness of some property of a thing from the goodness or badness of some property of the origin of that thing. For example, ‘This medication was derived from a plant that is poisonous; therefore, even though my physician advises me to take it, I conclude that it would be very bad for me if I took it.’ The error is inappropriately arguing from the origin of the medication to the conclusion that it must be poisonous in any form or situation. The genetic fallacy is often construed very broadly making it coextensive with the personal attack type of argument (see the description of argumentum ad hominem below) that condemns a prior argument by condemning its source or proponent. Argumentum ad populum (argument to the people) is a kind of argument that uses appeal to popular sentiments to support a conclusion. Sometimes called “appeal to the gallery” or “appeal to popular pieties” or even “mob appeal,” this kind of argument has traditionally been portrayed as fallacious. However, there infinity, axiom of informal fallacy 431 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 431 need be nothing wrong with appealing to popular sentiments in argument, so long as their evidential value is not exaggerated. Even so, such a tactic can be fallacious when the attempt to arouse mass enthusiasms is used as a substitute to cover for a failure to bring forward the kind of evidence that is properly required to support one’s conclusion. Argumentum ad misericordiam (argument to pity) is a kind of argument that uses an appeal to pity, sympathy, or compassion to support its conclusion. Such arguments can have a legitimate place in some discussions – e.g., in appeals for charitable donations. But they can also put emotional pressure on a respondent in argument to try to cover up a weak case. For example, a student who does not have a legitimate reason for a late assignment might argue that if he doesn’t get a high grade, his disappointed mother might have a heart attack. The fallacy of composition is the error of arguing from a property of parts of a whole to a property of the whole – e.g., ‘The important parts of this machine are light; therefore this machine is light.’ But a property of the parts cannot always be transferred to the whole. In some cases, examples of the fallacy of composition are arguments from all the parts to a whole, e.g. ‘Everybody in the country pays her debts. Therefore the country pays its debts.’ The fallacy of division is the converse of that of composition: the error of arguing from a property of the whole to a property of its parts – e.g., ‘This machine is heavy; therefore all the parts of this machine are heavy.’ The problem is that the property possessed by the whole need not transfer to the parts. The fallacy of false cause, sometimes called post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this), is the error of arguing that because two events are correlated with one another, especially when they vary together, the one is the cause of the other. For example, there might be a genuine correlation between the stork population in certain areas of Europe and the human birth rate. But it would be an error to conclude, on that basis alone, that the presence of storks causes babies to be born. In general, however, correlation is good, if sometimes weak, evidence for causation. The problem comes in when the evidential strength of the correlation is exaggerated as causal evidence. The apparent connection could just be coincidence, or due to other factors that have not been taken into account, e.g., some third factor that causes both the events that are correlated with each other. The fallacy of secundum quid (neglecting qualifications) occurs where someone is arguing from a general rule to a particular case, or vice versa. One version of it is arguing from a general rule while overlooking or suppressing legitimate exceptions. This kind of error has also often been called the fallacy of accident. An example would be the argument ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of speech; therefore it is my right to shout “Fire” in this crowded theater if I want to.’ The other version of secundum quid, sometimes also called the fallacy of converse accident, or the fallacy of hasty generalization, is the error of trying to argue from a particular case to a general rule that does not properly fit that case. An example would be the argument ‘Tweetie [an ostrich] is a bird that does not fly; therefore birds do not fly’. The fault is the failure to recognize or acknowledge that Tweetie is not a typical bird with respect to flying. Argumentum consensus gentium (argument from the consensus of the nations) is a kind that appeals to the common consent of mankind to support a conclusion. Numerous philosophers and theologians in the past have appealed to this kind of argument to support conclusions like the existence of God and the binding character of moral principles. For example, ‘Belief in God is practically universal among human beings past and present; therefore there is a practical weight of presumption in favor of the truth of the proposition that God exists’. A version of the consensus gentium argument represented by this example has sometimes been put forward in logic textbooks as an instance of the argumentum ad populum (described above) called the argument from popularity: ‘Everybody believes (accepts) P as true; therefore P is true’. If interpreted as applicable in all cases, the argument from popularity is not generally sound, and may be regarded as a fallacy. However, if regarded as a presumptive inference that only applies in some cases, and as subject to withdrawal where evidence to the contrary exists, it can sometimes be regarded as a weak but plausible argument, useful to serve as a provisional guide to prudent action or reasoned commitment. Argumentum ad hominem (literally, argument against the man) is a kind of argument that uses a personal attack against an arguer to refute her argument. In the abusive or personal variant, the character of the arguer (especially character for veracity) is attacked; e.g., ‘You can’t believe what Smith says – he is a liar’. In evaluating testimony (e.g., in legal cross-examination), attacking an arguer’s character can be legitimate in some cases. Also in political debate, character can be a legitimate issue. However, ad hominem arguinformal fallacy informal fallacy 432 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 432 ments are commonly used fallaciously in attacking an opponent unfairly – e.g., where the attack is not merited, or where it is used to distract an audience from more relevant lines of argument. In the circumstantial variant, an arguer’s personal circumstances are claimed to be in conflict with his argument, implying that the arguer is either confused or insincere; e.g., ‘You don’t practice what you preach’. For example, a politician who has once advocated not raising taxes may be accused of “flip-flopping” if he himself subsequently favors legislation to raise taxes. This type of argument is not inherently fallacious, but it can go badly wrong, or be used in a fallacious way, for example if circumstances changed, or if the alleged conflict was less serious than the attacker claimed. Another variant is the “poisoning the well” type of ad hominem argument, where an arguer is said to have shown no regard for the truth, the implication being that nothing he says henceforth can ever be trusted as reliable. Yet another variant of the ad hominem argument often cited in logic textbooks is the tu quoque (you-too reply), where the arguer attacked by an ad hominem argument turns around and says, “What about you? Haven’t you ever lied before? You’re just as bad.” Still another variant is the bias type of ad hominem argument, where one party in an argument charges the other with not being honest or impartial or with having hidden motivations or personal interests at stake. Argumentum ad baculum (argument to the club) is a kind of argument that appeals to a threat or to fear in order to support a conclusion, or to intimidate a respondent into accepting it. Ad baculum arguments often take an indirect form; e.g., ‘If you don’t do this, harmful consequences to you might follow’. In such cases the utterance can often be taken as a threat. Ad baculum arguments are not inherently fallacious, because appeals to threatening or fearsome sanctions – e.g., harsh penalties for drunken driving – are not necessarily failures of critical argumentation. But because ad baculum arguments are powerful in eliciting emotions, they are often used persuasively as sophistical tactics in argumentation to avoid fulfilling the proper requirements of a burden of proof. Argument from authority is a kind of argument that uses expert opinion (de facto authority) or the pronouncement of someone invested with an institutional office or title (de jure authority) to support a conclusion. As a practical but fallible method of steering discussion toward a presumptive conclusion, the argument from authority can be a reasonable way of shifting a burden of proof. However, if pressed too hard in a discussion or portrayed as a better justification for a conclusion than the evidence warrants, it can become a fallacious argumentum ad verecundiam (see below). It should be noted, however, that arguments based on expert opinions are widely accepted both in artificial intelligence and everyday argumentation as legitimate and sound under the right conditions. Although arguments from authority have been strongly condemned during some historical periods as inherently fallacious, the current climate of opinion is to think of them as acceptable in some cases, even if they are fallible arguments that can easily go wrong or be misused by sophistical persuaders. Argumentum ad judicium represents a kind of knowledge-based argumentation that is empirical, as opposed to being based on an arguer’s personal opinion or viewpoint. In modern terminology, it apparently refers to an argument based on objective evidence, as opposed to somebody’s subjective opinion. The term appears to have been invented by Locke to contrast three commonly used kinds of arguments and a fourth special type of argument. The first three types of argument are based on premises that the respondent of the argument is taken to have already accepted. Thus these can all be called “personal” in nature. The fourth kind of argument – argumentum ad judicium – does not have to be based on what some person accepts, and so could perhaps be called “impersonal.” Locke writes that the first three kinds of arguments can dispose a person for the reception of truth, but cannot help that person to the truth. Only the argumentum ad judicium can do that. The first three types of arguments come from “my shamefacedness, ignorance or error,” whereas the argumentum ad judicium “comes from proofs and arguments and light arising from the nature of things themselves.” The first three types of arguments have only a preparatory function in finding the truth of a matter, whereas the argumentum ad judicium is more directly instrumental in helping us to find the truth. Argumentum ad verecundiam (argument to reverence or respect) is the fallacious use of expert opinion in argumentation to try to persuade someone to accept a conclusion. In the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) Locke describes such arguments as tactics of trying to prevail on the assent of someone by portraying him as irreverent or immodest if he does not readily yield to the authority of some learned informal fallacy informal fallacy 433 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 433 opinion cited. Locke does not claim, however, that all appeals to expert authority in argument are fallacious. They can be reasonable if used judiciously. Argumentum ad ignorantiam (argument to ignorance) takes the following form: a proposition a is not known or proved to be true (false); therefore A is false (true). It is a negative type of knowledge-based or presumptive reasoning, generally not conclusive, but it is nevertheless often non-fallacious in balance-of-consideration cases where the evidence is inconclusive to resolve a disputed question. In such cases it is a kind of presumption-based argumentation used to advocate adopting a conclusion provisionally, in the absence of hard knowledge that would determine whether the conclusion is true or false. An example would be: Smith has not been heard from for over seven years, and there is no evidence that he is alive; therefore it may be presumed (for the purpose of settling Smith’s estate) that he is dead. Arguments from ignorance ought not to be pressed too hard or used with too strong a degree of confidence. An example comes from the U.S. Senate hearings in 1950, in which Senator Joseph McCarthy used case histories to argue that certain persons in the State Department should be considered Communists. Of one case he said, “I do not have much information on this except the general statement of the agency that there is nothing in the files to disprove his Communist connections.” The strength of any argument from ignorance depends on the thoroughness of the search made. The argument from ignorance can be used to shift a burden of proof merely on the basis of rumor, innuendo, or false accusations, instead of real evidence. Ignoratio elenchi (ignorance of refutation) is the traditional name, following Aristotle, for the fault of failing to keep to the point in an argument. The fallacy is also called irrelevant conclusion or missing the point. Such a failure of relevance is essentially a failure to keep closely enough to the issue under discussion. Suppose that during a criminal trial, the prosecutor displays the victim’s bloody shirt and argues at length that murder is a horrible crime. The digression may be ruled irrelevant to the question at issue of whether the defendant is guilty of murder. Alleged failures of this type in argumentation are sometimes quite difficult to judge fairly, and a ruling should depend on the type of discussion the participants are supposed to be engaged in. In some cases, conventions or institutional rules of procedure – e.g. in a criminal trial – are aids to determining whether a line of argumentation should be judged relevant or not. Petitio principii (asking to be granted the “principle” or issue of the discussion to be proved), also called begging the question, is the fallacy of improperly arguing in a circle. Circular reasoning should not be presumed to be inherently fallacious, but can be fallacious where the circular argument has been used to disguise or cover up a failure to fulfill a burden of proof. The problem arises where the conclusion that was supposed to be proved is presumed within the premises to be granted by the respondent of the argument. Suppose I ask you to prove that this bicycle (the ownership of which is subject to dispute) belongs to Hector, and you reply, “All the bicycles around here belong to Hector.” The problem is that without independent evidence that shows otherwise, the premise that all the bicycles belong to Hector takes for granted that this bicycle belongs to Hector, instead of proving it by properly fulfilling the burden of proof. The fallacy of many questions (also called the fallacy of complex question) is the tactic of packing unwarranted presuppositions into a question so that any direct answer given by the respondent will trap her into conceding these presuppositions. The classical case is the question, “Have you stopped beating your spouse?” No matter how the respondent answers, yes or no, she concedes the presuppositions that (a) she has a spouse, and (b) she has beaten that spouse at some time. Where one or both of these presumptions are unwarranted in the given case, the use of this question is an instance of the fallacy of many questions. The fallacy of equivocation occurs where an ambiguous word has been used more than once in an argument in such a way that it is plausible to interpret it in one way in one instance of its use and in another way in another instance. Such an argument may seem persuasive if the shift in the context of use of the word makes these differing interpretations plausible. Equivocation, however, is generally seriously deceptive only in longer sequences of argument where the meaning of a word or phrase shifts subtly but significantly. A simplistic example will illustrate the gist of the fallacy: ‘The news media should present all the facts on anything that is in the public interest; the public interest in lives of movie stars is intense; therefore the news media should present all the facts on the private lives of movie stars’. This argument goes from plausible premises to an implausible conclusion by trading on the ambiguity of ‘public interest’. In one sense informal fallacy informal fallacy 434 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 434 it means ‘public benefit’ while in another sense it refers to something more akin to curiosity. Amphiboly (double arrangement) is a type of traditional fallacy (derived from Aristotle’s list of fallacies) that refers to the use of syntactically ambiguous sentences like ‘Save soap and waste paper’. Although the logic textbooks often cite examples of such sentences as fallacies, they have never made clear how they could be used to deceive in a serious discussion. Indeed, the example cited is not even an argument, but simply an ambiguous sentence. In cases of some advertisements like ‘Two pizzas for one special price’, however, one can see how the amphiboly seriously misleads readers into thinking they are being offered two pizzas for the regular price of one. Accent is the use of shifting stress or emphasis in speech as a means of deception. For example, if a speaker puts stress on the word ‘created’ in ‘All men were created equal’ it suggests (by implicaturum) the opposite proposition to ‘All men are equal’, namely ‘Not all men are (now) equal’. The oral stress allows the speaker to covertly suggest an inference the hearer is likely to draw, and to escape commitment to the conclusion suggested by later denying he said it. The slippery slope argument, in one form, counsels against some contemplated action (or inaction) on the ground that, once taken, it will be a first step in a sequence of events that will be difficult to resist and will (or may or must) lead to some dangerous (or undesirable or disastrous) outcome in the end. It is often argued, e.g., that once you allow euthanasia in any form, such as the withdrawal of heroic treatments of dying patients in hospitals, then (through erosion of respect for human life), you will eventually wind up with a totalitarian state where old, feeble, or politically troublesome individuals are routinely eliminated. Some slippery slope arguments can be reasonable, but they should not be put forward in an exaggerated way, supported with insufficient evidence, or used as a scare tactic.
informal logic: Grice preferred ‘material’ logic – “What Strawson means by ‘informal logic’ is best expressed by ‘ordinary-language logic,’ drawing on Bergmann’s distinction between the ordinary and the ideal.” Also called practical logic, the use of logic to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments as they occur in contexts of discourse in everyday conversations. In informal logic, arguments are assessed on a case-by-case basis, relative to how the argument was used in a given context to persuade someone to accept the conclusion, or at least to give some reason relevant to accepting the conclusion.
informatum – “What has ‘forma’ to do with ‘inform’?” – Grice. While etymologically it means ‘to mould,’ Lewis and Short render ‘informare’ as “to inform, instruct, educate (syn.: “instruere, instituere): artes quibus aetas puerilis ad humanitatem informari solet,” Cic. Arch. 3, 4: “animus a natura bene informatus,” formed, id. Off. 1, 4, 13. I. e. “the soul is well informed by nature.” Informativus – informational. Grice distinguishes between the indicative and the informational. “Surely it is stupid to inform myself, but not Strawson, that it is raining. Grammarians don’t care, but I do!” information theory, also called communication theory, a primarily mathematical theory of communication. Prime movers in its development include Claude Shannon, H. Nyquist, R. V. L. Hartley, Norbert Wiener, Boltzmann, and Szilard. Original interests in the theory were largely theoretical or applied to telegraphy and telephony, and early development clustered around engineering problems in such domains. Philosophers (Bar-Hillel, Dretske, and Sayre, among others) are mainly interested in information theory as a source for developing a semantic theory of information and meaning. The mathematical theory has been less concerned with the details of how a message acquires meaning and more concerned with what Shannon called the “fundamental problem of communication” – reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message (that already has a meaning) selected at another point. Therefore, the two interests in information – the mathematical and the philosophical – have remained largely orthogonal. Information is an objective (mind-independent) entity. It can be generated or carried by messages (words, sentences) or other products of cognizers (interpreters). Indeed, communication theory focuses primarily on conditions involved in the generation and transmission of coded (linguistic) messages. However, almost any event can (and usually does) generate information capable of being encoded or transmitted. For example, Colleen’s acquiring red spots can contain information about Colleen’s having the measles and graying hair can carry information about her grandfather’s aging. This information can be encoded into messages about measles or aging (respectively) and transmitted, but the information would exist independently of its encoding or transmission. That is, this information would be generated (under the right conditions) by occurrence of the measles-induced spots and the age-induced graying themselves – regardless of anyone’s actually noticing. This objective feature of information explains its potential for epistemic and semantic development by philosophers and cognitive scientists. For example, in its epistemic dimension, a single (event, message, or Colleen’s spots) that contains informal logic information theory 435 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 435 (carries) the information that Colleen has the measles is something from which one (mom, doctor) can come to know that Colleen has the measles. Generally, an event (signal) that contains the information that p is something from which one can come to know that p is the case – provided that one’s knowledge is indeed based on the information that p. Since information is objective, it can generate what we want from knowledge – a fix on the way the world objectively is configured. In its semantic dimension, information can have intentionality or aboutness. What is happening at one place (thermometer reading rising in Colleen’s mouth) can carry information about what is happening at another place (Colleen’s body temperature rising). The fact that messages (or mental states, for that matter) can contain information about what is happening elsewhere, suggests an exciting prospect of tracing the meaning of a message (or of a thought) to its informational origins in the environment. To do this in detail is what a semantic theory of information is about. The mathematical theory of information is purely concerned with information in its quantitative dimension. It deals with how to measure and transmit amounts of information and leaves to others the work of saying what (how) meaning or content comes to be associated with a signal or message. In regard to amounts of information, we need a way to measure how much information is generated by an event (or message) and how to represent that amount. Information theory provides the answer. Since information is an objective entity, the amount of information associated with an event is related to the objective probability (likelihood) of the event. Events that are less likely to occur generate more information than those more likely to occur. Thus, to discover that the toss of a fair coin came up heads contains more information than to discover this about the toss of a coin biased (.8) toward heads. Or, to discover that a lie was knowingly broadcast by a censored, state-run radio station, contains less information than that a lie was knowingly broadcast by a non-censored, free radio station (say, the BBC). A (perhaps surprising) consequence of associating amounts of information with objective likelihoods of events is that some events generate no information at all. That is, that 55 % 3125 or that water freezes at 0oC. (on a specific occasion) generates no information at all – since these things cannot be otherwise (their probability of being otherwise is zero). Thus, their occurrence generates zero information. Shannon was seeking to measure the amount of information generated by a message and the amount transmitted by its reception (or about average amounts transmissible over a channel). Since his work, it has become standard to think of the measure of information in terms of reductions of uncertainty. Information is identified with the reduction of uncertainty or elimination of possibilities represented by the occurrence of an event or state of affairs. The amount of information is identified with how many possibilities are eliminated. Although other measures are possible, the most convenient and intuitive way that this quantity is standardly represented is as a logarithm (to the base 2) and measured in bits (short for how many binary digits) needed to represent binary decisions involved in the reduction or elimination of possibilities. If person A chooses a message to send to person B, from among 16 equally likely alternative messages (say, which number came up in a fair drawing from 16 numbers), the choice of one message would represent 4 bits of information (16 % 24 or log2 16 % 4). Thus, to calculate the amount of information generated by a selection from equally likely messages (signals, events), the amount of information I of the message s is calculated I(s) % logn. If there is a range of messages (s1 . . . sN) not all of which are equally likely (letting (p (si) % the probability of any si’s occurrence), the amount of information generated by the selection of any message si is calculated I(si) % log 1/p(si) % –log p(si) [log 1/x % –log x] While each of these formulas says how much information is generated by the selection of a specific message, communication theory is seldom primarily interested in these measures. Philosophers are interested, however. For if knowledge that p requires receiving the information that p occurred, and if p’s occurrence represents 4 bits of information, then S would know that p occurred only if S received information equal to (at least) 4 bits. This may not be sufficient for S to know p – for S must receive the right amount of information in a non-deviant causal way and S must be able to extract the content of the information – but this seems clearly necessary. Other measures of information of interest in communication theory include the average information, or entropy, of a source, information theory information theory 436 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 436 I(s) % 9p(si) $ I(si), a measure for noise (the amount of information that person B receives that was not sent by person A), and for equivocation (the amount of information A wanted or tried to send to B that B did not receive). These concepts from information theory and the formulas for measuring these quantities of information (and others) provide a rich source of tools for communication applications as well as philosophical applications. informed consent, voluntary agreement in the light of relevant information, especially by a patient to a medical procedure. An example would be consent to a specific medical procedure by a competent adult patient who has an adequate understanding of all the relevant treatment options and their risks. It is widely held that both morality and law require that no medical procedures be performed on competent adults without their informed consent. This doctrine of informed consent has been featured in case laws since the 1950s, and has been a focus of much discussion in medical ethics. Underwritten by a concern to protect patients’ rights to self-determination and also by a concern with patients’ well-being, the doctrine was introduced in an attempt to delineate physicians’ duties to inform patients of the risks and benefits of medical alternatives and to obtain their consent to a particular course of treatment or diagnosis. Interpretation of the legitimate scope of the doctrine has focused on a variety of issues concerning what range of patients is competent to give consent and hence from which ones informed consent must be required; concerning how much, how detailed, and what sort of information must be given to patients to yield informed consent; and concerning what sorts of conditions are required to ensure both that there is proper understanding of the information and that consent is truly voluntary rather than unduly influenced by the institutional authority of the physician.
ingarden: a leading phenomenologist, who taught in Lvov and Cracow and became prominent in the English-speaking world above all through his work in aesthetics and philosophy of literature. His Literary Work of Art (German 1931, English 1973) presents an ontological account of the literary work as a stratified structure, including word sounds and meanings, represented objects and aspects, and associated metaphysical and aesthetic qualities. The work forms part of a larger ontological project of combating the transcendental idealism of his teacher Husserl, and seeks to establish the essential difference in structure between minddependent ‘intentional’ objects and objects in reality. Ingarden’s ontological investigations are set out in his The Controversy over the Existence of the World (Polish 1947/48, German 1964–74, partial English translation as Time and Modes of Being, 1964). The work rests on a tripartite division of formal, material, and existential ontology and contains extensive analyses of the ontological structures of individual things, events, processes, states of affairs, properties and relations. It culminates in an attempted refutation of idealism on the basis of an exhaustive account of the possible relations between consciousness and reality.

inscriptum -- inscriptionalism -- nominalism. While Grice pours scorn on the American School of Latter-Day  Nominalists, nominalism, as used by Grice is possibly a misnomer. He doesn’t mean Occam, and Occam did not use ‘nominalismus.’ “Terminimus’ at most. So one has to be careful. The implicaturum is that the nominalist calls a ‘name’ what others shouldn’t.  Mind, Grice had two nominalist friends: S. N. Hamphsire (Scepticism and meaning”) and A. M. Quinton, of the play group! In “Properties and classes,” for the Aristotelian Society. And the best Oxford philosophical stylist, Bradley, is also a nominalist. There are other, more specific arguments against universals. One is that postulating such things leads to a vicious infinite regress. For suppose there are universals, both monadic and relational, and that when an entity instantiates a universal, or a group of entities instantiate a relational universal, they are linked by an instantiation relation. Suppose now that a instantiates the universal F. Since there are many things that instantiate many universals, it is plausible to suppose that instantiation is a relational universal. But if instantiation is a relational universal, when a instantiates FaF and the instantiation relation are linked by an instantiation relation. Call this instantiation relation i2 (and suppose it, as is plausible, to be distinct from the instantiation relation (i1) that links a and F). Then since i2 is also a universal, it looks as if aFi1 and i2 will have to be linked by another instantiation relation i3, and so on ad infinitum. (This argument has its source in Bradley 1893, 27–8.)

insinuatum: Cf. ‘indirectum’ Oddly, Ryle found an ‘insinuation’ abusive, which Russell found abusive. When McGuinness listed the abusive terms by Gellner, ‘insinuation’ was one of them, so perhaps Grice should take note! insinuation insinuate. The etymology is abscure. Certainly not Ciceronian. A bit of linguistic botany, “E implicates that p” – implicate to do duty for, in alphabetic order: mean, suggest, hint, insinuate, indicate, implicitly convey, indirectly convey, imply. Intransitive meaning "hint obliquely" is from 1560s. The problem is that Grice possibly used it transitively, with a ‘that’-clause. “Emissor E communicates that p, via insinuation,” i.e. E insinuates that p.” In fact, there’s nothing odd with the ‘that’-clause following ‘insinuate.’ Obviosuly, Grice will be saying that what is a mere insinuation it is taken by Austin, Strawson, Hart or Hare or Hampshire – as he criticizes him in the “Mind” article on intention and certainty -- (to restrict to mistakes by the play group) as part of the ‘analysans.’ `Refs. D. Holdcroft, “Forms of indirect communication,” Journal of Rhetoric, H. P. Grice, “Communicatum: directum-indirectum.”

Swinehead: “I like Swinehead – it sounds almost like Grice!” – Grice.

solubile -- insolubile: “As opposed to the ‘piece-of-cake’ solubilia” – Grice. A solubile is a piece of a cake. An insolubile is a sentences embodying a semantic antinomy such as the liar paradox. The insolubile is used by philosophers to analyze a self-nullifying sentences, the possibility that every sentence implies that they are true, and the relation between a communicatum and an animatum (psi). At first, Grice focuses on nullification to explicate a sentence like ‘I am lying’ (“Mento.” “Mendax”) which, when spoken, entails that the utterer “says nothing.” Grice: “Bradwardine suggests that such a sentence as “Mento” signifies that it is at once true and false, prompting Burleigh to argue that every sentences implies that it is true.” “Swineshead uses the insolubile to distinguish between truth and correspondence to reality.” While ‘This sentence is false’ is itself false, it corresponds to reality, while its contradiction, ‘This sentence is not false,’ does not, although the latter is also false. “Wyclif uses the insolubile to describe the senses (or implicatura) in which a sentence can be true, which led to his belief in the reality of logical beings or entities of reason, a central tenet of his realism.” “d’Ailly uses the insolubile to explain how the animatum (or soul) differs from the communicatum, holding that there is no insoluble in the soul, but that communication lends itself to the phenomenon by admitting a single sentence corresponding to two distinct states of the soul. Grice: “Of course that was Swine’s unEnglish overstatement, ‘unsolvable;’ everything is solvable!” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Liars at Oxford.”
institutum – Grice speaks of the institution of decision as the goal of conversation -- institution. (1) An organization such as a corporation or college. (2) A social practice such as marriage or making promises. (3) A system of rules defining a possible form of social organization, such as capitalist versus Communist principles of economic exchange. In light of the power of institutions to shape societies and individual lives, writers in professional ethics have explored four main issues. First, what political and legal institutions are feasible, just, and otherwise desirable (Plato, Republic; Rawls, A Theory of Justice)? Second, how are values embedded in institutions through the constitutive rules that define them (for example, “To promise is to undertake an obligation”), as well as through regulatory rules imposed on them from outside, such that to participate in institutions is a value-laden activity (Searle, Speech Acts, 1969)? Third, do institutions have collective responsibilities or are the only responsibilities those of individuals, and in general how are the responsibilities of individuals, institutions, and communities related? Fourth, at a more practical level, how can we prevent institutions from becoming corrupted by undue regard for money and power (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981) and by patriarchal prejudices (Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 1989)? -- institutional theory of art, the view that something becomes an artwork by virtue of occupying a certain position within the context of a set of institutions. George Dickie originated this theory of art (Art and the Aesthetic, 1974), which was derived loosely from Arthur Danto’s “The Artworld” (Journal of Philosophy, 1964). In its original form it was the view that a work of art is an artifact that has the status of candidate for appreciation conferred upon it by some person acting on behalf of the art world. That is, there are institutions – such as museums, galleries, and journals and newspapers that publish reviews and criticism – and there are individuals who work within those institutions – curators, directors, dealers, performers, critics – who decide, by accepting objects or events for discussion and display, what is art and what is not. The concept of artifactuality may be extended to include found art, conceptual art, and other works that do not involve altering some preexisting material, by holding that a use, or context for display, is sufficient to make something into an artifact. This definition of art raises certain questions. What determines – independently of such notions as a concern with art – whether an institution is a member of the art world? That is, is the definition ultimately circular? What is it to accept something as a candidate for appreciation? Might not this concept also threaten circularity, since there could be not only artistic but also other kinds of appreciation?
instrumentum: is Grice an instrumentalist? According to C. Lord (“Griceian instrumentalism”) he is – but he is not! Lord takes ‘tool’ literally. In Grice’s analysandum of the act of the communicatum, Lord takes ‘x’ to be a ‘tool’ or instrument for the production of a response in the emisor’s sendee. But is this the original Roman meaning of ‘instrumentum’? Griceian aesthetic instrumetalism according to Catherine Lord. instrumentalism, in its most common meaning, a kind of anti-realistic view of scientific theories wherein theories are construed as calculating devices or instruments for conveniently moving from a given set of observations to a predicted set of observations. As such the theoretical statements are not candidates for truth or reference, and the theories have no ontological import. This view of theories is grounded in a positive distinction between observation statements and theoretical statements, and the according of privileged epistemic status to the former. The view was fashionable during the era of positivism but then faded; it was recently revived, in large measure owing to the genuinely perplexing character of quantum theories in physics. ’Instrumentalism’ has a different and much more general meaning associated with the pragmatic epistemology of Dewey. Deweyan instrumentalism is a general functional account of all concepts (scientific ones included) wherein the epistemic status of concepts and the rationality status of actions are seen as a function of their role in integrating, predicting, and controlling our concrete interactions with our experienced world. There is no positivistic distinction instantiation instrumentalism 438 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 438 between observation and theory, and truth and reference give way to “warranted assertability.”
intellectum: hile the ‘dianoia’ is the intellectus, the ‘intellectum’ is the Griceian diaphanous ‘what is understood.’ (dianoia): Grice was fascinated by Cicero. “The way he managed to translate the Grecian ‘dia’ by the ‘inter is genial!” As Short and Lewis have it, it’s from “inter-legere,” to see into, perceive, understand. “intelligere,” originally meaning to comprehend, appeared frequently in Cicero, then underwent a slippage in its passive form, “intelligetur,” toward to understand, to communicate, to mean, ‘to give it to be understood.’ What is understood – INTELLECTUM -- by an expression can be not only its obvious sense but also something that is connoted, implied, insinuated, IMPLICATED, as Grice would prefer. Verstand, corresponding to Greek dianoia and Latin intellectio] Kant distinguished understanding from sensibility and reason. While sensibility is receptive, understanding is spontaneous. While understanding is concerned with the range of phenomena and is empty without intuition, reason, which moves from judgment to judgment concerning phenomena, is tempted to extend beyond the limits of experience to generate fallacious inferences. Kant claimed that the main act of understanding is judgment and called it a faculty of judgment. He claimed that there is an a priori concept or category corresponding to each kind of judgment as its logical function and that understanding is constituted by twelve categories. Hence understanding is also a faculty of concepts. Understanding gives the synthetic unity of appearance through the categories. It thus brings together intuitions and concepts and makes experience possible. It is a lawgiver of nature. Herder criticized Kant for separating sensibility and understanding. Fichte and Hegel criticized him for separating understanding and reason. Some neo-Kantians criticized him for deriving the structure of understanding from the act of judgment. “Now we can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgements, and the understanding may therefore be represented as a faculty of judgement.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Intellectus -- dianoia, Grecian term for the faculty of thought, specifically of drawing conclusions from assumptions and of constructing and following arguments. The term may also designate the thought that results from using this faculty. We would use dianoia to construct a mathematical proof; in contrast, a being  if there is such a being it would be a god  that could simply intuit the truth of the theorem would use the faculty of intellectual intuition, noûs. In contrast with noûs, dianoia is the distinctly human faculty of reason. Plato uses noûs and dianoia to designate, respectively, the highest and second levels of the faculties represented on the divided line Republic 511de.  PLATO. E.C.H. dialectical argument dianoia 233   233 dichotomy paradox. Refs: Grice, “The criteria of intelligence.”
intensionalism: Grice finds a way to relieve a predicate that is vacuous from the embarrassing consequence of denoting or being satisfied by the empty set. Grice exploits the nonvoidness of a predicate which is part of the definition of the void predicate. Consider the vacuous predicate:‘... is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope.'The class '... is a daugther of an English queen and a pope.'is co-extensive with the predicate '... stands in relation  to a sequence composed of the class married to, daughters, English queens, and popes.'We correlate the void predicate with the sequence composed of relation R, the set ‘married to,’ the set ‘daughters,’ the set ‘English queens,’ and the set ‘popes.'Grice uses this sequence, rather than the empty set, to determine the explanatory potentiality of a void predicate. The admissibility of a nonvoid predicate in an explanation of a possible phenomenon (why it would happen if it did happen) may depends on the availability of a generalisation whithin which the predicate specifies the antecedent condition. A non-trivial generalisations of this sort is certainly available if derivable from some further generalisation involving a less specific antecedent condition, supported by an antecedent condition that is specified by means a nonvoid predicate. intension, the meaning or connotation of an expression, as opposed to its extension or denotation, which consists of those things signified by the expression. The intension of a declarative sentence is often taken to be a proposition and the intension of a predicate expression (common noun, adjective) is often taken to be a concept. For Frege, a predicate expression refers to a concept and the intension or Sinn (“sense”) of a predicate expression is a mode of presentation distinct from the concept. Objects like propositions or concepts that can be the intension of terms are called intensional objects. (Note that ‘intensional’ is not the same word as ‘intentional’, although the two are related.) The extension of a declarative sentence is often taken to be a state of affairs and that of a predicate expression to be the set of objects that fall under the concept which is the intension of the term. Extension is not the same as reference. For example, the term ‘red’ may be said to refer to the property redness but to have as its extension the set of all red things. Alternatively properties and relations are sometimes taken to be intensional objects, but the property redness is never taken to be part of the extension of the adjective ‘red’. intensionality, failure of extensionality. A linguistic context is extensional if and only if the extension of the expression obtained by placing any subexpression in that context is the same as the extension of the expression obtained by placing in that context any subexpression with the same extension as the first subexpression. Modal, intentional, and direct quotational contexts are main instances of intensional contexts. Take, e.g., sentential contexts. The extension of a sentence is its truth or falsity (truth-value). The extension of a definite description is what it is true of: ‘the husband of Xanthippe’ and ‘the teacher of Plato’ have the same extension, for they are true of the same man, Socrates. Given this, it is easy to see that ‘Necessarily, . . . was married to Xanthippe’ is intensional, for ‘Necessarily, the husband of Xanthippe was married to Xanthippe’ is true, but ‘Necessarily, the teacher of Plato was married to Xanthippe’ is not. Other modal terms that generate intensional contexts include ‘possibly’, ‘impossibly’, ‘essentially’, ‘contingently’, etc. Assume that Smith has heard of Xanthippe but not Plato. ‘Smith believes that . . . was married to Xanthippe’ is intensional, for ‘Smith believes that the husband of Xanthippe was married to Xanthippe’ is true, but ‘Smith believes that the teacher of Plato was married to Xanthippe’ is not. Other intentional verbs that generate intensional contexts include ‘know’, ‘doubt’, ‘wonder’, ‘fear’, ‘intend’, ‘state’, and ‘want’. ‘The fourth word in “. . . “ has nine letters’ is intensional, for ‘The fourth word in “the husband of Xanthippe” has nine letters’ is true but ‘the fourth word in “the teacher of Plato” has nine letters’ is not. intensional logic, that part of deductive logic which treats arguments whose validity or invalidity depends on strict difference, or identity, of meaning. The denotation of a singular term (i.e., a proper name or definite description), the class of things of which a predicate is true, and the truth or falsity (the truth-value) of a sentence may be called the extensions of these respective linguistic expressions. Their intensions are their meanings strictly so called: the (individual) concept conveyed by the singular term, the property expressed by the predicate, and the proposition asserted by the sentence. The most extensively studied part of formal logic deals largely with inferences turning only on extensions. One principle of extensional logic is that if two singular terms have identical denotations, the truth-values of corresponding sentences containing the terms are identical. Thus the inference from ‘Bern is the capital of Switzerland’ to ‘You are in Bern if and only if you are in the capital of Switzerland’ is valid. But this is invalid: ‘Bern is the capital of Switzerland. Therefore, you believe that you are in Bern if and only if you believe that you are in the capital of Switzerland.’ For one may lack the belief instrumental rationality intensional logic 439 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 439 that Bern is the capital of Switzerland. It seems that we should distinguish between the intensional meanings of ‘Bern’ and of ‘the capital of Switzerland’. One supposes that only a strict identity of intension would license interchange in such a context, in which they are in the scope of a propositional attitude. It has been questioned whether the idea of an intension really applies to proper names, but parallel examples are easily constructed that make similar use of the differences in the meanings of predicates or of whole sentences. Quite generally, then, the principle that expressions with the same extension may be interchanged with preservation of extension of the containing expression, seems to fail for such “intensional contexts.” The range of expressions producing such sensitive contexts includes psychological verbs like ‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘suppose’, ‘assert’, ‘desire’, ‘allege’, ‘wonders whether’; expressions conveying modal ideas such as necessity, possibility, and impossibility; some adverbs, e.g. ‘intentionally’; and a large number of other expressions – ’prove’, ‘imply’, ‘make probable’, etc. Although reasoning involving some of these is well understood, there is not yet general agreement on the best methods for dealing with arguments involving many of these notions.
intentionalism: Grice analyses ‘intend’ in two prongs; the first is a willing-clause, and the second is a causal clause about the willing causing the action. It’s a simplified account that he calls Prichardian because he relies on ‘willin that.’ The intender intends that some action takes place. It does not have to be an action by the intender. Cf. Suppes’s specific section. when Anscombe comes out with her “Intention,” Grice’s Play Group does not know what to do. Hampshire is almost finished with his “Thought and action” that came out the following year. Grice is lecturing on how a “dispositional” reductive analysis of ‘intention’ falls short of his favoured instrospectionalism. Had he not fallen for an intention-based semantics (or strictly, an analysis of "U means that p" in terms of U intends that p"), Grice would be obsessed with an analysis of ‘intending that …’ James makes an observation about the that-clause. I will that the distant table slides over the floor toward me. It does not. The Anscombe Society. Irish-born Anscombe’s views are often discussed by Oxonian philosophers. She brings Witters to the Dreaming Spires, as it were. Grice is especially connected with Anscombes reflections on intention. While he favoures an approach such as that of Hampshire in Thought and Action, Grice borrows a few points from Anscombe, notably that of direction of fit, originally Austin’s. Grice explicitly refers to Anscombe in “Uncertainty,” and in his reminiscences he hastens to add that Anscombe would never attend any of the Saturday mornings of the play group, as neither does Dummett. The view of Ryle is standardly characterised as a weaker or softer version of behaviourism According to this standard interpretation, the view by Ryle is that a statements containin this or that term relating to the ‘soul’ can be translated, without loss of meaning, into an ‘if’ utterance about what an agent does. So Ryle, on this account, is to be construed as offering a dispositional analysis of a statement about the soul into a statement about behaviour. It is conceded that Ryle does not confine a description of what the agent does to purely physical behaviour—in terms, e. g. of a skeletal or a muscular description. Ryle is happy to speak of a full-bodied action like scoring a goal or paying a debt. But the soft behaviourism attributed to Ryle still attempts an analysis or translation of statement about the soul into this or that dispositional statement which is itself construed as subjunctive if describing what the agent does. Even this soft behaviourism fails. A description of the soul is not analysable or translatable into a statement about behaviour or praxis even if this is allowed to include a non-physical descriptions of action. The list of conditions and possible behaviour is infinite since any one proffered translation may be ‘defeated,’ as Hart and Hall would say, by a slight alteration of the circumstances. The defeating condition in any particular case may involve a reference to a fact about the agent’s soul, thereby rendering the analysis circular. In sum, the standard interpretation of Ryle construes him as offering a somewhat weakened form of reductive behaviourism whose reductivist ambition, however weakened, is nonetheless futile. This characterisation of Ryle’s programme is wrong. Although it is true that he is keen to point out the disposition behind this or that concept about the soul, it would be wrong to construe Ryle as offering a programme of analysis of a ‘soul’ predicate in terms of an ‘if’ utterance. The relationship between a ‘soul’ predicate and the ‘if’ utterance with which he unpack it is other than that required by this kind of analysis. It is helpful to keep in mind that Ryle’s target is the official doctrine with its eschatological commitment. Ryle’s argument serves to remind one that we have in a large number of cases ways of telling or settling disputes, e. g., about someone’s character or intellect. If A disputes a characterisation of Smith as willing that p, or judging that p, B may point to what Smith says and does in defending the attribution, as well as to features of the circumstances. But the practice of giving a reason of this kind to defend or to challenge an ascription of a ‘soul’ predicates would be put under substantial pressure if the official doctrine is correct. For Ryle to remind us that we do, as a matter of fact, have a way of settling disputes about whether Smith wills that he eat an apple is much weaker than saying that the concept of willing is meaningless unless it is observable or verifiable; or even that the successful application of a soul predicate requires that we have a way of settling a dispute in every case. Showing that a concept is one for which, in a large number of cases, we have an agreement-reaching procedure, even if it do not always guarantee success, captures an important point, however: it counts against any theory of, e. g., willing that would render it unknowable in principle or in practice whether or not the concept is correctly applied in every case. And this is precisely the problem with the official doctrine (and is still a problem, with some of its progeny. Ryle points out that there is a form of dilemma that pits the reductionist against the dualist: those whose battle-cry is ‘nothing but…’ and those who insist on ‘something else as well.’ Ryle attempts a dissolution of the dilemma by rejecting the two horns; not by taking sides with either one, though part of what dissolution requires in this case, as in others, is a description of how each side is to be commended for seeing what the other side does not, and criticised for failing to see what the other side does. The attraction of behaviourism, Ryle reminds us, is simply that it does not insist on an occult happening as the basis upon which a ‘soul’ term is given meaning, and points to a perfectly observable criterion that is by and large employed when we are called upon to defend or correct our employment of a ‘soul’ term. The problem with behaviourism is that it has a too-narrow view both of what counts as behaviour and of what counts as observable. Then comes Grice to play with meaning and intending, and allowing for deeming an avowal of this or that souly state as, in some fashion, incorrigible. For Grice, while U does have, ceteris paribus privileged access to each state of his soul, only his or that avowal of this or that souly state is deemed incorrigible. This concerns communication as involving intending. Grice goes back to this at Brighton. He plays with G judges that it is raining, G judges that G judges that it is raining. Again, Grice uses a subscript: “G judges2 that it is raining.” If now G expresses that it is raining, G judges2 that it is raining. A second-order avowal is deemed incorrigible. It is not surprising the the contemporary progeny of the official doctrine sees a behaviourist in Grice. Yet a dualist is badly off the mark in his critique of Grice. While Grice does appeal to a practice and a habif, and even the more technical ‘procedure’ in the ordinary way as ‘procedure’ is used in ordinary discussion. Grice does not make a technical concept out of them as one expect of some behavioural psychologist, which he is not. He is at most a philosophical psychologist, and a functionalist one, rather than a reductionist one. There is nothing in any way that is ‘behaviourist’ or reductionist or physicalist about Grice’s talk. It is just ordinary talk about behaviour. There is nothing exceptional in talking about a practice, a customs, or a habit regarding communication. Grice certainly does not intend that this or that notion, as he uses it, gives anything like a detailed account of the creative open-endedness of a communication-system. What this or that anti-Griceian has to say IS essentially a diatribe first against empiricism (alla Quine), secondarily against a Ryle-type of behaviourism, and in the third place, Grice. In more reasoned and dispassionate terms, one would hardly think of Grice as a behaviourist (he in fact rejects such a label in “Method”), but as an intentionalist. When we call Grice an intentionalist, we are being serious. As a modista, Grice’s keyword is intentionalism, as per the good old scholastic ‘intentio.’ We hope so. This is Aunt Matilda’s conversational knack. Grice keeps a useful correspondence with Suppes which was helpful. Suppes takes Chomsky more seriously than an Oxonian philosopher would. An Oxonian philosopher never takes Chomsky too seriously. Granted, Austin loves to quote “Syntactic Structures” sentence by sentence for fun, knowing that it would never count as tutorial material. Surely “Syntactic Structures” would not be a pamphlet a member of the play group would use to educate his tutee. It is amusing that when he gives the Locke lectures, Chomsky cannot not think of anything better to do but to criticise Grice, and citing him from just one reprint in the collection edited by, of all people, Searle. Some gratitude. The references are very specific to Grice. Grice feels he needs to provide, he thinks, an analysis ‘mean’ as metabolically applied to an expression. Why? Because of the implicaturum. By uttering x (thereby explicitly conveying that p), U implicitly conveys that q iff U relies on some procedure in his and A’s repertoire of procedures of U’s and A’s communication-system. It is this talk of U’s being ‘ready,’ and ‘having a procedure in his repertoire’ that sounds to New-World Chomsky too Morrisian, as it does not to an Oxonian. Suppes, a New-Worlder, puts himself in Old-Worlder Grice’s shoes about this. Chomsky should never mind. When an Oxonian philosopher, not a psychologist, uses ‘procedure’ and ‘readiness,’ and having a procedure in a repertoire, he is being Oxonian and not to be taken seriously, appealing to ordinary language, and so on. Chomsky apparently does get it. Incidentally, Suppess has defended Grice against two other targets, less influential. One is Hungarian-born J. I. Biro, who does not distinguish between reductive analysis and reductionist analysis, as Grice does in his response to Somervillian Rountree-Jack. The other target is perhaps even less influential: P. Yu in a rather simplistic survey of the Griceian programme for a journal that Grice finds too specialized to count, “Linguistics and Philosophy.” Grice is always ashamed and avoided of being described as “our man in the philosophy of language.” Something that could only have happened in the Old World in a red-brick university, as Grice calls it.  Suppes contributes to PGRICE with an excellent ‘The primacy of utterers meaning,’ where he addresses what he rightly sees as an unfair characterisations of Grice as a behaviourist. Suppes’s use of “primacy” is genial, since its metabole which is all about. Biro actually responds to Suppes’s commentary on Grice as proposing a reductive but not reductionist analysis of meaning. Suppes rightly characterises Grice as an Oxonian ‘intentionalist’ (alla Ogden), as one would characterize Hampshire, with philosophical empiricist, and slightly idealist, or better ideationalist, tendencies, rather. Suppes rightly observes that Grice’ use of such jargon is meant to impress. Surely there are more casual ways of referring to this or that utterer having a basic procedure in his repertoire. It is informal and colloquial, enough, though, rather than behaviouristically, as Ryle would have it. Grice is very happy that in the New World Suppes teaches him how to use ‘primacy’ with a straight face! Intentionalism is also all the vogue in Collingwood reading Croce, and Gardiner reading Marty via Ogden, and relates to expression. In his analysis of intending Grice is being very Oxonian, and pre-Austinian: relying, just to tease leader Austin, on Stout, Wilson, Bosanquet, MacMurray, and Pritchard. Refs.: There are two sets of essays. An early one on ‘disposition and intention,’ and the essay for The British Academy (henceforth, BA). Also his reply to Anscombe and his reply to Davidson. There is an essay on the subjective condition on intention. Obviously, his account of communication has been labeled the ‘intention-based semantic’ programme, so references under ‘communication’ above are useful. BANC.Grice's reductIOn, or partial reduction anyway, of meamng to intention places a heavy load on the theory of intentions. But in the articles he has written about these matters he has not been very explicit about the structure of intentIOns. As I understand his position on these matters, it is his view that the defence of the primacy of utterer's meaning does not depend on having worked out any detailed theory of intention. It IS enough to show how the reduction should be thought of in a schematic fashion in order to make a convincing argument. I do think there is a fairly straightforward extenSIOn of Grice's ideas that provides the right way of developing a theory of intentIOns appropnate for Ius theory of utterer's meaning. Slightly changing around some of the words m Grice we have the following The Primacy of Utterer's Meaning 125 example. U utters '''Fido is shaggy", if "U wants A to think that U thinks that Jones's dog is hairy-coated.'" Put another way, U's intention is to want A to think U thinks that Jones's dog is hairy-coated. Such intentions clearly have a generative structure similar but different from the generated syntactic structure we think of verbal utterances' having. But we can even say that the deep structures talked about by grammarians of Chomsky's ilk could best be thought of as intentions. This is not a suggestion I intend to pursue seriously. The important point is that it is a mistake to think about classifications of intentions; rather, we should think in terms of mechanisms for generating intentions. Moreover, it seems to me that such mechanisms in the case of animals are evident enough as expressed in purposeful pursuit of prey or other kinds of food, and yet are not expressed in language. In that sense once again there is an argument in defence of Grice's theory. The primacy of utterer's meaning has primacy because of the primacy of intention. We can have intentions without words, but we cannot have words of any interest without intentions. In this general context, I now turn to Biro's (1979) interesting criticisms of intentionalism in the theory of meaning. Biro deals from his own standpoint with some of the issues I have raised already, but his central thesis about intention I have not previously discussed. It goes to the heart of controversies about the use of the concept of intention to explain the meaning of utterances. Biro puts his point in a general way by insisting that utterance meaning must be separate from and independent of speaker's meaning or, in the terminology used here, utterer's meaning. The central part of his argument is his objection to the possibility of explaining meaning in terms of intentions. Biro's argument goes like this: 1. A central purpose of speech is to enable others to learn about the speaker's intentions. 2. It will be impossible to discover or understand the intentions of the speaker unless there are independent means for understanding what he says, since what he says will be primary evidence about his intentions. 3. Thus the meaning of an utterance must be conceptually independent of the intentions of the speaker. This is an appealing positivistic line. The data relevant to a theory or hypothesis must be known independently of the hypothesis. Biro is quick to state that he is not against theoretical entities, but the way in which he separates theoretical entities and observable facts makes clear the limited role he wants them to play, in this case the theoretical entities being intentions. The central idea is to be found in the following passage: The point I am insisting on here is merely that the ascription of an intention to an agent has the character of an hypothesis, something invoked to explain phenomena which may be described independently of that explanation (though not necessarily independently of the fact that they fall into a class for which the hypothesis in question generally or normally provides an explanation). (pp. 250-1.) [The italics are Biro's.] Biro's aim is clear from this quotation. The central point is that the data about intentions, namely, the utterance, must be describable independently of hypotheses about the intentions. He says a little later to reinforce this: 'The central pointis this: it is the intention-hypothesis that is revisable, not the act-description' (p. 251). Biro's central mistake, and a large one too, is to think that data can be described independently of hypotheses and that somehow there is a clean and simple version of data that makes such description a natural and inevitable thing to have. It would be easy enough to wander off into a description of such problems in physics, where experiments provide a veritable wonderland of seemingly arbitrary choices about what to include and what to exclude from the experimental experience as 'relevant data', and where the arbitrariness can only be even partly understood on the basis of understanding the theories bemg tested. Real data do not come in simple linear strips like letters on the page. Real experiments are blooming confusions that never get sorted out completely but only partially and schematically, as appropriate to the theory or theories being tested, and in accordance with the traditions and conventions of past similar experiments. makes a point about the importance of convention that I agree but it is irrelevant to my central of controversy with  What I say about experiments is even more true of undisciplined and unregulated human interactiono Experiments, especially in physics, are presumably among the best examples of disciplined and structured action. Most conversations, in contrast, are really examples of situations of confusion that are only straightened out under strong hypotheses of intentions on the of speakers and listeners as well. There is more than one level at which the takes The Primacy of Utterer's Meaning 127 place through the beneficent use of hypotheses about intentions. I shall not try to deal with all of them here but only mention some salient aspects. At an earlier point, Biro says:The main reason for introducing intentions into some of these analyses is precisely that the public (broadly speaking) features of utterances -the sounds made, the circumstances in which they are made and the syntactic and semantic properties of these noises considered as linguistic items-are thought to be insufficient for the specification of that aspect of the utterance which we call its meaning. [po 244.] If we were to take this line of thought seriously and literally, we would begin with the sound pressure waves that reach our ears and that are given the subtle and intricate interpretation required to accept them as speech. There is a great variety of evidence that purely acoustical concepts are inadequate for the analysis of speech. To determine the speech content of a sound pressure wave we need extensive hypotheses about the intentions that speakers have in order to convert the public physical features of utterances into intentional linguistic items. Biro might object at where I am drawing the line between public and intentional, namely, at the difference between physical and linguistic, but it would be part of my thesis that it is just because of perceived and hypothesized intentions that we are mentally able to convert sound pressure waves into meaningful speech. In fact, I can envisage a kind of transcendental argument for the existence of intentions based on the impossibility from the standpoint of physics alone of interpreting sound pressure waves as speech. Biro seems to have in mind the nice printed sentences of science and philosophy that can be found on the printed pages of treatises around the world. But this is not the right place to begin to think about meaning, only the end point. Grice, and everybody else who holds an intentional thesis about meaning, recognizes the requirement to reach an account of such timeless sentence meaning or linguistic meaning.In fact, Grice is perhaps more ready than I am to concede that such a theory can be developed in a relatively straightforward manner. One purpose of my detailed discussion of congruence of meaning in the previous section is to point out some of the difficulties of having an adequate detailed theory of these matters, certainly an adequate detailed theory of the linguistic meaning or the sentence meaning. Even if I were willing to grant the feasibility of such a theory, I would not grant the use of it that Biro has made. For the purposes of this discussion printed text may be accepted as well-defined, theoryindependent data. (There are even issues to be raised about the printed page, but ones that I will set aside in the present context. I have in mind the psychological difference between perception of printed letters, words, phrases, or sentences, and that of related but different nonlinguistic marks on paper.) But no such data assumptions can be made about spoken speech. Still another point of attack on Biro's positivistic line about data concerns the data of stress and prosody and their role in fixing the meaning of an utterance. Stress and prosody are critical to the interpretation of the intentions of speakers, but the data on stress and prosody are fleeting and hard to catch on the fly_ Hypotheses about speakers' intentions are needed even in the most humdrum interpret atins of what a given prosodic contour or a given point of stress has contributed to the meaning of the utterance spoken. The prosodic contour and the points of stress of an utterance are linguistic data, but they do not have the independent physical description Biro vainly hopes for. Let me put my point still another way. I do not deny for a second that conventions and traditions of speech play a role in fixing the meaning of a particular utterance on a particular occasion. It is not a matter of interpretmg afresh, as if the universe had just begun, a particular utterance in terms of particular intentions at that time and place without dependence upon past prior mtentions and the traditions of spoken speech that have evolved in the community of which the speaker and listener are a part. It is rather that hypotheses about intentions are operating continually and centrally in the interpretation of what is said. Loose, live speech depends upon such active 'on-line' interpretation of intention to make sense of what has been said. If there were some absolutely agreed-upon concept of firm and definite linguistlc meaning that Biro and others could appeal to, then it might be harder to make the case I am arguing for. But I have already argued in the discussion of congruence of meaning that this is precisely what is not the case. The absence of any definite and satisfactory theory of linguistic meaning argues also for movmg back to the more concrete and psychologically richer concept of utterer's meaning. This is the place to begin the theory of meaning, and this Itself rests to a very large extent on the concept of intention -- intention, (1) a characteristic of action, as when one acts intentionally or with a certain intention; (2) a feature of one’s mind, as when one intends (has an intention) to act in a certain way now or in the future. Betty, e.g., intentionally walks across the room, does so with the intention of getting a drink, and now intends to leave the party later that night. An important question is: how are (1) and (2) related? (See Anscombe, Intention, 1963, for a groundbreaking treatment of these and other basic problems concerning intention.) Some philosophers see acting with an intention as basic and as subject to a three-part analysis. For Betty to walk across the room with the intention of getting a drink is for Betty’s walking across the room to be explainable (in the appropriate way) by her desire or (as is sometimes said) pro-attitude in favor of getting a drink and her belief that walking across the room is a way of getting one. On this desire-belief model (or wantbelief model) the main elements of acting with an intention are (a) the action, (b) appropriate desires (pro-attitudes) and beliefs, and (c) an appropriate explanatory relation between (a) and (b). (See Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” in Essays on Actions and Events, 1980.) In explaining (a) in terms of (b) we give an explanation of the action in terms of the agent’s purposes or reasons for so acting. This raises the fundamental question of what kind of explanation this is, and how it is related to explanation of Betty’s movements by appeal to their physical causes. What about intentions to act in the future? Consider Betty’s intention to leave the party later. Though the intended action is later, this intention may nevertheless help explain some of Betty’s planning and acting between now and then. Some philosophers try to fit such futuredirected intentions directly into the desire-belief model. John Austin, e.g., would identify Betty’s intention with her belief that she will leave later because of her desire to leave (Lectures on Jurisprudence, vol. I, 1873). Others see futuredirected intentions as distinctive attitudes, not to be reduced to desires and/or beliefs. How is belief related to intention? One question here is whether an intention to A requires a belief that one will A. A second question is whether a belief that one will A in executing some intention ensures that one intends to A. Suppose that Betty believes that by walking across the room she will interrupt Bob’s conversation. Though she has no desire to interrupt, she still proceeds across the room. Does she intend to interrupt the conversation? Or is there a coherent distinction between what one intends and what one merely expects to bring about as a result of doing what one intends? One way of talking about such cases, due to Bentham (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789), is to say that Betty’s walking across the room is “directly intentional,” whereas her interrupting the conversation is only “obliquely intentional” (or indirectly intentional). -- intentional fallacy, the (purported) fallacy of holding that the meaning of a work of art is fixed by the artist’s intentions. (Wimsatt and Beardsintensive magnitude intentional fallacy 440 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 440 ley, who introduced the term, also used it to name the [purported] fallacy that the artist’s aims are relevant to determining the success of a work of art; however, this distinct usage has not gained general currency.) Wimsatt and Beardsley were formalists; they held that interpretation should focus purely on the work of art itself and should exclude appeal to biographical information about the artist, other than information concerning the private meanings the artist attached to his words. Whether the intentional fallacy is in fact a fallacy is a much discussed issue within aesthetics. Intentionalists deny that it is: they hold that the meaning of a work of art is fixed by some set of the artist’s intentions. For instance, Richard Wollheim (Painting as an Art) holds that the meaning of a painting is fixed by the artist’s fulfilled intentions in making it. Other intentionalists appeal not to the actual artist’s intentions, but to the intentions of the implied or postulated artist, a construct of criticism, rather than a real person. See also AESTHETIC FORMALISM, AESTHETICS, INTENTION. B.Ga. intentionality, aboutness. Things that are about other things exhibit intentionality. Beliefs and other mental states exhibit intentionality, but so, in a derived way, do sentences and books, maps and pictures, and other representations. The adjective ‘intentional’ in this philosophical sense is a technical term not to be confused with the more familiar sense, characterizing something done on purpose. Hopes and fears, for instance, are not things we do, not intentional acts in the latter, familiar sense, but they are intentional phenomena in the technical sense: hopes and fears are about various things. The term was coined by the Scholastics in the Middle Ages, and derives from the Latin verb intendo, ‘to point (at)’ or ‘aim (at)’ or ‘extend (toward)’. Phenomena with intentionality thus point outside of themselves to something else: whatever they are of or about. The term was revived by the nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano, who claimed that intentionality defines the distinction between the mental and the physical; all and only mental phenomena exhibit intentionality. Since intentionality is an irreducible feature of mental phenomena, and since no physical phenomena could exhibit it, mental phenomena could not be a species of physical phenomena. This claim, often called the Brentano thesis or Brentano’s irreducibility thesis, has often been cited to support the view that the mind cannot be the brain, but this is by no means generally accepted today. There was a second revival of the term in the 1960s and 1970s by analytic philosophers, in particular Chisholm, Sellars, and Quine. Chisholm attempted to clarify the concept by shifting to a logical definition of intentional idioms, the terms used to speak of mental states and events, rather than attempting to define the intentionality of the states and events themselves. Intentional idioms include the familiar “mentalistic” terms of folk psychology, but also their technical counterparts in theories and discussions in cognitive science, ‘X believes that p,’ and ‘X desires that q’ are paradigmatic intentional idioms, but according to Chisholm’s logical definition, in terms of referential opacity (the failure of substitutivity of coextensive terms salva veritate), so are such less familiar idioms as ‘X stores the information that p’ and ‘X gives high priority to achieving the state of affairs that q’. Although there continue to be deep divisions among philosophers about the proper definition or treatment of the concept of intentionality, there is fairly widespread agreement that it marks a feature – aboutness or content – that is central to mental phenomena, and hence a central, and difficult, problem that any theory of mind must solve.

intersubjective – Grice: “Who was the first Grecian philosopher to philosophise on conversational intersubjectivity? Surely Plato! Socrates is just his alter ego – and after Aeschylus, there is always a ‘deuterogonist’”! conversational intersubjectivity. Philosophical sociology – While Grice saw himself as a philosophical psychologist, he would rather be seen dead than as a philosophical sociologist – ‘intersubjective at most’! -- Comte: A. philosopher and sociologist, the founder of positivism. He was educated in Paris at l’École Polytechnique, where he briefly taught mathematics. He suffered from a mental illness that occasionally interrupted his work. In conformity with empiricism, Comte held that knowledge of the world arises from observation. He went beyond many empiricists, however, in denying the possibility of knowledge of unobservable physical objects. He conceived of positivism as a method of study based on observation and restricted to the observable. He applied positivism chiefly to science. He claimed that the goal of science is prediction, to be accomplished using laws of succession. Explanation insofar as attainable has the same structure as prediction. It subsumes events under laws of succession; it is not causal. Influenced by Kant, he held that the causes of phenomena and the nature of things-in-themselves are not knowable. He criticized metaphysics for ungrounded speculation about such matters; he accused it of not keeping imagination subordinate to observation. He advanced positivism for all the sciences but held that each science has additional special methods, and has laws not derivable by human intelligence from laws of other sciences. He corresponded extensively with J. S. Mill, who Comte, Auguste Comte, Auguste 168   168 encouraged his work and discussed it in Auguste Comte and Positivism 1865. Twentieth-century logical positivism was inspired by Comte’s ideas. Comte was a founder of sociology, which he also called social physics. He divided the science into two branches  statics and dynamics dealing respectively with social organization and social development. He advocated a historical method of study for both branches. As a law of social development, he proposed that all societies pass through three intellectual stages, first interpreting phenomena theologically, then metaphysically, and finally positivistically. The general idea that societies develop according to laws of nature was adopted by Marx. Comte’s most important work is his six-volume Cours de philosophie positive Course in Positive Philosophy, 183042. It is an encyclopedic treatment of the sciences that expounds positivism and culminates in the introduction of sociology.
intervention -- intervening variable, in Grice’s philosophical psychology, a state of an organism, person or, as Grice prefers, a ‘pirot,’ (vide his ‘pirotology’) or ‘creature,’ postulated to explain the pirot’s behaviour and defined in ‘functioanlist,’ Aristotelian terms of its cause (perceptual input) and effect (the behavioural output to be explained by attribution of a state of the ‘soul’) rather than its intrinsic properties. A food drive or need for nuts, in a squarrel (as Grice calls his ‘Toby’) conceived as an intervening variable, is defined in terms of the number of hours without food (the cause) and the strength or robustness of efforts to secure it (effect).. The squarrel’s feeling hungry (‘needing a nut), is no longer an intrinsic property – the theoretical term ‘need’ is introduced in a ramseyified sentence by describing – and it need not be co-related to a state in the brain – since there is room for variable realisability. Grice sees at least three reasons for postulating an intervening variable (like the hours without nut-hobbling). First, time lapse between stimulus (perceptual input) and behavioural output may be large, as when an animal – even a squirrel -- eats food found hours earlier. Why did not the animal hobble the nut when it first found it? Perhaps at the time of discovery, the squarrel had already eaten, so food drive (the squarrel’s need) is reduced. Second, Toby may act differently in the same sort of situation, as when Toby hobbles a nut at noon one day but delay until sunset the next. Again, this may be because of variation in food drive or the squarrel’s need. Third, behaviour may occur in the absence of external stimulation or perceptual input, as when Toby forages for nut for the winter. This, too, may be explained by the strength of the food drive or squarrel’s need. An intervening variables has been viewed, as Grice notes reviewing Oxonian philosophical psychology from Stout to Ryle via Prichard) depending on the background theory, as a convenient ‘fiction’ (as Ramsey, qua theoretical construct) or as a psychologically real state, or as a physically real state with multiple realisability conditions. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre,” in “The Conception of value.”
intuitum: Grice: “At Oxford, the tutor teaches to trust your ‘intuition’ – and will point to the cognateness of ‘tutor’ and ‘in-tuition’!” – tŭĕor , tuĭtus, 2 (  I.perf. only post-Aug., Quint. 5, 13, 35; Plin. Ep. 6, 29, 10; collat. form tūtus, in the part., rare, Sall. J. 74, 3; Front. Strat. 2, 12, 13; but constantly in the P. a.; inf. parag. tuerier, Plaut. Rud. 1, 4, 35; collat. form acc. to the 3d conj. tŭor , Cat. 20, 5; Stat. Th. 3, 151: “tuĕris,” Plaut. Trin. 3, 2, 82: “tuimur,” Lucr. 1, 300; 4, 224; 4, 449; “6, 934: tuamur,” id. 4, 361: “tuantur,” id. 4, 1004; imper. tuĕre, id. 5, 318), v. dep. a. [etym. dub.], orig., to see, to look or gaze upon, to watch, view; hence, pregn., to see or look to, to defend, protect, etc.: tueri duo significat; unum ab aspectu, unde est Ennii illud: tueor te senex? pro Juppiter! (Trag. v. 225 Vahl.); “alterum a curando ac tutela, ut cum dicimus bellum tueor et tueri villam,” Varr. L. L. 7, § 12 Müll. sq.—Accordingly, I. To look at, gaze at, behold, watch, view, regard, consider, examine, etc. (only poet.; syn.: specto, adspicio, intueor): quam te post multis tueor tempestatibus, Pac. ap. Non. 407, 32; 414, 3: “e tenebris, quae sunt in luce, tuemur,” Lucr. 4, 312: “ubi nil aliud nisi aquam caelumque tuentur,” id. 4, 434: “caeli templa,” id. 6, 1228 al.: “tuendo Terribiles oculos, vultum, etc.,” Verg. A. 8, 265; cf. id. ib. 1, 713: “talia dicentem jam dudum aversa tuetur,” id. ib. 4, 362: “transversa tuentibus hircis,” id. E. 3, 8: “acerba tuens,” looking fiercely, Lucr. 5, 33; cf. Verg. A. 9, 794: “torva,” id. ib. 6, 467.— (β). With object-clause: “quod multa in terris fieri caeloque tuentur (homines), etc.,” Lucr. 1, 152; 6, 50; 6, 1163.— II. Pregn., to look to, care for, keep up, uphold, maintain, support, guard, preserve, defend, protect, etc. (the predom. class. signif. of the word; cf.: “curo, conservo, tutor, protego, defendo): videte, ne ... vobis turpissimum sit, id, quod accepistis, tueri et conservare non posse,” Cic. Imp. Pomp. 5, 12: “ut quisque eis rebus tuendis conservandisque praefuerat,” Cic. Verr. 2, 4, 63, 140: “omnia,” id. N. D. 2, 23, 60: “mores et instituta vitae resque domesticas ac familiares,” id. Tusc. 1, 1, 2: “societatem conjunctionis humanae munifice et aeque,” id. Fin. 5, 23, 65: “concordiam,” id. Att. 1, 17, 10: rem et gratiam et auctoritatem suam, id. Fam. 13, 49, 1: “dignitatem,” id. Tusc. 2, 21, 48: “L. Paulus personam principis civis facile dicendo tuebatur,” id. Brut. 20, 80: “personam in re publicā,” id. Phil. 8, 10, 29; cf.: tuum munus, Planc. ap. Cic. Fam. 10, 11, 1: “tueri et sustinere simulacrum pristinae dignitatis,” Cic. Rab. Post. 15, 41: “aedem Castoris P. Junius habuit tuendam,” to keep in good order, Cic. Verr. 2, 1, 50, § 130; cf. Plin. Pan. 51, 1: “Bassum ut incustoditum nimis et incautum,” id. Ep. 6, 29, 10: “libertatem,” Tac. A. 3, 27; 14, 60: “se, vitam corpusque tueri,” to keep, preserve, Cic. Off. 1, 4, 11: “antea majores copias alere poterat, nunc exiguas vix tueri potest,” id. Deiot. 8, 22: “se ac suos tueri,” Liv. 5, 4, 5: “sex legiones (re suā),” Cic. Par. 6, 1, 45: “armentum paleis,” Col. 6, 3, 3: “se ceteris armis prudentiae tueri atque defendere,” to guard, protect, Cic. de Or. 1, 38, 172; cf.: “tuemini castra et defendite diligenter,” Caes. B. C. 3, 94: “suos fines,” id. B. G. 4, 8: “portus,” id. ib. 5, 8: “oppidum unius legionis praesidio,” id. B. C. 2, 23: “oram maritimam,” id. ib. 3, 34: “impedimenta,” to cover, protect, Hirt. B. G. 8, 2.—With ab and abl.: “fines suos ab excursionibus et latrociniis,” Cic. Deiot. 8, 22: “domum a furibus,” Phaedr. 3, 7, 10: mare ab hostibus, Auct. B. Afr. 8, 2.—With contra: “quos non parsimoniā tueri potuit contra illius audaciam,” Cic. Prov. Cons. 5, 11: “liberūm nostrorum pueritiam contra inprobitatem magistratuum,” Cic. Verr. 2, 1, 58, § 153; Quint. 5, 13, 35; Plin. 20, 14, 54, § 152; Tac. A. 6, 47 (41).—With adversus: “tueri se adversus Romanos,” Liv. 25, 11, 7: “nostra adversus vim atque injuriam,” id. 7, 31, 3: “adversus Philippum tueri Athenas,” id. 31, 9, 3; 42, 46, 9; 42, 23, 6: “arcem adversus tres cohortes tueri,” Tac. H. 3, 78; Just. 17, 3, 22; 43, 3, 4.—In part. perf.: “Verres fortiter et industrie tuitus contra piratas Siciliam dicitur,” Quint. 5, 13, 35 (al. tutatus): “Numidas in omnibus proeliis magis pedes quam arma tuta sunt,” Sall. J. 74, 3.!*? 1. Act. form tŭĕo , ēre: “censores vectigalia tuento,” Cic. Leg. 3, 3, 7: “ROGO PER SVPEROS, QVI ESTIS, OSSA MEA TVEATIS,” Inscr. Orell. 4788.— 2. tŭĕor , ēri, in pass. signif.: “majores nostri in pace a rusticis Romanis alebantur et in bello ab his tuebantur,” Varr. R. R. 3, 1, 4; Lucr. 4, 361: “consilio et operā curatoris tueri debet non solum patrimonium, sed et corpus et salus furiosi,” Dig. 27, 10, 7: “voluntas testatoris ex bono et aequo tuebitur,” ib. 28, 3, 17.—Hence, tūtus , a, um, P. a. (prop. well seen to or guarded; hence), safe, secure, out of danger (cf. securus, free from fear). A. Lit. (α). Absol.: “nullius res tuta, nullius domus clausa, nullius vita saepta ... contra tuam cupiditatem,” Cic. Verr. 2, 5, 15, § 39: “cum victis nihil tutum arbitrarentur,” Caes. B. G. 2, 28: “nec se satis tutum fore arbitratur,” Hirt. B. G. 8, 27; cf.: “me biremis praesidio scaphae Tutum per Aegaeos tumultus Aura feret,” Hor. C. 3, 29, 63; Ov. M. 8, 368: “tutus bos rura perambulat,” Hor. C. 4, 5, 17: “quis locus tam firmum habuit praesidium, ut tutus esset?” Cic. Imp. Pomp. 11, 31: “mare tutum praestare,” id. Fl. 13, 31: “sic existimabat tutissimam fore Galliam,” Hirt. B. G. 8, 54: “nemus,” Hor. C. 1, 17, 5: “via fugae,” Cic. Caecin. 15, 44; cf.: “commodior ac tutior receptus,” Caes. B. C. 1, 46: “perfugium,” Cic. Rep. 1, 4, 8: “tutum iter et patens,” Hor. C. 3, 16, 7: “tutissima custodia,” Liv. 31, 23, 9: “praesidio nostro pasci genus esseque tutum,” Lucr. 5, 874: “vitam consistere tutam,” id. 6, 11: “tutiorem et opulentiorem vitam hominum reddere,” Cic. Rep. 1, 2, 3: est et fideli tuta silentio Merces, secure, sure (diff. from certa, definite, certain), Hor. C. 3, 2, 25: “tutior at quanto merx est in classe secundā!” id. S. 1, 2, 47: “non est tua tuta voluntas,” not without danger, Ov. M. 2, 53: “in audaces non est audacia tuta,” id. ib. 10, 544: “externā vi non tutus modo rex, sed invictus,” Curt. 6, 7, 1: “vel tutioris audentiae est,” Quint. 12, prooem. § 4: “ cogitatio tutior,” id. 10, 7, 19: “fuit brevitas illa tutissima,” id. 10, 1, 39: “regnum et diadema tutum Deferens uni,” i. e. that cannot be taken away, Hor. C. 2, 2, 21: male tutae mentis Orestes, i. e. unsound, = male sanae, id. S. 2, 3, 137: quicquid habes, age, Depone tutis auribus, qs. carefully guarded, i. e. safe, faithful, id. C. 1, 27, 18 (cf. the opp.: auris rimosa, id. S. 2, 6, 46).—Poet., with gen.: “(pars ratium) tuta fugae,” Luc. 9, 346.— (β). With ab and abl.: tutus ab insidiis inimici, Asin. ap. Cic. Fam. 10, 31, 2: “ab insidiis,” Hor. S. 2, 6, 117: “a periculo,” Caes. B. G. 7, 14: “ab hoste,” Ov. H. 11, 44: “ab hospite,” id. M. 1, 144: “a conjuge,” id. ib. 8, 316: “a ferro,” id. ib. 13, 498: “a bello, id. H. (15) 16, 344: ab omni injuriā,” Phaedr. 1, 31, 9.— (γ). With ad and acc.: “turrim tuendam ad omnis repentinos casus tradidit,” Caes. B. C. 3, 39: “ad id, quod ne timeatur fortuna facit, minime tuti sunt homines,” Liv. 25, 38, 14: “testudinem tutam ad omnes ictus video esse,” id. 36, 32, 6.— (δ). With adversus: “adversus venenorum pericula tutum corpus suum reddere,” Cels. 5, 23, 3: “quo tutiores essent adversus ictus sagittarum,” Curt. 7, 9, 2: “loci beneficio adversus intemperiem anni tutus est,” Sen. Ira, 2, 12, 1: “per quem tutior adversus casus steti,” Val. Max. 4, 7, ext. 2: “quorum praesidio tutus adversus hostes esse debuerat,” Just. 10, 1, 7.—ε) With abl.: incendio fere tuta est Alexandria, Auct. B. Alex. 1, 3.— b. Tutum est, with a subj. -clause, it is prudent or safe, it is the part of a prudent man: “si dicere palam parum tutum est,” Quint. 9, 2, 66; 8, 3, 47; 10, 3, 33: “o nullis tutum credere blanditiis,” Prop. 1, 15, 42: “tutius esse arbitrabantur, obsessis viis, commeatu intercluso sine ullo vulnere victoriā potiri,” Caes. B. G. 3, 24; Quint. 7, 1, 36; 11, 2, 48: “nobis tutissimum est, auctores plurimos sequi,” id. 3, 4, 11; 3, 6, 63.— 2. As subst.: tūtum , i, n., a place of safety, a shelter, safety, security: Tr. Circumspice dum, numquis est, Sermonem nostrum qui aucupet. Th. Tutum probe est, Plaut. Most. 2, 2, 42: “tuta et parvula laudo,” Hor. Ep. 1, 15, 42: “trepidum et tuta petentem Trux aper insequitur,” Ov. M. 10, 714: “in tuto ut collocetur,” Ter. Heaut. 4, 3, 11: “esse in tuto,” id. ib. 4, 3, 30: “ut sitis in tuto,” Cic. Fam. 12, 2, 3: “in tutum eduxi manipulares meos,” Plaut. Most. 5, 1, 7: “in tutum receptus est,” Liv. 2, 19, 6.— B. Transf., watchful, careful, cautious, prudent (rare and not ante-Aug.; “syn.: cautus, prudens): serpit humi tutus nimium timidusque procellae,” Hor. A. P. 28: “tutus et intra Spem veniae cautus,” id. ib. 266: “non nisi vicinas tutus ararit aquas,” Ov. Tr. 3, 12, 36: “id suā sponte, apparebat, tuta celeribus consiliis praepositurum,” Liv. 22, 38, 13: “celeriora quam tutiora consilia magis placuere ducibus,” id. 9, 32, 3.—Hence, adv. in two forms, tūtē and tūtō , safely, securely, in safety, without danger. a. Posit. (α). Form tute (very rare): “crede huic tute,” Plaut. Trin. 1, 2, 102: “eum tute vivere, qui honeste vivat,” Auct. Her. 3, 5, 9: “tute cauteque agere,” id. ib. 3, 7, 13.— (β). Form tuto (class. in prose and poetry): “pervenire,” Plaut. Mil. 2, 2, 70; Lucr. 1, 179: “dimicare,” Caes. B. G. 3, 24: “tuto et libere decernere,” id. B. C. 1, 2: “ut tuto sim,” in security, Cic. Fam. 14, 3, 3: “ut tuto ab repentino hostium incursu etiam singuli commeare possent,” Caes. B. G. 7, 36. — b. Comp.: “ut in vadis consisterent tutius,” Caes. B. G. 3, 13: “tutius et facilius receptus daretur,” id. B. C. 2, 30: “tutius ac facilius id tractatur,” Quint. 5, 5, 1: “usitatis tutius utimur,” id. 1, 5, 71: “ut ubivis tutius quam in meo regno essem,” Sall. J. 14, 11.— c. Sup. (α). Form tutissime: nam te hic tutissime puto fore, Pomp. ap. Cic. Att. 8, 11, A.— (β). Form tutissimo: “quaerere, ubi tutissimo essem,” Cic. Att. 8, 1, 2; cf. Charis. p. 173 P.: “tutissimo infunduntur oboli quattuor,” Plin. 20, 3, 8, § 14. Grice was especially interested in the misuses of intuition. He found that J. L. Austin (born in Lancaster) had “Northern intuitions.” “I myself have proper heart-of-England intuitions.” “Strawson has Cockney intuitions.” “I wonder how we conducted those conversations on Saturday mornings!” “Strictly, an intuition is a non-inferential knowledge or grasp, as of a proposition, concept, or entity, that is not based on perception, memory, or introspection; also, the capacity in virtue of which such cognition is possible. A person might know that 1 ! 1 % 2 intuitively, i.e., not on the basis of inferring it from other propositions. And one might know intuitively what yellow is, i.e., might understand the concept, even though ‘yellow’ is not definable. Or one might have intuitive awareness of God or some other entity. Certain mystics hold that there can be intuitive, or immediate, apprehension of God. Ethical intuitionists hold both that we can have intuitive knowledge of certain moral concepts that are indefinable, and that certain propositions, such as that pleasure is intrinsically good, are knowable through intuition. Self-evident propositions are those that can be seen (non-inferentially) to be true once one fully understands them. It is often held that all and only self-evident propositions are knowable through intuition, which is here identified with a certain kind of intellectual or rational insight. Intuitive knowledge of moral or other philosophical propositions or concepts has been compared to the intuitive knowledge of grammaticality possessed by competent users of a language. Such language users can know immediately whether certain sentences are grammatical or not without recourse to any conscious reasoning. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “My intutions.” BANC.
Ionian-sea-coast philosophy: Grice, “Or mar ionio, as the Italians have it!” -- the characteristically naturalist and rationalist thought of Grecian philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. who were active in Ionia, the region of ancient Greek colonies on the coast of Asia Minor and adjacent islands. First of the Ionian philosophers were the three Milesians. Grice: “It always amused me that they called themselves Ionians, but then Williams, who founded Providence in the New World, called himself an Englishman!”. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “The relevance of Ionian philosophy today.”
Irigaray: philosopher and psychoanalyst. Her earliest work was in psychoanalysis and linguistics, focusing on the role of negation in the language of schizophrenics (Languages, 1966). A trained analyst with a private practice, she attended Lacan’s seminars at the École Normale Supérieure and for several years taught a course in the psychoanalysis department at Vincennes. With the publication of Speculum, De l’autre femme(Speculum of the Other Woman) in 1974 she was dismissed from Vincennes. She argues that psychoanalysis, specifically its attitude toward women, is historically and culturally determined and that its phallocentric bias is treated as universal truth. With the publication of Speculum and Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (This Sex Which Is Not One) in 1977, her work extends beyond psychoanalysis and begins a critical examination of philosophy. Influenced primarily by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, her work is a critique of the fundamental categories of philosophical thought: one/many, identity/difference, being/non-being, rational/irrational, mind/body, form/matter, transcendental/sensible. She sets out to show the concealed aspect of metaphysical constructions and what they depend on, namely, the unacknowledged mother. In Speculum, the mirror figures as interpretation and criticism of the enclosure of the Western subject within the mirror’s frame, constituted solely through the masculine imaginary. Her project is one of constituting the world – and not only the specular world – of the other as woman. This engagement with the history of philosophy emphasizes the historical and sexual determinants of philosophical discourse, and insists on bringing the transcendental back to the elements of the earth and embodiment. Her major contribution to philosophy is the notion of sexual difference. An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984) claims that the central contemporary philosophical task is to think through sexual difference. Although her notion of sexual difference is sometimes taken to be an essentialist view of the feminine, in fact it is an articulation of the difference between the sexes that calls into question an understanding of either the feminine or masculine as possessing a rigid gender identity. Instead, sexual difference is the erotic desire for otherness. Insofar as it is an origin that is continuously differentiating itself from itself, it challenges Aristotle’s understanding of the arche as solid ground or hypokeimenon. As aition or first cause, sexual difference is responsible for something coming into being and is that to which things are indebted for their being. This indebtedness allows Irigaray to formulate an ethics of sexual difference. Her latest work continues to rethink the foundations of ethics. Both Towards a Culture of Difference (1990) and I Love To You (1995) claim that there is no civil identity proper to women and therefore no possibility of equivalent social and political status for men and women. She argues for a legal basis to ground the reciprocity between the sexes; that there is no living universal, that is, a universal that reflects sexual difference; and that this lack of a living universal leads to an absence of rights and responsibilities which reflects both men and women. She claims, therefore, that it is necessary to “sexuate” rights. These latest works continue to make explicit the erotic and ethical project that informs all her work: to think through the dimension of sexual difference that opens up access to the alliances between living beings who are engendered and not fabricated, and who refuse to sacrifice desire for death, power, or money.
iron-age metaphysics: Euclidean geometry, the version of geometry that includes among its axioms the parallel axiom, which asserts that, given a line L in a plane, there exists just one line in the plane that passes through a point not on L but never meets L. The phrase ‘Euclidean geometry’ refers both to the doctrine of geometry to be found in Euclid’s Elements fourth century B.C. and to the mathematical discipline that was built on this basis afterward. In order to present properties of rectilinear and curvilinear curves in the plane and solids in space, Euclid sought definitions, axioms, ethics, divine command Euclidean geometry 290   290 and postulates to ground the reasoning. Some of his assumptions belonged more to the underlying logic than to the geometry itself. Of the specifically geometrical axioms, the least self-evident stated that only one line passes through a point in a plane parallel to a non-coincident line within it, and many efforts were made to prove it from the other axioms. Notable forays were made by G. Saccheri, J. Playfair, and A. M. Legendre, among others, to put forward results logically contradictory to the parallel axiom e.g., that the sum of the angles between the sides of a triangle is greater than 180° and thus standing as candidates for falsehood; however, none of them led to paradox. Nor did logically equivalent axioms such as that the angle sum equals 180° seem to be more or less evident than the axiom itself. The next stages of this line of reasoning led to non-Euclidean geometry. From the point of view of logic and rigor, Euclid was thought to be an apotheosis of certainty in human knowledge; indeed, ‘Euclidean’ was also used to suggest certainty, without any particular concern with geometry. Ironically, investigations undertaken in the late nineteenth century showed that, quite apart from the question of the parallel axiom, Euclid’s system actually depended on more axioms than he had realized, and that filling all the gaps would be a formidable task. Pioneering work done especially by M. Pasch and G. Peano was brought to a climax in 9 by Hilbert, who produced what was hoped to be a complete axiom system. Even then the axiom of continuity had to wait for the second edition! The endeavor had consequences beyond the Euclidean remit; it was an important example of the growth of axiomatization in mathematics as a whole, and it led Hilbert himself to see that questions like the consistency and completeness of a mathematical theory must be asked at another level, which he called metamathematics. It also gave his work a formalist character; he said that his axiomatic talk of points, lines, and planes could be of other objects. Within the Euclidean realm, attention has fallen in recent decades upon “neo-Euclidean” geometries, in which the parallel axiom is upheld but a different metric is proposed. For example, given a planar triangle ABC, the Euclidean distance between A and B is the hypotenuse AB; but the “rectangular distance” AC ! CB also satisfies the properties of a metric, and a geometry working with it is very useful in, e.g., economic geography, as anyone who drives around a city will readily understand.  Grice: "Much the most significant opposition to my type of philosophising comes from those like Baron Russell who feel that ‘ “ordinary-language” philosophy’ is an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regard exponents like me as wantonly dedicating themselves to what the Baron calls 'stone-age metaphysics', "The Baron claims that 'stone-age metaphysics' is the best that can be dredged up from a ‘philosophical’ study of an ‘ordinary’ language, such as Oxonian, as it ain't. "The use made of Russell’s phrase ‘stone-age metaphysics’ has more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force."“Certainly ‘stone-age’ *physics*, if by that we mean a 'primitive' (as the Baron puts it -- in contrast to 'iron-age physics') set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might conceivably be embedded somehow or other in an ‘ordinary’ language such as Oxonian, does not seem to be a proper object for first-order devotion -- I'll grant the Baron that!"“But this fact should *not* prevent something derivable or extractable from ‘stone-age’ (if not 'iron-age') *physics*, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research.”"I would not be surprised if an extractable characterization of this may not be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, the Baron's favoured iron-age physics!"
non sequitur --: irrationality, unreasonableness. Whatever it entails, irrationality can characterize belief, desire, intention, and action. intuitions irrationality 443 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 443 Irrationality is often explained in instrumental, or goal-oriented, terms. You are irrational if you (knowingly) fail to do your best, or at least to do what you appropriately think adequate, to achieve your goals. If ultimate goals are rationally assessable, as Aristotelian and Kantian traditions hold, then rationality and irrationality are not purely instrumental. The latter traditions regard certain specific (kinds of) goals, such as human well-being, as essential to rationality. This substantialist approach lost popularity with the rise of modern decision theory, which implies that, in satisfying certain consistency and completeness requirements, one’s preferences toward the possible outcomes of available actions determine what actions are rational and irrational for one by determining the personal utility of their outcomes. Various theorists have faulted modern decision theory on two grounds: human beings typically lack the consistent preferences and reasoning power required by standard decision theory but are not thereby irrational, and rationality requires goods exceeding maximally efficient goal satisfaction. When relevant goals concern the acquisition of truth and the avoidance of falsehood, epistemic rationality and irrationality are at issue. Otherwise, some species of non-epistemic rationality or irrationality is under consideration. Species of non-epistemic rationality and irrationality correspond to the kind of relevant goal: moral, prudential, political, economic, aesthetic, or some other. A comprehensive account of irrationality will elucidate epistemic and non-epistemic irrationality as well as such sources of irrationality as weakness of will and ungrounded belief.
esse:“est” (“Homo animale rationalis est” – Aristotle, cited by Grice in “Aristotle on the multiplicity of being”) – “is” is the third person singular form of the verb ‘be’, with at least three fundamental usages that philosophers distinguish according to the resources required for a proper semantic representation. First, there is the ‘is’ of existence, which Grice finds otiose – “Marmaduke Bloggs is a journalist who climbed Mt Everest on hands and knees – a typical invention by journalists”. (There is a unicorn in the garden: Dx (Ux8Gx)) uses the existential quantifier. Bellerophon’s dad: “There is a flying horse in the stable.” “That’s mine, dad.” – Then, second, there is the ‘is’ of identity (Hesperus is Phosphorus: j % k) employs the predicate of identity, or dyadic relation of “=,” as per Leibniz’s problem – “The king of France” – Kx = Ky. Then third there is the ‘is’ of predication, which can be essential (izzing) or accidentail (hazzing). (Samson is strong: Sj) merely juxtaposes predicate symbol and proper name. Some controversy attends the first usage. Some (notably that eccentric philosopher that went by the name of Meinong) maintain that ‘is’ applies more broadly than ‘exists.’ “Is” produces truths when combined with ‘deer’ and ‘unicorn.’ ‘Exists,’ rather than ‘is’, produces a truth when combined with ‘deer’ -- but not ‘unicorn’. Aquinas takes “esse” to denote some special activity that every existing thing necessarily performs, which would seem to imply that with ‘est’ they attribute more to an object than we do with ‘exists’. Other issues arise in connection with the second usage. Does, e.g. “Hesperus is Phosphorus,” attribute anything more to the heavenly body than its identity with itself? Consideration of such a question leads Frege, wrongly to conclude, in what Ryle calls the “Fido”-Fido theory of meaning that names (and other meaningful expressions) of ordinary language have a “sense” or “mode of presenting” the thing to which they refer that representations within our standard, extensional logical systems fail to expose. The distinction between the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication parallels Frege’s distinction between ‘objekt” and concept: words signifying objects stand to the right of the ‘is’ of identity and those signifying concepts stand to the right of the ‘is’ of predication. Although it seems remarkable that so many deep and difficult philosophical concepts should link to a single short and commonplace word, we should perhaps not read too much into that observation. Grecian and Roman indeed divide the various roles played by English’s compact copula among several constructions, but there are dialects, even within Oxford, that use the expression “is” for other purposes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aristotle on the multiplicity of being.”
-ism: used by Grice derogatorily. In his ascent to the City of the Eternal Truth, he meets twelve –isms, which he orders alphabetically. These are: Empiricism. Extensionalism. Functionalism. MaterialismMechanism. Naturalism. Nominalism. Phenomenalism. Positivism. Physicalism. Reductionism. Scepticism. Grice’s implicaturum is that each is a form of, er, minimalism, as opposed to maximalism. He also seems to implicate that, while embracing one of those –isms is a reductionist vice, embracing their opposites is a Christian virtue – He explicitly refers to the name of Bunyan’s protagonist, “Christian” – “in a much more publicized journey, I grant.” So let’s see how we can correlate each vicious heathen ism with the Griceian Christian virtuous ism. Empiricism. “Surely not all is experience. My bones are not.” Opposite: Rationalism. Extensionalism. Surely the empty set cannot end up being the fullest! Opposite Intensionalism. Functionalism. What is the function of love? We have to extend functionalism to cover one’s concern for the other – And also there’s otiosity. Opposite: Mentalism. Materialism – My bones are ‘hyle,’ but my eternal soul isn’t. Opposite Spiritualism.  Mechanism – Surely there is finality in nature, and God designed it. Opposite Vitalism. Naturalism – Surely Aristotle meant something by ‘ta meta ta physica,’ There is a transnatural realm. Opposite: Transnaturalism.  Nominalism. Occam was good, except with his ‘sermo mentalis.’ Opposite: Realism. Phenomenalism – Austin and Grice soon realised that Berlin was wrong. Opposite ‘thing’-language-ism. Positivism – And then there’s not. Opposite: Negativism.  Physicalism – Surely my soul is not a brain state. Opposite: Transnaturalism, since Physicalismm and Naturalism mean the same thing, ony in Greek, the other in Latin.  Reductionism – Julie is wrong when she thinks I’m a reductionist. Opposite: Reductivism.  Scepticism: Surely there’s common sense. Opposite: Common-Sensism. Refs: H. P. Grice, “Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice,” The Grice Papers, BANC.

isocrates – Grice: “the chief rival of Plato.” A pupil of Socrates and also of Gorgias, Isocrates founds a play group or club in Athens – vide H. P. Grice, “Athenian dialectic” -- that attracts many aristocrats. Many of Isocrates’s philosophy touches on ‘dialectic.’ “Against the Sophists and On the Antidosis are most important in this respect. “On the antidosis” stands to Isocrates as the “Apology” of Plato stands to Socrates, a defense of Socrates against an attack not on his life, but on his property. The aim of Isocrates’s philosophy is good judgment in practical affairs, and he believes his contribution to Greece through education more valuable than legislation could possibly be. Isocrates repudiates instruction in theoretical (what he called ‘otiose’) philosophy, and insisted on distinguishing his teaching of rhetoric from the sophistry that gives clever speakers an unfair advantage. In politics Isocrates is a Panhellenic patriot, and urges the warring Greek city-states to unite under strong leadership and take arms against the Persian Empire. His most famous work, and the one in which he took the greatest pride, is the “Panegyricus,” a speech in praise of Athens. In general, Isocrates supports democracy in Athens, but toward the end of his life complained bitterly of abuses of the system.
descriptum – definite (“the”) and “indefinite” (“some at least one”). Analysed by Grice in terms of /\x. “The king of France is bald” There is at least a king of France, there is at most a king of France, and anything that is a king of France is bald. For indefinite descriptum he holds the equivalence with \/x, “some (at least one). – Grice follows Peano in finding the ‘iota’ operator a good abbreviatory device to avoid the boring ‘Russellian expansion.” “We should forgive Russell – his background was mathematics not the belles letters as with Bradley and me, and anyone at Oxford, really.” – Grice.  iota – iota operator used by Grice. Peano uses iota as short for “isos,” Grecian for ‘Same”. Peano defines “ix” as “the class of whatever is the same as x”. Peano then looked for a symbol for the inverse for this. He first uses a negated iota, and then an inverted iota, so that inverted iota x reads “the sole [unique] member of x” “ι” read as “the” -- s the inverted iota or description operator and is used in expressions for definite descriptions, such as “(ιx)ϕx(ιx)ϕx,” which is read: the x such that ϕxϕx). [(ιx)ϕx(ιx)ϕx] -- a definite description in brackets. This is a scope indicator for definite descriptions. The topic of ‘description’ is crucial for Grice, and he regrets Russell focused on the definite rather than the indefinite descriptor. As a matter of fact, while Grice follows the custom of referring to the “Russellian expansion” of iota, he knows it’s ultimately the “Peanoian” expansion. Indeed, Peano uses the non-inverted iota “i” for the unit class. For the ONLY or UNIQUE member of this class, i. e. the definite article “the,” Peano uses the inverted iota (cf. *THE* Twelve Apostles). (On occasion Peano uses the denied iota for that).  Peano’s approach to ‘the’ evolve in at least three stages towards a greater precision in the treatment of the description, both definite and indefinite. Peano introducesin 1897  the fundamental definition of the unit class as the class such that ALL of its members are IDENTICAL. In Peanoian symbols, ix = ye (y = x). Peano approaches the UNIQUE OR ONLY member of such a class, by way of an indirect definition: “x = ia • = • a = ix.” Regarding the analysis of the definite article “the,” Peano makes the crucial point that every ‘proposition’ or ‘sentence’ containing “the” (“The apostles were twelve”) can be offered a reductive AND REDUCTIONIST analysis, first, to. the for,? ia E b, and, second, to the inclusion of the class in the class (a b), which already supposes the elimination of “i.” Peano notes he can avoid an identity whose first member contains “I” (1897:215). One difference between Peano’s and Russell's treatment of classes in the context of the theory of description is that, while, for Peano, a description combines a class abstract with the inverse of the unit class operator, Russell restricts the free use of a class abstract due the risk of paradox generation. For Peano, it is necessary that there EXIST the class (‘apostle’), and he uses for this the symbol ‘I,’ which indicates that the class is not vacuous, void, or empty, and that it have a unique member, the set of twelve apostles. If either of these two conditions – existence and uniqueness -- are not met, the symbol is meaningless, or pointless. Peano offers various instances for handling the symbol of the inverted iota, and the way in which -- starting from that ‘indirect’ or implicit definition, it can be eliminated altogether. One example is of particular interest, as it states a link between the reductionist analysis of the inverted iota and the problem of what Peano calls ‘doubtful’ existence (rather than vacuous, void, or empty). Peano starts by defining the superlative ‘THE greatEST number of a class of real numbers’ as ‘THE number n such that there is no number of this class being greater than n.’ Peano warns that one should not infer from this definition the ‘existence’ of the aforementioned greatEST number. Grice does not quite consider this in the ‘definite description’ section of “Vacuous name” but gives a similar example: “The climber on hands and knees of Mt. Everest does not exist. He was invented by the journalists.” And in other cases where there is a NON-IDENTIFICATORY use of ‘the’, which Grice symbolises as ‘the,’ rather than ‘THE’: “The butler certainly made a mess with our hats and coats – whoever he is --.” As it happens Strawson mistook the haberdasher to be the butler. So that Strawson is MIS-IDENTIFYING the denotatum as being ‘the butler’ when it is ‘the haberdasher.’ The butler doesn’t really exist. Smith dressed the haberdasher as a butler and made him act as one just to impress. Similarly, as per Russell’s ‘Prince George soon found out that ‘the author of Waverley’ did not exist,” (variant of his example). Similarly, Peano proves that we can speak legitimately of “THE GREATEST real number” even if we have doubts it ‘exists. He just tweaks the original definition to obtain a different expression where “I” is dropped out. For Peano, then, the reductionist analysis of the definite article “the” is feasible and indeed advisable for a case of ‘doubtful’ existence. Grice does not consider ‘doubtful’ but he may. “The climber on hands and knees of Mt Everest may, but then again may not, attend the party the Merseyside Geographical Society is giving in his honour. He will attend if he exists; he will not attend if he doesn’t.” Initially, Peano thinks “I” need not be equivalent to, in the sense of systematically replaced by, the two clauses (indeed three) in the expansion which are supposed to give the import of ‘the,’ viz. existence and uniqueness (subdivided in ‘at least’ and ‘at most’). His reductionism proves later to be absolute. He starts from the definition in terms of the unit class. He goes on to add a series of "possible" definitions -- allowing for alternative logical orders. One of this alternative definitions is stipulated to be a strict equivalence, about which he had previously been sceptical. Peano asserts that the only unque individual belongs to a unit.  Peano does not put it in so many words that this expression is meaningless. In the French translation, what he said is Gallic: “Nous ne donnons pas de signification a ce symbole si la classe a est nulle, ou si elle contient plusieurs individus.” “We don’t give signification to this symbol IF the class is void, or if the class contains more than one individual.” – where we can see that he used ‘iota’ to represent ‘individus,’ from Latin ‘individuum,’ translating Greek ‘a-tomos.’ So it is not meant to stand for Greek ‘idion,’ as in ‘idiosyncratic.’ But why did he choose the iota, which is a Grecian letter. Idion is in the air (if not ‘idiot.’). Thus, one may take the equivalence in practice, given that if the three conditions in the expansion are met, the symbol cannot be used at all. There are other ways of providing a reductionist analysis of the same symbols according to Peano, e. g., laE b. = : a = tx. :Jx • Xc b class (a) such that it belongs to another class (b) is equal to the EXISTENCE of exactly one (at least one and at most one) idiosyncratic individual or element such that this idiosyncratic individual is a member of that class (b), i. e. "the only or unique (the one member) member of a belongs to b" is to be held equivalent to ‘There is at least one x such that, first, the unit class a is equal to the class constituted by x, and, second, x belongs to b.’ Or, ‘The class of x such that a is the class constituted by x, and that x belongs to b, is not an empty class, and that it have a unique member.” This is exactly Russell's tri-partite expansion referred to Russell (‘on whom Grice heaped all the praise,’ to echo Quine). Grice was not interested in history, only in rebutting Strawson. Of course, Peano provides his conceptualisations in terms of ‘class’ rather than, as Russell, Sluga [or ‘Shuga,’ as Cole reprints him] and Grice do, in terms of the ‘propositional function,’ i. e.  Peano reduces ‘the’ in terms of a property or a predicate, which defins a class. Peano reads the membership symbol as "is,” which opens a new can of worms for Grice: “izzing” – and flies out of the fly bottle. Peano is well aware of the importance of his device to eliminate the definite article “the” to more ‘primitive’ terms. That is why Peano qualifies his definition as an "expriment la P[proposition] 1 a E b sous une autre forme, OU ne figure plus le signe i; puisque toute P contenant le signe i a est REDUCTIBLE ala forme ia E b, OU best une CIs, on pourra ELIMINER le signe i dans toute P.” The once received view that the symbol "i" is for Peano undefinable and primitive has now been corrected.  Before making more explicit the parallelism with Whitehead’s and Russell's and Grice’s theory of description (vide Quine, “Reply to H. P. Grice”) we may consider a few potential problems. First, while it is true that the symbol ‘i’ has been given a ‘reductionist analysis’, in the definiens we still see the symbol of the unit class, which would refer somehow to the idea that is symbolized by ''ix’. Is this a sign of circularity, and evidence that the descriptor has not been eliminated? For Peano, there are at least two ways of defining a symbol of the unit class without using ‘iota’ – straight, inverted, or negated. One way is directly replacing ix by its value: y 3(y = x). We have: la E b • =: 3x 3{a =y 3(y =x) • X E b},  which expresses the same idea in a way where a reference to iota has disappeared. We can read now "the only member of a belongs to b" as "there is at least one x such that (i) the unit class a is equal to all the y such that y =x, and (ii) x belongs to b" (or "the class of x such that they constitute the class of y, and that they constitute the class a, and that in addition they belong to the class b, is not an empty class"). The complete elimination underlies the mentioned definition. Peano is just not interested in making the point explicit. A second way is subtler. By pointing out that, in the "hypothesis" preceding the quoted definition, it is clearly stated that the class "a" is defined as the unit class in terms of the existence and identity of all of their members (i.e. uniqueness): a E Cis. 3a: x, yEa. X = y: bE CIs • : This is why "a" is equal to the expression ''tx'' (in the second member). One may still object that since "a" can be read as "the unit class", Peano does not quite provide a ‘reductionist’ analysis as it is shown through the occurrence of these words in some of the readings proposed above. However, the hypothesis preceding the definition only states that the meaning of the symbols which are used in the second member is to be. Thus, "a" is stated as "an existing unit class", which has to be understood in the following way: 'a' stands for a non-empty class that all of its members are identical. We can thus can "a", wherever it occurs, by its meaning, given that this interpretation works as only a purely ‘nominal’ definition, i.e. a convenient abbreviation. However, the actual substitution would lead us to rather complicated prolixic expressions that would infringe Grice’s desideratum of conversational clarity. Peano's usual way of working can be odd. Starting from this idea, we can interpret the definition as stating that "ia Eb" is an abbreviation of the definiens and dispensing with the conditions stating existence and uniqueness in the hypothesis, which have been incorporated to their new place. The hypothesis  contains only the statement of "a" and" b" as being classes, and the definition amounts to: a, bECls.::J :. ME b. =:3XE([{3aE[w, zEa. ::Jw•z' w= z]} ={ye (y= x)}] • XE b). Peano’s way is characterized as the constant search for SHORTER, briefer, and more conveniente expressions – which is Grice’s solution to Strawson’s misconception – there is a principle of conversational tailoring. It is quite understandable that Peano prefers to avoid long expansions. The important thing is not the intuitive and superficial similarity between the symbols "ia" and ''ix'', caused simply by the appearance of the Greek letter iota in both cases, or the intuitive meaning of  "the unit class.” What is key are the conditions under which these expressions have been introduced in Peano’s system, which are completely clear and quite explicit in the first definition. It may still be objected that Peano’s elimination of ‘the’ is a failure in that it derives from Peano's confusion between class membership and class inclusion -- a singleton class would be its sole member – but these are not clearly distinct notions. It follows that (iii) "a" is both a class and, according to the interpretation of the definition, an individual (iv), as is shown by joining the hypothesis preceding the definition and the definition itself. The objection derives from the received view on Peano, according to which his logic is, compared to Whitehead’s and Russell’s, not strict or formal enough, but also contains some important confusions here and there.  And certainly Russell would be more than happy to correct a minor point. Russell always thinks of Peano and his school as being strangely free of confusions or mistakes. It may be said that Peano indeed ‘confuses’ membership with inclusion (cf. Grice ‘not confused, but mistaken’) given that it was he himself who, predating Frege, introduces the distinction with the symbol "e.” If the objection amounts to Peano admitting that the symbol for membership holds between class A and class B, it is true that this is the case when Peano uses it to indicate the meaning of some symbols, but only through the reading of "is,” which could be" 'a and b being classes, "the only member of a belongs to b,” to be the same as "there is at least one x such that (i) 'there is at least one a such that for ,': and z belonging to a,. w = z' is equal to y such that y =. x' , and (ii) x belongs to b ,where both the iota and the unit class are eliminated in the definiens. There is a similar apparent vicious circularity in Frege's definition of number. "k e K" as "k is a class"; see also the hypothesis from above for another example).  This by no means involves confusion, and is shown by the fact that Peano soon adds four definite properties distinguishing precisely both class inclusion and class membership,, which has Russell himself preserving the useful and convenient reading.  "ia" does not stand for the singleton class. Peano states pretty clearly that" 1" (T)  makes sense only when applied to this or that individual, and ''t'' as applied to this or that class, no matter what symbols is used for these notions. Thus, ''ta'', like "tx" have to be read as "the class constituted by ...", and" la" as "the only member of a". Thus, although Peano never uses "ix" (because he is thinking in terms of this or that class), had he done so its meaning, of course, would have been exactly the same as "la", with no confusion at all. "a" stands for a class because it is so stated in the hypothesis, although it can represent an individual when preceded by the descriptor, and together with it, i.e. when both constitute a new symbol as a. Peano's habit is better understood by interpreting what he is saying it in terms of a propositional function, and then by seeing" la" as being somewhat similar to x, no matter what reasons of convenience led him to prefer symbols generally used for classes ("a" instead of"x"). There is little doubt that this makes the world of a difference for Russell and Sluga (or Shuga) but not Strawson or Grice, or Quine (“I’m sad all the praise was heaped by Grice on Russell, not Peano”). For Peano the inverted iota is the symbol for an operator on a class, it leads us to a different ‘concept’ when it flanks a term, and this is precisely the point Shuga (or Sluga) makes to Grice – ‘Presupposition and conversational implicaturum” – the reference to Shuga was omitted in the reprint in Way of Words). In contrast, for Russell, the iota operator is only a part of what Whitehead and Russell call an ‘incomplete’ symbol. In fact, Grice borrows the complete-incomplete distinction from Whitehead and Russell. For Peano, the descriptor can obviously be given a reductionist eliminationist analysis only in conjunction with the rest of the ‘complete’ symbol, "ia e b.’ Whitehead’s and Russell’s point, again, seems drawn from Peano. And there is no problem when we join the original hypothesis with the definition, “a eCis. 3a: x, yea. -::Jx,y. x =y: be CIs • :. . la e b. =: 3x 3(a =tx. x e b). If it falls within the scope of the quantifier in the hypothesis, “a” is a variable which occurs both free and bound in the formula – And it has to be a variable, since qua constant, no quantifier is needed. It is not clear what Peano’s position would have been. Admittedly, Peano – living always in a rush in Paris -- does not always display the highest standards of Oxonian clarity between the several uses of, say, "existence" involved in his various uses of this or that quantifier. In principle, there would be no problem when a variable appears both bound and free in the same expression. And this is so because the variable appears bound in one occurrence and free in another. And one cannot see how this could affect the main claim. The point Grice is making here (which he owes to ‘Shuga’) is to recognise the fundamental similarities in the reductionist analysis of “the” in Peano and Russell. It is true that Russell objects to an ‘implicit’ or indirect definition under a hypothesis. He would thus have rejected the Peanoian reductionist analysis of “the.” However, Whitehead and Russell rejects an ‘implicit’ definition under a hypothesis in the specific context of the “unrestricted’ variable of “Principia.” Indeed, Russell had been using, before Whitehead’s warning, this type of ‘implicit’ definition under a hypothesis for a long period the minute he mastered Peano's system. It is because Russell interprets a definition under a hypothesis as Peano does, i.e. merely as a device for fixing the denotatum of this or that symbol in an interpreted formula. When one reads after some symbolic definition, things like "'x' being ... " or" 'y' being ... ", this counts as a definition under a hypothesis, if only because the denotatum of the symbol has to be determined. Even if Peano's reductionist analysis of “the” fails because it within the framework of a merely conditional definition, the implicaturum of his original insight (“the” is not primitive) surely influences Whitehead and Russell. Peano is the first who introduces the the distinction between a free (or ‘real’) and a bound (or ‘apparent’) variable, and, predating, Frege -- existential and universal quantification, with an attempt at a substitutional theory based the concept of a ‘proposition,’ without relying on the concepts of ‘class’ or ‘propositional function.’ It may be argued that Peano could hardly may have thought that he eliminated “the.” Peano continues to use “the” and his whole system depends on it. Here, a Griceian practica reason can easily explain Peano’s retaining “the” in a system in cases where the symbol is merely the abbreviation of something that is in principle totally eliminable.In the same vein, Whitehead and Russell do continue to use “the” after the tripartite expansion. Peano, like Whitehead and Russell after him, undoubtedly thinks, and rightly, too, that the descriptor IS eliminable.If he does not flourish this elimination with by full atomistic philosophic paraphernalia which makes Russell's theory of description one of the most important logical successes of Cambridge philosopher – that was admired even at Oxford, if by Grice if not by Strawson, that is another thing. Peano somewhat understated the importance of his reductionist analysis, but then again, his goal is very different from Whitehead’s and Russell's logicism. And different goals for different strokes. In any case, the reductionist analysis of “the” is worked out by Peano with essentially the same symbolic resources that Whitehead and  Russell employ. In a pretty clear fashion, coming from him, Peano states two of the three conditions -- existence and uniqueness – subdivided into ‘at least and at most --, as being what it is explicitly conveyed by “the.” That is why in a negation of a vacuous description, being true, the existence claim, within the scope of the negation, is an annullable implicaturum, while in an affirmation, the existence claim is an entailment rendering the affirmation that predicates a feature of a vacuous definite description is FALSE. Peano has enough symbolic techniques for dispensing with ‘the’, including those required for constructing a definition in use. If he once rather cursorily noted that for Peano, “i” (‘the’) is primitive and indefinable, Quine later recognised Peano’s achievement, and he was “happy to get straight on Peano” on descriptions, having checked all the relevant references and I fully realising that he was wrong when he previously stated that the iota descriptor was for Peano primitive and indefinable. Peano deserves all the credit for the reductionist analysis that has been heaped on Whitehead and Russell, except perhaps for Whitehead’s and Russell’s elaboration on the philosophical lesson of a ‘contextual’ definition.For Peano, “the” cannot be defined in isolation; only in the context of the class (a) from which it is the UNIQUE member (la), and also in the context of the (b) from which that class is a member, at least to the extent that the class a is included in the class b. This carries no conflation of membership and inclusion. It is just a reasonable reading of " 1a Eb". "Ta" is just meaningless if the conditions of existence and uniqueness (at least and at most) are not fulfilled. Surely it may be argued that Peano’s reductionist analysis of “the” is not exactly the same as Whitehead’s and Russell's. Still, in his own version, it surely influenced Whitehead and Russell. In his "On Fundamentals,” Russell includes a definition in terms analogous to Peano's, and with almost the same symbols. The alleged improvement of Whitehead’s and Russell’s definition is in clarity. The concept of a ‘propositional function’ is indeed preferable to that of class membership. Other than that, the symbolic expression of the the three-prong expansive conditions -- existence and uniqueness (at least and at most) -- is preserved. Russell develops Peano’s claim to the effect that “ia” cannot be defined alone, but always in the context of a class, which Russell translates as ‘the context of a propositional function.’ His version in "On Denoting” is well known. In an earlier  letter to Jourdain, dated, Jan. 3, 1906 we read: “'JI( lX) (x) • =•(:3b) : x. =x. X = b: 'JIb.” (They never corresponded about the things Strawson corresponded with Grice – cricket). As G. Landini has pointed out, there is even an earlier occurrence of this definition in Russell’s "On Substitution" with only very slight symbolic differences. We can see the heritage from Peano in a clear way if we compare the definition with the version for classes in the letter to Jourdain: 'JI(t'u) • = : (:3b) : xEU. =x. X = b: 'JIb. Russell can hardly be accused of plagiarizing Peano; yet all the ideas and the formal devices which are important for the reductionist analysis of “the” were developed by in Peano, complete with conceptual and symbolic resources, and which Russell acknowledged that he studied in detail before formulating his own theory in “On denoting.” Regarding Meinong’s ontological jungle, for Russell, the principle of ‘subsistence disappears as a consequence of the reductionist analysis of “the,” which is an outcome of Russell’s semantic monism. Russell's later attitude to Meinong as his main enemy is a comfortable recourse (Griffin I977a).  As for Bocher, Russell himself admits some influence from his nominalism. Bacher describes mathematical objects as "mere symbols"  and advises Russell to follow this line of work in a letter, two months before Russell's key idea. The 'class as one' is merely a symbol or name which we choose at pleasure.” It is important to mention MacColl who he speaks of "symbolic universes", with things like a ‘round square.’MacColl also speaks of "symbolic ‘existence’". Indeed, Russell publishes “On denoting” as a direct response to MacColl. Refs.: P. Benacerraf and H. Putnam, “Philosophy of Mathematics, 2nd ed.Cambridge.; M. Bocher, 1904a. "The Fundamental Conceptions and Methods of Mathematics", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society; M. A. E. Dummett, The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy; Duckworth), G. Frege, G., Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Breslau: Koebner), tr. J.  L. Austin, The Foundations of Arithmetic, Blackwell, Partial English trans. (§§55-91, 106-1O7) by M. S. Mahoney in Benacerraf and Putnam; "Uber Sinn und Bedeutung". Trans. as "On Sense and Reference" in Frege 1952a, pp. 56-78. --, I892b. "Uber Begriff und Gegenstand". Trans. as "On Concept and Object" in Frege I952a, pp. 42-55. --, I893a. Grungesetze der Arithmetik, Vol. I Gena: Pohle). Partial English trans. by M. Furth, The Basic Laws ofArithmetic (Berkeley: U. California P., 1964). --, I906a. "Uber die Grundlagen der Geometrie", Jahresbericht der deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung, 15 (1906): 293-309, 377-403, 423-30. English trans. by Eike-Henner WKluge as "On the Foundations of Geometry", in On the Foundations of Geometry and Formal Theories of Arithmetic (New Haven and London, Yale U. P., 1971). --, I952a. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, tr. by P. T. Geach and M. Black (Oxford: Blackwell). Grattan-Guinness, L, I977a. Dear Russell-Dear Jourdain (London: Duckworth). Griffin, N., I977a. "Russell's 'Horrible Travesty' of Meinong", Russell, nos. 25- 28: 39-51. E. D. Klemke, ed., I970a. Essays on Bertrand Russell (Urbana: U. Illinois P.). Largeault, ]., I97oa. Logique et philosophie chez Frege (Paris: Nauwelaerts). MacColl, H., I905a. "Symbolic Reasoning". Repr. in Russell I973a, pp. 308-16. Mosterfn, ]., I968a. "Teoria de las descripciones" (unpublished PH.D. thesis, U. of Barcelona). Peano, G., as. Opere Scelte, ed. U. Cassina, 3 vols. (Roma: Cremonese, 1957- 59)· --, I897a. "Studii di logica matematica". Repr. in 05,2: 201-17. --, I897b. "Logique mathematique". Repr. in 05,2: 218-81. --, I898a. "Analisi della teoria dei vettori". Repr. in 05,3: 187-2°7. --, I90oa. "Formules de logique mathematique". Repr. in 05,2: 304-61. W. V. O. Quine, 1966a. "Russell's Ontological Development", Journal of Philosophy, 63: 657-67. Repr. in R. Schoenman, ed., Bertrand Russell: Philosopher of the Century (London: Allen and Unwin,1967). Resnik, M., I965a. "Frege's Theory of Incomplete Entities", Philosophy of Science, 32: 329-41. E. A. Rodriguez-Consuegra, 1987a. "Russell's Logicist Definitions of Numbers 1899-1913: Chronology and Significance", History and Philosophy of Logic, 8:141- 69. --, I988a. "Elementos logicistas en la obra de Peano y su escuela", Mathesis, 4: 221-99· --, I989a. "Russell's Theory ofTypes, 1901-1910: Its Complex Origins in the Unpublished Manuscripts", History and Philosophy ofLogic, 10: 131-64. --, I990a. "The Origins of Russell's Theory of Descriptions according to the Unpublished Manuscripts", Russell, n.s. 9: 99-132. --, I99Ia. The Mathematical Philosophy of BertrandRussell: Origins and Development (Basel, Boston and Berlin: Birkhauser). --, I992a. "A New Angle on Russell's 'Inextricable Tangle' over Meaning and Denotation", Russell, n.s. 12 (1992): 197-207. Russell, B., I903a. "On the Meaning and Denotation ofPhrases", Papers 4: 283- 96. --, I905a. "The Existential Import of Propositions", Mind, 14: 398-401. Repr. in I973a, pp. 98-103. --, I905b. "On Fundamentals", Papers 4: 359....,.413. --, I905c. "On Denoting", Mind, 14: 479-93. Repr. in LK, pp. 41-56; Papers 4: 415-27. --, I905d "On Substitution". Unpublished ms. (McMaster U., RAl 220.010940b). --, I906a. "On the Substitutional Theory of Classes and Relations". In I973a, PP· 165-89· --, I908a. "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory ofTypes", American Journal of Mathematics, 30: 222-62. Repr. in LK, pp. 59-102. --, I973a. Essays in Analysis, ed. D. Lackey (London: Allen & Unwin). Skosnik, 1972a. "Russell's Unpublished Writings on Truth and Denoting", Russell, no. 7: 12-13. P. F. Strawson, 1950a. "On Referring". Repr. in Klemke I970a, pp. 147-72. Tichy, P., I988a. The Foundations of Frege's Logic (Berlin: de Gruyter). J. Walker, A Study o fFrege (Blackwell).

izzing: Athenian and Oxonian dialectic.As Grice puts it, "Socrates, like us, was really trying to solve linguistic puzzles."This is especially true in the longer dialogues of Plato — the 'Republic' and the Laws'— where we learn quite a lot about Socrates' method and philosophy, filtered, of course, through his devoted pupil's mind.Some of the Pre-Socratics, who provide Plato and his master with many of their problems, were in difficulties about how one thing could be two things at once — say, a white horse. How could you say 'This is a horse and this is white' without saying 'This one thing is two things'? Socrates and Plato together solved this puzzle by saying that what was meant by saying 'The horse is white' is that the horse partakes of the eternal, and perfect, Form horseness, which was invisible but really more horselike than any worldly Dobbin; and ditto about the Form whiteness: it was whiter than any earthly white. The theory of Form covers our whole world of ships and shoes and humpty-dumptys, which, taken all in all, are shadows — approximations of those invisible, perfect Forms. Using the sharp tools in our new linguistic chest, we can whittle Plato down to size and say that he invented his metaphysical world of Forms to solve the problem of different kinds of 'is'es -- what Grice calls the 'izz' proper and the 'izz' improper ('strictly, a 'hazz').You see how Grice, an Oxford counterpart of Plato, uses a very simple grammatical tool in solving problems like this. Instead of conjuring up an imaginary edifice of Forms, he simply says there are two different types of 'is'es — one of predication and one of identity -- 'the izz' and the 'hazz not.' The first, the 'izz' (which is really a 'hazz' -- it is a 'hizz' for Socrates being 'rational') asserts a quality: this is white.' The second 'hazz' points to the object named: 'This is a horse.' By this simple grammatical analysis we clear away the rubble of what were Plato's Forms. That's why an Oxford philosopher loves Aristotle -- and his Athenian dialectic -- (Plato worked in suburbia, The Academy) -- who often, when defining a thing — for example, 'virtue' — asked himself, 'Does the definition square with the ordinary views (ta legomena) of men?' But while Grice does have this or that antecedent, he is surely an innovator in concentrating MOST (if not all) of his attention on what he calls 'the conversational implicaturum.'Grice has little patience with past philosophers.Why bother listening to men whose problems arose from bad grammar? (He excludes Ariskant here). At present, we are mostly preoccupied with language and grammar. Grice would never dream of telling his tutee what he ought to do, the kind of life he ought to lead.That was no longer an aim of philosophy, he explained, but even though philosophy has changed in its aims and methods, people have not, and that was the reason for the complaining tutees -- the few of them -- , for the bitter attacks of Times' correspondents, and even, perhaps, for his turning his back on philosophy. Grice came to feel that Oxford philosophy was a minor revolutionary movement — at least when it is seen through the eyes of past philosophers. I asked him about the fathers of the revolution. Again he was evasive. Strictly speaking, the minor revolution is fatherless, except that Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Vitters — all of them, as it happened, Cambridge University figures — "are responsible for the present state of things at Oxford." under ‘conjunctum,’ we see that there is an alternative vocabulary, of ‘copulatum.’ But Grice prefers to narrow the use of ‘copula’ to izzing’ and ‘hazzing.’ Oddly, Grice sees izzing as a ‘predicate,’ and symbolises it as Ixy. While he prefers ‘x izzes y,’ he also uses ‘x izz y.’ Under izzing comes Grice’s discussion of essential predicate, essence, and substance qua predicabilia (secondary substance). As opposed to ‘hazzing,’ which covers all the ‘ta sumbebeka,’ or ‘accidentia.’ Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aristotle on the multiplicity of ‘being.’”

jacobi: man of letters, popular novelist, and author of several influential philosophical works. His “Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza” precipitates a dispute with Mendelssohn on Lessing’s alleged pantheism. The ensuing Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy) focused attention on the apparent conflict between human freedom and any systematic, philosophical interpretation of reality. In the appendix to his David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus (“David Hume on Belief, or Idealism and Realism,” 1787), Jacobi scrutinized the new transcendental philosophy of Kant, and subjected Kant’s remarks concerning “things-in-themselves” to devastating criticism, observing that, though one could not enter the critical philosophy without presupposing the existence of things-in-themselves, such a belief is incompatible with the tenets of that philosophy. This criticism deeply influenced the efforts of post-Kantians (e.g., Fichte) to improve transcendental idealism. In 1799, in an “open letter” to Fichte, Jacobi criticized philosophy in general and transcendental idealism in particular as “nihilism.” Jacobi espoused a fideistic variety of direct realism and characterized his own standpoint as one of “nonknowing.” Employing the arguments of “Humean skepticism,” he defended the necessity of a “leap of faith,” not merely in morality and religion, but in every area of human life. Jacobi’s criticisms of reason and of science profoundly influenced German Romanticism. Near the end of his career he entered bitter public controversies with Hegel and Schelling concerning the relationship between faith and knowledge.
james: w. New-World philosopher, psychologist, and one of the founders of pragmatism. He was born in New York, the oldest of five children and elder brother of the novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James. Their father, Henry James, Sr., was an unorthodox religious philosopher, deeply influenced by the thought of Swedenborg, some of which seeped into William’s later fascination with psychical research. The James family relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the father insisted on his children obtaining an Old-World education, and prolonged trips to England and the Continent were routine, a procedure that made William multilingual and extraordinarily cosmopolitan. In fact, a pervasive theme in James’s personal and creative life was his deep split between things New-World and Old-World Europe: he felt like a bigamist “coquetting with too many countries.” As a person, James is extraordinarily sensitive to psychological and bodily experiences. He could be described as “neurasthenic” – afflicted with constant psychosomatic symptoms such as dyspepsia, vision problems, and clinical depression. In 1868 he recorded a profound personal experience, a “horrible fear of my own existence.” In two 1870 diary entries, James first contemplates suicide and then pronounces his belief in free will and his resolve to act on that belief in “doing, suffering and creating.” Under the influence of the then burgeoning work in experimental psychology, James attempted to sustain, on empirical grounds, his belief in the self as Promethean, as self-making rather than as a playing out of inheritance or the influence of social context. This bold and extreme doctrine of individuality is bolstered by his attack on both the neo-Hegelian and associationist doctrines. He held that both approaches miss the empirical reality of relations as affectively experienced and the reality of consciousness as a “stream,” rather than an aspect of an Absolute or simply a box holding a chain of concepts corresponding to single sense impressions. In 1890, James published his masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology, which established him as the premier psychologist of the Euro-American world. It was a massive compendium and critique of virtually all of the psychology literature then extant, but it also claimed that the discipline was in its infancy. James believed that the problems he had unearthed could only be understood by a philosophical approach. James held only one academic degree, an M.D. from Harvard, and his early teaching at Harvard was in anatomy and physiology. He subsequently became a professor of psychology, but during the writing of the Principles, he began to teach philosophy as a colleague of Royce and Santayana. From 1890 forward James saw the fundamental issues as at bottom philosophical and he undertook an intense inquiry into matters epistemological and metaphysical; in particular, “the religious question” absorbed him. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy was published in 1897. The lead essay, “The Will to Believe,” had been widely misunderstood, partly because it rested on unpublished metaphysical assumptions and partly because it ran aggressively counter to the reigning dogmas of social Darwinism and neo-Hegelian absolutism, both of which denigrated the personal power of the individual. For James, one cannot draw a conclusion, fix a belief, or hold to a moral or religious maxim unless all suggestions of an alternative position are explored. Further, some alternatives will be revealed only if one steps beyond one’s frame of reference, seeks novelty, and “wills to believe” in possibilities beyond present sight. The risk taking in such an approach to human living is further detailed in James’s essays “The Dilemma of Determinism” and “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” both of which stress the irreducibility of ambiguity, the presence of chance, and the desirability of tentativeness in our judgments. After presenting the Gifford Lectures in 1901– 02, James published his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which coalesced his interest in psychic states both healthy and sick and afforded him the opportunity to present again his firm belief that human life is characterized by a vast array of personal, cultural, and religious approaches that cannot and should not be reduced one to the other. For James, the “actual peculiarities of the world” must be central to any philosophical discussion of truth. In his Hibbert Lectures of 1909, published as A Pluralistic Universe, James was to represent this sense of plurality, openness, and the variety of human experience on a wider canvas, the vast reach of consciousness, cosmologically understood. Unknown to all but a few philosophical correspondents, James had been assiduously filling notebooks with reflections on the mind–body problem and the relationship between meaning and truth and with a philosophical exploration and extension of his doctrine of relations as found earlier in the Principles. In 1904–05 James published a series of essays, gathered posthumously in 1912, on the meaning of experience and the problem of knowledge. In a letter to François Pillon in 1904, he writes: “My philosophy is what I call a radical empiricism, a pluralism, a ‘tychism,’ which represents order as being gradually won and always in the making.” Following his 1889 essay “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” and his chapter on “The Stream of Thought” in the Principles, James takes as given that relations between things are equivalently experienced as the things themselves. Consequently, “the only meaning of essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind.” The description of consciousness as a stream having a fringe as well as a focus, and being selective all the while, enables him to take the next step, the formulation of his pragmatic epistemology, one that was influenced by, but is different from, that of Peirce. Published in 1907, Pragmatism generated a transatlantic furor, for in it James unabashedly states that “Truth happens to be an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.” He also introduces the philosophically notorious claim that “theories” must be found that will “work.” Actually, he means that a proposition cannot be judged as true independently of its consequences as judged by experience. James’s prose, especially in Pragmatism, alternates between scintillating and limpid. This quality led to both obfuscation of his intention and a lulling of his reader into a false sense of simplicity. He does not deny the standard definition of truth as a propositional claim about an existent, for he writes “woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connexions.” Yet he regards this structure as but a prologue to the creative activity of the human mind. Also in Pragmatism, speaking of the world as “really malleable,” he argues that man engenders truths upon reality. This tension between James as a radical empiricist with the affirmation of the blunt, obdurate relational manifold given to us in our experience and James as a pragmatic idealist holding to the constructing, engendering power of the Promethean self to create its own personal world, courses throughout all of his work. James was chagrined and irritated by the quantity, quality, and ferocity of the criticism leveled at Pragmatism. He attempted to answer those critics in a book of disparate essays, The Meaning of Truth (1909). The book did little to persuade his critics; since most of them were unaware of his radically empirical metaphysics and certainly of his unpublished papers, James’s pragmatism remained misunderstood until the publication of Perry’s magisterial two-volume study, The Thought and Character of William James (1935). By 1910, James’s heart disease had worsened; he traveled to Europe in search of some remedy, knowing full well that it was a farewell journey. Shortly after returning to his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, he died. One month earlier he had said of a manuscript (posthumously published in 1911 as Some Problems in Philosophy), “say that by it I hoped to round out my system, which is now too much like an arch only on one side.” Even if he had lived much longer, it is arguable that the other side of the arch would not have appeared, for his philosophy was ineluctably geared to seeking out the novel, the surprise, the tychistic, and the plural, and to denying the finality of all conclusions. He warned us that “experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges” and no matter how laudable or seductive our personal goal, “life is in the transitions.” The Works of William James, including his unpublished manuscripts, have been collected in a massive nineteen-volume critical edition by Harvard University Press (1975–88). His work can be seen as an imaginative vestibule into the twentieth century. His ideas resonate in the work of Royce, Unamuno, Niels Bohr, Husserl, M. Montessori, Dewey, and Wittgenstein. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “William James’s England and what he learned there!”  
James-Lange theory, the theory, put forward by James and independently by Lange, an anatomist, that an emotion is the felt awareness of bodily reactions to something perceived or thought (James) or just the bodily reactions themselves (Lange). According to the more influential version (James, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind, 1884), “our natural way of thinking” mistakenly supposes that the perception or thought causes the emotion, e.g., fear or anger, which in turn causes the bodily reactions, e.g., rapid heartbeat, weeping, trembling, grimacing, and actions such as running and striking. In reality, however, the fear or anger consists in the bodily sensations caused by these reactions. In support of this theory, James proposed a thought experiment: Imagine feeling some “strong” emotion, one with a pronounced “wave of bodily disturbance,” and then subtract in imagination the felt awareness of this disturbance. All that remains, James found, is “a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception,” a cognition lacking in emotional coloration. Consequently, it is our bodily feelings that emotionalize consciousness, imbuing our perceptions and thoughts with emotional qualities and endowing each type of emotion, such as fear, anger, and joy, with its special feeling quality. But this does not warrant James’s radical conclusion that emotions or emotional states are effects rather than causes of bodily reactions. That conclusion requires the further assumption, which James shared with many of his contemporaries, that the various emotions are nothing but particular feeling qualities. Historically, the James-Lange theory led to further inquiries into the physiological and cognitive causes of emotional feelings and helped transform the psychology of emotions from a descriptive study relying on introspection to a broader naturalistic inquiry.
Jansenism, a set of doctrines advanced by philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterized by a predestinarianism that emphasized Adam’s fall (“il pecato originale di Adamo”) irresistible efficacious grace (“grice”), limited atonement, election, and reprobation. Addressing the issue of free will and grace left open by the Council of Trent, Cornelius Jansen crystallized the seventeenth-century Augustinian revival, producing a compilation of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian teachings (Augustinus). Propagated by Saint Cyran and Antoine Arnauld (On Frequent Communion, 1643), adopted by the nuns of Port-Royal, and defended against Jesuit attacks by Pascal (Provincial Letters, 1656–57), Jansenism pervaded Roman Catholicism from Utrecht to Rome for over 150 years. Condemned by Pope Innocent X (Cum Occasione, 1653) and crushed by Louis XIV and the French clergy (the 1661 formulary), it survived outside France and rearmed for a counteroffensive. Pasquier Quesnel’s (1634–1719) “second Jansenism,” condemned by Pope Clement XI (Unigenitus, 1713), was less Augustinian, more rigorist, and advocated Presbyterianism and Gallicanism.
jaspers: philosopher, one of the main representatives of the existentialist movement (although he rejected ‘existentialism’ as a distortion of the philosophy of existence). Jaspers studied law and medicine at Heidelberg, Munich, Berlin, and Göttingen. He concluded his studies with an M.D. (Homesickness and Crime) from Heidelberg. From 1908 until 1915 he worked as a voluntary assistant in the psychiatric clinic, and published his first major work (Allgemeine Psychopathologie, 1913; General Psychopathology, 1965). After his habilitation in psychology (1913) Jaspers lectured as Privatdocent. In 1919 he published Psychologie der Weltanschauung (“Psychology of Worldviews”). Two years later he became professor in philosophy. Because of his personal convictions and marriage with Gertrud Mayer (who was Jewish) the Nazi government took away his professorship in 1937 and suppressed all publications. He and his wife were saved from deportation because the American army liberated Heidelberg a few days before the fixed date of April 14, 1945. In 1948 he accepted a professorship from the University of Basel. As a student, Jaspers felt a strong aversion to academic philosophy. However, as he gained insights in the fields of psychiatry and psychology, he realized that both the study of human beings and the meaning of scientific research pointed to questions and problems that demanded their own thoughts and reflections. Jaspers gave a systematic account of them in his three-volume Philosophie (1931; with postscript, 1956; Philosophy, 1969–71), and in the 1,100 pages of Von der Wahrheit (On Truth, 1947). In the first volume (“Philosophical World-orientation”) he discusses the place and meaning of philosophy with regard to the human situation in general and scientific disciplines in particular. In the second (“Clarification of Existence”), he contrasts the compelling modes of objective (scientific) knowledge with the possible (and in essence non-objective) awareness of being in self-relation, communication, and historicity, both as being oneself presents itself in freedom, necessity, and transcendence, and as existence encounters its unconditionality in limit situations (of death, suffering, struggle, guilt) and the polar intertwining of subjectivity and objectivity. In the third volume (“Metaphysics”) he concentrates on the meaning of transcendence as it becomes translucent in appealing ciphers (of nature, history, consciousness, art, etc.) to possible existence under and against the impact of stranding. His Von der Wahrheit is the first volume of a projected work on philosophical logic (cf. Nachlaß zur philosophischen Logik, ed. H. Saner and M. Hänggi, 1991) in which he develops the more formal aspects of his philosophy as “periechontology” (ontology of the encompassing, des Umgreifenden, with its modes of being there, consciousness, mind, existence, world, transcendence, reason) and clarification of origins. In both works Jaspers focuses on “existential philosophy” as “that kind of thinking through which man tries to become himself both as thinking makes use of all real knowledge and as it transcends this knowledge. This thinking does not recognize objects, but clarifies and enacts at once the being of the one who thinks in this way” (Philosophische Autobiographie, 1953). In his search for authentic existence in connection with the elaboration of “philosophical faith” in reason and truth, Jaspers had to achieve a thorough understanding of philosophical, political, and religious history as well as an adequate assessment of the present situation. His aim became a world philosophy as a possible contribution to universal peace out of the spirit of free and limitless communication, unrestricted open-mindedness, and unrelenting truthfulness. Besides a comprehensive history of philosophy (Die groben Philosophen I, 1957; II and III, 1981; The Great Philosophers, 2 vols., 1962, 1966) and numerous monographs (on Cusanus, Descartes, Leonardo da Vinci, Schelling, Nietzsche, Strindberg, van Gogh, Weber) he wrote on subjects such as the university (Die Idee der Universität, 1946; The Idea of the University, 1959), the spiritual situation of the age (Die geistige Situation der Zeit, 1931; Man in the Modern Age, 1933), the meaning of history (Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, 1949; The Origin and Goal of History, in which he developed the idea of an “axial period”), the guilt question (Die Schuldfrage, 1946; The Question of German Guilt, 1947), the atomic bomb (Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen, 1958; The Future of Mankind, 1961), German politics (Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? 1966; The Future of Germany, 1967). He also wrote on theology and religious issues (Die Frage der Entymythologisierung. Eine Diskussion mit Rudolf Bultmann, 1954; Myth and Christianity, 1958; Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, 1962; Philosophical Faith and Revelation, 1967).
jevons: w. s., philosopher of science. In economics, he clarified the idea of value, arguing that it is a function of utility. Later theorists imitated his use of the calculus and other mathematical tools to reach theoretical results. His approach anticipated the idea of marginal utility, a notion basic in modern economics. Jevons regarded J. S. Mill’s logic as inadequate, preferring the new symbolic logic of Boole. One permanent contribution was his introduction of the concept of inclusive ‘or’, with ‘or’ meaning ‘either or, or both’. To aid in teaching the new logic of classes and propositions, Jevons invented his “logical piano.” In opposition to the confidence in induction of Mill and Whewell, both of whom thought, for different reasons, that induction can arrive at exact and necessary truths, Jevons argued that science yields only approximations, and that any perfect fit between theory and observation must be grounds for suspicion that we are wrong, not for confidence that we are right. Jevons introduced probability theory to show how rival hypotheses are evaluated. He was a subjectivist, holding that probability is a measure of what a perfectly rational person would believe given the available evidence. H. P. Grice: “Jevons’s Aristotle.”
da Floris: Italian philosopher, the founder the order of Ciscercian order of San Giovanni in Fiore (vide, Grice, “St. John’s and the Cistercians”). He devoted the rest of his life to meditation and the recording of his prophetic visions. In his major works Liber concordiae Novi ac Veteri Testamenti (“Book of the Concordances between the New and the Old Testament,” 1519), Expositio in Apocalypsim (1527), and Psalterium decem chordarum (1527), Joachim illustrates the deep meaning of history as he perceived it in his visions. History develops in coexisting patterns of twos and threes. The two testaments represent history as divided in two phases ending in the First and Second Advent, respectively. History progresses also through stages corresponding to the Holy Trinity. The age of the Father is that of the law; the age of the Son is that of grace, ending approximately in 1260; the age of the Spirit will produce a spiritualized church. Some monastic orders like the Franciscans and Dominicans saw themselves as already belonging to this final era of spirituality and interpreted Joachim’s prophecies as suggesting the overthrow of the contemporary ecclesiastical institutions. Some of his views were condemned by the Lateran Council in 1215.  

philoponus: Grecian philosopher and theologian, who worked in Alexandria (“philoponus,” ‘workaholic’, just a nickname). A Christian from birth, he was a pupil of the Platonist Ammonius, and is the first Christian Aristotelian. As such, he challenged Aristotle on many points where he conflicted with Christian doctrine, e.g. the eternity of the world, the need for an infinite force, the definition of place, the impossibility of a vacuum, and the necessity for a fifth element to be the substance of the heavens. Johannes composed commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Meteorologics, and On the Soul; and a treatise Against Proclus: On the Eternity of the World. There is dispute as to whether the commentaries exhibit a change of mind (away from orthodox Aristotelianism) on these questions.
Damascenus Chrysorrhoas: Greican theologian and Eastern church doctor. Born of a well-to-do family in Damascus, he was educated in Greek. He attained a high position in government but resigned under the antiChristian Caliph Abdul Malek and became a monk about 700, living outside Jerusalem. He left extensive writings, most little more than compilations of older texts. The Iconoclastic Synod of 754 condemned his arguments in support of the veneration of images in the three Discourses against the Iconoclasts (726–30), but his orthodoxy was confirmed in 787 at the Second Council of Nicaea. His Sources of Knowledge consists of a Dialectic, a history of heresies, and an exposition of orthodoxy. Considered a saint from the end of the eighth century, he was much respected in the East and was regarded as an important witness to Eastern Orthodox thought by the West in the Middle Ages.
Poinsot: philosopher, studied at Louvain, entered the Dominican order (1610), and taught at Piacenza. His most important works are the Cursus philosophicus, a work on logic and natural philosophy; and the Cursus theologicus (“Course of Theology,” 1637–44), a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. John considered himself a Thomist, but he modified Aquinas’s views in important ways. The “Ars Logica,” the first part of the Cursus philosophicus, is the source of much subsequent Catholic teaching in logic. It is divided into two parts: the first deals with formal logic and presents a comprehensive theory of terms, propositions, and reasoning; the second discusses topics in material logic, such as predicables, categories, and demonstration. An important contribution in the first is a comprehensive theory of signs that has attracted considerable attention in the twentieth century among such philosophers as Maritain, Yves Simon, John Wild, and others. An important contribution in the second part is the division of knowledge according to physical, mathematical, and metaphysical degrees, which was later adopted by Maritain. John dealt with metaphysical problems in the second part of the Cursus philosophicus and in the Cursus theologicus. His views are modifications of Aquinas’s. For example, Aquinas held that the principle of individuation is matter designated by quantity; John interpreted this as matter radically determined by dimensions, where the dimensions are indeterminate. In contrast to other major figures of the Spanish Scholasticism of the times, John did not write much in political and legal theory. He considered ethics and political philosophy to be speculative rather than practical sciences, and adopted a form of probabilism. Moreover, when in doubt about a course of action, one may simply adopt any pertinent view proposed by a prudent moralist.
salisbury: Grice: “One should not confuse Salisbury with Salisbury.” English philosopher, tutored by Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers in Paris. It is possible that during this time he also studied grammar, rhetoric, and part of the quadrivium with Conches at Chartres. After 1147 he was for a time a member of the Roman Curia, secretary to Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, and friend of Thomas Becket. For his role in Becket’s canonization, Louis VII of France rewarded him with the bishopric of Chartres. Salisbury is a dedicated student of philosophy. In his letters, biographies of Anselm and Becket, and Memoirs of the Papal Court, Salisbury provides, in perhaps the best medieval imitation of classical Latin style, an account of some of the most important ideas, events, and personalities of his time. Neither these works nor his Polycraticus and “Metalogicon,” for which he is most celebrated, are systematic philosophical treatises. The “Polycraticus” is, however, considered one of the first medieval treatises to take up political theory in any extended way. Salisbury maintains that if a ruler does not legislate in accordance with natural moral law, legitimate resistance to him can include his assassination. In the “Metalogicon,” on the other hand, Salisbury discusses, in a humanist spirit, the benefits for a civilized world of philosophical training based on Aristotle’s logic. He also presents current views on the nature of the universale and, not surprisingly, endorses an Aristotelian view of them as neither extramental entities nor mere expressum, but a conceptus that nevertheless has a basis in reality insofar as they are the result of the mind’s abstracting from extramental entities what those entities have in common.
johnson: Grice, “Not to be confused with Dr. Johnson – this one was as a philosopher should just be, an MA, like me!” -- w. e., very English philosopher who lectured on psychology and logic at Cambridge University. His Logic was published in three parts: Part I (1921); Part II, Demonstrative Inference: Deductive and Inductive (1922); and Part III, The Logical Foundations of Science (1924). He did not complete Part IV on probability, but in 1932 Mind published three of its intended chapters. Johnson’s other philosophical publications, all in Mind, were not abundant. The discussion note “On Feeling as Indifference” (1888) deals with problems of classification. “The Logical Calculus” (three parts, 1892) anticipates the “Cambridge” style of logic while continuing the tradition of Jevons and Venn; the same is true of treatments of formal logic in Logic. “Analysis of Thinking” (two parts, 1918) advances an adverbial theory of experience. Johnson’s philosophic influence at Cambridge exceeded the influence of these publications, as one can see from the references to him by John Neville Keynes in Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic and by his son John Maynard Keynes in A Treatise on Probability. Logic contains original and distinctive treatments of induction, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. Johnson’s theory of inference proposes a treatment of implication that is an alternative to the view of Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica. He coined the term ‘ostensive definition’ and introduced the distinction between determinates and determinables.
jung: founder of analytical psychology, a form of psychoanalysis that differs from Freud’s chiefly by an emphasis on the collective character of the unconscious and on archetypes as its privileged contents. Jung, like Freud, was deeply influenced by philosophy in his early years. Before his immersion in psychiatry, he wrote several essays of explicitly philosophical purport. Kant was doubtless the philosopher who mattered most to Jung, for whom archetypes were conceived as a priori structures of the human psyche. Plato and Neoplatonists, Schopenhauer and especially Nietzsche (to whose Zarathustra he devoted a seminar of several years’ duration) were also of critical importance. Oddly, Jung was a close reader of James (in German translation, of course), and his Psychological Types (1921) – in addition to an extended discussion of nominalism versus realism – contains a detailed treatment of Jamesian typologies of the self. Jung considered the self to be an amalgamation of an “ectopsyche” – consisting of four functions (intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking) that surround an ego construed not as a singular entity but as a “complex” of ideas and emotions – and an “endosphere” (i.e., consciousness turned inward in memory, affect, etc.). The personal unconscious, which preoccupied Freud, underlies the endosphere and its “invasions,” but it is in turn grounded in the collective unconscious shared by all humankind. The collective unconscious was induced by Jung from his analysis of dream symbols and psychopathological symptoms. It is an inherited archive of archaic-mythic forms and figures that appear repeatedly in the most diverse cultures and historical epochs. Such forms and figures – also called archetypes – are considered “primordial images” preceding the “ideas” that articulate rational thought. As a consequence, the self, rather than being autonomous, is embedded in a prepersonal and prehistoric background from which there is no effective escape. However, through prolonged psychotherapeutically guided “individuation,” a slow assimilation of the collective unconscious into daily living can occur, leading to an enriched and expanded sense of experience and selfhood.
Hart, Grice’s favourite prudens, iurisprudens: jurisprudence, the science or “knowledge” of law; thus, in its widest usage, the study of the legal doctrines, rules, and principles of any legal system, especially that which is valid at Oxford. More commonly, however, ‘prudens,’ or ‘iurisprudens’ designates the study not of the actual laws of particular legal systems, but of the general concepts and principles that underlie a legal system or that are common to every such system (general jurisprudence). Jurisprudence in this usage, sometimes also called the philosophy of law – but Grice preferred, “philosophical jurisprudence”) may be further subdivided according to the major focus of a particular study. Examples include Roman and English historical jurisprudence (a study of the development of legal principles over time, often emphasizing the origin of law in custom or tradition rather than in enacted rules), sociological jurisprudence (an examination of the relationship between legal rules and the behavior of individuals, groups, or institutions), functional jurisprudence (an inquiry into the relationship between legal norms and underlying social interests or needs), and analytical jurisprudence (an investigation into the connections among legal concepts). Within analytical jurisprudence the most substantial body of thought focuses on the meaning of the concept of law itself (legal theory) and the relationship between that concept and the concept of the moral. Legal positivism, the view that there is no necessary connection between legal (a legal right) and the moral (a moral right), opposes the natural law view that no sharp distinction between these concepts can be drawn. Legal positivism is sometimes thought to be a consequence of positivism’s insistence that legal validity is determined ultimately by reference to certain basic social facts: “the command of the sovereign” (Austin – “the other Austin, the benevolent one!” -- Grice), the Grundnorm (Kelsen), or “the rule of re-cognition” (Hart). These different positivist characterizations of the basic, law-determining FACT yield different claims about the normative character of law, with classical positivists (e.g., John Austin) insisting that legal systems are essentially coercive, whereas modern positivists (e.g., Hans Kelsen) maintain that they are normative. Disputes within legal theory often generate or arise out of disputes about theories of adjudication, or how a judge does or should decide a case. Mechanical jurisprudence, or formalism, the theory that all cases can be decided solely by analyzing a legal concept, is thought by many to have characterized judicial decisions and legal reasoning in the nineteenth century; that theory became an easy target in the twentieth century for various forms of legal ‘realism,’ the view (which Grice found pretentious) that law is better determined by observing what a court and a citizen actually does than by analyzing stated legal rules and concepts. Recent developments in the natural law tradition also focus on the process of adjudication and the normative claim that accompany the judicial declaration of legal rights and obligations. These normative claim, the natural law theorist argues, show a legal right is a species of a political right or a moral right. In consequence, one must either revise prevailing theories of adjudication and abandon the social-fact theory of law (New-World Dworkin), or explore the connection between legal theory and the classical question of political theory. Under what condition does a legal obligation, even if determined by an inter-subjetctive fact, create a genuine political obligation (e.g., the meta-obligation to obey the law)? Other jurisprudential notions that overlap topics in political theory include rule of law, legal moralism, and civil disobedience. The disputes within legal theory about the connection between law and morality should not be confused with discussions of “natural law” within moral theory. In Grice’s meta-ethics, so-called “natural law” denotes a particular view about the objective status of a moral norm that has produced a considerable literature, extending from ancient Grecian and Roman thought, through medieval theological writings, to contemporary Oxonian ethical thought. Though the claim that one cannot sharply separate law and morality is often made as part of a general natural law moral theory, the referents of ‘natural law’ in legal and moral theory do not share any obvious logical relationship. A moral theorist may conclude that there is NO necessary connection between law and morality, thus endorsing a positivist view of law, while consistently advocating a natural law view of morality itself. Conversely, as Grice notes, a natural law legal theorist, in accepting the view that there IS a connection (or priority) between law and morality (a moral right being evaluational prior than a legal right, even if not epistemically prior), might nonetheless endorse a substantive moral theory different from that implied by a natural law moral theory. Refs.: G. P. Baker, “Meaning and defeasibility,” in Festschrift for H. L. A. Hart,  G. P. Baker, “Alternative mind styles,” in Festschrift for H. P. Grice, H. L. A. Hart, “Grice” in “The nightmare,” H. P. Grice, “Moral right and legal right: three types of conceptual priority.”
jury nullification, a jury’s ability, or the exercise of that ability, to acquit a criminal defendant despite finding facts that leave no reasonable doubt about violation of a criminal statute. This ability is not a right, but an artifact of criminal procedure. In the common law, the jury has sole authority to determine the facts, and the judge to determine the law. The jury’s findings of fact cannot be reviewed. The term ‘nullification’ suggests that jury nullification is opposed to the rule of law. This thought would be sound only if an extreme legal positivism were true – that the law is nothing but the written law and the written law covers every possible fact situation. Jury nullification is better conceived as a form of equity, a rectification of the inherent limits of written law. In nullifying, juries make law. To make jury nullification a right, then, raises problems of democratic legitimacy, such as whether a small, randomly chosen group of citizens has authority to make law.
de jure: Or titular, as opposed to ‘de facto.’ Each getting what he is due. Formal justice is the impartial and consistent application of a Kantian principle, whether or not the principle itself is just. Substantive justice is closely associated with rights, i.e., with what individuals can legitimately demand of one another or what they can legitimately demand of their government (e.g., with respect to the protection of liberty or the promotion of equality). Retributive justice concerns when and why punishment is justified. Debate continues over whether punishment is justified as retribution for past wrongdoing or because it deters future wrongdoing. Those who stress retribution as the justification for punishment usually believe human beings have libertarian free will, while those who stress deterrence usually accept determinism. At least since Aristotle, justice has commonly been identified both with obeying law and with treating everyone with fairness. But if law is, and justice is not, entirely a matter of convention, then justice cannot be identified with obeying law. The literature on legal positivism and natural law theory contains much debate about jury nullification justice 456 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 456 whether there are moral limits on what conventions could count as law. Corrective justice concerns the fairness of demands for civil damages. Commutative justice concerns the fairness of wages, prices, and exchanges. Distributive justice concerns the fairness of the distribution of resources. Commutative justice and distributive justice are related, since people’s wages influence how much resources they have. But the distinction is important because it may be just to pay A more than B (because A is more productive than B) but just that B is left with more after-tax resources (because B has more children to feed than A does). In modern philosophy, however, the debate about just wages and prices has been overshadowed by the larger question of what constitutes a just distribution of resources. Some (e.g., Marx) have advocated distributing resources in accordance with needs. Others have advocated their distribution in whatever way maximizes utility in the long run. Others have argued that the fair distribution is one that, in some sense, is to everyone’s advantage. Still others have maintained that a just distribution is whatever results from the free market. Some theorists combine these and other approaches.
iustificatum: “Late Latin; apparently neither the Grecians nor Cicero saw the need for it!”– Grice. justification, a concept of broad scope that spans epistemology and ethics and has as special cases the concepts of apt belief and right action. The concept has, however, highly varied application. Many things, of many different sorts, can be justified. Prominent among them are beliefs and actions. To say that X is justified is to say something positive about X. Other things being equal, it is better that X be justified than otherwise. However, not all good entities are justified. The storm’s abating may be good since it spares some lives, but it is not thereby justified. What we can view as justified or unjustified is what we can relate appropriately to someone’s faculties or choice. (Believers might hence view the storm’s abating as justified after all, if they were inclined to judge divine providence.) Just as in epistemology we need to distinguish justification from truth, since either of these might apply to a belief in the absence of the other, so in ethics we must distinguish justification from utility: an action might be optimific but not justified, and justified but not optimific. What is distinctive of justification is then the implied evaluation of an agent (thus the connection, however remote, with faculties of choice). To say that a belief is (epistemically) justified (apt) or to say that an action is (ethically) justified (“right” – in one sense) is to make or imply a judgment on the subject and how he or she has arrived at that action or belief. Often a much narrower concept of justification is used, one according to which X is justified only if X has been or at least can be justified through adducing reasons. Such adducing of reasons can be viewed as the giving of an argument of any of several sorts: e.g., conclusive, prima facie, inductive, or deductive. A conclusive justification or argument adduces conclusive reasons for the possible (object of) action or belief that figures in the conclusion. In turn, such reasons are conclusive if and only if they raise the status of the conclusion action or belief so high that the subject concerned would be well advised to conclude deliberation or inquiry. A prima facie justification or argument adduces a prima facie reason R (or more than one) in favor of the possible (object of) action or belief O that figures in the conclusion. In turn, R is a prima facie reason for O if and only if R specifies an advantage or positive consideration in favor of O, one that puts O in a better light than otherwise. Even if R is a prima facie reason for O, however, R can be outweighed, overridden, or defeated by contrary considerations RH. Thus my returning a knife that I promised to return to its rightful owner has in its favor the prima facie reason that it is my legal obligation and the fulfillment of a promise, but if the owner has gone raving mad, then there may be reasons against returning the knife that override, outweigh, or defeat. (And there may also be reasons that defeat a positive prima facie reason without amounting to reasons for the opposite course. Thus it may emerge that the promise to return the knife was extracted under duress.) A (valid) deductive argument for a certain conclusion C is a sequence of thoughts or statements whose last member is C (not necessarily last temporally, but last in the sequence) and each member of which is either an assumption or premise of the argument or is based on earlier members of the sequence in accordance with a sound principle of necessary inference, such as simplification: from (P & Q) to P; or addition: from P to (P or Q); or modus ponens: from P and (P only if Q) to Q. Whereas the premises of a deductive argument necessarily entail the conclusion, which cannot possibly fail to be true when the justice as fairness justification 457 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 457 premises are all true, the premises of an inductive argument do not thus entail its conclusion but offer considerations that only make the conclusion in some sense more probable than it would be otherwise. From the premises that it rains and that if it rains the streets are wet, one may deductively derive the conclusion that the streets are wet. However, the premise that I have tried to start my car on many, many winter mornings during the two years since I bought it and that it has always started, right up to and including yesterday, does not deductively imply that it will start when I try today. Here the conclusion does not follow deductively. Though here the reason provided by the premise is only an inductive reason for believing the conclusion, and indeed a prima facie and defeasible reason, nevertheless it might well be in our sense a conclusive reason. For it might enable us rightfully to conclude inquiry and/or deliberation and proceed to (action or, in this case) belief, while turning our attention to other matters (such as driving to our destination).
Fides: -- justification by faith, the characteristic doctrine of the Protestant Reformation that sinful human beings can be justified before God through faith in Jesus Christ. ‘Being justified’ is understood in forensic terms: before the court of divine justice humans are not considered guilty because of their sins, but rather are declared by God to be holy and righteous in virtue of the righteousness of Christ, which God counts on their behalf. Justification is received by faith, which is not merely belief in Christian doctrine but includes a sincere and heartfelt trust and commitment to God in Christ for one’s salvation. Such faith, if genuine, leads to the reception of the transforming influences of God’s grace and to a life of love, obedience, and service to God. These consequences of faith, however, are considered under the heading of sanctification rather than justification. The rival Roman Catholic doctrine of justification – often mislabeled by Protestants as “justification by works” – understands key terms differently. ‘Being just’ is understood not primarily in forensic terms but rather as a comprehensive state of being rightly related to God, including the forgiveness of sins, the reception of divine grace, and inner transformation. Justification is a work of God initially accomplished at baptism; among the human “predispositions” for justification are faith (understood as believing the truths God has revealed), awareness of one’s sinfulness, hope in God’s mercy, and a resolve to do what God requires. Salvation is a gift of God that is not deserved by human beings, but the measure of grace bestowed depends to some extent on the sincere efforts of the sinner who is seeking salvation. The Protestant and Catholic doctrines are not fully consistent with each other, but neither are they the polar opposites they are often made to appear by the caricatures each side offers of the other.
Jus ad bellum, jus in bello: a set of conditions justifying the resort to war (jus ad bellum) and prescribing how war may permissibly be conducted (jus in bello). The theory is a Western approach to the moral assessment of war that grew out of the Christian tradition beginning with Augustine, later taking both religious and secular (including legalist) forms. Proposed conditions for a just war vary in both number and interpretation. Accounts of jus ad bellum typically require: (1) just cause: an actual or imminent wrong against the state, usually a violation of rights, but sometimes provided by the need to protect innocents, defend human rights, or safeguard the way of life of one’s own or other peoples; (2) competent authority: limiting the undertaking of war to a state’s legitimate rulers; (3) right intention: aiming only at peace and the ends of the just cause (and not war’s attendant suffering, death, and destruction); (4) proportionality: ensuring that anticipated good not be outweighed by bad; (5) last resort: exhausting peaceful alternatives before going to war; and (6) probability of success: a reasonable prospect that war will succeed. Jus in bellorequires: (7) proportionality: ensuring that the means used in war befit the ends of the just cause and that their resultant good and bad, when individuated, be proportionate in the sense of (4); and (8) discrimination: prohibiting the killing of noncombatants and/or innocents. Sometimes conditions (4), (5), and (6) are included in (1). The conditions are usually considered individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a fully just war. But sometimes strength of just cause is taken to offset some lack of proportion in means, and sometimes absence of right intention is taken to render a war evil though not necessarily unjust. Most just war theorists take jus ad bellum to warrant only defensive wars. But some follow earlier literature and allow for just offensive wars. Early theorists deal primarily with jus ad bellum, later writers with both jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Recent writers stress jus in bello, with particular attention to deterrence: the attempt, by instilling fear of retaliation, to induce an adversary to refrain from attack. Some believe that even though large-scale use of nuclear weapons would violate requirements of proportionality and discrimination, the threatened use of such weapons can maintain peace, and hence justify a system of nuclear deterrence.
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ariskant: “Today I’ll lecture on Aristkant, or rather his second part,” – Grice. Kant (which Grice spelt ‘cant,’ seeing that it was Scots) Immanuel, preeminent Scots philosopher whose distinctive concern was to vindicate the authority of reason. He believed that by a critical examination of its own powers, reason can distinguish unjustifiable traditional metaphysical claims from the principles that are required by our theoretical need to determine ourselves within spatiotemporal experience and by our practical need to legislate consistently with all other rational wills. Because these principles are necessary and discoverable, they defeat empiricism and skepticism, and because they are disclosed as simply the conditions of orienting ourselves coherently within experience, they contrast with traditional rationalism and dogmatism. Kant was born and raised in the eastern Prussian university town of Königsberg (today Kaliningrad), where, except for a short period during which he worked as a tutor in the nearby countryside, he spent his life as student and teacher. He was trained by Pietists and followers of Leibniz and Wolff, but he was also heavily influenced by Newton and Rousseau. In the 1750s his theoretical philosophy began attempting to show how metaphysics must accommodate as certain the fundamental principles underlying modern science; in the 1760s his 460 K 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 460 practical philosophy began attempting to show (in unpublished form) how our moral life must be based on a rational and universally accessible self-legislation analogous to Rousseau’s political principles. The breakthrough to his own distinctive philosophy came in the 1770s, when he insisted on treating epistemology as first philosophy. After arguing in his Inaugural Dissertation (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World) both that our spatiotemporal knowledge applies only to appearances and that we can still make legitimate metaphysical claims about “intelligible” or non-spatiotemporal features of reality (e.g., that there is one world of substances interconnected by the action of God), there followed a “silent decade” of preparation for his major work, the epoch-making Critique of Pure Reason (first or “A” edition, 1781; second or “B” edition, with many revisions, 1787; Kant’s initial reaction to objections to the first edition dominate his short review, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, 1783; the full title of which means ‘preliminary investigations for any future metaphysics that will be able to present itself as a science’, i.e., as a body of certain truths). This work resulted in his mature doctrine of transcendental idealism, namely, that all our theoretical knowledge is restricted to the systematization of what are mere spatiotemporal appearances. This position is also called formal or Critical idealism, because it criticizes theories and claims beyond the realm of experience, while it also insists that although the form of experience is ideal, or relative to us, this is not to deny the reality of something independent of this form. Kant’s earlier works are usually called pre-Critical not just because they precede his Critique but also because they do not include a full commitment to this idealism. Kant supplemented his “first Critique” (often cited just as “the” Critique) with several equally influential works in practical philosophy – Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason (the “second Critique,” 1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (consisting of “Doctrine of Justice” and “Doctrine of Virtue,” 1797). Kant’s philosophy culminated in arguments advancing a purely moral foundation for traditional theological claims (the existence of God, immortality, and a transcendent reward or penalty proportionate to our goodness), and thus was characterized as “denying knowledge in order to make room for faith.” To be more precise, Kant’s Critical project was to restrict theoretical knowledge in such a way as to make it possible for practical knowledge to reveal how pure rational faith has an absolute claim on us. This position was reiterated in the Critique of Judgment (the “third Critique,” 1790), which also extended Kant’s philosophy to aesthetics and scientific methodology by arguing for a priori but limited principles in each of these domains. Kant was followed by radical idealists (Fichte, Schelling), but he regarded himself as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, and in numerous shorter works he elaborated his belief that everything must submit to the “test of criticism,” that human reason must face the responsibility of determining the sources, extent, and bounds of its own principles. The Critique concerns pure reason because Kant believes all these determinations can be made a priori, i.e., such that their justification does not depend on any particular course of experience (‘pure’ and ‘a priori’ are thus usually interchangeable). For Kant ‘pure reason’ often signifies just pure theoretical reason, which determines the realm of nature and of what is, but Kant also believes there is pure practical reason (or Wille), which determines a priori and independently of sensibility the realm of freedom and of what ought to be. Practical reason in general is defined as that which determines rules for the faculty of desire and will, as opposed to the faculties of cognition and of feeling. On Kant’s mature view, however, the practical realm is necessarily understood in relation to moral considerations, and these in turn in terms of laws taken to have an unconditional imperative force whose validity requires presuming that they are addressed to a being with absolute freedom, the faculty to choose (Willkür) to will or not to will to act for their sake. Kant also argues that no evidence of human freedom is forthcoming from empirical knowledge of the self as part of spatiotemporal nature, and that the belief in our freedom, and thus the moral laws that presuppose it, would have to be given up if we thought that our reality is determined by the laws of spatiotemporal appearances alone. Hence, to maintain the crucial practical component of his philosophy it was necessary for Kant first to employ his theoretical philosophy to show that it is at least possible that the spatiotemporal realm does not exhaust reality, so that there can be a non-empirical and free side to the self. Therefore Kant’s first Critique is a theoretical foundation for his entire system, which is devoted to establishing not just (i) what the most general necessary principles for the spatio-temporal domain are – a project that has been called his “metaphysics of experience” – but also (ii) that this domain cannot without contradiction define ultimate reality (hence his transcendental idealism). The first of these claims involves Kant’s primary use of the term ‘transcendental’, namely in the context of what he calls a transcendental deduction, which is an argument or “exposition” that establishes a necessary role for an a priori principle in our experience. As Kant explains, while mathematical principles are a priori and are necessary for experience, the mathematical proof of these principles is not itself transcendental; what is transcendental is rather the philosophical argument that these principles necessarily apply in experience. While in this way some transcendental arguments may presume propositions from an established science (e.g., geometry), others can begin with more modest assumptions – typically the proposition that there is experience or empirical knowledge at all – and then move on from there to uncover a priori principles that appear required for specific features of that knowledge. Kant begins by connecting metaphysics with the problem of synthetic a priori judgment. As necessary, metaphysical claims must have an a priori status, for we cannot determine that they are necessary by mere a posteriori means. As objective rather than merely formal, metaphysical judgments (unlike those of logic) are also said to be synthetic. This synthetic a priori character is claimed by Kant to be mysterious and yet shared by a large number of propositions that were undisputed in his time. The mystery is how a proposition can be known as necessary and yet be objective or “ampliative” or not merely “analytic.” For Kant an analytic proposition is one whose predicate is “contained in the subject.” He does not mean this “containment” relation to be understood psychologically, for he stresses that we can be psychologically and even epistemically bound to affirm non-analytic propositions. The containment is rather determined simply by what is contained in the concepts of the subject term and the predicate term. However, Kant also denies that we have ready real definitions for empirical or a priori concepts, so it is unclear how one determines what is really contained in a subject or predicate term. He seems to rely on intuitive procedures for saying when it is that one necessarily connects a subject and predicate without relying on a hidden conceptual relation. Thus he proposes that mathematical constructions, and not mere conceptual elucidations, are what warrant necessary judgments about triangles. In calling such judgments ampliative, Kant does not mean that they merely add to what we may have explicitly seen or implicitly known about the subject, for he also grants that complex analytic judgments may be quite informative, and thus “new” in a psychological or epistemic sense. While Kant stresses that non-analytic or synthetic judgments rest on “intuition” (Anschauung), this is not part of their definition. If a proposition could be known through its concepts alone, it must be analytic, but if it is not knowable in this way it follows only that we need something other than concepts. Kant presumed that this something must be intuition, but others have suggested other possibilities, such as postulation. Intuition is a technical notion of Kant, meant for those representations that have an immediate relation to their object. Human intuitions are also all sensible (or sensuous) or passive, and have a singular rather than general object, but these are less basic features of intuition, since Kant stresses the possibility of (nonhuman) non-sensible or “intellectual” intuition, and he implies that singularity of reference can be achieved by non-intuitive means (e.g., in the definition of God). The immediacy of intuition is crucial because it is what sets them off from concepts, which are essentially representations of representations, i.e., rules expressing what is common to a set of representations. Kant claims that mathematics, and metaphysical expositions of our notions of space and time, can reveal several evident synthetic a priori propositions, e.g., that there is one infinite space. In asking what could underlie the belief that propositions like this are certain, Kant came to his Copernican revolution. This consists in considering not how our representations may necessarily conform to objects as such, but rather how objects may necessarily conform to our representations. On a “pre-Copernican” view, objects are considered just by themselves, i.e., as “things-in-themselves” (Dinge an sich) totally apart from any intrinsic cognitive relation to our representations, and thus it is mysterious how we could ever determine them a priori. If we begin, however, with our own faculties of representation we might find something in them that determines how objects must be – at least when considered just as phenomena (singular: phenomenon), i.e., as objects of experience rather than as noumena (singular: noumenon), i.e., things-inthemselves specified negatively as unknown and beyond our experience, or positively as knowable in some absolute non-sensible way – which Kant insists is theoretically impossible for sensible beings like us. For example, Kant claims that when we consider our faculty for receiving impressions, or sensibility, we can find not only contingent contents but also two necessary forms or “pure forms of intuition”: space, which structures all outer representations given us, and time, which structures all inner representations. These forms can explain how the synthetic a priori propositions of mathematics will apply with certainty to all the objects of our experience. That is, if we suppose that in intuiting these propositions we are gaining a priori insight into the forms of our representation that must govern all that can come to our sensible awareness, it becomes understandable that all objects in our experience will have to conform with these propositions. Kant presented his transcendental idealism as preferable to all the alternative explanations that he knew for the possibility of mathematical knowledge and the metaphysical status of space and time. Unlike empiricism, it allowed necessary claims in this domain; unlike rationalism, it freed the development of this knowledge from the procedures of mere conceptual analysis; and unlike the Newtonians it did all this without giving space and time a mysterious status as an absolute thing or predicate of God. With proper qualifications, Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental ideality of space and time can be understood as a radicalization of the modern idea of primary and secondary qualities. Just as others had contended that sensible color and sound qualities, e.g., can be intersubjectively valid and even objectively based while existing only as relative to our sensibility and not as ascribable to objects in themselves, so Kant proposed that the same should be said of spatiotemporal predicates. Kant’s doctrine, however, is distinctive in that it is not an empirical hypothesis that leaves accessible to us other theoretical and non-ideal predicates for explaining particular experiences. It is rather a metaphysical thesis that enriches empirical explanations with an a priori framework, but begs off any explanation for that framework itself other than the statement that it lies in the “constitution” of human sensibility as such. This “Copernican” hypothesis is not a clear proof that spatiotemporal features could not apply to objects apart from our forms of intuition, but more support for this stronger claim is given in Kant’s discussion of the “antinomies” of rational cosmology. An antinomy is a conflict between two a priori arguments arising from reason when, in its distinctive work as a higher logical faculty connecting strings of judgments, it posits a real unconditioned item at the origin of various hypothetical syllogisms. There are antinomies of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, and they each proceed by pairs of dogmatic arguments which suppose that since one kind of unconditioned item cannot be found, e.g., an absolutely first event, another kind must be posited, e.g., a complete infinite series of past events. For most of the other antinomies, Kant indicates that contradiction can be avoided by allowing endless series in experience (e.g., of chains of causality, of series of dependent beings), series that are compatible with – but apparently do not require – unconditioned items (uncaused causes, necessary beings) outside experience. For the antinomy of quantity, however, he argues that the only solution is to drop the common dogmatic assumption that the set of spatiotemporal objects constitutes a determinate whole, either absolutely finite or infinite. He takes this to show that spatiotemporality must be transcendentally ideal, only an indeterminate feature of our experience and not a characteristic of things-in-themselves. Even when structured by the pure forms of space and time, sensible representations do not yield knowledge until they are grasped in concepts and these concepts are combined in a judgment. Otherwise, we are left with mere impressions, scattered in an unintelligible “multiplicity” or manifold; in Kant’s words, “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Judgment requires both concepts and intuitions; it is not just any relation of concepts, but a bringing together of them in a particular way, an “objective” unity, so that one concept is predicated of another – e.g., “all bodies are divisible” – and the latter “applies to certain appearances that present themselves to us,” i.e., are intuited. Because any judgment involves a unity of thought that can be prefixed by the phrase ‘I think’, Kant speaks of all representations, to the extent that they can be judged by us, as subject to a necessary unity of apperception. This term originally signified self-consciousness in contrast to direct consciousness or perception, but Kant uses it primarily to contrast with ‘inner sense’, the precognitive manifold of temporal representations as they are merely given in the mind. Kant also contrasts the empirical ego, i.e., the self as it is known contingently in experience, with the transcendental ego, i.e., the self thought of as the subject of structures of intuiting and thinking that are necessary throughout experience. The fundamental need for concepts and judgments suggests that our “constitution” may require not just intuitive but also conceptual forms, i.e., “pure concepts of the understanding,” or “categories.” The proof that our experience does require such forms comes in the “deduction of the objective validity of the pure concepts of the understanding,” also called the transcendental deduction of the categories, or just the deduction. This most notorious of all Kantian arguments appears to be in one way harder and in one way easier than the transcendental argument for pure intuitions. Those intuitions were held to be necessary for our experience because as structures of our sensibility nothing could even be imagined to be given to us without them. Yet, as Kant notes, it might seem that once representations are given in this way we can still imagine that they need not then be combined in terms of such pure concepts as causality. On the other hand, Kant proposed that a list of putative categories could be derived from a list of the necessary forms of the logical table of judgments, and since these forms would be required for any finite understanding, whatever its mode of sensibility is like, it can seem that the validity of pure concepts is even more inescapable than that of pure intuitions. That there is nonetheless a special difficulty in the transcendental argument for the categories becomes evident as soon as one considers the specifics of Kant’s list. The logical table of judgments is an a priori collection of all possible judgment forms organized under four headings, with three subforms each: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive), and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodictic). This list does not map exactly onto any one of the logic textbooks of Kant’s day, but it has many similarities with them; thus problematic judgments are simply those that express logical possibility, and apodictic ones are those that express logical necessity. The table serves Kant as a clue to the “metaphysical deduction” of the categories, which claims to show that there is an origin for these concepts that is genuinely a priori, and, on the premise that the table is proper, that the derived concepts can be claimed to be fundamental and complete. But by itself the list does not show exactly what categories follow from, i.e., are necessarily used with, the various forms of judgment, let alone what their specific meaning is for our mode of experience. Above all, even when it is argued that each experience and every judgment requires at least one of the four general forms, and that the use of any form of judgment does involve a matching pure concept (listed in the table of categories: reality, negation, limitation; unity, plurality, totality; inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community; possibility – impossibility, existence –non-existence, and necessity–contingency) applying to the objects judged about, this does not show that the complex relational forms and their corresponding categories of causality and community are necessary unless it is shown that these specific forms of judgment are each necessary for our experience. Precisely because this is initially not evident, it can appear, as Kant himself noted, that the validity of controversial categories such as causality cannot be established as easily as that of the forms of intuition. Moreover, Kant does not even try to prove the objectivity of the traditional modal categories but treats the principles that use them as mere definitions relative to experience. Thus a problematic judgment, i.e., one in which “affirmation or negation is taken as merely possible,” is used when something is said to be possible in the sense that it “agrees with the formal conditions of experience, i.e., with the conditions of intuition and of concepts.” A clue for rescuing the relational categories is given near the end of the Transcendental Deduction (B version), where Kant notes that the a priori all-inclusiveness and unity of space and time that is claimed in the treatment of sensibility must, like all cognitive unity, ultimately have a foundation in judgment. Kant expands on this point by devoting a key section called the analogies of experience to arguing that the possibility of our judging objects to be determined in an objective position in the unity of time (and, indirectly, space) requires three a priori principles (each called an “Analogy”) that employ precisely the relational categories that seemed especially questionable. Since these categories are established as needed just for the determination of time and space, which themselves have already been argued to be transcendentally ideal, Kant can conclude that for us even a priori claims using pure concepts of the understanding provide what are only transcendentally ideal claims. Thus we cannot make determinate theoretical claims about categories such as substance, cause, and community in an absolute sense that goes beyond our experience, but we can establish principles for their spatiotemporal specifications, called schemata, namely, the three Analogies: “in all change of appearance substance is permanent,” “all alterations take place in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect,” and “all substances, insofar as they can be perceived to coexist in space, are in thoroughgoing reciprocity.” Kant initially calls these regulative principles of experience, since they are required for organizing all objects of our empirical knowledge within a unity, and, unlike the constitutive principles for the categories of quantity and quality (namely: “all intuitions [for us] are extensive magnitudes,” and “in all appearances the real that is an object of sensation has intensive magnitude, that is, a degree”), they do not characterize any individual item by itself but rather only by its real relation to other objects of experience. Nonetheless, in comparison to mere heuristic or methodological principles (e.g., seek simple or teleological explanations), these Analogies are held by Kant to be objectively necessary for experience, and for this reason can also be called constitutive in a broader sense. The remainder of the Critique exposes the “original” or “transcendental” ideas of pure reason that pretend to be constitutive or theoretically warranted but involve unconditional components that wholly transcend the realm of experience. These include not just the antinomic cosmological ideas noted above (of these Kant stresses the idea of transcendental freedom, i.e., of uncaused causing), but also the rational psychological ideas of the soul as an immortal substance and the rational theological idea of God as a necessary and perfect being. Just as the pure concepts of the understanding have an origin in the necessary forms of judgments, these ideas are said to originate in the various syllogistic forms of reason: the idea of a soul-substance is the correlate of an unconditioned first term of a categorical syllogism (i.e., a subject that can never be the predicate of something else), and the idea of God is the correlate of the complete sum of possible predicates that underlies the unconditioned first term of the disjunctive syllogism used to give a complete determination of a thing’s properties. Despite the a priori origin of these notions, Kant claims we cannot theoretically establish their validity, even though they do have regulative value in organizing our notion of a human or divine spiritual substance. Thus, even if, as Kant argues, traditional proofs of immortality, and the teleological, cosmological, and ontological arguments for God’s existence, are invalid, the notions they involve can be affirmed as long as there is, as he believes, a sufficient non-theoretical, i.e., moral argument for them. When interpreted on the basis of such an argument, they are transformed into ideas of practical reason, ideas that, like perfect virtue, may not be verified or realized in sensible experience, but have a rational warrant in pure practical considerations. Although Kant’s pure practical philosophy culminates in religious hope, it is primarily a doctrine of obligation. Moral value is determined ultimately by the nature of the intention of the agent, which in turn is determined by the nature of what Kant calls the general maxim or subjective principle underlying a person’s action. One follows a hypothetical imperative when one’s maxim does not presume an unconditional end, a goal (like the fulfillment of duty) that one should have irrespective of all sensible desires, but rather a “material end” dependent on contingent inclinations (e.g., the directive “get this food,” in order to feel happy). In contrast, a categorical imperative is a directive saying what ought to be done from the perspective of pure reason alone; it is categorical because what this perspective commands is not contingent on sensible circumstances and it always carries overriding value. The general formula of the categorical imperative is to act only according to those maxims that can be consistently willed as a universal law – something said to be impossible for maxims aimed merely at material ends. In accepting this imperative, we are doubly self-determined, for we are not only determining our action freely, as Kant believes humans do in all exercises of the faculty of choice; we are also accepting a principle whose content is determined by that which is absolutely essential to us as agents, namely our pure practical reason. We thus are following our own law and so have autonomy when we accept the categorical imperative; otherwise we fall into heteronomy, or the (free) acceptance of principles whose content is determined independently of the essential nature of our own ultimate being, which is rational. Given the metaphysics of his transcendental idealism, Kant can say that the categorical imperative reveals a supersensible power of freedom in us such that we must regard ourselves as part of an intelligible world, i.e., a domain determined ultimately not by natural laws but rather by laws of reason. As such a rational being, an agent is an end in itself, i.e., something whose value is not dependent on external material ends, which are contingent and valued only as means to the end of happiness – which is itself only a conditional value (since the satisfaction of an evil will would be improper). Kant regards accepting the categorical imperative as tantamount to respecting rational nature as an end in itself, and to willing as if we were legislating a kingdom of ends. This is to will that the world become a “systematic Kant, Immanuel Kant, Immanuel 465 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 465 union of different rational beings through common laws,” i.e., laws that respect and fulfill the freedom of all rational beings. Although there is only one fundamental principle of morality, there are still different types of specific duties. One basic distinction is between strict duty and imperfect duty. Duties of justice, of respecting in action the rights of others, or the duty not to violate the dignity of persons as rational agents, are strict because they allow no exception for one’s inclination. A perfect duty is one that requires a specific action (e.g. keeping a promise), whereas an imperfect duty, such as the duty to perfect oneself or to help others, cannot be completely discharged or demanded by right by someone else, and so one has considerable latitude in deciding when and how it is to be respected. A meritorious duty involves going beyond what is strictly demanded and thereby generating an obligation in others, as when one is extraordinarily helpful to others and “merits” their gratitude.
kennyism: “His surname means ‘white,’ as in penguin, kennedy.” – Grice. Cited by Grice in his British Academy lecture – Grice was pleased that Kenny translated Vitters’s “Philosophical Grammar” – “He turned it into more of a philosophical thing than I would have thought one could!”

kepler: philosopher, born in Weil der Stadt, near Stuttgart. He studied astronomy with Michael Maestlin at the University of Tübingen, and then began the regular course of theological studies that prepared him to become a Lutheran pastor. Shortly before completing these studies he accepted the post of mathematician at Graz. “Mathematics” was still construed as including astronomy and astrology. There he published the Mysterium cosmographicum (1596), the first mjaor astronomical work to utilize the Copernican system since Copernicus’s own De revolutionibus half a century before. The Copernican shift of the sun to the center allowed Kepler to propose an explanation for the spacing of the planets (the Creator inscribed the successive planetary orbits in the five regular polyhedra) and for their motions (a sun-centered driving force diminishing with disKao Tzu Kepler, Johannes 466 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 466 tance from the sun). In this way, he could claim to have overcome the traditional prohibition against the mathematical astronomer’s claiming reality for the motion he postulates. Ability to explain had always been the mark of the philosopher. Kepler, a staunch Lutheran, was forced to leave Catholic Graz as bitter religious and political disputes engulfed much of northern Europe. He took refuge in the imperial capital, Prague, where Tycho Brahe, the greatest observational astronomer of the day, had established an observatory. Tycho asked Kepler to compose a defense of Tycho’s astronomy against a critic, Nicolaus Ursus, who had charged that it was “mere hypothesis.” The resulting Apologia (1600) remained unpublished; it contains a perceptive analysis of the nature of astronomical hypothesis. Merely saving the phenomena, Kepler argues, is in general not sufficient to separate two mathematical systems like those of Ptolemy and Copernicus. Other more properly explanatory “physical” criteria will be needed. Kepler was allowed to begin work on the orbit of Mars, using the mass of data Tycho had accumulated. But shortly afterward, Tycho died suddenly (1601). Kepler succeeded to Tycho’s post as Imperial Mathematician; more important, he was entrusted with Tycho’s precious data. Years of labor led to the publication of the Astronomia nova (1609), which announced the discovery of the elliptical orbit of Mars. One distinctive feature of Kepler’s long quest for the true shape of the orbit was his emphasis on finding a possible physical evaluation for any planetary motion he postulated before concluding that it was the true motion. Making the sun’s force magnetic allowed him to suppose that its effect on the earth would vary as the earth’s magnetic axis altered its orientation to the sun, thus perhaps explaining the varying distances and speeds of the earth in its elliptical orbit. The full title of his book makes his ambition clear: A New Astronomy Based on Causes, or A Physics of the Sky. Trouble in Prague once more forced Kepler to move. He eventually found a place in Linz (1612), where he continued his exploration of cosmic harmonies, drawing on theology and philosophy as well as on music and mathematics. The “Harmonia mundi” was his favorite among his books: “It can wait a century for a reader, as God himself has waited six thousand years for a witness.” The discovery of what later became known as his third law, relating the periodic times of any two planets as the ratio of the 3 /2 power of their mean distances, served to confirm his long-standing conviction that the universe is fashioned according to ideal harmonic relationships. In the Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae (1612), he continued his search for causes “either natural or archetypal,” not only for the planetary motions, but for such details as the size of the sun and the densities of the planets. He was more convinced than ever that a physics of the heavens had to rest upon its ability to explain (and not just to predict) the peculiarities of the planetary and lunar motions. What prevented him from moving even further than he did toward a new physics was that he had not grasped what later came to be called the principle of inertia. Thus he was compelled to postulate not only an attractive force between planet and sun but also a second force to urge the planet onward. It was Newton who showed that the second force is unnecessary, and who finally constructed the “physics of the sky” that had been Kepler’s ambition. But he could not have done it without Kepler’s notion of a quantifiable force operating between planet and sun, an unorthodox notion shaped in the first place by an imagination steeped in Neoplatonic metaphysics and the theology of the Holy Spirit.
Keynes, j. Neville – “the father of the better known Keynes, but the more interesting of the pair.” – Grice. Keynes, j. k., philosopher, author of “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” and “A Treatise on Probability,” cited by Grice for the importance of the ontological status of properties. Keynes was also active in English Oxbridge philosophical life, being well acquainted with such philosophers as G. E. Moore and F. P. Ramsey. In the philosophy of probability, Keynes pioneers the treatment of the proposition as the bearers of a probability assignment. Unlike classical subjectivists, Keynes treats probability as objective evidential relations among at least two proposition in ‘if’ connection. These relations are to be directly epistemically accessible to an intuitive ‘faculty.’ An idiosyncratic feature of Keynes’s system is that different probability assignments cannot always be compared (ordered as equal, less than, or greater than one another). Keynesianism permanently affected philosophy. Keynes’s philosophy has a number of important dimensions. While Keynes’s theorizing is in the capitalistic tradition, he rejects Sctos Smith’s notion of an invisible hand that would optimize the performance of an economy without any intentional direction by an individual or by the government. This involved rejection of the economic policy of “laissez-faire,” according to which government intervention in the economy’s operation is useless, or worse. Keynes argues that the natural force could deflect an economy from a course of optimal growth and keep it permanently out of equilibrium. Keynes proposes a number of mechanisms for adjusting its performance. Keynes advocates programs of government taxation and spending, not primarily as a means of providing public goods, but as a means of increasing prosperity. The philosopher is thereby provided with another means for justifying the existence of a strong government. One of the important ways that Keynes’s philosophy still directs much theorizing is its deep division between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Keynes argues, in effect, that micro-oeconomic analysis with its emphasis on ideal individual rationality and perfect intersubjective game-theoretical two-player competition is inadequate as a tool for understanding a macrophenomenon such as interest, and money. Keynes tries to show how human psychological foibles and market frictions require a qualitatively different kind of analysis at the macro level. Much theorizing is concerned with understanding the connections between micro- and macrophenomena and micro- and macroeconomics in an attempt to dissolve or blur the division. This issue is a philosophically important instance of a potential theoretical reduction. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Keynes’s ontology in the “Treatise on Probability,” H. P. Grice, “Credibility and Probability.”
kierkegaard: “Literally, churchyard, fancy that!” – Grice. Philosopher born to a well-to-do family, he consumed his inheritance while writing a large corpus of essays in a remarkably short time. His life was marked by an intense relationship with a devout but melancholy father, from whom he inherited his own bent to melancholy, with which he constantly struggled. A decisive event was his broken engagement from Regina Olsen, which precipitated the beginning of his authorship; his first essays are partly an attempt to explain, in a covert and symbolic way, the reasons why he felt he could not marry. Later Kierkegaard was involved in a controversy in which he was mercilessly attacked by a popular satirical periodical; this experience deepened his understanding of the significance of suffering and the necessity for an authentic individual to stand alone if necessary against “the crowd.” This caused him to abandon his plans to take a pastorate, a post for which his education had prepared him. At the end of his life, he waged a lonely, public campaign in the popular press and in a magazine he founded himself, against the Danish state church. He collapsed on the street with the final issue of this magazine, The Instant, ready for the printer, and was carried to a hospital. He died a few weeks later, affirming a strong Christian faith, but refusing to take communion from the hands of a priest of the official church. Though some writers have questioned whether Kierkegaard’s writings admit of a unified interpretation, Kierkegaard himself sees his oeuvre as serving Christianity; he saw himself as a “missionary” whose task was to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom.” However, much of this literature does not address Christianity directly, but rather concerns itself with an analysis of human existence. Kierkegaard see this as necessary, because Christianity is first and foremost a way of existing. He saw much of the confusion about Christian faith as rooted in confusion about the nature of existence. Hence to clear up the former, the latter must be carefully analyzed. The great misfortune of “Christendom” and “the present age” is that people “have forgotten what it means ‘to exist,’” and Kierkegaard sees himself as a modern Socrates sent to “remind” others of what they know but have forgotten. It is not surprising that the analyses of human existence he provides have been of great interest to many philosophers. Kierkegaard frequently uses the verb ‘to exist’ (at existere) idiosyncratically, to refer to human existence. In this sense God is said NOT to exist, even though God has eternal reality. Kierkegaard describes human existence as an unfinished process, in which “the individual” (a key concept in his thought) must take responsibility for achieving an identity as a self through a free choice. Such a choice is described as a leap, to highlight Kierkegaard’s view that intellectual reflection alone can never motivate action. A decision to end the process of reflection is necessary and such a decision must be generated by a passion. The passions that shape a person’s self are referred to by Kierkegaard as the individual’s “inwardness” or “subjectivity.” The most significant passion, love or faith, does not merely happen; they must be cultivated and formed. The process by which the individual becomes a self is described by Kierkegaard as ideally moving through three stages, termed the “stages on life’s way.” Since human development occurs by freedom and not automatically, however, the individual can become fixated in any of these stages. Thus the stages also confront each other as rival views of life, or “spheres of existence.” The three stages or spheres are the “aesthetic,” (or sensual), the ethical, and the religious. A distinctive feature of Kierkegaard’s philosophy is that these three lifeviews are represented by pseudonymous “characters” who actually “author” some of the oeuvre; this leads to interpretive difficulties, since it is not always clear what to attribute to Kierkegaard himself and what to the pseudonymous character. Fortunately, he also wrote many devotional and religious works under his own name, where this problem does not arise. The “aesthetic” life is described by Kierkegaard as lived for and in “the moment.” It is a life governed by “immediacy,” or the satisfaction of one’s immediate desire, though it is capable of a kind of development in which one learns to enjoy life reflectively. What the aesthetic person lacks is a commitment (except to sensation itself) which is the key to the ethical life, a life that attempts to achieve a unified self through commitment to ideals with enduring validity, rather than simply sensual appeal. The religious life emerges from the ethical life when the individual realizes both the transcendent character of the true ideals and also how far short of realizing those ideals the person is. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript two forms of the religious life are distinguished: a “natural” religiosity (religiousness “A”) in which the person attempts to relate to the divine and resolve the problem of guilt, relying solely on one’s natural “immanent” idea of the divine; and Christianity (religiousness “B”), in which God becomes incarnate as a human being in order to establish a relation with humans. Christianity can be accepted only through the “leap of faith.” It is a religion not of “immanence” but of “transcendence,” since it is based on a revelation. This revelation cannot be rationally demonstrated, since the incarnation is a paradox that transcends human reason. Reason can, however, when the passion of faith is present, come to understand the appropriateness of recognizing its own limits and accepting the paradoxical incarnation of God in the form of Jesus Christ. The true Christian is not merely an admirer of Jesus, but one who believes by becoming a follower. The irreducibility of the religious life to the ethical life is illustrated for Kierkegaard in the biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac to obey the command of God. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard (through his pseudonym “de Silentio”) analyzes this act of Abraham’s as involving a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Abraham’s act cannot be understood merely in ethical terms as a conflict of duties in which one rationally comprehensible duty is superseded by a higher one. Rather, Abraham seems to be willing to “suspend” the ethical as a whole in favor of a higher religious duty. Thus, if one admires Abraham as “the father of faith,” one admires a quality that cannot be reduced to simply moral virtue. Some (like J. L. Mackie) have read this as a claim that religious faith may require immoral behavior; others (like P. F. Strawson) argue that what is relativized by the teleological suspension of the ethical is not an eternally valid set of moral requirements, but rather ethical obligations as these are embedded in human social institutions. Thus, in arguing that “the ethical” is not the highest element in existence, Kierkegaard leaves open the possibility that our social institutions, and the ethical ideals that they embody, do not deserve our absolute and unqualified allegiance, an idea with important political implications. In accord with his claim that existence cannot be reduced to intellectual thought, Kierkegaard devotes much attention to emotions and passions. Anxiety is particularly important, since it reflects human freedom. Anxiety involves a “sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy”; it is the psychological state that precedes the basic human fall into sin, but it does not explain this “leap,” since no final explanation of a free choice can be given. Such negative emotions as despair and guilt are also important for Kierkegaard; they reveal the emptiness of the aesthetic and the ultimately unsatisfactory character of the ethical, driving individuals on toward the religious life. Irony and humor are also seen as important “boundary zones” for the stages of existence. The person who has discovered his or her own “eternal validity” can look ironically at the relative values that capture most people, who live their lives aesthetically. Similarly, the “existential humorist” who has seen the incongruities that necessarily pervade our ethical human projects is on the border of the religious life. Kierkegaard also analyzes the passions of faith Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 469 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 469 and love. Faith is ultimately understood as a “willing to be oneself” that is made possible by a transparent, trusting relationship to the “power that created the self.” Kierkegaard distinguishes various forms of love, stressing that Christian love must be understood as neighbor love, a love that is combined and is not rooted in any natural relationship to the self, such as friendship or kinship, but ultimately is grounded in the fact that all humans share a relationship to their creator. Kierkegaard is well known for his critique of Hegel’s absolute idealism. Hegel’s claim to have written “the system” is ridiculed for its pretensions of finality. From the Dane’s perspective, though reality may be a system for God, it cannot be so for any existing thinker, since both reality and the thinker are incomplete and system implies completeness. Hegelians are also criticized for pretending to have found a presuppositionless or absolute starting point; for Kierkegaard, philosophy begins not with doubt but with wonder. Reflection is potentially infinite; the doubt that leads to skepticism cannot be ended by thought alone but only by a resolution of the will. Kierkegaard also defends traditional Aristotelian logic and the principle of non-contradiction against the Hegelian introduction of “movement” into logic. Kierkegaard is particularly disturbed by the Hegelian tendency to see God as immanent in society; he thought it important to understand God as “wholly other,” the “absolutely different” who can never be exhaustively embodied in human achievement or institutions. To stand before God one must stand as an individual, in “fear and trembling,” conscious that this may require a break with the given social order. Kierkegaard is often characterized as the father of existentialism. There are reasons for this; he does indeed philosophize existentially, and he undoubtedly exercised a deep influence on many twentieth-century existentialists such as Sartre and Camus. But the characterization is anachronistic, since existentialism as a movement is a twentieth-century phenomenon, and the differences between Kierkegaard and those existentialists are also profound. If existentialism is defined as the denial that there is such a thing as a human essence or nature, it is unlikely that Kierkegaard is an existentialist. More recently, the Dane has also been seen as a precursor of postmodernism. His rejection of classical foundationalist epistemologies and employment of elusive literary techniques such as his pseudonyms again make such associations somewhat plausible. However, despite his rejection of the system and criticism of human claims to finality and certitude, Kierkegaard does not appear to espouse any form of relativism or have much sympathy for “anti-realism.” He has the kind of passion for clarity and delight in making sharp distinctions that are usually associated with contemporary “analytic” philosophy. In the end he must be seen as his own person, a unique Christian presence with sensibilities that are in many ways Greek and premodern rather than postmodern. He has been joyfully embraced and fervently criticized by thinkers of all stripes. He remains “the individual” he wrote about, and to whom he dedicated many of his works.
kilvington: Oriel, Oxford. Yorks. Grice, “The English Place Name Society told me.” “I tried to teach Sophismata at Oxford, but my tutees complained that Chillington’s Latin chilled them!” – Grice. English philosopher. He was a scholar associated with the household of Richard de Bury and an early member of “The Oxford Calculators,” as Grice calls them, important in the early development of physics. Kilvington’s “Sophismata” is the only work of his studied extensively to date. It is an investigation of puzzles regarding ceasing, doubting, the liar, change, velocity and acceleration, motive power, beginning and ceasing, the continuum, infinity, knowing and doubting, and the liar and related paradoxes. Kilvington’s “Sophismata” is peculiar insofar as all these are treated in a conceptual way, in contrast to the more artificial “calculations” used by Bradwardine, Heytesbury, and other Oxford Calculators to handle this or that problem. Kilvington also wrote a commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and questions on Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption, Physics, and Nicomachean Ethics. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Chillington chills: “Sophismata” – on beginning and ceasing and knowing and doubting – implicatura.”
kilwardby of rufina: English philosopher, he taught at Paris, joins the Dominicans and teaches at Oxford. He becomes archbishop of Canterbury and condemns thirty propositions, among them Aquinas’s position that there is a single substantial form in a human being. Kilwardby resigns his archbishopric and is appointed to the bishopric of Santa Rufina, Italy, where he dies. Kilwardby writes extensively and had considerable medieval influence, especially in philosophy of language; but it is now unusually difficult to determine which works are authentically his. “De Ortu Scientiarum advances a sophisticated account of how a name is imposed and a detailed account of the nature and role of conceptual analysis. In metaphysics Kilwardby of Rufina insisted that things are individual and that universality arises from operations of the soul. He writes extensively on happiness and was concerned to show that some happiness is possible in this life. In psychology he argued that freedom of decision is a disposition arising from the cooperation of the intellect and the will.
cognitum: KK-thesis: the thesis that knowing entails knowing that one knows, symbolized in propositional epistemic logic as Kp > KKp, where ‘K’ stands for knowing. According to the KK-thesis, proposed by Grice in “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre,” the (propositional) logic of knowledge resembles the modal system S4. The KK-thesis was introduced into epistemological discussion by Hintikka in Knowledge and Belief. He calls the KKthesis a “virtual implication,” a conditional whose negation is “indefensible.” A tacit or an explicit acceptance of the thesis has been part of many philosophers’ views about knowledge since Plato and Aristotle. If the thesis is formalized as Kap P KaKap, where ‘Ka’ is read as ‘a knows that’, it holds only if the person a knows that he is referred to by ‘a’; this qualification is automatically satisfied for the first-person case. The validity of the thesis seems sensitive to variations in the sense of ‘know’; it has sometimes been thought to characterize a strong concept of knowledge, e.g., knowledge based on (factually) conclusive reasons, or active as opposed to implicit knowledge. If knowledge is regarded as true belief based on conclusive evidence, the KKthesis entails that a person knows that p only if his evidence for p is also sufficient to justify the claim that he knows that p; the epistemic claim should not require additional evidence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre,” in “The Conception of Value.”
Shaftesbury: “One of my favourite rationalist philosophers” – Grice.
Kleist: philosopher whose oeuvre is based on the antinomy of reason and sentiment, one as impotent as the other, and reflects the Aufklärung crisis at the turn of the century. He resigned from the Prussian army. Following a reading of Kant, he lost faith in a “life’s plan” as inspired by Leibniz’s, Wolff’s, and Shaftesbury’s rationalism. Kleist looks for salvation in Rousseau but concluded that sentiment revealed itself just as untrustworthy as reason as soon as man left the state of original grace (“or grice, his spelling is doubtful” – Grice) and realized himself to be neither a puppet nor a god (see Essay on the Puppet Theater, 1810). The Schroffenstein Family repeats the Shakespearian theme of two young people who love each other but belong to warring families. One already finds in it the major elements of Kleist’s universe: the incapacity of the individual to master his fate, the theme of the tragic error, and the importance of the juridical. In 1803, Kleist returned to philosophy and literature and realized in Amphitryon (1806) the impossibility of the individual knowing himself and the world and acting deliberately in it. The divine order that is the norm of tragic art collapses, and with it, the principle of identity. Kleistian characters, “modern” individuals, illustrate this normative chaos. The Broken Jug (a comedy) shows Kleist’s interest in law. In his two parallel plays, Penthesilea and The Young Catherine of Heilbronn, Kleist presents an alternative: either “the marvelous order of the world” and the theodicy that carries Catherine’s fate, or the sublime and apocryphal mission of the Christlike individual who must redeem the corrupt order. Before his suicide, Kleist looked toward the renaissance of the German nation for a historical way out of this metaphysical conflict.
knowledge by acquaintance: knowledge of objects by means of direct awareness of them. The notion of knowledge by acquaintance is primarily associated with Russell (The Problems of Philosophy). Russell first distinguishes knowledge of truths from knowledge of things. He then distinguishes two kinds of knowledge of things: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Ordinary speech suggests that we are acquainted with the people and the physical objects in our immediate environments. On Russell’s view, however, our contact with these things is indirect, being mediated by our mental representations of them. He holds that the only things we know by acquaintance are the content of our minds, abstract universals, and, perhaps, ourselves. Russell says that knowledge by description is indirect knowledge of objects, our knowledge being mediated by other objects and truths. He suggests that we know external objects, such as tables and other people, only by description (e.g., the cause of my present experience). Russell’s discussion of this topic is quite puzzling. The considerations that lead him to say that we lack acquaintance with external objects also lead him to say that, strictly speaking, we lack knowledge of such things. This seems to amount to the claim that what he has called “knowledge by description” is not, strictly speaking, a kind of knowledge at all. Russell also holds that every proposition that a person understands must be composed entirely of elements with which the person is acquainted. This leads him to propose analyses of familiar propositions in terms of mental objects with which we are acquainted.
de re/de sensu:, knowledge de re, with respect to some object, that it has a particular property, or knowledge, of a group of objects, that they stand in some relation. Knowledge de re is typically contrasted with knowledge de dicto, which is knowledge of facts or propositions. If persons A and B know that a winner has been declared in an election, but only B knows which candidate has won, then both have de dicto knowledge that someone has won, but only B has de re knowledge about some candidate that she is the winner. Person B can knowingly attribute the property of being the winner to one of the candidates. It is generally held that to have de re knowledge about an object one must at least be in some sense familiar with or causally connected to the object. A related concept is knowledge de se. This is self-knowledge, of the sort expressed by ‘I am —— ’. Knowledge de se is not simply de re knowledge about oneself. A person might see a group of people in a mirror and notice that one of the people has a red spot on his nose. He then has de dicto knowledge that someone in the group has a red spot on his nose. On most accounts, he also has de re knowledge with respect to that individual that he has a spot. But if he has failed to recognize that he himself is the one with the spot, then he lacks de se knowledge. He doesn’t know (or believe) what he would express by saying “I have a red spot.” So, according to this view, knowledge de se is not merely knowledge de re about oneself.
köhler: philosophical psychologist who, with Wertheimer and Koffka, founded Gestalt psychologie. Köhler makestwo distinctive contributions to Gestalt doctrine, one empirical, one theoretical. The empirical contribution was his study of animal thinking, performed on Tenerife (The Mentality of Apes). The then dominant theory of problem solving was E. L. Thorndike’s associationist trial-and-error learning theory, maintaining that animals attack problems by trying out a series of behaviors, one of which is gradually “stamped in” by success. Köhler argues that trial-and-error behavior occurred only when, as in Thorndike’s experiments, part of the problem situation was hidden. He arranged more open puzzles, such as getting bananas hanging from a ceiling, requiring the ape to get a (visible) box to stand on. His apes showed insight – suddenly arriving at the correct solution. Although he demonstrated the existence of insight, its nature remains elusive, and trial-and-error learning remains the focus of research. Köhler’s theoretical contribution was the concept of isomorphism, Gestalt psychology’s theory of psychological representation. He held an identity theory of mind and body, and isomorphism claims that a topological mapping exists between the behavioral field in which an organism is acting (cf. Lewin) and fields of electrical currents in the brain (not the “mind”). Such currents have not been discovered. Important works by Köhler include Gestalt Psychology, The Place of Value in a World of Facts, Dynamics in Psychology, and Selected Papers (ed. M. Henle).
Kotarbigski: philosopher, cofounder, with Lukasiewicz and Lesniewski, of the Warsaw Centre of Logical Research. His broad philosophical interests and humanistic concerns, probity, scholarship, and clarity in argument, consequent persuasiveness, and steadfast championship of human rights made him heir to their common mentor Kasimir Twardowski, father of modern Polish philosophy. In philosophical, historical, and methodological works like his influential Elements of Theory of Knowledge, Formal Logic, and Scientific Methodology (1929; mistitled Gnosiology in English translation), he popularized the more technical contributions of his colleagues, and carried on Twardowski’s objectivist and “anti-irrationalist” critical tradition, insisting on accuracy and clarity, holding that philosophy has no distinctive method beyond the logical and analytical methods of the empirical and deductive sciences. As a free-thinking liberal humanist socialist, resolved to be “a true compass, not a weathervane,” he defended autonomous ethics against authoritarianism, left or right. His lifelong concern with community and social practice led him to develop praxiology as a theory of efficacious action. Following Lesniewsi’s “refutation” of Twardowski’s Platonism, Kotarbigski insisted on translating abstractions into more concrete terms. The principal tenets of his “reist, radical realist, and imitationist” rejection of Platonism, phenomenalism, and introspectionism are (1) pansomatism or ontological reism as modernized monistic materialism: whatever is anything at all (even a soul) is a body – i.e., a concrete individual object, resistant and spatiotemporally extended, enduring at least a while; (2) consequent radical realism: no object is a “property,” “relation,” “event,” “fact,” or “abstract entity” of any other kind, nor “sense-datum,” “phenomenon,” or essentially “private mental act” or “fact” accessible only to “introspection”; (3) concretism or semantic reism and imitationism as a concomitant “nominalist” program – thus, abstract terms that, hypostatized, might appear to name “abstract entities” are pseudo-names or onomatoids to be eliminated by philosophical analysis and elucidatory paraphrase. Hypostatizations that might appear to imply existence of such Platonic universals are translatable into equivalent generalizations characterizing only bodies. Psychological propositions are likewise reducible, ultimately to the basic form: Individual So-and-so experiences thus; Such-and-such is so. Only as thus reduced can such potentially misleading expressions be rightly understood and judged true or false.
krause: philosopher representative of a tendency to develop Kant’s views in the direction of pantheism and mysticism. Educated at Jena, he came under the influence of Fichte and Schelling. Taking his philosophical starting point as Fichte’s analysis of self-consciousness, and adopting as his project a “spiritualized” systematic elaboration of the philosophy of Spinoza (somewhat like the young Schelling), he arrived at a position that he called panentheism. According to this, although nature and human consciousness are part of God or Absolute Being, the Absolute is neither exhausted in nor identical with them. To some extent, he anticipated Hegel in invoking an “end of history” in which the finite realm of human affairs would reunite with the infinite essence in a universal moral and “spiritual” order.
Kripke: philosopher cited by H. P. Grice, he formulated a semantics for modal logic (the logic of necessity and possibility) based on Leibniz’s notion of a possible world, and, using the apparatus, proved completeness for a variety of systems. Possible world semantics (due in part also to Carnap and others) has proved to be pretty fruitful.. Kripke’s Princeton lectures, Naming and Necessity are a watershed. The work primarily concerns proper names of individuals (e.g., ‘H. P. Grice is called ‘H. P. Grice’’) and, by extension, terms for natural kinds (‘Oxonian’) and similar expressions. Kripke uses his thesis that any such term is a “rigid designator,”– i.e., designates the same thing with respect to every possible world in which that thing exists (and does not designate anything else with respect to worlds in which it does not exist) – to argue, contrary to the received Fregeian view, that the designation of a proper name is not semantically secured by means of a description that gives the sense of the name. On the contrary, the description associated with a particular use of a name will frequently designate something else entirely. Kripke derives putative examples of necessary a posteriori truths, as well as contingent a priori truths. In addition, he defends essentialism – the doctrine that some properties of things are properties that those things could not fail to have (except by not existing) – and uses it, together with his account of natural-kind terms, to argue against the identification of mental entities with their physical manifestations (e.g., sensations with specific neural events). In a sequel, “A Puzzle about Belief,” Kripke addresses the problem of substitution failure in sentential contexts attributing belief or other propositional attitudes. Kripke’s interpretation of the later Wittgenstein as a semantic skeptic has also had a profound impact (Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language). His semantic theory of truth (“Outline of a Theory of Truth”) has sparked renewed interest in the liar paradox (‘This statement is false’) and related paradoxes, and in the development of non-classical languages containing their own truth predicates as possible models for ordinary language. He is also known for his work in intuitionism and on his theory of transfinite recursion on admissible ordinals. Kripke, McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, frequently lectures on numerous further significant results in philosophy. A Kripke semantics, a type of formal semantics for languages with operators A and B for necessity and possibility (‘possible worlds semantics’ and ‘relational semantics’ are sometimes used for the same notion); also, a similar semantics for intuitionistic logic. In a basic version a framefor a sentential language with A and B is a pair (W, R) where W is a non-empty set (the “possible worlds”) and R is a binary relation on W – the relation of “relative possibility” or “accessibility.” A model on the frame (W, R) is a triple (W, R, V), where V is a function (the “valuation function”) that assigns truth-values to sentence letters at worlds. If w 1 W then a sentence AA is true at world w in the model (W, R, V) if A is true at all worlds v 1 W for which wRv. Informally, AA is true at world w if A is true at all the worlds that would be possible if w were actual. This is a generalization of the doctrine commonly attributed to Leibniz that necessity is truth in all possible worlds. A is valid in the model (W, R, V) if it is true at all worlds w 1 W in that model. It is valid in the frame (W, R) if it is valid in all models on that frame. It is valid if it is valid in all frames. In predicate logic versions, a frame may include another component D, that assigns a non-empty set Dw of objects (the existents at w) to each possible world w. Terms and quantifiers may be treated either as objectual (denoting and ranging over individuals) or conceptual (denoting and ranging over functions from possible worlds to individuals) and either as actualist or possibilist(denoting and ranging over either existents or possible existents). On some of these treatments there may arise further choices about whether and how truth-values should be assigned to sentences that assert relations among non-existents. The development of Kripke semantics marks a watershed in the modern study of modal systems. A number of axiomatizations for necessity and possibility were proposed and investigated. Carnap showed that for the simplest of these systems, C. I. Lewis’s S5, AA can be interpreted as saying that A is true in all “state descriptions.” Answering even the most basic questions about the other systems, however, required effort and ingenuity. Stig Kanger, Richard Montague, Kripke, and Hintikka each formulated interpretations for such systems that generalized Carnap’s semantics by using something like the accessibility relation described above. Kripke’s semantics was more natural than the others in that accessibility was taken to be a relation among mathematically primitive “possible worlds,” and, in a series of papers, Kripke demonstrated that versions of it provide characteristic interpretations for a number of modal systems. For these reasons Kripke’s formulation has become standard. Relational semantics provided simple solutions to some older problems about the distinctness and relative strength of the various systems. It also opened new areas of investigation, facilitating general results (establishing decidability and other properties for infinite classes of modal systems), incompleteness results (exhibiting systems not determined by any class of frames), and correspondence results (showing that the frames verifying certain modal formulas were exactly the frames meeting certain conditions on R). It suggested parallel interpretations for notions whose patterns of inference were known to be similar to that of necessity and possibility, including obligation and permission, epistemic necessity and possibility, provability and consistency, and, more recently, the notion of a computation’s inevitably or possibly terminating in a particular state. It inspired similar semantics for nonclassical conditionals and the more general neighborhood or functional variety of possible worlds semantics. The philosophical utility of Kripke semantics is more difficult to assess. Since the accessibility relation is often explained in terms of the modal operators, it is difficult to maintain that the semantics provides an explicit analysis of the modalities it interprets. Furthermore, questions about which version of the semantics is correct (particularly for quantified modal systems) are themselves tied to substantive questions about the nature of things and worlds. The semantics does impose important constraints on the meaning of modalities, and it provides a means for many philosophical questions to be posed more clearly and starkly.
Kristeva: The centerpiece of Kristeva’s semiotic theory has two correlative moments: a focus on the speaking subject as embodying unconscious motivations (and not simply the conscious intentionality of a Husserlian transcendental ego) and an articulation of the signifying phenomenon as a dynamic, productive process (not a static sign-system). Kristeva’s most systematic philosophical work, La Révolution du langage poétique brings her semiotics to mature expression through an effective integration of psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), elements of linguistic models (from Roman Jakobson to Chomskyan generative grammar) and semiology (from Saussure to Peirce and Louis Hjelmslev), and a literary approach to text (influenced by Bakhtin). Together the symbolic and the semiotic, two dialectical and irreconcilable modalities of meaning, constitute the signifying process. The symbolic designates the systematic rules governing denotative and propositional speech, while the semiotic isolates an archaic layer of meaning that is neither representational nor based on relations among signs. The concept of the chora combines the semiotic, translinguistic layer of meaning (genotext) with a psychoanalytic, drive-based model of unconscious sound production, dream logic, and fantasy life that defy full symbolic articulation. Drawing on Plato’s non-unified notion of the maternal receptacle (Timaeus), the chora constitutes the space where subjectivity is generated. Drives become “ordered” in rhythmic patterns during the pre-Oedipal phase before the infant achieves reflexive capacity, develops spatial intuition and time consciousness, and posits itself as an enunciating subject. Ordered, but not according to symbolic laws, semiotic functions arise when the infant forms associations between its vocal gesticulations and sensorimotor development, and patterns these associations after the mother’s corporeal modulations. The semiotic chora, while partly repressed in identity formation, links the subject’s preverbal yet functional affective life to signification. All literary forms – epic narrative, metalanguage, contemplation or theoria and text-practice – combine two different registers of meaning, phenotext and genotext. Yet they do so in different ways and none encompasses both registers in totality. The phenotext refers to language in its function “to communicate” and can be analyzed in terms of syntax and semantics. Though not itself linguistic, the genotext reveals itself in the way that “phonematic” and “melodic devices” and “syntactic and logical” features establish “semantic” fields. The genotext isolates the specific mode in which a text sublimates drives; it denotes the “process” by which a literary form generates a particular type of subjectivity. Poetic language is unique in that it largely reveals the genotext. This linkage between semiotic processes, genotext, and poetic language fulfills the early linguistic project (1967–73) and engenders a novel post-Hegelian social theory. Synthesizing semiotics and the destructive death drive’s attack against stasis artfully restores permanence to Hegelian negativity. Poetic mimesis, because it transgresses grammatical rules while sustaining signification, reactivates the irreducible negativity and heterogeneity of drive processes. So effectuating anamnesis, poetry reveals the subject’s constitution within language and, by holding open rather than normalizing its repressed desire, promotes critical analysis of symbolic and institutionalized values. Later works like Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980), Etrangers à nous-mêmes (1989), Histoires d’amour, and Les Nouvelles maladies de l’âme shift away from collective political agency to a localized, culturally therapeutic focus. Examining xenophobic social formations, abjection and societal violence, romantic love, grief, women’s melancholic poison in patriarchy, and a crisis of moral values in the postmetaphysical age, they harbor forceful implications for ethics and social theory.
Kropotkin: philosopher, best remembered for his anarchism and his defense of mutual aid as a factor of evolution. Traveling extensively in Siberia on scientific expeditions (1862–67), he was stimulated by Darwin’s newly published theory of evolution and sought, in the Siberian landscape, confirmation of Darwin’s Malthusian principle of the struggle for survival. Instead Kropotkin found that underpopulation was the rule, that climate was the main obstacle to survival, and that mutual aid was a far more common phenomenon than Darwin recognized. He soon generalized these findings to social theory, opposing social Darwinism, and also began to espouse anarchist theory.
Kuhn: Grice: “I would hardly look for inspiration in ‘philosophical minor revolutions’ in Kuhn, who wasn’t really a philosopher – MA physics, PhD philosophy of science” -- philosopher, studied at Harvard, where he received degrees in physics and a doctorate in the history of science. He then taught history of science or philosophy of science at Harvard (1951–56), Berkeley (1956–64), Princeton (1964–79), and M.I.T. (1979–91). Kuhn traced his shift from physics to the history and philosophy of science to a moment in 1947 when he was Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich Kuhn, Thomas S(amuel) 478 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 478 asked to teach some science to humanities majors. Searching for a case study to illuminate the development of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle’s Physics and was astonished at how “simply wrong” it was. After a while, Kuhn came to “think like an Aristotelian physicist” and to realize that Aristotle’s basic concepts were totally unlike Newton’s, and that, understood on its own terms, Aristotle’s Physics was not bad Newtonian mechanics. This new perspective resulted in The Copernican Revolution (1957), a study of the transformation of the Aristotelian geocentric image of the world to the modern heliocentric one. Pondering the structure of these changes, Kuhn produced his immensely influential second book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He argued that scientific thought is defined by “paradigms,” variously describing these as disciplinary matrixes or exemplars, i.e., conceptual world-views consisting of beliefs, values, and techniques shared by members of a given community, or an element in that constellation: concrete achievements used as models for research. According to Kuhn, scientists accept a prevailing paradigm in “normal science” and attempt to articulate it by refining its theories and laws, solving various puzzles, and establishing more accurate measurements of constants. Eventually, however, their efforts may generate anomalies; these emerge only with difficulty, against a background of expectations provided by the paradigm. The accumulation of anomalies triggers a crisis that is sometimes resolved by a revolution that replaces the old paradigm with a new one. One need only look to the displacement of Aristotelian physics and geocentric astronomy by Newtonian mechanics and heliocentrism for instances of such paradigm shifts. In this way, Kuhn challenged the traditional conception of scientific progress as gradual, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. He elaborated upon these themes and extended his historical inquiries in his later works, The Essential Tension (1977) and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978). H. P. Grice, “A minor revolution in philosophy.”
Labriola: born in Genova, Liguria, Italia, philosopher who studied Hegel and corresponded with Engels for years (Lettere a Engels, 1949). Labriola’s essays on Marxism appeared first in French in the collection Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire. Another influential work, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia collects ten letters to Georges Sorel on Marxism. Labriola did not intend to develop an original Marxist theory but only to give an accurate exposition of Marx’s thought. He believed that socialism would inevitably ensue from the inner contradictions of capitalist society and defended Marx’s views as objective scientific truths. He criticized revisionism and defended the need to maintain the orthodoxy of Marxist thought. His views and works were publicized by two of his students, Sorel in France and Croce in Italy. Gramsci brought new attention to Labriola as an example of pure and independent Marxism.
labours: the twelve labours of Grice. They are twelve. The first is Extensionalism. The second is Nominalism. The third is Positivism. The fourth is Naturalism. The fifth is Mechanism. The sixth is Phenomenalism. The seventh is Reductionism. The eighth is physicalism. The ninth is materialism. The tenth is Empiricism. The eleventh is Scepticism, and the twelfth is functionalism. “As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positivism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physicalism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey.”“The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.” “There are many persons, for example, who view Naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting Nominalism.”“And it is not easy to see how anyone could couple support for Phenomenalism with support for Physicalism.”“After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age, I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.“But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?” “The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelve-fold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies.” “To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which seeks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertised philosophical commodity, such as abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth.”“In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character; in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.”“In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of ‘desert landscapes.’”“But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate.”“We are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape.”“We are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer.”“To change the image somewhat, what bothers me about whatI am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.”“I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these betes noires seem to possess.”“Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission.”“They limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.”“They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation.”“Some prima-facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away.”“And they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs.”“My own instincts operate in a reverse direction from this.”“I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.”“I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.”“This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic.”“But all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack.”“I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism.’”“The best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which I should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject.”“My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that 'Because it is red' is no more informative as an answer to the question 'Why is a pillar-box called ‘red’?' than would be 'Because he is Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called "Grice"?', and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory.”“The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, butdistinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs.”“As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system.”“Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject.”“On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist view-point, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set.”“But if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be.”“This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.”“I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks.” H. P. Grice, “Grice’s seven labours.”

Lacan: he developed and transformed Freudian theory and practice on the basis of the structuralist semiotics originated by Saussure. According to Lacan, the unconscious is not a congeries of biological instincts and drives, but rather a system of signifiers. Lacan construes, e.g., the fundamental Freudian processes of condensation and displacement as instances of metaphor and metonymy. Lacan proposea a Freudianism in which any traces of the substantial Cartesian self are replaced by a system of this or that symbolic function. Contrary to standard views, the ego is an imaginary projection, not our access to the real (which, for Lacan, is the unattainable and inexpressible limit of language). In accord with his theoretical position, Lacan develops a new form of psychoanalytic practice that tries to avoid rather than achieve the “transference” whereby the analysand identifies with the ego of the analyst. Lacan’s writings (e.g., Écrits and the numerous volumes of his Séminaires) are of legendary difficulty, offering idiosyncratic networks of allusion, word play, and paradox, which Grice finds rich and stimulating and Strawson irresponsibly obscure. Beyond psychoanalysis, Lacan has been particularly influential on literary theorists and on poststructuralist philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze.
Laffitte: positivist philosopher, a disciple of Comte and founder of the Revue Occidentale. Laffitte spread positivism by adopting Comte’s format of “popular” courses. He faithfully acknowledged Comte’s objective method and religion of humanity. Laffitte wrote Great Types of Humanity. In Positive Ethics, he distinguishes between theoretical and practical ethics. His Lectures on First Philosophy sets forth a metaphysics, or a body of general and abstract laws, that attempts to complete positivism, to resolve the conflict between the subjective and the objective, and to avert materialism.
La Forge: philosopher, a member of the Cartesian school. La Forge seems to have become passionately interested in Descartes’s philosophy and grew to become one of its most visible and energetic advocates. La Forge (together with Gérard van Gutschoven) illustrated an edition of Descartes’s L’homme and provided an extensive commentary; both illustrations and commentary were often reprinted with the text. His main work, though, is the Traité de l’esprit de l’homme: though not a commentary on Descartes, it is “in accordance with the principles of René Descartes,” according to its subtitle. It attempts to continue Descartes’s program in L’homme, left incomplete at his death, by discussing the mind and its union with the body. In many ways La Forge’s work is quite orthodox; he carefully follows Descartes’s opinions on the nature of body, the nature of soul, etc., as they appear in the extant writings to which he had access. But with others in the Cartesian school, La Forge’s work contributed to the establishment of the doctrine of occasionalism as Cartesian orthodoxy, a doctrine not explicitly found in Descartes’s writings.
Future and general duty: I think it is clear that whatever I imply, suggest, mean, etc., is distinct from what I explicitly convey. I wish to introduce, as terms of art, one verb "implicate" and two related nouns, "implicature" (cf. "implying") and "implicatum" (cf. "what is implied").  The point of my maneuvre is to free you from having to choose (a) between this or that member of the family of verbs (imply, etc.) for which the verb "implicate" is to do general duty. (b) between this or that member of the family of nouns (the implying, etc.) for which the noun "implicature" is to do general duty.(c) between this or that member of the the family of nouns or nominal consstructions ('what is implied,' etc.) for which 'implicatum' is to do general duty. I will add: implicaturumimplicatura. "Implicaturum" (sing.) becomes, of course, "implicatura." So, strictly, while the verb to use do do general duty is 'implicate,' the NOUN is 'implicaturum' (plural: implicatura). I think it is clear that whatever I imply or keep implicit (suggest, mean, etc.)is distinct from what I explicitly convey, or make explicit. I wish to introduce, as a term of art the Latinate verb 'implicate,' from the Latin 'implicare' -- with its derivative, 'implicaturum.' The point of my maneuvre is for my tutee's delight: he won't have to choose between this or that member of the family of verbs ('suggest,' 'mean') for which the Latinate verb 'implicate' (from 'implicaare' with its derivative form, 'implicaturum,') is to do general duty. If we compare it with ‘amare’: Grice: “As Cicero knows, there is a world of difference between ‘amatum’ and ‘amaturum’ – so with ‘implicatum’ and ‘implicaturum’!” – IMPLICATURUM: about to imply, about to be under obligation to imply, about to be obliged to imply. Refs. H. P. Grice, “Implicaturum.”
lambda implicaturum -- Church: a., philosopher, known in pure logic for his discovery and application of the Church lambda operator, one of the central ideas of the Church lambda calculus, and for his rigorous formalizations of the theory of types, a higher-order underlying logic originally formulated in a flawed form by Whitehead and Russell. The lambda operator enables direct, unambiguous, symbolic representation of a range of philosophically and mathematically important expressions previously representable only ambiguously or after elaborate paraphrasing. In philosophy, Church advocated rigorous analytic methods based on symbolic logic. His philosophy was characterized by his own version of logicism, the view that mathematics is reducible to logic, and by his unhesitating acceptance of higherorder logics. Higher-order logics, including second-order, are ontologically rich systems that involve quantification of higher-order variables, variables that range over properties, relations, and so on. Higher-order logics were routinely used in foundational work by Frege, Peano, Hilbert, Gödel, Tarski, and others until around World War II, when they suddenly lost favor. In regard to both his logicism and his acceptance of higher-order logics, Church countered trends, increasingly dominant in the third quarter of the twentieth century, against reduction of mathematics to logic and against the so-called “ontological excesses” of higher-order logic. In the 0s, although admired for his high standards of rigor and for his achievements, Church was regarded as conservative or perhaps even reactionary. Opinions have softened in recent years. On the computational and epistemological sides of logic Church made two major contributions. He was the first to articulate the now widely accepted principle known as Church’s thesis, that every effectively calculable arithmetic function is recursive. At first highly controversial, this principle connects intuitive, epistemic, extrinsic, and operational aspects of arithmetic with its formal, ontic, intrinsic, and abstract aspects. Church’s thesis sets a purely arithmetic outer limit on what is computationally achievable. Church’s further work on Hilbert’s “decision problem” led to the discovery and proof of Church’s theorem  basically that there is no computational procedure for determining, of a finite-premised first-order argument, whether it is valid or invalid. This result contrasts sharply with the previously known result that the computational truth-table method suffices to determine the validity of a finite-premised truthfunctional argument. Church’s thesis at once highlights the vast difference between propositional logic and first-order logic and sets an outer limit on what is achievable by “automated reasoning.” Church’s mathematical and philosophical writings are influenced by Frege, especially by Frege’s semantic distinction between sense and reference, his emphasis on purely syntactical treatment of proof, and his doctrine that sentences denote are names of their truth-values. lambda-calculus, also l-calculus, a theory of mathematical functions that is (a) “logic-free,” i.e. contains no logical constants (formula-connectives or quantifier-expressions), and (b) equational, i.e. ‘%’ is its sole predicate (though its metatheory refers to relations of reducibility between terms). There are two species, untyped and typed, each with various subspecies. Termhood is always inductively defined (as is being a type-expression, if the calculus is typed). A definition of being a term will contain at least these clauses: take infinitely many variables (of each type if the calculus is typed) to be terms; for any terms t and s (of appropriate type if the calculus is typed), (ts) is a term (of type determined by that of t and s if the calculus is typed); for any term t and a variable u (perhaps meeting certain conditions), (lut) is a term (“of” type determined by that of t and u if the calculus is typed). (ts) is an application-term; (lut) is a l-term, the labstraction of t, and its l-prefix binds all free occurrences of u in t. Relative to any assignment a of values (of appropriate type if the calculus is typed) to its free variables, each term denotes a unique entity. Given a term (ts), t denotes a function and (ts) denotes the output of that function when it is applied to the denotatum of s, all relative to a. (lut) denotes relative to a that function which when applied to any entity x (of appropriate type if the calculus is typed) outputs the denotatum of t relative to the variant of a obtained by assigning u to the given x. Alonzo Church introduced the untyped l-calculus around 1932 as the basis for a foundation for mathematics that took all mathematical objects to be functions. It characterizes a universe of functions, each with that universe as its domain and each yielding values in that universe. It turned out to be almost a notational variant of combinatory logic, first presented by Moses Schonfinkel (1920, written up and published by Behmann in 1924). Church presented the simplest typed l calculus in 1940. Such a calculus characterizes a domain of objects and functions, each “of” a unique type, so that the type of any given function determines two further types, one being the type of all and only those entities in the domain of that function, the other being the type of all those entities output by that function. In 1972 Jean-Yves Girard presented the first second-order (or polymorphic) typed l-calculus. It uses additional type-expressions themselves constructed by second-order l-abstraction, and also more complicated terms constructed by labstracting with respect to certain type-variables, and by applying such terms to type-expressions. The study of l-calculi has deepened our understanding of constructivity in mathematics. They are of interest in proof theory, in category theory, and in computer science.
Lambert: German natural philosopher, logician, mathematician, and astronomer. Born in Mulhouse (Alsace), he was an autodidact who became a prominent member of the Munich Academy (1759) and the Berlin Academy (1764). He made significant discoveries in physics and mathematics. His most important philosophical works were Neues Organon, or Thoughts on the Investigation and Induction of Truth and the Distinction Between Error and Appearances,” 1764) and Anlage zur Architectonic, or Theory of the Simple and Primary Elements in Philosophical and Mathematical Knowledge.” Lambert attempted to revise metaphysics. Arguing against both German rationalism and British empiricism, he opted for a form of phenomenalism similar to that of Kant and Tetens. Like his two contemporaries, he believed that the mind contains a number of basic concepts and principles that make knowledge possible. The philosopher’s task is twofold: first, these fundamental concepts and principles have to be analyzed; second, the truths of science have to be derived from them. In his own attempt at accomplishing this, Lambert tended more toward Leibniz than Locke.
mettrie, Julien Offroy de la: philosopher who was his generation’s most notorious materialist, atheist, and hedonist. Raised in Brittany, he was trained at Leiden by Hermann Boerhaave, an iatromechanist, whose works he translated into French. As a Lockean sensationalist who read Gassendi and followed the Swiss physiologist Haller, La Mettrie took nature to be life’s dynamic and ultimate principle. He published Natural History of the Soul, which attacked Cartesian dualism and dispensed with God. Drawing from Descartes’s animal-machine, his masterpiece, Man the Machine(1747), argued that the organization of matter alone explains man’s physical and intellectual faculties. Assimilating psychology to mechanistic physiology, La Mettrie integrates man into nature and proposed a materialistic monism. An Epicurean and a libertine, he denies any religious or rational morality in Anti-Seneca and instead accommodated human behavior to natural laws. Anticipating Sade’s nihilism, his Art of Enjoying Pleasures and Metaphysical Venus eulogized physical passions. Helvétius, d’Holbach, Marx, Plekhanov, and Lenin all acknowledged a debt to his belief that “to write as a philosopher is to teach materialism.”


Lange, philosopher, born at Wald near Solingen, he became a university instructor at Bonn, professor of inductive logic at Zürich in 1870, and professor at Marburg in 1873, establishing neo-Kantian studies there. He published three books in 1865: Die Arbeiterfrage (The Problem of the Worker), Die Grundlegung der mathematischen Psychologie (The Foundation of Mathematical Psychology), and J. S. Mills Ansichten über die sociale Frage und die angebliche Umwälzung der Socialwissenschaftlichen durch Carey (J. S. Mill’s Views of the Social Question and Carey’s Supposed Social-Scientific Revolution). Lange’s most important work, however, Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism), was published in 1866. An expanded second edition in two volumes appeared in 1873–75 and in three later editions. The History of Materialism is a rich, detailed study not only of the development of materialism but of then-recent work in physical theory, biological theory, and political economy; it includes a commentary on Kant’s analysis of knowledge. Lange adopts a restricted positivistic approach to scientific interpretations of man and the natural world and a conventionalism in regard to scientific theory, and also encourages the projection of aesthetic interpretations of “the All” from “the standpoint of the ideal.” Rejecting reductive materialism, Lange argues that a strict analysis of materialism leads to ineliminable idealist theoretical issues, and he adopts a form of materio-idealism. In his Geschichte are anticipations of instrumental fictionalism, pragmatism, conventionalism, and psychological egoism. Following the skepticism of the scientists he discusses, Lange adopts an agnosticism about the ultimate constituents of actuality and a radical phenomenalism. His major work was much admired by Russell and significantly influenced the thought of Nietzsche. History of Materialism predicted coming sociopolitical “earthquakes” because of the rise of science, the decline of religion, and the increasing tensions of “the social problem.” Die Arbeiterfrage explores the impact of industrialization and technology on the “social problem” and predicts a coming social “struggle for survival” in terms already recognizable as Social Darwinism. Both theoretically and practically, Lange was a champion of workers and favored a form of democratic socialism. His study of J. S. Mill and the economist Henry Carey was a valuable contribution to social science and political economic theory.
Peyrère, Isaac La: a Calvinist of probable Marrano extraction and a Catholic convert whose messianic and anthropological work (Men Before Adam, 1656) scandalized Jews, Catholics, and Protestants alike. Anticipating both ecumenism and Zionism, The Recall of the Jews (1643) claims that, together, converted Jews and Christians will usher in universal redemption. A threefold “salvation history” undergirds La Peyrère’s “Marrano theology”: (1) election of the Jews; (2) their rejection and the election of the Christians; (3) the recall of the Jews.
laplace: he produced the definitive formulation of the classical theory of probability. He taught at various schools in Paris, including the École Militaire; one of his students was Napoleon, to whom he dedicated his work on probability. According to Laplace, probabilities arise from our ignorance. The world is deterministic, so the probability of a possible event depends on our limited information about it rather than on the causal forces that determine whether it shall occur. Our chief means of calculating probabilities is the principle of insufficient reason, or the principle of indifference. It says that if there is no reason to believe that one of n mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive possible cases will obtain rather than some other, so that the cases are equally possible, then the probability of each case is 1/n. In addition, the probability of a possible event equivalent to a disjunction of cases is the number of cases favorable to the event divided by the total number of cases. For instance, the probability that the top card of a well-shuffled deck is a diamond is 13/52.Laplace’s chief work on probability is Théorie analytique des probabilités(Analytic Theory of Probabilities, 1812).
law -- H. P. Grice was obsessed with ‘laws’ to introduce ‘psychological concepts.’ covering law model, the view of scientific explanation as a deductive argument which contains non-vacuously at least one universal law among its premises. The names of this view include ‘Hempel’s model’, ‘Hempel-Oppenheim HO model’, ‘Popper-Hempel model’, ‘deductivenomological D-N model’, and the ‘subsumption theory’ of explanation. The term ‘covering law model of explanation’ was proposed by William Dray. The theory of scientific explanation was first developed by Aristotle. He suggested that science proceeds from mere knowing that to deeper knowing why by giving understanding of different things by the four types of causes. Answers to why-questions are given by scientific syllogisms, i.e., by deductive arguments with premises that are necessarily true and causes of their consequences. Typical examples are the “subsumptive” arguments that can be expressed by the Barbara syllogism: All ravens are black. Jack is a raven. Therefore, Jack is black. Plants containing chlorophyll are green. Grass contains chlorophyll. Therefore, grass is green. In modern logical notation, An explanatory argument was later called in Grecian synthesis, in Latin compositio or demonstratio propter quid. After the seventeenth century, the terms ‘explication’ and ‘explanation’ became commonly used. The nineteenth-century empiricists accepted Hume’s criticism of Aristotelian essences and necessities: a law of nature is an extensional statement that expresses a uniformity, i.e., a constant conjunction between properties ‘All swans are white’ or types of events ‘Lightning is always followed by thunder’. Still, they accepted the subsumption theory of explanation: “An individual fact is said to be explained by pointing out its cause, that is, by stating the law or laws of causation, of which its production is an instance,” and “a law or uniformity in nature is said to be explained when another law or laws are pointed out, of which that law itself is but a case, and from which it could be deduced” J. S. Mill. A general model of probabilistic explanation, with deductive explanation as a specific case, was given by Peirce in 3. A modern formulation of the subsumption theory was given by Hempel and Paul Oppenheim in 8 by the following schema of D-N explanation: Explanandum E is here a sentence that describes a known particular event or fact singular explanation or uniformity explanation of laws. Explanation is an argument that answers an explanation-seeking why-question ‘Why E?’ by showing that E is nomically expectable on the basis of general laws r M 1 and antecedent conditions. The relation between the explanans and the explanandum is logical deduction. Explanation is distinguished from other kinds of scientific systematization prediction, postdiction that share its logical characteristics  a view often called the symmetry thesis regarding explanation and prediction  by the presupposition that the phenomenon E is already known. This also separates explanations from reason-seeking arguments that answer questions of the form ‘What reasons are there for believing that E?’ Hempel and Oppenheim required that the explanans have empirical content, i.e., be testable by experiment or observation, and it must be true. If the strong condition of truth is dropped, we speak of potential explanation. Dispositional explanations, for non-probabilistic dispositions, can be formulated in the D-N model. For example, let Hx % ‘x is hit by hammer’, Bx % ‘x breaks’, and Dx % ‘x is fragile’. Then the explanation why a piece of glass was broken may refer to its fragility and its being hit: It is easy to find examples of HO explanations that are not satisfactory: self-explanations ‘Grass is green, because grass is green’, explanations with too weak premises ‘John died, because he had a heart attack or his plane crashed’, and explanations with irrelevant information ‘This stuff dissolves in water, because it is sugar produced in Finland’. Attempts at finding necessary and sufficient conditions in syntactic and semantic terms for acceptable explanations have not led to any agreement. The HO model also needs the additional Aristotelian condition that causal explanation is directed from causes to effects. This is shown by Sylvain Bromberger’s flagpole example: the length of a flagpole explains the length of its shadow, but not vice versa. Michael Scriven has argued against Hempel that eaplanations of particular events should be given by singular causal statements ‘E because C’. However, a regularity theory Humean or stronger than Humean of causality implies that the truth of such a singular causal statement presupposes a universal law of the form ‘Events of type C are universally followed by events of type E’. The HO version of the covering law model can be generalized in several directions. The explanans may contain probabilistic or statistical laws. The explanans-explanandum relation may be inductive in this case the explanation itself is inductive. This gives us four types of explanations: deductive-universal i.e., D-N, deductiveprobabilistic, inductive-universal, and inductiveprobabilistic I-P. Hempel’s 2 model for I-P explanation contains a probabilistic covering law PG/F % r, where r is the statistical probability of G given F, and r in brackets is the inductive probability of the explanandum given the explanans: The explanation-seeking question may be weakened from ‘Why necessarily E?’ to ‘How possibly E?’. In a corrective explanation, the explanatory answer points out that the explanandum sentence E is not strictly true. This is the case in approximate explanation e.g., Newton’s theory entails a corrected form of Galileo’s and Kepler’s laws. 
Law-like generalisation, also called nomological (or nomic), a generalization that, unlike an accidental generalization, possesses nomic necessity or counterfactual force. Compare (1) ‘All specimens of gold have a melting point of 1,063o C’ with (2) ‘All the rocks in my garden are sedimentary’. (2) may be true, but its generality is restricted to rocks in my garden. Its truth is accidental; it does not state what must be the case. (1) is true without restriction. If we write (1) as the conditional ‘For any x and for any time t, if x is a specimen of gold subjected to a temperature of 1,063o C, then x will melt’, we see that the generalization states what must be the case. (1) supports the hypothetical counterfactual assertion ‘For any specimen of gold x and for any time t, if x were subjected to a temperature of 1,063o C, then x would melt’, which means that we accept (1) as nomically necessary: it remains true even if no further specimens of gold are subjected to the required temperature. This is not true of (2), for we know that at some future time an igneous rock might appear in my garden. Statements like (2) are not lawlike; they do not possess the unrestricted necessity we require of lawlike statements. Ernest Nagel has claimed that a nomological statement must satisfy two other conditions: it must deductively entail or be deductively entailed by other laws, and its scope of prediction must exceed the known evidence for it.
law of thought: a law by which or in accordance with which valid thought proceeds, or that justify valid inference, or to which all valid deduction is reducible. Laws of thought are rules that apply without exception to any subject matter of thought, etc.; sometimes they are said to be the object of logic. The term, rarely used in exactly the same sense by different authors, has long been associated with three equally ambiguous expressions: the law of identity (ID), the law of contradiction (or non-contradiction; NC), and the law of excluded middle (EM). Sometimes these three expressions are taken as propositions of formal ontology having the widest possible subject matter, propositions that apply to entities per se: (ID) every thing is (i.e., is identical to) itself; (NC) no thing having a given quality also has the negative of that quality (e.g., no even number is non-even); (EM) every thing either has a given quality or has the negative of that quality (e.g., every number is either even or non-even). Equally common in older works is use of these expressions for principles of metalogic about propositions: (ID) every proposition implies itself; (NC) no proposition is both true and false; (EM) every proposition is either true or false. Beginning in the middle to late 1800s these expressions have been used to denote propositions of Boolean Algebra about classes: (ID) every class includes itself; (NC) every class is such that its intersection (“product”) with its own complement is the null class; (EM) every class is such that its union (“sum”) with its own complement is the universal class. More recently the last two of the three expressions have been used in connection with the classical propositional logic and with the socalled protothetic or quantified propositional logic; in both cases the law of non-contradiction involves the negation of the conjunction (‘and’) of something with its own negation and the law of excluded middle involves the disjunction (‘or’) of something with its own negation. In the case of propositional logic the “something” is a schematic letter serving as a place-holder, whereas in the case of protothetic logic the “something” is a genuine variable. The expressions ‘law of non-contradiction’ and ‘law of excluded middle’ are also used for semantic principles of model theory concerning sentences and interpretations: (NC) under no interpretation is a given sentence both true and false; (EM) under any interpretation, a given sentence is either true or false. The expressions mentioned above all have been used in many other ways. Many other propositions have also been mentioned as laws of thought, including the dictum de omni et nullo attributed to Aristotle, the substitutivity of identicals (or equals) attributed to Euclid, the socalled identity of indiscernibles attributed to Leibniz, and other “logical truths.” The expression “law of thought” gains added prominence through its use by Boole to denote theorems of his “algebra of logic”; in fact, he named his second logic book An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Modern logicians, in almost unanimous disagreement with Boole, take this expression to be a misnomer; none of the above propositions classed under ‘laws of thought’ are explicitly about thought per se, a mental phenomenon studied by psychology, nor do they involve explicit reference to a thinker or knower as would be the case in pragmatics or in epistemology. The distinction between psychology (as a study of mental phenomena) and semantics (as a study of valid inference) is widely accepted.
Lebensphilosophie, German term, translated as ‘philosophy of life’, that became current in a variety of popular and philosophical inflections during the second half of the nineteenth century. Such philosophers as Dilthey and Eucken frequently applied it to a general philosophical approach or attitude that distinguished itself, on the one hand, from the construction of comprehensive systems by Hegel and his followers and, on the other, from the tendency of empiricism and early positivism to reduce human experience to epistemological questions about sensations or impressions. Rather, a Lebensphilosophie should begin from a recognition of the variety and complexity of concrete and already meaningful human experience as it is “lived”; it should acknowledge that all human beings, including the philosopher, are always immersed in historical processes and forms of organization; and it should seek to understand, describe, and sometimes even alter these and their various patterns of interrelation without abstraction or reduction. Such “philosophies of life” as those of Dilthey and Eucken provided much of the philosophical background for the conception of the social sciences as interpretive rather than explanatory disciplines. They also anticipated some central ideas of phenomenology, in particular the notion of the Life-World in Husserl, and certain closely related themes in Heidegger’s version of existentialism.
legal moralism, the view (defended in this century by, e.g., Lord Patrick Devlin) that law may properly be used to enforce morality, including notably “sexual morality.” Contemporary critics of the view (e.g., Hart) expand on the argument of Mill that law should only be used to prevent harm to others.
legal positivism, a theory about the nature of law, commonly thought to be characterized by two major tenets: (1) that there is no necessary connection between law and morality; and (2) that legal validity is determined ultimately by reference to certain basic social facts, e.g., the command of the sovereign (John Austin), the Grundnorm (Hans Kelsen), or the rule of recognition (Hart). These different descriptions of the basic law-determining facts lead to different claims about the normative character of law, with classical positivists (e.g., John Austin) insisting that law is essentially coercive, and modern positivists (e.g., Hans Kelsen) maintaining that it is normative. The traditional opponent of the legal positivist is the natural law theorist, who holds that no sharp distinction can be drawn between law and morality, thus challenging positivism’s first tenet. Whether that tenet follows from positivism’s second tenet is a question of current interest and leads inevitably to the classical question of political theory: Under what conditions might legal obligations, even if determined by social facts, create genuine political obligations (e.g., the obligation to obey the law)?
legal realism, a theory in philosophy of law or jurisprudence broadly characterized by the claim that the nature of law is better understood by observing what courts and citizens actually do than by analyzing stated legal rules and legal concepts. The theory is also associated with the thoughts that legal rules are disguised predictions of what courts will do, and that only the actual decisions of courts constitute law. There are two important traditions of legal realism, in Scandinavia and in the United States. Both began in the early part of the century, and both focus on the reality (hence the name ‘legal realism’) of the actual legal system, rather than on law’s official image of itself. The Scandinavian tradition is more theoretical and presents its views as philosophical accounts of the normativity of law based on skeptical methodology – the normative force of law consists in nothing but the feelings of citizens or officials or both about or their beliefs in that normative force. The older, U.S. tradition is more empirical or sociological or instrumentalist, focusing on how legislation is actually enacted, how rules are actually applied, how courts’ decisions are actually taken, and so forth. U.S. legal realism in its contemporary form is known as critical legal studies. Its argumentation is both empirical (law as experienced to be and as being oppressive by gender) and theoretical (law as essentially indeterminate, or interpretative – properties that prime law for its role in political manipulation).
Leibniz: German rationalist philosopher who made seminal contributions in geology, linguistics, historiography, mathematics, and physics, as well as philosophy. He was born in Leipzig and died in Hanover. Trained in the law, he earned a living as a councilor, diplomat, librarian, and historian, primarily in the court of Hanover. His contributions in mathematics, physics, and philosophy were known and appreciated among his educated contemporaries in virtue of his publication in Europe’s leading scholarly journals and his vast correspondence with intellectuals in a variety of fields. He was best known in his lifetime for his contributions to mathematics, especially to the development of the calculus, where a debate raged over whether Newton or Leibniz should be credited with priority for its discovery. Current scholarly opinion seems to have settled on this: each discovered the basic foundations of the calculus independently; Newton’s discovery preceded that of Leibniz; Leibniz’s publication of the basic theory of the calculus preceded that of Newton. Leibniz’s contributions to philosophy were known to his contemporaries through articles published in learned journals, correspondence, and one book published in his lifetime, the Theodicy (1710). He wrote a book-length study of Locke’s philosophy, New Essays on Human Understanding, but decided not to publish it when he learned of Locke’s death. Examination of Leibniz’s papers after his own death revealed that what he published during his lifetime was but the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps the most complete formulation of Leibniz’s mature metaphysics occurs in his correspondence (1698–1706) with Burcher De Volder, a professor of philosophy at the University of Leyden. Leibniz therein formulated his basic ontological thesis: Considering matters accurately, it must be said that there is nothing in things except simple substances, and, in them, nothing but perception and appetite. Moreover, matter and motion are not so much substances or things as they are the phenomena of percipient beings, the reality of which is located in the harmony of each percipient with itself (with respect to different times) and with other percipients. In this passage Leibniz asserts that the basic individuals of an acceptable ontology are all monads, i.e., immaterial entities lacking spatial parts, whose basic properties are a function of their perceptions and appetites. He held that each monad perceives all the other monads with varying degrees of clarity, except for God, who perceives all monads with utter clarity. Leibniz’s main theses concerning causality among the created monads are these: God creates, conserves, and concurs in the actions of each created monad. Each state of a created monad is a causal consequence of its preceding state, except for its state at creation and any of its states due to miraculous divine causality. Intrasubstantial causality is the rule with respect to created monads, which are precluded from intersubstantial causality, a mode of operation of which God alone is capable. Leibniz was aware that elements of this monadology may seem counterintuitive, that, e.g., there appear to be extended entities composed of parts, existing in space and time, causally interacting with each other. In the second sentence of the quoted passage Leibniz set out some of the ingredients of his theory of the preestablished harmony, one point of which is to save those appearances that are sufficiently well-founded to deserve saving. In the case of material objects, Leibniz formulated a version of phenomenalism, based on harmony among the perceptions of the monads. In the case of apparent intersubstantial causal relations among created monads, Leibniz proposed an analysis according to which the underlying reality is an increase in the clarity of relevant perceptions of the apparent causal agent, combined with a corresponding decrease in the clarity of the relevant perceptions of the apparent patient. Leibniz treated material objects and intersubstantial causal relations among created entities as well-founded phenomena. By contrast, he treated space and time as ideal entities. Leibniz’s mature metaphysics includes a threefold classification of entities that must be accorded some degree of reality: ideal entities, well-founded phenomena, and actual existents, i.e., the monads with their perceptions and appetites. In the passage quoted above Leibniz set out to distinguish the actual entities, the monads, from material entities, which he regarded as well-founded phenomena. In the following passage from another letter to De Volder he formulated the distinction between actual and ideal entities: In actual entities there is nothing but discrete quantity, namely, the multitude of monads, i.e., simple substances. . . . But continuous quantity is something ideal, which pertains to possibles, and to actuals, insofar as they are possible. Indeed, a continuum involves indeterminate parts, whereas, by contrast, there is nothing indefinite in actual entities, in which every division that can be made, is made. Actual things are composed in the manner that a number is composed of unities, ideal things are composed in the manner that a number is composed of fractions. The parts are actual in the real whole, but not in the ideal. By confusing ideal things with real substances when we seek actual parts in the order of possibles and indeterminate parts in the aggregate of actual things, we entangle ourselves in the labyrinth of the continuum and in inexplicable contradictions. The labyrinth of the continuum was one of two labyrinths that, according to Leibniz, vex the philosophical mind. His views about the proper course to take in unraveling the labyrinth of the continuum are one source of his monadology. Ultimately, he concluded that whatever may be infinitely divided without reaching indivisible entities is not something that belongs in the basic ontological category. His investigations of the nature of individuation and identity over time provided premises from which he concluded that only indivisible entities are ultimately real, and that an individual persists over time only if its subsequent states are causal consequences of its preceding states. In refining the metaphysical insights that yielded the monadology, Leibniz formulated and defended various important metaphysical theses, e.g.: the identity of indiscernibles – that individual substances differ with respect to their intrinsic, non-relational properties; and the doctrine of minute perceptions – that each created substance has some perceptions of which it lacks awareness. In the process of providing what he took to be an acceptable account of well-founded phenomena, Leibniz formulated various theses counter to the then prevailing Cartesian orthodoxy, concerning the nature of material objects. In particular, Leibniz argued that a correct application of Galileo’s discoveries concerning acceleration of freely falling bodies of the phenomena of impact indicates that force is not to be identified with quantity of motion, i.e., mass times velocity, as Descartes held, but is to be measured by mass times the square of the velocity. Moreover, Leibniz argued that it is force, measured as mass times the square of the velocity, that is conserved in nature, not quantity of motion. From these results Leibniz drew some important metaphysical conclusions. He argued that force, unlike quantity of motion, cannot be reduced to a conjunction of modifications of extension. But force is a central property of material objects. Hence, he concluded that Descartes was mistaken in attempting to reduce matter to extension and its modifications. Leibniz concluded that each material substance must have a substantial form that accounts for its active force. These conclusions have to do with entities that Leibniz viewed as phenomenal. He drew analogous conclusions concerning the entities he regarded as ultimately real, i.e., the monads. Thus, although Leibniz held that each monad is absolutely simple, i.e., without parts, he also held that the matter–form distinction has an application to each created monad. In a letter to De Volder he wrote: Therefore, I distinguish (1) the primitive entelechy or soul, (2) primary matter, i.e., primitive passive power, (3) monads completed from these two, (4) mass, i.e., second matter . . . in which innumerable subordinate monads come together, (5) the animal, i.e., corporeal substance, which a dominating monad makes into one machine. The second labyrinth vexing the philosophical mind, according to Leibniz, is the labyrinth of freedom. It is fair to say that for Leibniz the labyrinth of freedom is fundamentally a matter of how it is possible that some states of affairs obtain contingently, i.e., how it is possible that some propositions are true that might have been false. There are two distinct sources of the problem of contingency in Leibniz’s philosophy, one theological, and the other metaphysical. Each source may be grasped by considering an argument that appears to have premises to which Leibniz was predisposed and the conclusion that every state of affairs that obtains, obtains necessarily, and hence that there are no contingent propositions. The metaphysical argument is centered on some of Leibniz’s theses about the nature of truth. He held that the truth-value of all propositions is settled once truth-values have been assigned to the elementary propositions, i.e., those expressed by sentences in subject-predicate form. And he held that a sentence in subject-predicate form expresses a true proposition if and only if the concept of its predicate is included in the concept of its subject. But this makes it sound as if Leibniz were committed to the view that an elementary proposition is true if and only if it is conceptually true, from which it seems to follow that an elementary proposition is true if and only if it is necessarily true. Leibniz’s views concerning the relation of the truthvalue of non-elementary propositions to the truth-value of elementary propositions, then, seem to entail that there are no contingent propositions. He rejected this conclusion in virtue of rejecting the thesis that if an elementary proposition is conceptually true then it is necessarily true. The materials for his rejection of this thesis are located in theses connected with his program for a universal science (scientia universalis). This program had two parts: a universal notation (characteristica universalis), whose purpose was to provide a method for recording scientific facts as perspicuous as algebraic notation, and a formal system of reasoning (calculus ratiocinator) for reasoning about the facts recorded. Supporting Leibniz’s belief in the possibility and utility of the characteristica universalis and the calculus ratiocinator is his thesis that all concepts arise from simple primitive concepts via concept conjunction and concept complementation. In virtue of this thesis, he held that all concepts may be analyzed into their simple, primitive components, with this proviso: in some cases there is no finite analysis of a concept into its primitive components; but there is an analysis that converges on the primitive components without ever reaching them. This is the doctrine of infinite analysis, which Leibniz applied to ward off the threat to contingency apparently posed by his account of truth. He held that an elementary proposition is necessarily true if and only if there is a finite analysis that reveals that its predicate concept is included in its subject concept. By contrast, an elementary proposition is contingently true if and only if there is no such finite analysis, but there is an analysis of its predicate concept that converges on a component of its subject concept. The theological argument may be put this way. There would be no world were God not to choose to create a world. As with every choice, as, indeed, with every state of affairs that obtains, there must be a sufficient reason for that choice, for the obtaining of that state of affairs – this is what the principle of sufficient reason amounts to, according to Leibniz. The reason for God’s choice of a world to create must be located in God’s power and his moral character. But God is allpowerful and morally perfect, both of which attributes he has of necessity. Hence, of necessity, God chose to create the best possible world. Whatever possible world is the best possible world, is so of necessity. Hence, whatever possible world is actual, is so of necessity. A possible world is defined with respect to the states of affairs that obtain in it. Hence, whatever states of affairs obtain, do so of necessity. Therefore, there are no contingent propositions. Leibniz’s options here were limited. He was committed to the thesis that the principle of sufficient reason, when applied to God’s choice of a world to create, given God’s attributes, yields the conclusion that this is the best possible world – a fundamental component of his solution to the problem of evil. He considered two ways of avoiding the conclusion of the argument noted above. The first consists in claiming that although God is metaphysically perfect of necessity, i.e., has every simple, positive perfection of necessity, and although God is morally perfect, nonetheless he is not morally perfect of necessity, but rather by choice. The second consists in denying that whatever possible world is the best, is so of necessity, relying on the idea that the claim that a given possible world is the best involves a comparison with infinitely many other possible worlds, and hence, if true, is only contingently true. Once again the doctrine of infinite analysis served as the centerpiece of Leibniz’s efforts to establish that, contrary to appearances, his views do not lead to necessitarianism, i.e., to the thesis that there is no genuine contingency. Much of Leibniz’s work in philosophical theology had as a central motivation an effort to formulate a sound philosophical and theological basis for various church reunion projects – especially reunion between Lutherans and Calvinists on the Protestant side, and ultimately, reunion between Protestants and Catholics. He thought that most of the classical arguments for the existence of God, if formulated with care, i.e., in the way in which Leibniz formulated them, succeeded in proving what they set out to prove. For example, Leibniz thought that Descartes’s version of the ontological argument established the existence of a perfect being, with one crucial proviso: that an absolutely perfect being is possible. Leibniz believed that none of his predecessors had established this premise, so he set out to do so. The basic idea of his purported proof is this. A perfection is a simple, positive property. Hence, there can be no demonstration that there is a formal inconsistency in asserting that various collections of them are instantiated by the same being. But if there is no such demonstration, then it is possible that something has them all. Hence, a perfect being is possible. Leibniz did not consider in detail many of the fundamental epistemological issues that so moved Descartes and the British empiricists. Nonetheless, Leibniz made significant contributions to the theory of knowledge. His account of our knowledge of contingent truths is much like what we would expect of an empiricist’s epistemology. He claimed that our knowledge of particular contingent truths has its basis in sense perception. He argued that simple enumerative induction cannot account for all our knowledge of universal contingent truths; it must be supplemented by what he called the a priori conjectural method, a precursor of the hypothetico-deductive method. He made contributions to developing a formal theory of probability, which he regarded as essential for an adequate account of our knowledge of contingent truths. Leibniz’s rationalism is evident in his account of our a priori knowledge, which for him amounted to our knowledge of necessary truths. Leibniz thought that Locke’s empiricism did not provide an acceptable account of a priori knowledge, because it attempted to locate all the materials of justification as deriving from sensory experience, thus overlooking what Leibniz took to be the primary source of our a priori knowledge, i.e., what is innate in the mind. He summarized his debate with Locke on these matters thus: Our differences are on matters of some importance. It is a matter of knowing if the soul in itself is entirely empty like a writing tablet on which nothing has as yet been written (tabula rasa), . . . and if everything inscribed there comes solely from the senses and experience, or if the soul contains originally the sources of various concepts and doctrines that external objects merely reveal on occasion. The idea that some concepts and doctrines are innate in the mind is central not only to Leibniz’s theory of knowledge, but also to his metaphysics, because he held that the most basic metaphysical concepts, e.g., the concepts of the self, substance, and causation, are innate. Leibniz utilized the ideas behind the characteristica universalis in order to formulate a system of formal logic that is a genuine alternative to Aristotelian syllogistic logic and to contemporary quantification theory. Assuming that propositions are, in some fashion, composed of concepts and that all composite concepts are, in some fashion, composed of primitive simple concepts, Leibniz formulated a logic based on the idea of assigning numbers to concepts according to certain rules. The entire program turns on his concept containment account of truth previously mentioned. In connection with the metatheory of this logic Leibniz formulated the principle: “eadem sunt quorum unum alteri substitui potest salva veritate” (“Those things are the same of which one may be substituted for the other preserving truth-value”). The proper interpretation of this principle turns in part on exactly what “things” he had in mind. It is likely that he intended to formulate a criterion of concept identity. Hence, it is likely that this principle is distinct from the identity of indiscernibles, previously mentioned, and also from what has come to be called Leibniz’s law, i.e., the thesis that if x and y are the same individual then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. The account outlined above concentrates on Leibniz’s mature views in metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. The evolution of his thought in these areas is worthy of close study, which cannot be brought to a definitive state until all of his philosophical work has been published in the edition of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin.
lekton (Grecian, ‘what can be said’), a Stoic term sometimes translated as ‘the meaning of an utterance’. A lekton differs from an utterance in being what the utterance (or its emisor) signifies: A lekton is said to be what the Grecian grasps and the non-Grecian does not when Gricese is spoken. Moreover, a lekton is incorporeal, which for the Stoics means it does not, strictly speaking, exist, but only “sub-sists,” and so cannot act or be acted upon. A lekton constitutes the content of a state of Grice’s soul:. A lekton is what we assent to and endeavor toward and they “correspond” to the presentations given to rational animals. The Stoics acknowledged a lekton for a predicate as well as for a sentence (including questions, oaths, and imperatives). An axioma or a propositions is a lekton that can be assented to and may be true or false (although being essentially tensed, its truth-value may change). The Stoics’ theory of reference suggests that they also acknowledged singular propositions, which “perish” when the referent ceases to exist. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Benson Mates and the stoics.”
lenin: a Marxist philosopher, principal creator of Soviet dialectical materialism. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, he attacked his contemporaries who sought to interpret Marx’s philosophy in the spirit of the phenomenalistic positivism of Avenarius and Mach. Rejecting their position as idealist, Lenin argues that matter is not a construct from sensations but an objective reality independent of consciousness; because a sensation directly copies this reality, objective truth is possible. The dialectical dimension of Lenin’s outlook is best elaborated in his posthumous Philosophical Notebooks (written 1914–16), a collection of reading notes and fragments in which he gives close attention to the Hegelian dialectic and displays warm sympathy toward it, though he argues that the dialectic should be interpreted materialistically rather than idealistically. Some of Lenin’s most original theorizing, presented in Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) and State and Revolution (1918), is devoted to analyzing the connection between monopoly capitalism and imperialism and to describing the coming violent replacement of bourgeois rule by, first, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and, later, stateless communism. Lenin regarded all philosophy as a partisan weapon in the class struggle, and he wielded his own philosophy polemically in the interests of Communist revolution. As a result of the victory of the Bolsheviks in November 1917, Lenin’s ideas were enshrined as the cornerstone of Soviet intellectual culture and were considered above criticism until the advent of glasnost.
lequier: philosopher, educated in Paris. He influenced Renouvier, who regarded Lequier as his “master in philosophy.” Through Renouvier, he came to the attention of James, who called Lequier a “philosopher of genius.” Central to Lequier’s philosophy is the idea of freedom understood as the power to “create,” or add novelty to the world. Such freedom involves an element of arbitrariness and is incompatible with determinism. Anticipating James, Lequier argued that determinism, consistently affirmed, leads to skepticism about truth and values. Though a devout Roman Catholic, his theological views were unorthodox for his time. God cannot know future free actions until they occur and therefore cannot be wholly immutable and eternal. Lequier’s views anticipate in striking ways some views of James, Bergson, Alexander, and Peirce, and the process philosophies and process theologies of Whitehead and Hartshorne.
leroux: philosopher reputed to have introduced “socialism” in France – “the word, not the doctrine!” – Grice). He claimed to be the first to use solidarité (conversational solidarity) as a sociological concept (in his memoirs, La Grève de Samarez. The son of a Parisian café owner, Leroux centered his life work on journalism, both as a printer (patenting an advanced procedure for typesetting) and as founder of a number of significant serial publications. The Encyclopédie Nouvelle, which he launched with Jean Reynaud is conceived and written in the spirit of Diderot’s magnum opus. It aspired to be the platform for republican and democratic thought during the July Monarchy. The reformer’s influence on contemporaries such as Hugo, Belinsky, J. Michelet, and Heine was considerable. Leroux fervently believed in Progress, unlimited and divinely inspired. This doctrine he took to be eighteenth-century France’s particular contribution to the Enlightenment. Progress must make its way between twin perils: the “follies of illuminism” or “foolish spiritualism” and the “abject orgies of materialism.” Accordingly, Leroux blamed Condillac for having “drawn up the code of materialism” by excluding an innate Subject from his sensationalism (“Condillac,” Encyclopédie Nouvelle). Cousin’s eclecticism, state doctrine under the July Monarchy and synonym for immobility (“Philosophy requires no further development; it is complete as is,” Leroux wrote sarcastically in 1838, echoing Cousin), was a constant target of his polemics. Having abandoned traditional Christian beliefs, Leroux viewed immortality as an infinite succession of rebirths on earth, our sense of personal identity being preserved throughout by Platonic “reminiscences” (De l’Humanité).
lesniewski: philosopher-logician, co-founder, with Lukasiewicz and Kotarbigski, of the Warsaw Center of Logical Research. He perfected the logical reconstruction of classical mathematics by Frege, Schröder, Whitehead, and Russell in his synthesis of mathematical with modernized Aristotelian logic. A pioneer in scientific semantics whose insights inspired Tarski, Les’niewski distinguished genuine antinomies of belief, in theories intended as true mathematical sciences, from mere formal inconsistencies in uninterpreted calculi. Like Frege an acute critic of formalism, he sought to perfect one comprehensive, logically true instrument of scientific investigation. Demonstrably consistent, relative to classical elementary logic, and distinguished by its philosophical motivation and logical economy, his system integrates his central achievements. Other contributions include his ideographic notation, his method of natural deduction from suppositions and his demonstrations of inconsistency of other systems, even Frege’s revised foundations of arithmetic. Fundamental were (1) his 1913 refutation of Twardowski’s Platonistic theory of abstraction, which motivated his “constructive nominalism”; and (2) his deep analyses of Russell’s paradox, which led him to distinguish distributive from collective predication and (as generalized to subsume Grelling and Nelson’s paradox of self-reference) logical from semantic paradoxes, and so (years before Ramsey and Gödel) to differentiate, not just the correlatives object language and metalanguage, but any such correlative linguistic stages, and thus to relativize semantic concepts to successive hierarchical strata in metalinguistic stratification. His system of logic and foundations of mathematics comprise a hierarchy of three axiomatic deductive theories: protothetic, ontology, and mereology. Each can be variously based on just one axiom introducing a single undefined term. His prototheses are basic to any further theory. Ontology, applying them, complements protothetic to form his logic. Les’niewski’s ontology develops his logic of predication, beginning (e.g.) with singular predication characterizing the individual so-and-so as being one (of the one or more) such-and-such, without needing classabstraction operators, dispensable here as in Russell’s “no-class theory of classes.” But this, his logic of nouns, nominal or predicational functions, etc., synthesizing formulations by Aristotle, Leibniz, Boole, Schröder, and Whitehead, also represents a universal theory of being and beings, beginning with related individuals and their characteristics, kinds, or classes distributively understood to include individuals as singletons or “one-member classes.” Les’niewski’s directives of definition and logical grammar for his systems of protothetic and ontology provide for the unbounded hierarchies of “open,” functional expressions. Systematic conventions of contextual determinacy, exploiting dependence of meaning on context, permit unequivocal use of the same forms of expression to bring out systematic analogies between homonyms as analogues in Aristotle’s and Russell’s sense, systematically ambiguous, differing in semantic category and hence significance. Simple distinctions of semantic category within the object language of the system itself, together with the metalinguistic stratification to relativize semantic concepts, prevent logical and semantic paradoxes as effectively as Russell’s ramified theory of types. Lesniewski’s system of logic, though expressively rich enough to permit Platonist interpretation in terms of universals, is yet “metaphysically neutral” in being free from ontic commitments. It neither postulates, presupposes, nor implies existence of either individuals or abstractions, but relies instead on equivalences without existential import that merely introduce and explicate new terms. In his “nominalist” construction of the endless Platonic ladder of abstraction, logical principles can be elevated step by step, from any level to the next, by definitions making abstractions eliminable, translatable by definition into generalizations characterizing related individuals. In this sense it is “constructively nominalist,” as a developing language always open to introduction of new terms and categories, without appeal to “convenient fictions.” Les’niewski’s system, completely designed by 1922, was logically and chronologically in advance of Russell’s 1925 revision of Principia Mathematica to accommodate Ramsey’s simplification of Russell’s theory of types. Yet Les’niewski’s premature death, the ensuing disruption of war, which destroyed his manuscripts and dispersed survivors such as Sobocigski and Lejewski, and the relative inaccessibility of publications delayed by Les’niewski’s own perfectionism have retarded understanding of his work.
Lessing: philosopher whose oeuvre aimed to replace the so-called possession of truth by a search for truth through public debate. The son of a Protestant minister, he studied theology but gave it up to take part in the literary debate between Gottsched and the Swiss Bodmer and Breitinger, which dealt with French classicism (Boileau) and English influences (Shakespeare for theater and Milton for poetry). His literary criticism (Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend), his own dramatic works, and his theological-philosophical reflections were united in his conception of a practical Aufklärung, which opposed all philosophical or religious dogmatism. Lessing’s creation and direction of the National German Theater of Hamburg (1767–70) helped to form a sense of German national identity. In 1750 Lessing published Thoughts on the Moravian Brothers, which contrasted religion as lived by this pietist community with the ecclesiastical institution. In 1753–54 he wrote a series of “rehabilitations” (Rettugen) to show that the opposition between dogmas and heresies, between “truth” and “error,” was incompatible with living religious thought. This position had the seeds of a historical conception of religion that Lessing developed during his last years. In 1754 he again attempted a deductive formulation, inspired by Spinoza, of the fundamental truths of Christianity. Lessing rejected this rationalism, as substituting a dogma of reason for one of religion. To provoke public debate on the issue, be published H. S. Reimarus’s Fragments of an Anonymous Author (1774–78), which the Protestant hierarchy considered atheistic. The relativism and soft deism to which his arguments seemed to lead were transformed in his Education of Mankind (1780) into a historical theory of truth. In Lessing’s view, all religions have an equal dignity, for none possesses “the” truth; they represent only ethical and practical moments in the history of mankind. Revelation is assimilated into an education of mankind and God is compared to a teacher who reveals to man only what he is able to assimilate. This secularization of the history of salvation, in which God becomes immanent in the world, is called pantheism (“the quarrel of pantheism”). For Lessing, Judaism and Christianity are the preliminary stages of a third gospel, the “Gospel of Reason.” The Masonic Dialogues (1778) introduced this historical and practical conception of truth as a progress from “thinking by oneself” to dialogue (“thinking aloud with a friend”). In the literary domain Lessing broke with the culture of the baroque: against the giants and martyrs of baroque tragedy, he offered the tragedy of the bourgeois, with whom any spectator must be able to identify. After a poor first play in 1755 – Miss Sara Sampson – which only reflected the sentimentalism of the time, Lessing produced a model of the genre with Emilia Galotti (1781). The Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767– 68) was supposed to be influenced by Aristotle, but its union of fear and pity was greatly influenced by Moses Mendelssohn’s theory of “mixed sensations.” Lessing’s entire aesthetics was based not on permanent ontological, religious, or moral rules, but on the spectator’s interest. In Laokoon (1766) he associated this aesthetics of reception with one of artistic production, i.e., a reflection on the means through which poetry and the plastic arts create this interest: the plastic arts by natural signs and poetry through the arbitrary signs that overcome their artificiality through the imitation not of nature but of action. Much like Winckelmann’s aesthetics, which influenced German classicism for a considerable time, Lessing’s aesthetics opposed the baroque, but for a theory of ideal beauty inspired by Plato it substituted a foundation of the beautiful in the agreement between producer and receptor.
Leucippus: Grecian pre-Socratic philosopher credited with founding atomism, expounded in a work titled The Great World-system. Positing the existence of atoms and the void, he answered Eleatic arguments against change by allowing change of place. The arrangements and rearrangements of groups of atoms could account for macroscopic changes in the world, and indeed for the world itself. Little else is known of Leucippus. It is difficult to distinguish his contributions from those of his prolific follower Democritus.
Levinas: philosopher. Educated as an orthodox Jew and a Russian citizen, he studied philosophy at Strasbourg and Freiburg, introduced the work of Husserl and Heidegger in France, taught philosophy at Paris, spent years in a German labor camp and was a professor at the universities of Poitiers, Nanterre, and the Sorbonne. To the impersonal totality of being reduced to “the same” by the Western tradition (including Hegel’s and Husserl’s idealism and Heidegger’s ontology), Levinas opposes the irreducible otherness of the human other, death, time, God, etc. In Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (1961), he shows how the other’s facing and speaking urge philosophy to transcend the horizons of comprehension, while Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974) concentrates on the self of “me” as one-for-the-other. Appealing to Plato’s form of the Good and Descartes’s idea of the infinite, Levinas describes the asymmetrical relation between the other’s “highness” or “infinity” and me, whose self-enjoyment is thus interrupted by a basic imperative: Do not kill me, but help me to live! The fact of the other’s existence immediately reveals the basic “ought” of ethics; it awakens me to a responsibility that I have never been able to choose or to refuse. My radical “passivity,” thus revealed, shows the anachronic character of human temporality. It also refers to the immemorial past of “Him” whose “illeity” is still otherwise other than the human other: God, or the Good itself, who is neither an object nor a you. Religion and ethics coincide because the only way to meet with God is to practice one’s responsibility for the human other, who is “in the trace of God.” Comprehensive thematization and systematic objectification, though always in danger of reducing all otherness, have their own relative and subordinate truth, especially with regard to the economic and political conditions of universal justice toward all individuals whom I cannot encounter personally. With and through the other I meet all humans. In this experience lies the origin of equality and human rights. Similarly, theoretical thematization has a positive role if it remains aware of its ancillary or angelic role with regard to concern for the other. What is said in philosophy betrays the saying by which it is communicated. It must therefore be unsaid in a return to the saying. More than desire for theoretical wisdom, philosophy is the wisdom of love.
Lewin: German philosophical psychologist, perhaps the most influential of the Gestalt psychologists. Believing traditional psychology was stuck in an “Aristotelian” class-logic stage of theorizing, Lewin proposed advancing to a “Galilean” stage of field theory. His central field concept was the “life space, containing the person and his psychological environment.” Primarily concerned with motivation (or goal-oriented behaviour), he explained locomotion as caused by life-space objects’ valences, psychological vectors of force acting on people as physical vectors of force act on physical objects. A thing with positive valence exert attractive force; A thing with negative valence exert repulsive force; an ambivalent thing exerts both. To attain theoretical rigor, Lewin borrows from mathematical topology, mapping life spaces as diagrams. One represented the motivational conflict involved in choosing between pizza and hamburger: Life spaces frequently contain psychological barriers (e.g., no money) blocking movement toward or away from a valenced object. Lewin also created the important field of group dynamics in 1939, carrying out innovative studies on children and adults, focusing on group cohesion and effects of leadership style. His main works are A Dynamic Theory of Personality (1935), Principles of Topological Psychology (1936), and Field Theory in Social Science (1951). H. P. Grice, “Lewin and aspects of reason.”
Lewis: philosopher who advocated a version of pragmatism and empiricism, but was nonetheless strongly influenced by Kant. Lewis was born in Massachusetts, New England (his ancestors were from Lincolnshire), educated at Harvard, and taught at the University of California and Harvard. He wrote in logic (A Survey of Symbolic Logic; Symbolic Logic, coauthored with C. H. Langford), in epistemology (Mind and the World Order; An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation), and in ethical theory (The Ground and Nature of the Right, 1965; Our Social Inheritance, 1957). General views. Use of the senses involves “presentations” of sense experiences that signalize external objects. Reflection upon the relations of sense experiences to psychological “intensions” permits our thoughts to refer to aspects of objective reality. Consequently, we can experience those non-presented objective conditions. Intensions, which include the mind’s categories, are meanings in one ordinary sense, and concepts in a philosophical sense. When judging counts as knowing, it has the future-oriented function and sole value of guiding action in pursuit of what one evaluates as good. Intensions do not fundamentally depend upon being formulated in those linguistic phrases that may express them and thereby acquire meaning. Pace Kant, our categories are replaceable when pragmatically unsuccessful, and are sometimes invented, although typically socially instilled. Kant also failed to realize that any a priori knowledge concerns only what is expressed by an “analytic truth,” i.e., what is knowable with certainty via reflection upon intensions and permits reference to the necessary inclusion (and exclusion) relations between objective properties. Such inclusion/exclusion relationships are “entailments” expressible by a use of “if” different from material implication. The degree of justification of an empirical judgment about objective reality (e.g., that there is a doorknob before one) and of any beliefs in consequences that are probable given the judgment, approximates to certainty when the judgment stands in a relationship of “congruence” to a collection of justified judgments (e.g., a collection including the judgments that one remembers seeing a doorknob a moment before, and that one has not just turned around). Lewis’s empiricism involves one type of phenomenalism. Although he treats external conditions as metaphysically distinct from passages of sense experience, he maintains that the process of learning about the former does not involve more than learning about the latter. Accordingly, he speaks of the “sense meaning” of an intension, referring to an objective condition. It concerns what one intends to count as a process that verifies that the particular intension applies to the objective world. Sense meanings of a statement may be conceived as additional “entailments” of it, and are expressible by conjunctions of an infinite number of statements each of which is “the general form of a specific terminating judgment” (as defined below). Lewis wants his treatment of sense meaning to rule out Berkeley’s view that objects exist only when perceived. Verification of an objective judgment, as Kant realized, is largely specified by a non-social process expressed by a rule to act in imaginable ways in response to imaginable present sense experiences (e.g. seeing a doorknob) and thereupon to have imaginable future sense experiences (e.g. feeling a doorknob). Actual instances of such passages of sense experience raise the probability of an objective judgment, whose verification is always partial. Apprehensions of sense experiences are judgments that are not reached by basing them on grounds in a way that might conceivably produce errors. Such apprehensions are “certain.” The latter term may be employed by Lewis in more than one sense, but here it at least implies that the judgment is rationally credible and in the above sense not capable of being in error. So such an apprehension is “datal,” i.e., rationally employed in judging other matters, and “immediate,” i.e., formed noninferentially in response to a presentation. These presentations make up “the (sensory) given.” Sense experience is what remains after everything that is less than certain in one’s experience of an objective condition is set aside. Lewis thought some version of the epistemic regress argument to be correct, and defended the Cartesian view that without something certain as a foundation no judgment has any degree of justification. Technical terminology. Presentation: something involved in experience, e.g. a visual impression, in virtue of which one possesses a non-inferential judgment that it is involved. The given: those presentations that have the content that they do independently of one’s intending or deciding that they have it. Terminating: decisively and completely verifiable or falsifiable in principle. (E.g., where S affirms a present sense experience, A affirms an experience of seeming to initiate an action, and E affirms a future instance of sense experience, the judgment ‘S and if A then E’ is terminating.) The general form of the terminating judgment that S and if A then E: the conditional that if S then (in all probability) E, if A. (An actual judgment expressed by this conditional is based on remembering passages of sense experience of type S/A/E and is justified thanks to the principle of induction and the principle that seeming to remember an event makes the judgment that the event occurred justified at least to some degree. These statements concern a connection that holds independently of whether anyone is thinking and underlies the rationality of relying to any degree upon what is not part of one’s self.) Congruence: the relationship among statements in a collection when the following conditional is true: If each had some degree of justification independently of the remaining ones, then each would be made more justified by the conjoint truth of the remaining ones. (When the antecedent of this conditional is true, and a statement in the collection is such that it is highly improbable that the remaining ones all be true unless it is true, then it is made very highly justified.) Pragmatic a priori: those judgments that are not based on the use of the senses but on employing a set of intensions, and yet are susceptible of being reasonably set aside because of a shift to a different set of intensions whose employment is pragmatically more useful (roughly, more useful for the attainment of what has intrinsic value). Valuation: the appraising of something as having value or being morally right. (What has some value that is not due to its consequences is what has intrinsic value, e.g., enjoyable experiences of self-realization in living rationally. Other evaluations of what is good are empirical judgments concerning what may be involved in actions leading to what is intrinsically good. Rational reflection permits awareness of various moral principles.)
Lewis: very Irish literary critic, novelist, and Christian apologist, whom Grice would occasionally see at the Bird and Baby. (“I don’t like him” – Grice). Born in Belfast, Lewis took three first-class degrees at Oxford, became a tutor at Magdalen, and assumed the chair of medieval and Renaissance studies at Cambridge. While his tremendous output includes important works on medieval literature and literary criticism, he is best known for his fiction and Christian apologetics. Lewis combined a poetic sense and appreciation of argument that allowed him to communicate complex philosophical and theological material to lay audiences. His popular writings in the philosophy of religion range over a variety of topics, including the nature and existence of God (Mere Christianity, 1952), miracles (Miracles, 1947), hell (The Great Divorce, 1945), and the problem of evil (The Problem of Pain, 1940). His own conversion to Christianity as an adult is chronicled in his autobiography (Surprised by Joy, 1955). In defending theism Lewis employed arguments from natural theology (most notably versions of the moral and teleological arguments) and arguments from religious experience. Also of philosophical interest is his defense of moral absolutism in The Abolition of Man.
Lewis: philosopher influential in many areas. Lewis received the B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore and the Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard when Grice was giving the William James lectures on the implicaturum He has been a member of the philosophy department at U.C.L.A. and Princeton . In philosophy of mind, Lewis is known principally for “An Argument for the Identity Theory” (1966), “Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications” (1972), and “Mad Pain and Martian Pain” (1980). He argues for the functionalist thesis that mental states are defined by their typical causal roles, and the materialist thesis that the causal roles definitive of mental states are occupied by physical states. Lewis develops the view that theoretical definitions in general are functionally defined, applying the formal concept of a Ramsey sentence. And he suggests that the platitudes of commonsense or folk psychology constitute the theory implicitly defining psychological concepts. In philosophy of language and linguistics, Lewis is known principally for Convention (1969), “General Semantics” (1970), and “Languages and Language” (1975). His theory of convention had its source in the theory of games of pure coordination developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. Roughly, conventions are arbitrary solutions to coordination problems that perpetuate themselves once a precedent is set because they serve a common interest. Lewis requires it to be common knowledge that people prefer to conform to a conventional regularity given that others do. He treats linguistic meanings as compositional intensions. The basic intensions for lexical constituents are functions assigning extensions to indices, which include contextual factors and a possible world. An analytic sentence is one true at every index. Languages are functions from sentences to meanings, and the language of a population is the one in which they have a convention of truthfulness and trust. In metaphysics and modal logic, Lewis is known principally for “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic” (1968) and On the Plurality of Worlds (1986). Based on its theoretical benefits, Lewis argues for modal realism: other possible worlds and the objects in them are just as real as the actual world and its inhabitants. Lewis develops a non-standard form of modal logic in which objects exist in at most one possible world, and for which the necessity of identity fails. Properties are identified with the set of objects that have them in any possible world, and propositions as the set of worlds in which they are true. He also develops a finergrained concept of structured properties and propositions. In philosophical logic and philosophy of science, Lewis is best known for Counterfactuals (1973), “Causation” (1973), and “Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities” (1976). He developed a formal semantics for counterfactual conditionals that matches their truth conditions and logic much more adequately than the previously available material or strict conditional analyses. Roughly, a counterfactual is true if its consequent is true in every possible world in which its antecedent is true that is as similar overall to the actual world as the truth of the antecedent will allow. Lewis then defended an analysis of causation in terms of counterfactuals: c caused e if e would not have occurred if c had not occurred or if there is a chain of events leading from e to c each member of which is counterfactually dependent on the next. He presents a reductio ad absurdum argument to show that conditional probabilities could not be identified with the probabilities of any sort of conditional. Lewis has also written on visual experience, events, holes, parts of classes, time travel, survival and identity, subjective and objective probability, desire as belief, attitudes de se, deontic logic, decision theory, the prisoner’s dilemma and the Newcomb problem, utilitarianism, dispositional theories of value, nuclear deterrence, punishment, and academic ethics. H. P. Grice, “Lewis at Harvard.”
lexical ordering, also called lexicographic ordering, a method, given a finite ordered set of symbols, such as the letters of the alphabet, of ordering all finite sequences of those symbols. All finite sequences of letters, e.g., can be ordered as follows: first list all single letters in alphabetical order; then list all pairs of letters in the order aa, ab, . . . az; ba . . . bz; . . . ; za . . . zz. Here pairs are first grouped and alphabetized according to the first letter of the pair, and then within these groups are alphabetized according to the second letter of the pair. All sequences of three letters, four letters, etc., are then listed in order by an analogous process. In this way every sequence of n letters, for any n, is listed. Lexical ordering differs from alphabetical ordering, although it makes use of it, because all sequences with n letters come before any sequence with n ! 1 letters; thus, zzt will come before aaab. One use of lexical ordering is to show that the set of all finite sequences of symbols, and thus the set of all words, is at most denumerably infinite.
Liber vitae -- Arbitrium – liber vitae -- book of life, expression found in Hebrew and Christian scriptures signifying a record kept by the Lord of those destined for eternal happiness Exodus 32:32; Psalms 68; Malachi 3:16; Daniel 12:1; Philippians 4:3; Revelation 3:5, 17:8, 20:12, 21:27. Medieval philosophers often referred to the book of life when discussing issues of predestination, divine omniscience, foreknowledge, and free will. Figures like Augustine and Aquinas asked whether it represented God’s unerring foreknowledge or predestination, or whether some names could be added or deleted from it. The term is used by some contemporary philosophers to mean a record of all the events in a person’s life. 
liberalism – alla Locke – “meaning liberalism” – “Every man has the liberty to make his words for any idea he pleases.” “every Man has so inviolable a Liberty, to make Words stand for what Ideas he pleases.” Bennett on Locke: An utterer has all the freedom he has to make any of his expressions for any idea he pleases. Constant, Benjamin – Grice was a sort of a liberal – at least he was familiar with “pinko Oxford” --  in full, Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, defender of liberalism and passionate analyst of  and European politics. He welcomed the  Revolution but not the Reign of Terror, the violence of which he avoided by accepting a lowly diplomatic post in Braunschweig 1787 94. In 1795 he returned to Paris with Madame de Staël and intervened in parliamentary debates. His pamphlets opposed both extremes, the Jacobin and the Bonapartist. Impressed by Rousseau’s Social Contract, he came to fear that like Napoleon’s dictatorship, the “general will” could threaten civil rights. He had first welcomed Napoleon, but turned against his autocracy. He favored parliamentary democracy, separation of church and state, and a bill of rights. The high point of his political career came with membership in the Tribunat 180002, a consultative chamber appointed by the Senate. His centrist position is evident in the Principes de politique 180610. Had not republican terror been as destructive as the Empire? In chapters 1617, Constant opposes the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns. He assumes that the Grecian world was given to war, and therefore strengthened “political liberty” that favors the state over the individual the liberty of the ancients. Fundamentally optimistic, he believed that war was a thing of the past, and that the modern world needs to protect “civil liberty,” i.e. the liberty of the individual the liberty of the moderns. The great merit of Constant’s comparison is the analysis of historical forces, the theory that governments must support current needs and do not depend on deterministic factors such as the size of the state, its form of government, geography, climate, and race. Here he contradicts Montesquieu. The opposition between ancient and modern liberty expresses a radical liberalism that did not seem to fit  politics. However, it was the beginning of the liberal tradition, contrasting political liberty in the service of the state with the civil liberty of the citizen cf. Mill’s On Liberty, 1859, and Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty, 8. Principes remained in manuscript until 1861; the scholarly editions of Étienne Hofmann 0 are far more recent. Hofmann calls Principes the essential text between Montesquieu and Tocqueville. It was tr. into English as Constant, Political Writings ed. Biancamaria Fontana, 8 and 7. Forced into retirement by Napoleon, Constant wrote his literary masterpieces, Adolphe and the diaries. He completed the Principes, then turned to De la religion 6 vols., which he considered his supreme achievement.  liberalism, a political philosophy first formulated during the Enlightenment in response to the growth of modern nation-states, which centralize governmental functions and claim sole authority to exercise coercive power within their boundaries. One of its central theses has long been that a government’s claim to this authority is justified only if the government can show those who live under it that it secures their liberty. A central thesis of contemporary liberalism is that government must be neutral in debates about the good human life. John Locke, one of the founders of liberalism, tried to show that constitutional monarchy secures liberty by arguing that free and equal persons in a state of nature, concerned to protect their freedom and property, would agree with one another to live under such a regime. Classical liberalism, which attaches great value to economic liberty, traces its ancestry to Locke’s argument that government must safeguard property. Locke’s use of an agreement or social contract laid the basis for the form of liberalism championed by Rousseau and most deeply indebted to Kant. According to Kant, the sort of liberty that should be most highly valued is autonomy. Agents enjoy autonomy, Kant said, when they live according to laws they would give to themselves. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) set the main themes of the chapter of liberal thought now being written. Rawls asked what principles of justice citizens would agree to in a contract situation he called “the original position.” He argued that they would agree to principles guaranteeing adequate basic liberties and fair equality of opportunity, and requiring that economic inequalities benefit the least advantaged. A government that respects these principles secures the autonomy of its citizens by operating in accord with principles citizens would give themselves in the original position. Because of the conditions of the original position, citizens would not choose principles based on a controversial conception of the good life. Neutrality among such conceptions is therefore built into the foundations of Rawls’s theory. Some critics argue that liberalism’s emphasis on autonomy and neutrality leaves it unable to account for the values of tradition, community, or political participation, and unable to limit individual liberty when limits are needed. Others argue that autonomy is not the notion of freedom needed to explain why common forms of oppression like sexism are wrong. Still others argue that liberalism’s focus on Western democracies leaves it unable to address the most pressing problems of contemporary politics. Recent work in liberal theory has therefore asked whether liberalism can accommodate the political demands of religious and ethnic communities, ground an adequate conception of democracy, capture feminist critiques of extant power structures, or guide nation-building in the face of secessionist, nationalist, and fundamentalist claims. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Impenetrability: Humpty-Dumpty’s meaning-liberalism,” H. P. Grice, “Davidson and Humpty Dumpty’s glory.”
liberum arbitrium, Latin expression meaning ‘free judgment’, often used to refer to medieval doctrines of free choice or free will. It appears in the title of Augustine’s seminal work De libero arbitrio voluntatis (usually translated ‘On the Free Choice of the Will’) and in many other medieval writings (e.g., Aquinas, in Summa theologiae I, asks “whether man has free choice [liberum arbitrium]”). For medieval thinkers, a judgment (arbitrium) “of the will” was a conclusion of practical reasoning – “I will do this” (hence, a choice or decision) – in contrast to a judgment “of the intellect” (“This is the case”), which concludes theoretical reasoning.
delimitatum: limiting case, an individual or subclass of a given background class that is maximally remote from “typical” or “paradigm” members of the class with respect to some ordering that is not always explicitly mentioned. The number zero is a limiting case of cardinal number. A triangle is a limiting case of polygon. A square is a limiting case of rectangle when rectangles are ordered by the ratio of length to width. Certainty is a limiting case of belief when beliefs are ordered according to “strength of subjective conviction.” Knowledge is a limiting case of belief when beliefs are ordered according “adequacy of objective grounds.” A limiting case is necessarily a case (member) of the background class; in contrast a li-ch’i limiting case 504 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 504 borderline case need not be a case and a degenerate case may clearly fail to be a case at all.
linguistic botany: Ryle preferred to call himself a ‘geographer,’ or cartographer – cf. Grice on conceptual latitude and conceptual longitude. But then there are plants. Pretentious Austin, mocking continental philosophy called this ‘linguistic phenomenology,’ meaning literally, the ‘language phenomena’ out there. Feeling Byzanthine. Possibly the only occasion when Grice engaged in systematic botany. Like Hare, he would just rather ramble around. It was said of Hare that he was ‘of a different world.’ In the West Country, he would go with his mother to identify wild flowers, and they identied “more than a hundred.” Austin is not clear about ‘botanising.’ Grice helps. Grice was a meta-linguistic botanist. His point was to criticise ordinary-language philosophers criticising philosophers. Say: Plato and Ayer say that episteme is a kind of doxa. The contemporary, if dated, ordinary-language philosopher detects a nuance, and embarks risking collision with the conversational facts or data: rushes ahead to exploit the nuance without clarifying it, with wrong dicta like: What I known to be the case I dont believe to be the case. Surely, a cancellable implicaturum generated by the rational principle of conversational helpfulness is all there is to the nuance. Grice knew that unlike the ordinary-language philosopher, he was not providing a taxonomy or description, but a theoretical explanation. To not all philosophers analysis fits them to a T. It did to Grice. It did not even fit Strawson. Grice had a natural talent for analysis. He could not see philosophy as other than conceptual analysis. “No more, no less.” Obviously, there is an evaluative side to the claim that the province of philosophy is to be identified with conceptual analysis. Listen to a theoretical physicist, and hell keep talking about concepts, and even analysing them! The man in the street may not! So Grice finds himself fighting with at least three enemies: the man in the street (and trying to reconcile with him:  What I do is to help you), the scientists (My conceptual analysis is meta-conceptual), and synthetic philosophers who disagree with Grice that analysis plays a key role in philosophical methodology. Grice sees this as an update to his post-war Oxford philosophy. But we have to remember that back when he read that paper, post-war Oxford philosophy, was just around the corner and very fashionable. By the time he composed the piece on conceptual analysis as overlapping with the province of philosophy, he was aware that, in The New World, anaytic had become, thanks to Quine, a bit of an abusive term, and that Grices natural talent for linguistic botanising (at which post-war Oxford philosophy excelled) was not something he could trust to encounter outside Oxford, and his Play Group! Since his Negation and Personal identity Grice is concerned with reductive analysis. How many angels can dance on a needles point? A needless point? This is Grices update to his Post-war Oxford philosophy. More generally concerned with the province of philosophy in general and conceptual analysis beyond ordinary language. It can become pretty technical. Note the Roman overtone of province. Grice is implicating that the other province is perhaps science, even folk science, and the claims and ta legomena of the man in the street. He also likes to play with the idea that a conceptual enquiry need not be philosophical. Witness the very opening to Logic and conversation, Prolegomena. Surely not all inquiries need be philosophical. In fact, a claim to infame of Grice at the Play Group is having once raised the infamous, most subtle, question: what is it that makes a conceptual enquiry philosophically interesting or important? As a result, Austin and his kindergarten spend three weeks analysing the distinct inappropriate implicatura of adverbial collocations of intensifiers like highly depressed, versus very depressed, or very red, but not highly red, to no avail. Actually the logical form of very is pretty complicated, and Grice seems to minimise the point. Grices moralising implicaturum, by retelling the story, is that he has since realised (as he hoped Austin knew) that there is no way he or any philosopher can dictate to any other philosopher, or himself, what is it that makes a conceptual enquiry philosophically interesting or important. Whether it is fun is all that matters. Refs.: The main references are meta-philosophical, i. e. Grice talking about linguistic botany, rather than practicing it. “Reply to Richards,” and the references under “Oxonianism” below are helpful. For actual practice, under ‘rationality.’ There is a specific essay on linguistic botanising, too. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.

linguistic relativity, the thesis that at least some distinctions found in one language are found in no other language (a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, by Benjamin Lee Whorf, of New England, from the river Wharf, in Yorkshire – he died in Hartford, Conn., New England); more generally, the thesis that different languages utilize different representational systems that are at least in some degree informationally incommensurable and hence non-equivalent. The differences arise from the arbitrary features of languages resulting in each language encoding lexically or grammatically some distinctions not found in other languages. The thesis of linguistic determinism holds that the ways people perceive or think about the world, especially with respect to their classificatory systems, are causally determined or influenced by their linguistic systems or by the structures common to all human languages. Specifically, implicit or explicit linguistic categorization determines or influences aspects of nonlinguistic categorization, memory, perception, or cognition in general. Its strongest form (probably a straw-man position) holds that linguistically unencoded concepts are unthinkable. Weaker forms hold that concepts that are linguistically encoded are more accessible to thought and easier to remember than those that are not. This thesis is independent of that of linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism plus linguistic relativity as defined here implies the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
literary theory, a reasoned account of the nature of the literary artifact, its causes, effects, and distinguishing features. So understood, literary theory is part of the systematic study of literature covered by the term ‘criticism’, which also includes interpretation of literary works, philology, literary history, and the evaluation of particular works or bodies of work. Because it attempts to provide the conceptual foundations for practical criticism, literary theory has also been called “critical theory.” However, since the latter term has been appropriated by neo-Marxists affiliated with the Frankfurt School to designate their own kind of social critique, ‘literary theory’ is less open to misunderstanding. Because of its concern with the ways in which literary productions differ from other verbal artifacts and from other works of art, literary theory overlaps extensively with philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and the other human sciences. The first ex professo theory of literature in the West, for centuries taken as normative, was Aristotle’s Poetics. On Aristotle’s view, poetry is a verbal imitation of the forms of human life and action in language made vivid by metaphor. It stimulates its audience to reflect on the human condition, enriches their understanding, and thereby occasions the pleasure that comes from the exercise of the cognitive faculty. The first real paradigm shift in literary theory was introduced by the Romantics of the nineteenth century. The Biographia Literaria of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recounting the author’s conversion from Humean empiricism to a form of German idealism, defines poetry not as a representation of objective structures, but as the imaginative self-expression of the creative subject. Its emphasis is not on the poem as a source of pleasure but on poetry as a heightened form of spiritual activity. The standard work on the transition from classical (imitation) theory to Romantic (expression) theory is M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. In the present century theory has assumed a place of prominence in literary studies. In the first half of the century the works of I. A. Richards – from his early positivist account of linear order poetry in books like Science and Poetry to his later idealist views in books like The Philosophy of Rhetoric – sponsored the practice of the American New Critics. The most influential theorist of the period is Northrop Frye, whose formalist manifesto, Anatomy of Criticism, proposed to make criticism the “science of literature.” The introduction of Continental thought to the English-speaking critical establishment in the 1960s and after spawned a bewildering variety of competing theories of literature: e.g., Russian formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, Marxism, Freudianism, feminism, and even the anti-theoretical movement called the “new pragmatism.” The best summary account of these developments is Frank Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism (1980). Given the present near-chaos in criticism, the future of literary theory is unpredictable. But the chaos itself offers ample opportunities for philosophical analysis and calls for the kind of conceptual discrimination such analysis can offer. Conversely, the study of literary theory can provide philosophers with a better understanding of the textuality of philosophy and of the ways in which philosophical content is determined by the literary form of philosophical texts.
lit. hum. (philos.): While Grice would take tutees under different curricula, he preferred Lit. Hum. So how much philosophy did this include. Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Mill. And that was mainly it. We are referring to the ‘philosophy’ component. Ayer used to say that he would rather have been a judge. But at Oxford of that generation, having a Lit. Hum. perfectly qualified you as a philosopher. And people like Ayer, who would rather be a juddge, end up being a philosopher after going through the Lit. Hum. Grice himself comes as a “Midlands scholarship boy” straight from Clifton on a classics scholarship, and being from the Midlands, straight to Corpus. The fact that he got on so well with Hardie helped. The fact that his interim at Merton worked was good. The fact that the thing at Rossall did NOT work was good. The fact that he becamse a fellow at St. John’s OBVIOUSLY helped. The fact that he had Strawson as a tutee ALSO helped helped. H. P. Grice, Literae Humaniores (Philosophy), Oxon.


locke. Grice cites Locke in “Personal identity,” and many more places. He has a premium for Locke. Acceptance, acceptance and certeris paribus condition, acceptance and modals, j-acceptance, moral acceptance, prudential acceptance, v-acceptance, ackrill, Aristotle, Austin, botvinnik , categorical imperative, chicken soul, immortality of, Davidson, descriptivism, descriptivism and ends, aequi-vocality thesis, final cause, frege, happiness, happiness and H-desirables, happiness and I-desirables, happiness as a system of ends, happiness as an end, hardie, hypothetical imperative , hypothetical imperative -- see technical imperatives, isaacson, incontinence, inferential principles, judging, judging and acceptance, Kant, logical theory, meaning, meaning and speech procedures, sentence meaning, what a speaker means, modes, modes and moods, moods, modes and embedding of mode-markers , judicative operator, volitive operator, mood operators, moods morality, myro, nagel, necessity, necessity and provability, necessity and relativized and absolute modalities, principle of total evidence, principles of inference, principles of inference, reasons, and necessity, provability, radical, rationality : as faculty manifested in reasoning, flat and variable, proto-rationality, rational being, and value as value-paradigmatic concept, rationality operator, reasonable, reasoning, reasoning and defeasibility, reasoning defined, rasoning and explanation, reasoning -- first account of, reasoning and good reasoning, reasoning, special status of, reasoning the hard way of, reasoning and incomplete reasoning, reasoning and indeterminacy of, reasoning and intention, reasoning and misreasoning, reasoning, practical, reasoning, probabilistic, reasoning as purposive activity, reasoning, the quick way of , reasoning -- too good to be reasoning, reasons, reasons altheic, reasons: division into practical and alethic, reasons: explanatory, reasons justificatory, reasons: justificatory-explanatory, reasoning and modals, reasoning and necessity, personal, practical and non-practical (alethic) reasons compared, systematizing hypothesis: types of, Russell, satisfactoriness, technical imperatives, value, value paradigmatic concepts, Wright, willing and acceptance, Vitters. Index acceptance 71-2 , 80-7 and certeris paribus condition 77 and modals 91-2 J-acceptance 51 moral 61 , 63 , 87 prudential 97-111 V-acceptance 51 Ackrill, J. L. 119-20 Aristotle 4-5 , 19 , 24-5 , 31 , 32 , 43 , 98-9 , 112-15 , 120 , 125 Austin, J. L. 99 Botvinnik 11 , 12 , 18 Categorical Imperative 4 , 70 chicken soul, immortality of 11-12 Davidson, Donald 45-8 , 68 descriptivism 92 ends 100-10 Equivocality thesis x-xv , 58 , 62 , 66 , 70 , 71 , 80 , 90 final cause 43-4 , 66 , 111 Frege, Gottlob 50 happiness 97-134 and H-desirables 114-18 , 120 and I-desirables 114-18 , 120 , 122 , 128 as a system of ends 131-4 as an end 97 , 113-15 , 119-20 , 123-8 Hardie, W. F. R. 119 hypothetical imperative 97 , see technical imperatives Isaacson, Dan 30n. incontinence 25 , 47 inferential principles 35 judging 51 , see acceptance Kant 4 , 21 , 25 , 31 , 43 , 44-5 , 70 , 77-8 , 86-7 , 90-8 logical theory 61 meaning ix-x and speech procedures 57-8 sentence meaning 68-9 what a speaker means 57-8 , 68 modes 68 , see moods moods xxii-xxiii , 50-6 , 59 , 69 , 71-2 embedding of mode-markers 87-9 judicative operator 50 , 72-3 , 90 volative operator 50 , 73 , 90 mood operators , see moods morality 63 , 98 Myro, George 40 Nagel, Thomas 64n. necessity xii-xiii , xvii-xxiii , 45 , 58-9 and provability 59 , 60-2 and relativized and absolute modalities 56-66 principle of total evidence 47 , 80-7 principles of inference 5 , 7 , 9 , 22-3 , 26 , 35 see also reasons, and necessity  provability 59 , 60-2 radical 50-3 , 58-9 , 72 , 88 rationality : as faculty manifested in reasoning 5 flat and variable 28-36 proto-rationality 33 rational being 4 , 25 , 28-30 and value as value-paradigmatic concept 35 rationality operator xiv-xv , 50-1 reasonable 23-5 reasoning 4-28 and defeasibility 47 , 79 , 92 defined 13-14 , 87-8 and explanation xxix-xxxv , 8 first account of 5-6 , 13-14 , 26-8 good reasoning 6 , 14-16 , 26-7 special status of 35 the hard way of 17 end p.135 incomplete reasoning 8-14 indeterminacy of 12-13 and intention 7 , 16 , 18-25 , 35-6 , 48-9 misreasoning 6-8 , 26 practical 46-50 probabilistic 46-50 as purposive activity 16-19 , 27-8 , 35 the quick way of 17 too good to be reasoning 14-18 reasons 37-66 altheic 44-5 , 49 division into practical and alethic 44 , 68 explanatory 37-9 justificatory 39-40 , 67-8 justificatory-explanatory 40-1 , 67 and modals 45 and necessity 44-5 personal 67 practical and non-practical (alethic) reasons compared xiixiii , 44-50 , 65 , 68 , 73-80 systematizing hypothesis 41-4 types of 37-44 Russell, Bertrand 50 satisfactoriness 60 , 87-9 , 95 technical imperatives 70 , 78 , 90 , 93-6 , 97 value 20 , 35 , 83 , 87-8 value paradigmatic concepts 35-6 von Wright 44 willing 50 , see acceptance Wittengenstein, Ludwig 50 -- English philosopher and proponent of empiricism, famous especially for his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) and for his Second Treatise of Government, also published in 1689, though anonymously. He came from a middle-class Puritan family in Somerset, and became acquainted with Scholastic philosophy in his studies at Oxford. Not finding a career in church or university attractive, he trained for a while as a physician, and developed contacts with many members of the newly formed Royal Society; the chemist Robert Boyle and the physicist Isaac Newton were close acquaintances. In 1667 he joined the London households of the then Lord Ashley, later first Earl of Shaftesbury; there he became intimately involved in discussions surrounding the politics of resistance to the Catholic king, Charles II. In 1683 he fled England for the Netherlands, where he wrote out the final draft of his Essay. He returned to England in 1689, a year after the accession to the English throne of the Protestant William of Orange. In his last years he was the most famous intellectual in England, perhaps in Europe generally. Locke was not a university professor immersed in the discussions of the philosophy of “the schools” but was instead intensely engaged in the social and cultural issues of his day; his writings were addressed not to professional philosophers but to the educated public in general. The Essay. The initial impulse for the line of thought that culminated in the Essay occurred early in 1671, in a discussion Locke had with some friends in Lord Shaftesbury’s apartments in London on matters of morality and revealed religion. In his Epistle to the Reader at the beginning of the Essay Locke says that the discussants found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side. After we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course, and that before we set ourselves upon enquiries of that nature it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with. Locke was well aware that for a thousand years European humanity had consulted its textual inheritance for the resolution of its moral and religious quandaries; elaborate strategies of interpretation, distinction, etc., had been developed for extracting from those disparate sources a unified, highly complex, body of truth. He was equally well aware that by his time, more than a hundred years after the beginning of the Reformation, the moral and religious tradition of Europe had broken up into warring and contradictory fragments. Accordingly he warns his readers over and over against basing their convictions merely on say-so, on unexamined tradition. As he puts it in a short late book of his, The Conduct of the Understanding, “We should not judge of things by men’s opinions, but of opinions by things.” We should look to “the things themselves,” as he sometimes puts it. But to know how to get at the things themselves it is necessary, so Locke thought, “to examine our own abilities.” Hence the project of the Essay. The Essay comes in four books, Book IV being the culmination. Fundamental to understanding Locke’s thought in Book IV is the realization that knowledge, as he thinks of it, is a fundamentally different phenomenon from belief. Locke holds, indeed, that knowledge is typically accompanied by belief; it is not, though, to be identified with it. Knowledge, as he thinks of it, is direct awareness of some fact – in his own words, perception of some agreement or disagreement among things. Belief, by contrast, consists of taking some proposition to be true – whether or not one is directly aware of the corresponding fact. The question then arises: Of what sorts of facts do we human beings have direct awareness? Locke’s answer is: Only of facts that consist of relationships among our “ideas.” Exactly what Locke had in mind when he spoke of ideas is a vexed topic; the traditional view, for which there is a great deal to be said, is that he regarded ideas as mental objects. Furthermore, he clearly regarded some ideas as being representations of other entities; his own view was that we can think about nonmental entities only by being aware of mental entities that represent those non-mental realities. Locke argued that knowledge, thus understood, is “short and scanty” – much too short and scanty for the living of life. Life requires the formation of beliefs on matters where knowledge is not available. Now what strikes anyone who surveys human beliefs is that many of them are false. What also strikes any perceptive observer of the scene is that often we can – or could have – done something about this. We can, to use Locke’s language, “regulate” and “govern” our belief-forming capacities with the goal in mind of getting things right. Locke was persuaded that not only can we thus regulate and govern our belief-forming capacities; we ought to do so. It is a God-given obligation that rests upon all of us. Specifically, for each human being there are some matters of such “concernment,” as Locke calls it, as to place the person under obligation to try his or her best to get things right. For all of us there will be many issues that are not of such concernment; for those cases, it will be acceptable to form our beliefs in whatever way nature or custom has taught us to form them. But for each of us there will be certain practical matters concerning which we are obligated to try our best – these differing from person to person. And certain matters of ethics and religion are of such concern to everybody that we are all obligated to try our best, on these matters, to get in touch with reality. What does trying our best consist of, when knowledge – perception, awareness, insight – is not available? One can think of the practice Locke recommends as having three steps. First one collects whatever evidence one can find for and against the proposition in question. This evidence must consist of things that one knows; otherwise we are just wandering in darkness. And the totality of the evidence must be a reliable indicator of the probability of the proposition that one is considering. Second, one analyzes the evidence to determine the probability of the proposition in question, on that evidence. And last, one places a level of confidence in the proposition that is proportioned to its probability on that satisfactory evidence. If the proposition is highly probable on that evidence, one believes it very firmly; if it only is quite probable, one believes it rather weakly; etc. The main thrust of the latter half of Book IV of the Essay is Locke’s exhortation to his readers to adopt this practice in the forming of beliefs on matters of high concernment – and in particular, on matters of morality and religion. It was his view that the new science being developed by his friends Boyle and Newton and others was using exactly this method. Though Book IV was clearly seen by Locke as the culmination of the Essay, it by no means constitutes the bulk of it. Book I launches a famous attack on innate ideas and innate knowledge; he argues that all our ideas and knowledge can be accounted for by tracing the way in which the mind uses its innate capacities to work on material presented to it by sensation and reflection (i.e., self-awareness). Book II then undertakes to account for all our ideas, on the assumption that the only “input” is ideas of sensation and reflection, and that the mind, which at birth is a tabula rasa (or blank tablet), works on these by such operations as combination, division, generalization, and abstraction. And then in Book III Locke discusses the various ways in which words hinder us in our attempt to get to the things themselves. Along with many other thinkers of the time, Locke distinguished between what he called natural theology and what he called revealed theology. It was his view that a compelling, demonstrative argument could be given for the existence of God, and thus that we could have knowledge of God’s existence; the existence of God is a condition of our own existence. In addition, he believed firmly that God had revealed things to human beings. As he saw the situation, however, we can at most have beliefs, not knowledge, concerning what God has revealed. For we can never just “see” that a certain episode in human affairs is a case of divine revelation. Accordingly, we must apply the practice outlined above, beginning by assembling satisfactory evidence for the conclusion that a certain episode really is a case of divine revelation. In Locke’s view, the occurrence of miracles provides the required evidence. An implication of these theses concerning natural and revealed religion is that it is never right for a human being to believe something about God without having evidence for its truth, with the evidence consisting ultimately of things that one “sees” immediately to be true. Locke held to a divine command theory of moral obligation; to be morally obligated to do something is for God to require of one that one do that. And since a great deal of what Jesus taught, as Locke saw it, was a code of moral obligation, it follows that once we have evidence for the revelatory status of what Jesus said, we automatically have evidence that what Jesus taught as our moral obligation really is that. Locke was firmly persuaded, however, that revelation is not our only mode of access to moral obligation. Most if not all of our moral obligations can also be arrived at by the use of our natural capacities, unaided by revelation. To that part of our moral obligations which can in principle be arrived at by the use of our natural capacities, Locke (in traditional fashion) gave the title of natural law. Locke’s own view was that morality could in principle be established as a deductive science, on analogy to mathematics: one would first argue for God’s existence and for our status as creatures of God; one would then argue that God was good, and cared for the happiness of God’s creatures. Then one would argue that such a good God would lay down commands to his creatures, aimed at their overall happiness. From there, one would proceed to reflect on what does in fact conduce to human happiness. And so forth. Locke never worked out the details of such a deductive system of ethics; late in his life he concluded that it was beyond his capacities. But he never gave up on the ideal. The Second Treatise and other writings. Locke’s theory of natural law entered intimately into the theory of civil obedience that he developed in the Second Treatise of Government. Imagine, he said, a group of human beings living in what he called a state of nature – i.e., a condition in which there is no governmental authority and no private property. They would still be under divine obligation; and much (if not all) of that obligation would be accessible to them by the use of their natural capacities. There would be for them a natural law. In this state of nature they would have title to their own persons and labor; natural law tells us that these are inherently our “possessions.” But there would be no possessions beyond that. The physical world would be like a gigantic English commons, given by God to humanity as a whole. Locke then addresses himself to two questions: How can we account for the emergence of political obligation from such a situation, and how can we account for the emergence of private property? As to the former, his answer is that we in effect make a contract with one another to institute a government for the Locke, John Locke, John 508 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 508 elimination of certain deficiencies in the state of nature, and then to obey that government, provided it does what we have contracted with one another it should do and does not exceed that. Among the deficiencies of the state of nature that a government can be expected to correct is the sinful tendency of human beings to transgress on other persons’ properties, and the equally sinful tendency to punish such transgressions more severely than the law of nature allows. As to the emergence of private property, something from the world at large becomes a given person’s property when that person “mixes” his or her labor with it. For though God gave the world as a whole to all of us together, natural law tells us that each person’s labor belongs to that person himself or herself – unless he or she freely contracts it to someone else. Locke’s Second Treatise is thus an articulate statement of the so-called liberal theory of the state; it remains one of the greatest of such, and proved enormously influential. It should be seen as supplemented by the Letters concerning Toleration (1689, 1690, 1692) that Locke wrote on religious toleration, in which he argued that all theists who have not pledged civil allegiance to some foreign power should be granted equal toleration. Some letters that Locke wrote to a friend concerning the education of the friend’s son should also be seen as supplementing the grand vision. If we survey the way in which beliefs are actually formed in human beings, we see that passion, the partisanship of distinct traditions, early training, etc., play important obstructive roles. It is impossible to weed out entirely from one’s life the influence of such factors. When it comes to matters of high “concernment,” however, it is our obligation to do so; it is our obligation to implement the three-step practice outlined above, which Locke defends as doing one’s best. But Locke did not think that the cultural reform he had in mind, represented by the appropriate use of this new practice, could be expected to come about as the result just of writing books and delivering exhortations. Training in the new practice was required; in particular, training of small children, before bad habits had been ingrained. Accordingly, Locke proposes in Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) an educational program aimed at training children in when and how to collect satisfactory evidence, appraise the probabilities of propositions on such evidence, and place levels of confidence in those propositions proportioned to their probability on that evidence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “To Locke,” C. McGinn, “Grice and Locke as telementationalists.”

Implicaturum: logical consequence, a proposition, sentence, or other piece of information that follows logically from one or more other propositions, sentences, or pieces of information. A proposition C is said to follow logically from, or to be a logical consequence of, propositions P1, P2, . . . , if it must be the case that, on the assumption that P1, P2, . . . , Pn are all true, the proposition C is true as well. For example, the proposition ‘Smith is corrupt’ is a logical consequence of the two propositions ‘All politicians are corrupt’ and ‘Smith is a politician’, since it must be the case that on the assumption that ‘All politicians are corrupt’ and ‘Smith is a politician’ are both true, ‘Smith is corrupt’ is also true. Notice that proposition C can be a logical consequence of propositions P1, P2, . . . , Pn, even if P1, P2, . . . , Pn are not actually all true. Indeed this is the case in our example. ‘All politicians are corrupt’ is not, in fact, true: there are some honest politicians. But if it were true, and if Smith were a politician, then ‘Smith is corrupt’ would have to be true. Because of this, it is said to be a logical consequence of those two propositions. The logical consequence relation is often written using the symbol X, called the double turnstile. Thus to indicate that C is a logical consequence of P1, P2, . . . , Pn, we would write: P1, P2, . . . , Pn X C or: P X C where P stands for the set containing the propositions p1, P2, . . . , Pn. The term ‘logical consequence’ is sometimes reserved for cases in which C follows from P1, P2, . . . , Pn solely in virtue of the meanings of the socalled logical expressions (e.g., ‘some’, ‘all’, ‘or’, ‘and’, ‘not’) contained by these propositions. In this more restricted sense, ‘Smith is not a politician’ is not a logical consequence of the proposition ‘All politicians are corrupt’ and ‘Smith is honest’, since to recognize the consequence relation here we must also understand the specific meanings of the non-logical expressions ‘corrupt’ and ‘honest’.

Constant – in system G -- a symbol, such as the connectives -, 8, /, or S or the quantifiers D or E of elementary quantification theory, that represents logical form. The contrast here is with expressions such as terms, predicates, and function symbols, which are supposed to represent the “content” of a sentence or proposition. Beyond this, there is little consensus on how to understand logical constancy. It is sometimes said, e.g., that a symbol is a logical constant if its interpretation is fixed across admissible valuations, though there is disagreement over exactly how to construe this “fixity” constraint. This account seems to make logical form a mere artifact of one’s choice of a model theory. More generally, it has been questioned whether there are any objective grounds for classifying some expressions as logical and others not, or whether such a distinction is (wholly or in part) conventional. Other philosophers have suggested that logical constancy is less a semantic notion than an epistemic one: roughly, that a is a logical constant if the semantic behavior of certain other expressions together with the semantic contribution of a determine a priori (or in some other epistemically privileged fashion) the extensions of complex expressions in which a occurs. There is also considerable debate over whether particular symbols, such as the identity sign, modal operators, and quantifiers other than D and E, are, or should be treated as, logical constants.
Grice’s “logical construction” – a phrase he borrowed from Broad via Russell -- something built by logical operations from certain elements. Suppose that any sentence, S, containing terms apparently referring to objects of type F can be paraphrased without any essential loss of content into some (possibly much more complicated) sentence, Sp, containing only terms referring to objects of type G (distinct from F): in this case, objects of type F may be said to be logical constructions out of objects of type G. The notion originates with Russell’s concept of an “incomplete symbol,” which he introduced in connection with his theory of descriptions. According to Russell, a definite description – i.e., a descriptive phrase, such as ‘the present king of France’, apparently picking out a unique object – cannot be taken at face value as a genuinely referential term. One reason for this is that the existence of the objects seemingly referred to by such phrases can be meaningfully denied. We can say, “The present king of France does not exist,” and it is hard to see how this could be if ‘the present king of France’, to be meaningful, has to refer to the present king of France. One solution, advocated by Meinong, is to claim that the referents required by what ordinary grammar suggests are singular terms must have some kind of “being,” even though this need not amount to actual existence; but this solution offended Russell’s “robust sense of reality.” According to Peano, Whitehead and Russell, then, ‘The F is G’ is to be understood as equivalent to (something like) ‘One and only one thing Fs and that thing is G’. (The phrase ‘one and only one’ can itself be paraphrased away in terms of quantifiers and identity.) The crucial feature of this analysis is that it does not define the problematic phrases by providing synonyms: rather, it provides a rule, which Russell called “a definition in use,” for paraphrasing whole sentences in which they occur into whole sentences in which they do not. This is why definite descriptions are “incomplete symbols”: we do not specify objects that are their meanings; we lay down a rule that explains the meaning of whole sentences in which they occur. Thus definite descriptions disappear under analysis, and with them the shadowy occupants of Meinong’s realm of being. Russell thought that the kind of analysis represented by the theory of descriptions gives the clue to the proper method for philosophy: solve metaphysical and epistemological problems by reducing ontological commitments. The task of philosophy is to substitute, wherever possible, logical constructions for inferred entities. Thus in the philosophy of mathematics, Russell attempted to eliminate numbers, as a distinct category of objects, by showing how mathematical statements can be translated into (what he took to be) purely logical statements. But what really gave Russell’s program its bite was his thought that we can refer only to objects with which we are directly acquainted. This committed him to holding that all terms apparently referring to objects that cannot be regarded as objects of acquaintance should be given contextual definitions along the lines of the theory of descriptions: i.e., to treating everything beyond the scope of acquaintance as a logical construction (or a “logical fiction”). Most notably, Russell regarded physical objects as logical constructions out of sense-data, taking this to resolve the skeptical problem about our knowledge of the external world. The project of showing how physical objects can be treated as logical constructions out of sense-data was a major concern of analytical philosophers in the interwar period, Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, standing as perhaps its major monument. However, the project was not a success. Even Carnap’s construction involves a system of space-time coordinates that is not analyzed in sense-datum terms and today few, if any, philosophers believe that such ambitious projects can be carried through..
informatum -- forma: “To inform was originally to mould, to shape,” and so quite different from Grecian ‘eidos.’ But the ‘forma-materia’ distinction stuck. Whhat is obtained from a proposition, a set of propositions, or an argument by abstracting from the matter of its content terms or by regarding the content terms as mere place-holders or blanks in a form. In what Grice (after Bergmann) calls an ideal (versus an ordinary) language the form of a proposition, a set of propositions, or an argument is determined by the ‘matter’ of the sentence, the set of sentences, or the argument-text expressing it. Two sentences, sets of sentences, or argument-texts are said to have the same form, in this way, if a uniform one-toone substitution of content words transforms the one exactly into the other. ‘Abe properly respects every agent who respects himself’ may be regarded as having the same form as the sentence ‘Ben generously assists every patient who assists himself’. Substitutions used to determine sameness of form (isomorphism) cannot involve change of form words such as ‘every’, ‘no’, ‘some’, ‘is’, etc., and they must be category-preserving, i.e., they must put a proper name for a proper name, an adverb for an adverb, a transitive verb for a transitive verb, and so on. Two sentences having the same grammatical form have exactly the same form words distributed in exactly the same pattern; and although they of course need not, and usually do not, have the same content words, they do have logical dependence logical form exactly the same number of content words. The most distinctive feature of form words, which are also called syncategorematic terms or logical terms, is their topic neutrality; the form words in a sentence are entirely independent of and are in no way indicative of its content or topic. Modern formal languages used in formal axiomatizations of mathematical sciences are often taken as examples of logically perfect languages. Pioneering work on logically perfect languages was done by George Boole, Frege, Giuseppe Peano, Russell, and Church. According to the principle of form, an argument is valid or invalid in virtue of form. More explicitly, every two arguments in the same form are both valid or both invalid. Thus, every argument in the same form as a valid argument is valid and every argument in the same form as an invalid argument is invalid. The argument form that a given argument fits (or has) is not determined solely by the logical forms of its constituent propositions; the arrangement of those propositions is critical because the process of interchanging a premise with the conclusion of a valid argument can result in an invalid argument. The principle of logical form, from which formal logic gets its name, is commonly used in establishing invalidity of arguments and consistency of sets of propositions. In order to show that a given argument is invalid it is sufficient to exhibit another argument as being in the same logical form and as having all true premises and a false conclusion. In order to show that a given set of propositions is consistent it is sufficient to exhibit another set of propositions as being in the same logical form and as being composed exclusively of true propositions. The history of these methods traces back through non-Cantorian set theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and medieval logicians (especially Anselm) to Aristotle. These methods must be used with extreme caution in an ordinary languages that fails to be logically perfect as a result of ellipsis, amphiboly, ambiguity, etc. E.g. ‘This is a male dog’ implies ‘This is a dog.’ But ‘This is a brass monkey’ does not strictly imply – but implicate -- ‘This is a monkey’, as would be required in a what Bergmann calls an ideal (or perfect, rather than ordinary or imperfect) language. Likewise, of two propositions commonly expressed by the ambiguous sentence ‘Ann and Ben are married’ one does and one does not imply (but at most ‘implicate’) the proposition that Ann is married to Ben. (cf. We are married, but not to each other – a New-World ditty.). Grice, Quine and other philosophers – not Strawson! -- are careful to distinguish, in effect, the unique form of a proposition from this or that ‘schematic’ form it may display. The proposition (A) ‘If Abe is Ben, if Ben is wise Abe is wise’ has exactly one form, which it shares with ‘If Carl is Dan, if Dan is kind Carl is kind’, whereas it has all of the following schematic forms: ‘If P, if Q then R;’ ‘If P, Q;’ and ‘P.’ The principle of form for propositions is that every two propositions in the same form are both tautological (logically necessary) or both non-tautological. Thus, although the propositions above are tautological, there are non-tautological propositions that fit this or that the schematic form just mentioned. Failure to distinguish form proper from ‘schematic form’ has led to fallacies. According to the principle of logical form quoted above every argument in the same logical form as an invalid argument is invalid, but it is not the case that every argument sharing a schematic form with an invalid argument is invalid. Contrary to what would be fallaciously thought, the conclusion ‘Abe is Ben’ is logically implied by the following two propositions taken together, ‘If Abe is Ben, Ben is Abe’ and ‘Ben is Abe’, even though the argument shares a schematic form with invalid arguments “committing” the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Refs.: Grice, “Leibniz on ‘lingua perfecta.’”
indicatum --  indicator: an expression that provides some help in identifying the conclusion of an argument or the premises offered in support of a conclusion. Common premise indicators include ‘for’, ‘because’, and ‘since’. Common conclusion indicators include ‘so’, ‘it follows that’, ‘hence’, ‘thus’, and ‘therefore’. Since Tom sat in the back of the room, he could not hear the performance clearly. Therefore, he could not write a proper review. ’Since’ makes clear that Tom’s seat location is offered as a reason to explain his inability to hear the performance. ‘Therefore’ indicates that the proposition that Tom could not write a proper review is the conclusion of the argument.
Notatum: symbol or communication device designed to achieve unambiguous formulation of principles and inferences in deductive logic. A notation involves some regimentation of words, word order, etc., of language. Some schematization was attempted even in ancient times by Aristotle, the Megarians, the Stoics, Boethius, and the medievals. But Leibniz’s vision of a universal logical language began to be realized only in the past 150 years. The notation is not yet standardized, but the following varieties of logical operators in propositional and predicate calculus may be noted. Given that ‘p’, ‘q’, ‘r’, etc., are propositional variables, or propositions, we find, in the contexts of their application, the following variety of operators (called truth-functional connectives). Negation: ‘-p’, ‘Ýp’, ‘p - ’, ‘p’ ’. Conjunction: ‘p • q’, ‘p & q’, ‘p 8 q’. Weak or inclusive disjunction: ‘p 7 q’. Strong or exclusive disjunction: ‘p V q’, ‘p ! q’, ‘p W q’. Material conditional (sometimes called material implication): ‘p / q’, ‘p P q’. Material biconditional (sometimes called material equivalence): ‘p S q’, ‘p Q q’. And, given that ‘x’, ‘y’, ‘z’, etc., are individual variables and ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, etc., are predicate letters, we find in the predicate calculus two quantifiers, a universal and an existential quantifier: Universal quantification: ‘(x)Fx’, ‘(Ex)Fx’, ‘8xFx’. Existential quantification: ‘(Ex)Fx’, ‘(Dx)Fx’, ‘7xFx’. The formation principle in all the schemata involving dyadic or binary operators (connectives) is that the logical operator is placed between the propositional variables (or propositional constants) connected by it. But there exists a notation, the so-called Polish notation, based on the formation rule stipulating that all operators, and not only negation and quantifiers, be placed in front of the schemata over which they are ranging. The following representations are the result of application of that rule: Negation: ‘Np’. Conjunction: ‘Kpq’. Weak or inclusive disjunction: ‘Apq’. Strong or exclusive disjunction: ‘Jpq’. Conditional: ‘Cpq’. Biconditional: ‘Epq’. Sheffer stroke: ‘Dpq’. Universal quantification: ‘PxFx’. Existential quantifications: ‘9xFx’. Remembering that ‘K’, ‘A’, ‘J’, ‘C’, ‘E’, and ‘D’ are dyadic functors, we expect them to be followed by two propositional signs, each of which may itself be simple or compound, but no parentheses are needed to prevent ambiguity. Moreover, this notation makes it very perspicuous as to what kind of proposition a given compound proposition is: all we need to do is to look at the leftmost operator. To illustrate, ‘p7 (q & r) is a disjunction of ‘p’ with the conjunction ‘Kqr’, i.e., ‘ApKqr’, while ‘(p 7 q) & r’ is a conjunction of a disjunction ‘Apq’ with ‘r’, i.e., ‘KApqr’. ‘- p P q’ is written as ‘CNpq’, i.e., ‘if Np, then q’, while negation of the whole conditional, ‘-(p P q)’, becomes ‘NCpq’. A logical thesis such as ‘((p & q) P r) P ((s P p) P (s & q) P r))’ is written concisely as ‘CCKpqrCCspCKsqr’. The general proposition ‘(Ex) (Fx P Gx)’ is written as ‘PxCFxGx’, while a truth-function of quantified propositions ‘(Ex)Fx P (Dy)Gy’ is written as ‘CPxFx9yGy’. An equivalence such as ‘(Ex) Fx Q - (Dx) - Fx’ becomes ‘EPxFxN9xNFx’, etc. Dot notation is way of using dots to construct well-formed formulas that is more thrifty with punctuation marks than the use of parentheses with their progressive strengths of scope. But dot notation is less thrifty than the parenthesis-free Polish notation, which secures well-formed expressions entirely on the basis of the order of logical operators relative to truth-functional compounds. Various dot notations have been devised. The convention most commonly adopted is that punctuation dots always operate away from the connective symbol that they flank. It is best to explain dot punctuation by examples: (1) ‘p 7 (q - r)’ becomes ‘p 7 .q P - r’; (2) ‘(p 7 q) P - r’ becomes ‘p 7 q. P - r’; (3) ‘(p P (q Q r)) 7 (p 7 r)’ becomes ‘p P. q Q r: 7. p 7r’; (4) ‘(- pQq)•(rPs)’ becomes ‘-p Q q . r Q s’. logically perfect language logical notation 513 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 513 Note that here the dot is used as conjunction dot and is not flanked by punctuation dots, although in some contexts additional punctuation dots may have to be added, e.g., ‘p.((q . r) P s), which is rewritten as ‘p : q.r. P s’. The scope of a group of n dots extends to the group of n or more dots. (5) ‘- p Q (q.(r P s))’ becomes ‘- p. Q : q.r P s’; (6)‘- pQ((q . r) Ps)’ becomes ‘~p. Q: q.r.Ps’; (7) ‘(- p Q (q . r)) P s’ becomes ‘- p Q. q.r: P s’. The notation for modal propositions made popular by C. I. Lewis consisted of the use of ‘B’ to express the idea of possibility, in terms of which other alethic modal notions were defined. Thus, starting with ‘B p’ for ‘It is possiblethat p’ we get ‘- B p’ for ‘It is not possible that p’ (i.e., ‘It is impossible that p’), ‘- B - p’ for ‘It is not possible that not p’ (i.e., ‘It is necessary that p’), and ‘B - p’ for ‘It is possible that not p’ (i.e., ‘It is contingent that p’ in the sense of ‘It is not necessary that p’, i.e., ‘It is possible that not p’). Given this primitive or undefined notion of possibility, Lewis proceeded to introduce the notion of strict implication, represented by ‘ ’ and defined as follows: ‘p q .% . - B (p. -q)’. More recent tradition finds it convenient to use ‘A’, either as a defined or as a primitive symbol of necessity. In the parenthesis-free Polish notation the letter ‘M’ is usually added as the sign of possibility and sometimes the letter ‘L’ is used as the sign of necessity. No inconvenience results from adopting these letters, as long as they do not coincide with any of the existing truthfunctional operators ‘N’, ‘K’, ‘A’, ‘J’, ‘C’, ‘E’, ‘D’. Thus we can express symbolically the sentences ‘If p is necessary, then p is possible’ as ‘CNMNpMp’ or as ‘CLpMp’; ‘It is necessary that whatever is F is G’ as ‘NMNPxCFxGx’ or as ‘LPxCFxGx’; and ‘Whatever is F is necessarily G’ as ‘PxCFxNMNGx’ or as PxCFxLGx; etc.
logical positivism, also called positivism, a philosophical movement inspired by empiricism and verificationism. While there are still philosophers who would identify themselves with some of the logical positivists’ theses, many of the central docrines of the theory have come under considerable attack in the last half of this century. In some ways logical positivism can be seen as a natural outgrowth of radical or British empiricism and logical atomism. The driving force of positivism may well have been adherence to the verifiability criterion for the meaningfulness of cognitive statements. Acceptance of this principle led positivists to reject as problematic many assertions of religion, morality, and the kind of philosophy they described as metaphysics. The verifiability criterion of meaning. The radical empiricists took genuine ideas to be composed of simple ideas traceable to elements in experience. If this is true and if thoughts about the empirical world are “made up” out of ideas, it would seem to follow that all genuine thoughts about the world must have as constituents thoughts that denote items of experience. While not all positivists tied meaning so clearly to the sort of experiences the empiricists had in mind, they were convinced that a genuine contingent assertion about the world must be verifiable through experience or observation. Questions immediately arose concerning the relevant sense of ‘verify’. Extreme versions of the theory interpret verification in terms of experiences or observations that entail the truth of the proposition in question. Thus for my assertion that there is a table before me to be meaningful, it must be in principle possible for me to accumulate evidence or justification that would guarantee the existence of the table, which would make it impossible for the table not to exist. Even this statement of the view is ambiguous, however, for the impossibility of error could be interpreted as logical or conceptual, or something much weaker, say, causal. Either way, extreme verificationism seems vulnerable to objections. Universal statements, such as ‘All metal expands when heated’, are meaningful, but it is doubtful that any observations could ever conclusively verify them. One might modify the criterion to include as meaningful only statements that can be either conclusively confirmed or conclusively disconfirmed. It is doubtful, however, that even ordinary statements about the physical world satisfy the extreme positivist insistence that they admit of conclusive verification or falsification. If the evidence we have for believing what we do about the physical world consists of knowledge of fleeting and subjective sensation, the possibility of hallucination or deception by a malevolent, powerful being seems to preclude the possibility of any finite sequence of sensations conclusively establishing the existence or absence of a physical object. Faced with these difficulties, at least some positivists retreated to a more modest form of verificationism which insisted only that if a proposition is to be meaningful it must be possible to find evidence or justification that bears on the likelihood of the proposition’s being true. It is, of course, much more difficult to find counterexamples to this weaker form of verificationism, but by the same token it is more difficult to see how the principle will do the work the positivists hoped it would do of weeding out allegedly problematic assertions. Necessary truth. Another central tenet of logical positivism is that all meaningful statements fall into two categories: necessary truths that are analytic and knowable a priori, and contingent truths that are synthetic and knowable only a posteriori. If a meaningful statement is not a contingent, empirical statement verifiable through experience, then it is either a formal tautology or is analytic, i.e., reducible to a formal tautology through substitution of synonymous expressions. According to the positivist, tautologies and analytic truths that do not describe the world are made true (if true) or false (if false) by some fact about the rules of language. ‘P or not-P’ is made true by rules we have for the use of the connectives ‘or’ and ‘not’ and for the assignments of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’. Again there are notorious problems for logical positivism. It is difficult to reduce the following apparently necessary truths to formal tautologies through the substitution of synonymous expressions: (1) Everything that is blue (all over) is not red (all over). (2) All equilateral triangles are equiangular triangles. (3) No proposition is both true and false. Ironically, the positivists had a great deal of trouble categorizing the very theses that defined their view, such as the claims about meaningfulness and verifiability and the claims about the analytic–synthetic distinction. Reductionism. Most of the logical positivists were committed to a foundationalist epistemology according to which all justified belief rests ultimately on beliefs that are non-inferentially justified. These non-inferentially justified beliefs were sometimes described as basic, and the truths known in such manner were often referred to as self-evident, or as protocol statements. Partly because the positivists disagreed as to how to understand the notion of a basic belief or a protocol statement, and even disagreed as to what would be good examples, positivism was by no means a monolithic movement. Still, the verifiability criterion of meaning, together with certain beliefs about where the foundations of justification lie and beliefs about what constitutes legitimate reasoning, drove many positivists to embrace extreme forms of reductionism. Briefly, most of them implicitly recognized only deduction and (reluctantly) induction as legitimate modes of reasoning. Given such a view, difficult epistemological gaps arise between available evidence and the commonsense conclusions we want to reach about the world around us. The problem was particularly acute for empiricists who recognized as genuine empirical foundations only propositions describing perceptions or subjective sensations. Such philosophers faced an enormous difficulty explaining how what we know about sensations could confirm for us assertions about an objective physical world. Clearly we cannot deduce any truths about the physical world from what we know about sensations (remember the possibility of hallucination). Nor does it seem that we could inductively establish sensation as evidence for the existence of the physical world when all we have to rely on ultimately is our awareness of sensations. Faced with the possibility that all of our commonplace assertions about the physical world might fail the verifiability test for meaningfulness, many of the positivists took the bold step of arguing that statements about the physical world could really be viewed as reducible to (equivalent in meaning to) very complicated statements about sensations. Phenomenalists, as these philosophers were called, thought that asserting that a given table exists is equivalent in meaning to a complex assertion about what sensations or sequences of sensations a subject would have were he to have certain other sensations. The gap between sensation and the physical world is just one of the epistemic gaps threatening the meaningfulness of commonplace assertions about the world. If all we know about the mental states of others is inferred from their physical behavior, we must still explain how such inference is justified. Thus logical positivists who took protocol statements to include ordinary assertions about the physical world were comfortable reducing talk about the mental states of others to talk about their behavior; this is logical behaviorism. Even some of those positivists who thought empirical propositions had to be reduced ultimately to talk about sensations were prepared to translate talk about the mental states of others into talk about their behavior, which, ironically, would in turn get translated right back into talk about sensation. Many of the positivists were primarily concerned with the hypotheses of theoretical physics, which seemed to go far beyond anything that could be observed. In the context of philosophy of science, some positivists seemed to take as unproblematic ordinary statements about the macrophysical world but were still determined either to reduce theoretical statements in science to complex statements about the observable world, or to view theoretical entities as a kind of convenient fiction, description of which lacks any literal truth-value. The limits of a positivist’s willingness to embrace reductionism are tested, however, when he comes to grips with knowledge of the past. It seems that propositions describing memory experiences (if such “experiences” really exist) do not entail any truths about the past, nor does it seem possible to establish memory inductively as a reliable indicator of the past. (How could one establish the past correlations without relying on memory?) The truly hard-core reductionists actually toyed with the possibility of reducing talk about the past to talk about the present and future, but it is perhaps an understatement to suggest that at this point the plausibility of the reductionist program was severely strained.
logical product, a conjunction of propositions or predicates. The term ‘product’ derives from an analogy that conjunction bears to arithmetic multiplication, and that appears very explicitly in an algebraic logic such as a Boolean algebra. In the same way, ‘logical sum’ usually means the disjunction of propositions or predicates, and the term ‘sum’ derives from an analogy that disjunction bears with arithmetic addition. In the logical literature of the nineteenth century, e.g. in the works of Peirce, ‘logical product’ and ‘logical sum’ often refer to the relative product and relative sum, respectively. In the work of George Boole, ‘logical sum’ indicates an operation that corresponds not to disjunction but rather to the exclusive ‘or’. The use of ‘logical sum’ in its contemporary sense was introduced by John Venn and then adopted and promulgated by Peirce. ‘Relative product’ was introduced by Augustus De Morgan and also adopted and promulgated by Peirce.
Subjectum – The subjectum-praedicatum distinction -- in Aristotelian and traditional (and what Grice calls NEO-traditionalism of Strawson) logic, the common noun, or sometimes the intension or the extension of the common noun, that follows the initial quantifier word (‘every’, ‘some’, ‘no’, etc.) of a sentence, as opposed to the material subject, which is the entire noun phrase including the quantifier and the noun, and in some usages, any modifiers that may apply. The material subject of ‘Every number exceeding zero is positive’ is ‘every number’, or in some usages, ‘every number exceeding zero’, whereas the conceptual or formal subject is ‘number’, or the intension or the extension of ‘number’. Similar distinctions are made between the logical predicate and the grammatical predicate: in the above example, ‘is positive’ is the material predicate, whereas the formal predicate is the adjective ‘positive’, or sometimes the property of being positive or even the extension of ‘positive’. In standard first-order predicate calculus with identity, the formal subject of a sentence under a given interpretation is the entire universe of discourse of the interpretation.
Grice on syntactics, semantics, and pramatics – syntactics -- description of the forms of the expressions of a language in virtue of which the expressions stand in logical relations to one another. Implicit in the idea of logical syntax is the assumption that all – or at least most – logical relations hold in virtue of form: e.g., that ‘If snow is white, then snow has color’ and ‘Snow is white’ jointly entail ‘Snow has color’ in virtue of their respective forms, ‘If P, then Q’, ‘P’, and ‘Q’. The form assigned to an expression in logical syntax is its logical form. Logical form may not be immediately apparent from the surface form of an expression. Both (1) ‘Every individual is physical’ and (2) ‘Some individual is physical’ apparently share the subjectpredicate form. But this surface form is not the form in virtue of which these sentences (or the propositions they might be said to express) stand in logical relations to other sentences (or propositions), for if it were, (1) and (2) would have the same logical relations to all sentences (or propositions), but they do not; (1) and (3) ‘Aristotle is an individual’ jointly entail (4) ‘Aristotle is physical’, whereas (2) and (3) do not jointly entail (4). So (1) and (2) differ in logical form. The contemporary logical syntax, devised largely by Frege, assigns very different logical forms to (1) and (2), namely: ‘For every x, if x is an individual, then x is physical’ and ‘For some x, x is an individual and x is physical’, respectively. Another example: (5) ‘The satellite of the moon has water’ seems to entail ‘There is at least one thing that orbits the moon’ and ‘There is no more than one thing that orbits the moon’. In view of this, Russell assigned to (5) the logical form ‘For some x, x orbits the moon, and for every y, if y orbits the moon, then y is identical with x, and for every y, if y orbits the moon, then y has water’. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Peirce, Mead, and Morris on the semiotic triad – and why we don’t study them at Oxford.”
logicism, the thesis that mathematics, or at least some significant portion thereof, is part of logic. Modifying Carnap’s suggestion (in “The Logicist Foundation for Mathematics,” first published in Erkenntnis), this thesis is the conjunction of two theses: expressibility logicism: mathematical propositions are (or are alternative expressions of) purely logical propositions; and derivational logicism: the axioms and theorems of mathematics can be derived from pure logic. Here is a motivating example from the arithmetic of the natural numbers. Let the cardinality-quantifiers be those expressible in the form ‘there are exactly . . . many xs such that’, which we abbreviate ¢(. . . x),Ü with ‘. . .’ replaced by an Arabic numeral. These quantifiers are expressible with the resources of first-order logic with identity; e.g. ‘(2x)Px’ is equivalent to ‘DxDy(x&y & Ez[Pz S (z%x 7 z%y)])’, the latter involving no numerals or other specifically mathematical vocabulary. Now 2 ! 3 % 5 is surely a mathematical truth. We might take it to express the following: if we take two things and then another three things we have five things, which is a validity of second-order logic involving no mathematical vocabulary: EXEY ([(2x) Xx & (3x)Yx & ÝDx(Xx & Yx)] / (5x) (Xx 7 Yx)). Furthermore, this is provable in any formalized fragment of second-order logic that includes all of first-order logic with identity and secondorder ‘E’-introduction. But what counts as logic? As a derivation? As a derivation from pure logic? Such unclarities keep alive the issue of whether some version or modification of logicism is true. The “classical” presentations of logicism were Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik and Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. Frege took logic to be a formalized fragment of secondorder logic supplemented by an operator forming singular terms from “incomplete” expressions, such a term standing for an extension of the “incomplete” expression standing for a concept of level 1 (i.e. type 1). Axiom 5 of Grundgesetze served as a comprehension-axiom implying the existence of extensions for arbitrary Fregean concepts of level 1. In his famous letter of 1901 Russell showed that axiom to be inconsistent, thus derailing Frege’s original program. Russell and Whitehead took logic to be a formalized fragment of a ramified full finite-order (i.e. type w) logic, with higher-order variables ranging over appropriate propositional functions. The Principia and their other writings left the latter notion somewhat obscure. As a defense of expressibility logicism, Principia had this peculiarity: it postulated typical ambiguity where naive mathematics seemed unambiguous; e.g., each type had its own system of natural numbers two types up. As a defense of derivational logicism, Principia was flawed by virtue of its reliance on three axioms, a version of the Axiom of Choice, and the axioms of Reducibility and Infinity, whose truth was controversial. Reducibility could be avoided by eliminating the ramification of the logic (as suggested by Ramsey). But even then, even the arithmetic of the natural numbers required use of Infinity, which in effect asserted that there are infinitely many individuals (i.e., entities of type 0). Though Infinity was “purely logical,” i.e., contained only logical expressions, in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (p. 141) Russell admits that it “cannot be asserted by logic to be true.” Russell then (pp. 194–95) forgets this: “If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer is arbitrary.” The answer, “Section 120, in which Infinity is first assumed!,” is not arbitrary. In Principia Whitehead and Russell jocularly say of Infinity that they “prefer to keep it as a hypothesis.” Perhaps then they did not really take logicism to assert the above identity, but rather a correspondence: to each sentence f of mathematics there corresponds a conditional sentence of logic whose antecedent is the Axiom of Infinity and whose consequent is a purely logical reformulation of f. In spite of the problems with the “classical” versions of logicism, if we count so-called higherorder (at least second-order) logic as logic, and if we reformulate the thesis to read ‘Each area of mathematics is, or is part of, a logic’, logicism remains alive and well.
logistic system, a formal language together with a set of axioms and rules of inference, or what many today would call a “logic.” The original idea behind the notion of a logistic system was that the language, axioms, rules, and attendant concepts of proof and theorem were to be specified in a mathematically precise fashion, thus enabling one to make the study of deductive reasoning an exact science. One was to begin with an effective specification of the primitive symbols of the language and of which (finite) sequences of symbols were to count as sentences or wellformed formulas. Next, certain sentences were to be singled out effectively as axioms. The rules of inference were also to be given in such a manner that there would be an effective procedure for telling which rules are rules of the system and what inferences they license. A proof was then defined as any finite sequence of sentences, each of which is either an axiom or follows from some earlier line(s) by one of the rules, with a theorem being the last line of a proof. With the subsequent development of logic, the requirement of effectiveness has sometimes been dropped, as has the requirement that sentences and proofs be finite in length.
Logos (plural: logoi) (Grecian, ‘word’, ‘speech’, ‘reason’), term with the following main philosophical senses. (1) Rule, principle, law. E.g., in Stoicism the logos is the divine order and in Neoplatonism the intelligible regulating forces displayed in the sensible world. The term came thus to refer, in Christianity, to the Word of God, to the instantiation of his agency in creation, and, in the New Testament, to the person of Christ. (2) Proposition, account, explanation, thesis, argument. E.g., Aristotle presents a logos from first principles. (3) Reason, reasoning, the rational faculty, abstract theory (as opposed to experience), discursive reasoning (as opposed to intuition). E.g., Plato’s Republic uses the term to refer to the intellectual part of the soul. (4) Measure, relation, proportion, ratio. E.g., Aristotle speaks of the logoi of the musical scales. (5) Value, worth. E.g., Heraclitus speaks of the man whose logos is greater than that of others.
Longinus (late first century A.D.), Greek literary critic, author of a treatise On the Sublime (Peri hypsous). The work is ascribed to “Dionysius or Longinus” in the manuscript and is now tentatively dated to the end of the first century A.D. The author argues for five sources of sublimity in literature: (a) grandeur of thought and (b) deep emotion, both products of the writer’s “nature”; (c) figures of speech, (d) nobility and originality in word use, and (e) rhythm and euphony in diction, products of technical artistry. The passage on emotion is missing from the text. The treatise, with Aristotelian but enthusiastic spirit, throws light on the emotional effect of many great passages of Greek literature; noteworthy are its comments on Homer (ch. 9). Its nostalgic plea for an almost romantic independence and greatness of character and imagination in the poet and orator in an age of dictatorial government and somnolent peace is unique and memorable.
lottery paradox, a paradox involving two plausible assumptions about justification which yield the conclusion that a fully rational thinker may justifiably believe a pair of contradictory propositions. The unattractiveness of this conclusion has led philosophers to deny one or the other of the assumptions in question. The paradox, which is due to Henry Kyburg, is generated as follows. Suppose I am contemplating a fair lottery involving n tickets (for some suitably large n), and I justifiably believe that exactly one ticket will win. Assume that if the probability of p, relative to one’s evidence, meets some given high threshold less than 1, then one has justification for believing that p (and not merely justification for believing that p is highly probable). This is sometimes called a rule of detachment for inductive hypotheses. Then supposing that the number n of tickets is large enough, the rule implies that I have justification for believing (T1) that the first ticket will lose (since the probability of T1 (% (n † 1)/n) will exceed the given high threshold if n is large enough). By similar reasoning, I will also have justification for believing (T2) that the second ticket will lose, and similarly for each remaining ticket. Assume that if one has justification for believing that p and justification for believing that q, then one has justification for believing that p and q. This is a consequence of what is sometimes called “deductive closure for justification,” according to which one has justification for believing the deductive consequences of what one justifiably believes. Closure, then, implies that I have justification for believing that T1 and T2 and . . . Tn. But this conjunctive proposition is equivalent to the proposition that no ticket will win, and we began with the assumption that I have justification for believing that exactly one ticket will win.
Lotze, philosopher and influential representative of post-Hegelian German metaphysics. Lotze was born in Bautzen and studied medicine, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Leipzig, where he became instructor, first in medicine and later in philosophy. His early views, expressed in his Metaphysik and Logik, were influenced by C. H. Weisse, a former student of Hegel’s. He succeeded Herbart as professor of philosophy at Göttingen. His best-known work, Mikrocosmus. “Logik” and “Metaphysik” were published as two parts of his “System der Philosophie. While Lotze shared the metaphysical and systematic appetites of his German idealist predecessors, he rejected their intellectualism, favoring an emphasis on the primacy of feeling; believed that metaphysics must fully respect the methods, results, and “mechanistic” assumptions of the empirical sciences; and saw philosophy as the never completed attempt to raise and resolve questions arising from the inevitable pluralism of methods and interests involved in science, ethics, and the arts. A strong personalism is manifested in his assertion that feeling discloses to us a relation to a personal deity and its teleological workings in nature. His most enduring influences can be traced, in America, through Royce, B. P. Bowne, and James, and, in England, through Bosanquet and Bradley.
Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, the result that for any set of sentences of standard predicate logic, if there is any interpretation in which they are all true, there there is also an interpretation whose domain consists of natural numbers and in which they are all true. Leopold Löwenheim proved in 1915 that for finite sets of sentences of standard predicate logic, if there is any interpretation in which they are true, there is also an interpretation that makes them true and where the domain is a subset of the domain of the first interpretation, and the new domain can be mapped one-to-one onto a set of natural numbers. Löwenheim’s proof contained some gaps and made essential but implicit use of the axiom of choice, a principle of set theory whose truth was, and is, a matter of debate. In fact, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem is equivalent to the axiom of choice. Thoralf Skolem, in 1920, gave a more detailed proof that made explicit the appeal to the axiom of choice and that extended the scope of the theorem to include infinite sets of sentences. In 1922 he gave an essentially different proof that did not depend on the axiom of choice and in which the domain consisted of natural numbers rather than being of the same size as a set of natural numbers. In most contemporary texts, Skolem’s result is proved by methods later devised by Gödel, Herbrand, or Henkin for proving other results. If the language does not include an identity predicate, then Skolem’s result is that the second domain consists of the entire set of natural numbers; if the language includes an identity predicate, then the second domain may be a proper subset of the natural numbers. (v. van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic). The original results were of interest because they showed that in many cases unexpected interpretations with smaller infinite domains than those of the initially given interpretation could be constructed. It was later shown – and this is the Upward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem – that interpretations with larger domains could also be constructed that rendered true the same set of sentences. Hence the theorem as stated initially is sometimes referred to as the Downward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. The theorem was surprising because it was believed that certain sets of axioms characterized domains, such as the continuum of real numbers, that were larger than the set of natural numbers. This surprise is called Skolem’s paradox, but it is to be emphasized that this is a philosophical puzzle rather than a formal contradiction. Two main lines of response to the paradox developed early. The realist, who believes that the continuum exists independently of our knowledge or description of it, takes the theorem to show either that the full truth about the structure of the continuum is ineffable or at least that means other than standard first-order predicate logic are required. The constructivist, who believes that the continuum is in some sense our creation, takes the theorem to show that size comparisons among infinite sets is not an absolute matter, but relative to the particular descriptions given. Both positions have received various more sophisticated formulations that differ in details, but they remain the two main lines of development.
Lucretius: Roman poet, author of “De rerum natura,” an epic poem in six books. Lucretius’s emphasis, as an orthodox Epicurean, is on the role of even the most technical aspects of physics and philosophy in helping to attain emotional peace and dismiss the terrors of popular religion. Each book studies some aspect of the school’s theories, while purporting to offer elementary instruction to its addressee, Memmius. Each begins with an ornamental proem and ends with a passage of heightened emotional impact; the argumentation is adorned with illustrations from personal observation, frequently of the contemporary Roman and Italian scene. Book 1 demonstrates that nothing exists but an infinity of atoms moving in an infinity of void. Opening with a proem on the love of Venus and Mars (an allegory of the Roman peace), it ends with an image of Epicurus as conqueror, throwing the javelin of war outside the finite universe of the geocentric astronomers. Book 2 proves the mortality of all finite worlds; Book 3, after proving the mortality of the human soul, ends with a hymn on the theme that there is nothing to feel or fear in death. The discussion of sensation and thought in Book 4 leads to a diatribe against the torments of sexual desire. The shape and contents of the visible world are discussed in Book 5, which ends with an account of the origins of civilization. Book 6, about the forces that govern meteorological, seismic, and related phenomena, ends with a frightening picture of the plague of 429 B.C. at Athens. The unexpectedly gloomy end suggests the poem is incomplete (also the absence of two great Epicurean themes, friendship and the gods).
Lukács: philosopher best known for his History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923). In 1918 he joined the Communist Party and for much of the remainder of his career had a controversial relationship with it. For several months in 1919 he was People’s Commissar for Education in Béla Kun’s government, until he fled to Vienna and later moved to Berlin. In 1933 he fled Hitler and moved to Moscow, remaining there until the end of World War II, when he returned to Budapest as a university professor. In 1956 he was Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy’s short-lived government. This led to a brief exile in Rumania. In his later years he returned to teaching in Budapest and was much celebrated by the Hungarian government. His Collected Works are forthcoming in both German and Hungarian. He is equally celebrated for his literary criticism and his reconstruction of the young Marx’s thought. For convenience his work is often divided into three periods: the pre-Marxist, the Stalinist, and the post-Stalinist. What unifies these periods and remains constant in his work are the problems of dialectics and the concept of totality. He stressed the Marxist claim of the possibility of a dialectical unity of subject and object. This was to be obtained through the proletariat’s realization of itself and the concomitant destruction of economic alienation in society, with the understanding that truth was a still-to-be-realized totality. (In the post–World War II period this theme was taken up by the Yugoslavian praxis theorists.) The young neo-Kantian Lukács presented an aesthetics stressing the subjectivity of human experience and the emptiness of social experience. This led several French philosophers to claim that he was the first major existentialist of the twentieth century; he strongly denied it. Later he asserted that realism is the only correct way to understand literary criticism, arguing that since humanity is at the core of any social discussion, form depends on content and the content of politics is central to all historical social interpretations of literature. Historically Lukács’s greatest claim to fame within Marxist circles came from his realization that Marx’s materialist theory of history and the resultant domination of the economic could be fully understood only if it allowed for both necessity and species freedom. In History and Class Consciousness he stressed Marx’s debt to Hegelian dialectics years before the discovery of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Lukács stresses his Hegelian Marxism as the correct orthodox version over and against the established Engels-inspired Soviet version of a dialectics of nature. His claim to be returning to Marx’s methodology emphasizes the primacy of the concept of totality. It is through Marx’s use of the dialectic that capitalist society can be seen as essentially reified and the proletariat viewed as the true subject of history and the only possible salvation of humanity. All truth is to be seen in relation to the proletariat’s historical mission. Marx’s materialist conception of history itself must be examined in light of proletarian knowledge. Truth is no longer given but must be understood in terms of relative moments in the process of the unfolding of the real union of theory and praxis: the totality of social relations. This union is not to be realized as some statistical understanding, but rather grasped through proletarian consciousness and directed party action in which subject and object are one. (Karl Mannheim included a modified version of this theory of social-historical relativism in his work on the sociology of knowledge.) In Europe and America this led to Western Marxism. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it led to condemnation. If both the known and the knower are moments of the same thing, then there is a two-directional dialectical relationship, and Marxism cannot be understood from Engels’s one-way movement of the dialectic of nature. The Communist attack on Lukács was so extreme that he felt it necessary to write an apologetic essay on Lenin’s established views. In The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics (1938), Lukács modified his views but still stressed the dialectical commonality of Hegel and Marx. In Lukács’s last years he unsuccessfully tried to develop a comprehensive ethical theory. The positive result was over two thousand pages of a preliminary study on social ontology.
Lukasiewicz: philosopher and logician, the most renowned member of the Warsaw School. The work for which he is best known is the discovery of many-valued logics, but he also invented bracket-free Polish notation; obtained original consistency, completeness, independence, and axiom-shortening results for sentential calculi; rescued Stoic logic from the misinterpretation and incomprehension of earlier historians and restored it to its rightful place as the first formulation of the theory of deduction; and finally incorporated Aristotle’s syllogisms, both assertoric and modal, into a deductive system in his work Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic. Reflection on Aristotle’s discussion of future contingency in On Interpretation led Lukasiewicz in 1918 to posit a third truth-value, possible, in addition to true and false, and to construct a formal three-valued logic. Where in his notation Cpq denotes ‘if p then q’, Np ‘not p’, Apq ‘either p or q’, and Kpq ‘both p and q’, the system is defined by the following matrices (½ is the third truthvalue): Apq is defined as CCpqq, and Kpq as NANpNq. The system was axiomatized by Wajsberg in 1931. Lukasiewicz’s motivation in constructing a formal system of three-valued logic was to break the grip of the idea of universal determinism on the imagination of philosophers and scientists. For him, there was causal determinism (shortly to be undermined by quantum theory), but there was also logical determinism, which in accordance with the principle of bivalence decreed that the statement that J.L. would be in Warsaw at noon on December 21 next year was either true or false now, and indeed had been either true or false for all time. In three-valued logic this statement would take the value ½, thus avoiding any apparent threat to free will posed by the law of bivalence.
Lull, Raymond, also spelled Raymond Lully, Ramon Llull, mystic and missionary. A polemicist against Islam, a social novelist, and a constructor of schemes for international unification, Lull is best known in the history of philosophy for his quasialgebraic or combinatorial treatment of metaphysical principles. His logic of divine and creaturely attributes is set forth first in an Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem (1274), next in an Ars demonstrativa (1283–89), then in reworkings of both of these and in the Tree of Knowledge, and finally in the Ars brevis and the Ars generalis ultima (1309–16). Each of these contains tables and diagrams that permit the reader to calculate the interactions of the various principles. Although his dates place him in the period of mature Scholasticism, the vernacular language and the Islamic or Judaic construction of Lull’s works relegate him to the margin of Scholastic debates. His influence is to be sought rather in late medieval and Renaissance cabalistic or hermetic traditions.
Luther: German religious reformer and leader of the Protestant Reformation. He was an Augustinian friar and unsystematic theologian from Saxony, schooled in nominalism (Ockham, Biel, Staupitz) and trained in biblical languages. Luther initially taught philosophy and subsequently Scripture (Romans, Galatians, Hebrews) at Wittenberg University. His career as a church reformer began with his public denunciation, in the 95 theses, of the sale of indulgences in October 1517. Luther produced three incendiary tracts: Appeal to the Nobility, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian Man (1520), which prompted his excommunication. At the 1521 Diet of Worms he claimed: “I am bound by the Scripture I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against my conscience. Here I stand, may God help me.” Despite his modernist stance on the primacy of conscience over tradition, the reformer broke with Erasmus over free will (De servo Arbitrio, 1525), championing an Augustinian, antihumanist position. His crowning achievement, the translation of the Bible into German (1534/45), shaped the modern German language. On the strength of a biblical-Christocentric, anti-philosophical theology, he proclaimed justification by faith alone and the priesthood of all believers. He unfolded a theologia crucis, reformed the Mass, acknowledged only two sacraments (baptism and the Eucharist), advocated consubstantiation instead of transubstantiation, and propounded the Two Kingdoms theory in church–state relations.
lycæum: an extensive sanctuary of Apollo just east off Athens (“so my “Athenian dialectic” has to be taken with a pinch of salt!”) -- the site of public athletic (or gymnastic) facilities where Aristotle teaches, a center for philosophy and systematic research in science and history organized there by Aristotle and his associates; it begins as an informal play group, lacking any legal status until Theophrastus, Aristotle’s colleague and principal heir, acquires land and buildings there. By a principle of metonymy common in philosophy (cf. ‘Academy’, ‘Oxford’, ‘Vienna’),‘Lycæum’ comes to refer collectively to members of the school and their methods and ideas, although the school remained relatively non-doctrinaire. Another ancient label for adherents of the school and their ideas, apparently derived from Aristotle’s habit of lecturing in a portico (peripatos) at the Lycæum, is ‘Peripatetic’. The school had its heyday in its first decades, when members include Eudemus, author of lost histories of mathematics; Aristoxenus, a prolific writer, principally on music (large parts of two treatises survive); Dicaearchus, a polymath who ranged from ethics and politics to psychology and geography; Meno, who compiled a history of medicine; and Demetrius of Phaleron, a dashing intellect who writes extensively and ruled Athens on behalf of dynasts. Under Theophrastus and his successor Strato, the Lycæum  produces original work, especially in natural science. But by the midthird century B.C., the Lycæum had lost its initial vigor. To judge from meager evidence, it offered sound education but few new ideas. Some members enjoyed political influence, but for nearly two centuries, rigorous theorizing is displaced by intellectual history and popular moralizing. In the first century B.C., the school enjoyed a modest renaissance when Andronicus oversaw the first methodical edition of Aristotle’s works and began the exegetical tradition that culminated in the monumental commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Oxonian dialectic and Athenian dialectic.”
Lyotard: philosopher, a leading representative of post-structuralism. Among major post-structuralist theorists (Gilles Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault), Lyotard is most closely associated with post-modernism. With roots in phenomenology (a student of Merleau-Ponty, his first book, Phenomenology [1954], engages phenomenology’s history and engages phenomenology with history) and Marxism (in the 1960s Lyotard was associated with the Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded by Cornelius Castoriadis [1922–97] and Claude Lefort [b.1924]), Lyotard’s work has centered on questions of art, language, and politics. His first major work, Discours, figure (1971), expressed dissatisfaction with structuralism and, more generally, any theoretical approach that sought to escape history through appeal to a timeless, universal structure of language divorced from our experiences. Libidinal Economy (1974) reflects the passion and enthusiasm of the events of May 1968 along with a disappointment with the Marxist response to those events. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), an occasional text written at the request of the Quebec government, catapulted Lyotard to the forefront of critical debate. Here he introduced his definition of the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: the postmodern names not a specific epoch but an antifoundationalist attitude that exceeds the legitimating orthodoxy of the moment. Postmodernity, then, resides constantly at the heart of the modern, challenging those totalizing and comprehensive master narratives (e.g., the Enlightenment narrative of the emancipation of the rational subject) that serve to legitimate its practices. Lyotard suggests we replace these narratives by less ambitious, “little narratives” that refrain from totalizing claims in favor of recognizing the specificity and singularity of events. Many, including Lyotard, regard The Differend (1983) as his most original and important work. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Kant’s Critique of Judgment, it reflects on how to make judgments (political as well as aesthetic) where there is no rule of judgment to which one can appeal. This is the différend, a dispute between (at least) two parties in which the parties operate within radically heterogeneous language games so incommensurate that no consensus can be reached on principles or rules that could govern how their dispute might be settled. In contrast to litigations, where disputing parties share a language with rules of judgment to consult to resolve their dispute, différends defy resolution (an example might be the conflicting claims to land rights by aboriginal peoples and current residents). At best, we can express différends by posing the dispute in a way that avoids delegitimating either party’s claim. In other words, our political task, if we are to be just, is to phrase the dispute in a way that respects the difference between the competing claims. In the years following The Differend, Lyotard published several works on aesthetics, politics, and postmodernism; the most important may well be his reading of Kant’s third Critique in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991).
Mach: philosopher, born in Turas, Moravia, and studied at Vienna. Appointed professor of mathematics at Graz in 1864, he moved in 1867 to the chair of physics at Prague, where he came to be recognized as one of the leading scientists in Europe, contributing not only to a variety of fields of physics (optics, electricity, mechanics, acoustics) but also to the new field of psychophysics, particularly in the field of perception. He returned to Vienna in 1895 to a chair in philosophy, designated for a new academic discipline, the history and theory of inductive science. His writings on the philosophy of science profoundly affected the founders of the Vienna Circle, leading Mach to be regarded as a progenitor of logical positivism. His best-known work, The Science of Mechanics (1883), epitomized the main themes of his philosophy. He set out to extract the logical structure of mechanics from an examination of its history and procedures. Mechanics fulfills the human need to abridge the facts about motion in the most economical way. It rests on “sensations” (akin to the “ideas” or “sense impressions” of classical empiricism); indeed, the world may be said to consist of sensations (a thesis that later led Lenin in a famous polemic to accuse Mach of idealism). Mechanics is inductive, not demonstrative; it has no a priori element of any sort. The divisions between the sciences must be recognized to be arbitrary, a matter of convenience only. The sciences must be regarded as descriptive, not as explanatory. Theories may appear to explain, but the underlying entities they postulate, like atoms, for example, are no more than aids to prediction. To suppose them to represent reality would be metaphysical and therefore idle. Mach’s most enduring legacy to philosophy is his enduring suspicion of anything “metaphysical.”
Machiavelli, Niccolò -- the Italian political theorist commonly considered the most influential political thinker of the Renaissance. Born in Florence, he was educated in the civic humanist tradition. From 1498 to 1512, he was secretary to the second chancery of the republic of Florence, with responsibilities for foreign affairs and the revival of the domestic civic militia. His duties involved numerous diplomatic missions both in and outside Italy. With the fall of the republic in 1512, he was dismissed by the returning Medici regime. From 1513 to 1527 he lived in enforced retirement, relieved by writing and occasional appointment to minor posts. Machaivelli’s writings fall into two genetically connected categories: chancery writings (reports, memoranda, diplomatic writings) and formal books, the chief among them The Prince (1513), the Discourses (1517), the Art of War (1520), Florentine Histories (1525), and the comic drama Mandragola (1518). With Machiavelli a new vision emerges of politics as autonomous activity leading to the creation of free and powerful states. This vision derives its norms from what humans do rather than from what they ought to do. As a result, the problem of evil arises as a central issue: the political actor reserves the right “to enter into evil when necessitated.” The requirement of classical, medieval, and civic humanist political philosophies that politics must be practiced within the bounds of virtue is met by redefining the meaning of virtue itself. Machiavellian virtù is the ability to achieve “effective truth” regardless of moral, philosophical, and theological restraints. He recognizes two limits on virtù: (1) fortuna, understood as either chance or as a goddess symbolizing the alleged causal powers of the heavenly bodies; and (2) the agent’s own temperament, bodily humors, and the quality of the times. Thus, a premodern astrological cosmology and the anthropology and cyclical theory of history derived from it underlie his political philosophy. History is seen as the conjoint product of human activity and the alleged activity of the heavens, understood as the “general cause” of all human motions in the sublunar world. There is no room here for the sovereignty of the Good, nor the ruling Mind, nor Providence. Kingdoms, republics, and religions follow a naturalistic pattern of birth, growth, and decline. But, depending on the outcome of the struggle between virtù and fortuna, there is the possibility of political renewal; and Machiavelli saw himself as the philosopher of political renewal. Historically, Machiavelli’s philosophy came to be identified with Machiavellianism (also spelled Machiavellism), the doctrine that the reason of state recognizes no moral superior and that, in its pursuit, everything is permitted. Although Machiavelli himself does not use the phrase ‘reason of state’, his principles have been and continue to be invoked in its defense.
MacIntyre: Like Kant, Scots philosopher and eminent contemporary representative of Aristotelian ethics. He was born in Scotland, educated in England, and has taught at universities in both England and (mainly) the United States. His early work included perceptive critical discussions of Marx and Freud as well as his influential A Short History of Ethics. His most discussed work, however, has been After Virtue (1981), an analysis and critique of modern ethical views from the standpoint of an Aristotelian virtue ethics. MacIntyre begins with the striking unresolvability of modern ethical disagreements, which he diagnoses as due to a lack of any shared substantive conception of the ethical good. This lack is itself due to the modern denial of a human nature that would provide a meaning and goal for human life. In the wake of the Enlightenment, MacIntyre maintains, human beings are regarded as merely atomistic individuals, employing a purely formal reason to seek fulfillment of their contingent desires. Modern moral theory tries to derive moral values from this conception of human reality. Utilitarians start from desires, arguing that they must be fulfilled in such a way as to provide the greatest happiness (utility). Kantians start from reason, arguing that our commitment to rationality requires recognizing the rights of others to the same goods that we desire for ourselves. MacIntyre, however, maintains that the modern notions of utility and of rights are fictions: there is no way to argue from individual desires to an interest in making others happy or to inviolable rights of all persons. He concludes that Enlightenment liberalism cannot construct a coherent ethics and that therefore our only alternatives are to accept a Nietzschean reduction of morality to will-to-power or to return to an Aristotelian ethics grounded in a substantive conception of human nature. MacIntyre’s positive philosophical project is to formulate and defend an Aristotelian ethics of the virtues (based particularly on the thought of Aquinas), where virtues are understood as the moral qualities needed to fulfill the potential of human nature. His aim is not the mere revival of Aristotelian thought but a reformulation and, in some cases, revision of that thought in light of its history over the last 2,500 years. MacIntyre pays particular attention to formulating concepts of practice (communal action directed toward a intrinsic good), virtue (a habit needed to engage successfully in a practice), and tradition (a historically extended community in which practices relevant to the fulfillment of human nature can be carried out). His conception of tradition is particularly noteworthy. His an effort to provide Aristotelianism with a historical orientation that Aristotle himself never countenanced; and, in contrast to Burke, it makes tradition the locus of rational reflection on and revision of past practices, rather than a merely emotional attachment to them. MacIntyre has also devoted considerable attention to the problem of rationally adjudicating the claims of rival traditions (especially in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 1988) and to making the case for the Aristotelian tradition as opposed to that of the Enlightenment and that of Nietzscheanism (especially in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, 1990).
McTaggart: Irish philosopher, the leading British personal idealist. Aside from his childhood and two extended visits to New Zealand, McTaggart lived in Cambridge as a student and fellow of Trinity College. His influence on others at Trinity, including Russell and Moore, was at times great, but he had no permanent disciples. He began formulating and defending his views by critically examining Hegel. In Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (1896) he argued that Hegel’s dialectic is valid but subjective, since the Absolute Idea Hegel used it to derive contains nothing corresponding to the dialectic. In Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901) he applied the dialectic to such topics as sin, punishment, God, and immortality. In his Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (1910) he concluded that the task of philosophy is to rethink the nature of reality using a method resembling Hegel’s dialectic. McTaggart attempted to do this in his major work, The Nature of Existence (two volumes, 1921 and 1927). In the first volume he tried to deduce the nature of reality from self-evident truths using only two empirical premises, that something exists and that it has parts. He argued that substances exist, that they are related to each other, that they have an infinite number of substances as parts, and that each substance has a sufficient description, one that applies only to it and not to any other substance. He then claimed that these conclusions are inconsistent unless the sufficient descriptions of substances entail the descriptions of their parts, a situation that requires substances to stand to their parts in the relation he called determining correspondence. In the second volume he applied these results to the empirical world, arguing that matter is unreal, since its parts cannot be determined by determining correspondence. In the most celebrated part of his philosophy, he argued that time is unreal by claiming that time presupposes a series of positions, each having the incompatible qualities of past, present, and future. He thought that attempts to remove the incompatibility generate a vicious infinite regress. From these and other considerations he concluded that selves are real, since their parts can be determined by determining correspondence, and that reality is a community of eternal, perceiving selves. He denied that there is an inclusive self or God in this community, but he affirmed that love between the selves unites the community producing a satisfaction beyond human understanding.
magnitude, extent or size of a thing with respect to some attribute; technically, a quantity or dimension. A quantity is an attribute that admits of several or an infinite number of degrees, in contrast to a quality (e.g., triangularity), which an object either has or does not have. Measurement is assignment of numbers to objects in such a way that these numbers correspond to the degree or amount of some quantity possessed by their objects. The theory of measurement investigates the conditions for, and uniqueness of, such numerical assignments. Let D be a domain of objects (e.g., a set of physical bodies) and L be a relation on this domain; i.e., Lab may mean that if a and b are put on opposite pans of a balance, the pan with a does not rest lower than the other pan. Let ; be the operation of weighing two objects together in the same pan of a balance. We then have an empirical relational system E % ‹ D, L, ; (. One can prove that, if E satisfies specified conditions, then there exists a measurement function mapping D to a set Num of real numbers, in such a way that the L and ; relations between objects in D correspond to the m and ! relations between their numerical values. Such an existence theorem for a measurement function from an empirical relational system E to a numerical relational system, N % ‹ Num, m ! (, is called a representation theorem. Measurement functions are not unique, but a uniqueness theorem characterizes all such functions for a specified kind of empirical relational system and specified type of numerical image. For example, suppose that for any measurement functions f, g for E there exists real number a ( 0 such that for any x in D, f(x) % ag(x). Then it is said that the measurement is on a ratio scale, and the function s(x) % ax, for x in the real numbers, is the scale transformation. For some empirical systems, one can prove that any two measurement functions are related by f % ag ! b, where a ( 0 and b are real numbers. Then the measurement is on an interval scale, with the scale transformation s(x) % ax ! b; e.g., measurement of temperature without an absolute zero is on an interval scale. In addition to ratio and interval scales, other scale types are defined in terms of various scale transformations; many relational systems have been mathematically analyzed for possible applications in the behavioral sciences. Measurement with weak scale types may provide only an ordering of the objects, so quantitative measurement and comparative orderings can be treated by the same general methods. The older literature on measurement often distinguishes extensive from intensive magnitudes. In the former case, there is supposed to be an empirical operation (like ; above) that in some sense directly corresponds to addition on numbers. An intensive magnitude supposedly has no such empirical operation. It is sometimes claimed that genuine quantities must be extensive, whereas an intensive magnitude is a quality. This extensive versus intensive distinction (and its use in distinguishing quantities from qualities) is imprecise and has been supplanted by the theory of scale types sketched above.
Maimon: philosopher who became the friend and protégé of Moses Mendelssohn and was an acute early critic and follower of Kant. His most important works were the Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie. Mit einem Anhang über die symbolische Erkenntnis, the Philosophisches Wörterbuch and the Versuch einer neuen Logik oder Theorie des Denkens. Maimon argued against the “thing-in-itself” as it was conceived by Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Gottlieb Ernst Schulze. For Maimon, the thing-in-itself was merely a limiting concept, not a real object “behind” the phenomena. While he thought that Kant’s system was sufficient as a refutation of rationalism or “dogmatism,” he did not think that it had – or could – successfully dispose of skepticism. Indeed, he advanced what can be called a skeptical interpretation of Kant. On the other hand, he also argued against Kant’s sharp distinction between sensibility and understanding and for the necessity of assuming the idea of an “infinite mind.” In this way, he prepared the way for Fichte and Hegel. However, in many ways his own theory is more similar to that of the neoKantian Hermann Cohen.
Maimonides: philosopher, physician, and jurist. Born in Córdova, Maimonides and his family fled the forced conversions of the Almohad invasion in 1148, living anonymously in Fez before finding refuge in 1165 in Cairo. There Maimonides served as physician to the vizier of Saladin, who overthrew the Fatimid dynasty in 1171. He wrote ten medical treatises, but three works secured his position among the greatest rabbinic jurists: his Book of the Commandments, cataloguing the 613 biblical laws; his Commentary on the Mishnah, expounding the rational purposes of the ancient rabbinic code; and the fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah, a codification of Talmudic law that retains almost canonical authority. His Arabic philosophic masterpiece The Guide to the Perplexed mediates between the Scriptural and philosophic idioms, deriving a sophisticated negative theology by subtly decoding biblical anthropomorphisms. It defends divine creation against al-Farabi’s and Avicenna’s eternalism, while rejecting efforts to demonstrate creation apodictically. The radical occasionalism of Arabic dialectical theology (kalam) that results from such attempts, Maimonides argues, renders nature unintelligible and divine governance irrational: if God creates each particular event, natural causes are otiose, and much of creation is in vain. But Aristotle, who taught us the very principles of demonstration, well understood, as his resort to persuasive language reveals, that his arguments for eternity were not demonstrative. They project, metaphysically, an analysis of time, matter, and potentiality as they are now and ignore the possibility that at its origin a thing had a very different nature. We could allegorize biblical creation if it were demonstrated to be false. But since it is not, we argue that creation is more plausible conceptually and preferable theologically to its alternative: more plausible, because a free creative act allows differentiation of the world’s multiplicity from divine simplicity, as the seemingly mechanical necessitation of emanation, strictly construed, cannot do; preferable, because Avicennan claims that God is author of the world and determiner of its contingency are undercut by the assertion that at no time was nature other than it is now. Maimonides read the biblical commandments thematically, as serving to inform human character and understanding. He followed al-Farabi’s Platonizing reading of Scripture as a symbolic elaboration of themes best known to the philosopher. Thus he argued that prophets learn nothing new from revelation; the ignorant remain ignorant, but the gift of imagination in the wise, if they are disciplined by the moral virtues, especially courage and contentment, gives wing to ideas, rendering them accessible to the masses and setting them into practice. In principle, any philosopher of character and imagination might be a prophet; but in practice the legislative, ethical, and mythopoeic imagination that serves philosophy finds fullest articulation in one tradition. Its highest phase, where imagination yields to pure intellectual communion, was unique to Moses, elaborated in Judaism and its daughter religions. Maimonides’ philosophy was pivotal for later Jewish thinkers, highly valued by Aquinas and other Scholastics, studied by Spinoza in Hebrew translation, and annotated by Leibniz in Buxtorf’s 1629 rendering, Doctor Perplexorum.
Malcolm: cited by Grice, profusely -- philosopher who was a prominent figure in post– World War II analytic philosophy and perhaps the foremost American interpreter and advocate of Wittgenstein. His association with Wittgenstein (vividly described in his Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir) began when he was at Cambridge. Other influences were Bouwsma, Malcolm’s tutor at Nebraska, and Moore, whom he knew at Cambridge. Malcolm taught at Cornell, and was associated with King’s, London. Malcolm’s earliest papers (e.g., “The Verification Argument,” and “Knowledge and Belief”) dealt with issues of knowledge and skepticism, and two dealt with Moore (The ones Grice is interested in). “Moore and Ordinary Language” infamously interprets Moore’s defense of common sense as a defense of ordinary (rather than ideal) language, but “Defending Common Sense” argued, -- “even more infamously” – Grice -- that Moore’s “two hands” proof of the external world involves a misuse of ‘know’ (“For surely it would be stupid of Moore to doubt that he has two hands.”). Moore’s proof is the topic of extended discussions between Malcolm and Vitters during the latter’s visit in Ithaca, and these provided the stimulus for Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Malcolm’s “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” was a highly influential discussion of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and especially of his “private language argument.” Two other works of that period were Malcolm’s Dreaming which argued that dreams do not have genuine duration or temporal location, and do not entail having genuine experiences, and “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” which defended a version of the ontological argument. Malcolm, inspired by Grice, wrote extensively on memory, first in his “Three Lectures on Memory,” published in his Knowledge and Certainty, and then in his Memory and Mind. In the latter he criticized both Grice’s philosophical and psychological theories of memory, and argues that the notion of a memory trace “is not a scientific discovery . . . [but] a product of philosophical thinking, of a sort that is natural and enormously tempting, yet thoroughly muddled.” A recurrent theme in Malcolm’s thought was that philosophical understanding requires getting to the root of the temptations to advance some philosophical doctrine, and that once we do so we will see the philosophical doctrines as confused or nonsensical. Although he was convinced that dualism and other Cartesian views about the mind were thoroughly confused, he thought no better of contemporary materialist and Grice’s functionalist views – “One never knows what Malcolm thinks – he doesn’t show, he doesn’t tell!” – Grice -- and of current theorizing in psychology and linguistics (one essay is entitled “The Myth of Cognitive Processes and Structures”). He shared with Wittgenstein both an antipathy to scientism and a respect for religion. He shared with Moore an antipathy to obscurantism and a respect for common sense. Malcolm’s “Nothing Is Hidden” (or implicit) examines the relations between Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophies. His other essays include Problems of Mind, Thought and Knowledge, and Consciousness and Causality, the latter coauthored with Armstrong. “Malcolm’s writings are marked by an exceptionally lucid, direct, and vivid style, if I may myself say so.” – Grice. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Malcolm on Moore: the implicaturum.”
Malebranche: philosopher, an important but unorthodox proponent of Cartesian philosophy. Malebranche was a priest of the Oratory, a religious order founded in 1611 by Cardinal Bérulle, who was favorably inclined toward Descartes. Malebranche himself became a Cartesian after reading Descartes’s physiological Treatise on Man in 1664, although he ultimately introduced crucial modifications into Cartesian ontology, epistemology, and physics. Malebranche’s most important philosophical work is The Search After Truth (1674), in which he presents his two most famous doctrines: the vision in God and occasionalism. He agrees with Descartes and other philosophers that ideas, or immaterial representations present to the mind, play an essential role in knowledge and perception. But whereas Descartes’s ideas are mental entities, or modifications of the soul, Malebranche argues that the ideas that function in human cognition are in God – they just are the essences and ideal archetypes that exist in the divine understanding. As such, they are eternal and independent of finite minds, and make possible the clear and distinct apprehension of objective, neccessary truth. Malebranche presents the vision in God as the proper Augustinian view, albeit modified in the light of Descartes’s epistemological distinction between understanding and sensation. The theory explains both our apprehension of universals and mathematical and moral principles, as well as the conceptual element that, he argues, necessarily informs our perceptual acquaintance with the world. Like Descartes’s theory of ideas, Malebranche’s doctrine is at least partly motivated by an antiskepticism, since God’s ideas cannot fail to reveal either eternal truths or the essences of things in the world created by God. The vision in God, however, quickly became the object of criticism by Locke, Arnauld, Foucher, and others, who thought it led to a visionary and skeptical idealism, with the mind forever enclosed by a veil of divine ideas. Malebranche is also the best-known proponent of occasionalism, the doctrine that finite created beings have no causal efficacy and that God alone is a true causal agent. Starting from Cartesian premises about matter, motion, and causation – according to which the essence of body consists in extension alone, motion is a mode of body, and a causal relation is a logically necessary relation between cause and effect – Malebranche argues that bodies and minds cannot be genuine causes of either physical events or mental states. Extended bodies, he claims, are essentially inert and passive, and thus cannot possess any motive force or power to cause and sustain motion. Moreover, there is no necessary connection between any mental state (e.g. a volition) or physical event and the bodily motions that usually follow it. Such necessity is found only between the will of an omnipotent being and its effects. Thus, all phenomena are directly and immediately brought about by God, although he always acts in a lawlike way and on the proper occasion. Malebranche’s theory of ideas and his occasionalism, as presented in the Search and the later Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688), were influential in the development of Berkeley’s thought; and his arguments for the causal theory foreshadow many of the considerations regarding causation and induction later presented by Hume. In addition to these innovations in Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology, Malebranche also modified elements of Descartes’s physics, most notably in his account of the hardness of bodies and of the laws of motion. In his other major work, the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680), Malebranche presents a theodicy, an explanation of how God’s wisdom, goodness, and power are to be reconciled with the apparent imperfections and evils in the world. In his account, elements of which Leibniz borrows, Malebranche claims that God could have created a more perfect world, one without the defects that plague this world, but that this would have involved greater complexity in the divine ways. God always acts in the simplest way possible, and only by means of lawlike general volitions; God never acts by “particular” or ad hoc volitions. But this means that while on any particular occasion God could intervene and forestall an apparent evil that is about to occur by the ordinary courses of the laws of nature (e.g. a drought), God would not do so, for this would compromise the simplicity of God’s means. The perfection or goodness of the world per se is thus relativized to the simplicity of the laws of that world (or, which is the same thing, to the generality of the divine volitions that, on the occasionalist view, govern it). Taken together, the laws and the phenomena of the world form a whole that is most worthy of God’s nature – in fact, the best combination possible. Malebranche then extends this analysis to explain the apparent injustice in the distribution of grace among humankind. It is just this extension that initiated Arnauld’s attack and drew Malebranche into a long philosophical and theological debate that would last until the end of the century.
Manichaeanism, also Manichaeism, a syncretistic religion founded by the Babylonian prophet Mani, who claimed a revelation from God and saw himself as a member of a line that included the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. In dramatic myths, Manichaeanism posited the good kingdom of God, associated with light, and the evil kingdom of Satan, associated with darkness. Awareness of light caused greed, hate, and envy in the darkness; this provoked an attack of darkness on light. In response the Father sent Primal Man, who lost the fight so that light and darkness were mixed. The Primal Man appealed for help, and the Living Spirit came to win a battle, making heaven and earth out of the corpses of darkness and freeing some capured light. A Third Messenger was sent; in response the power of darkness created Adam and Eve, who contained the light that still remained under his sway. Then Jesus was sent to a still innocent Adam who nonetheless sinned, setting in motion the reproductive series that yields humanity. This is the mythological background to the Manichaean account of the basic religious problem: the human soul is a bit of captured light, and the problem is to free the soul from darkness through asceticism and esoteric knowledge. Manichaeanism denies that Jesus was crucified, and Augustine, himself a sometime Manichaean, viewed the religion as a Docetic heresy that denies the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity in a real human body. The religion exhibits the pattern of escape from embodiment as a condition of salvation, also seen in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947), Hungarian-born German social scientist best known for his sociology of knowledge. Born in Budapest, where he took a university degree in philosophy, he settled in Heidelberg in 1919 as a private scholar until his call to Frankfurt as professor of sociology in 1928. Suspended as a Jew and as foreign-born by the Nazis in 1933, he accepted an invitation from the London School of Economics, where he was a lecturer for a decade. In 1943, Mannheim became the first professor of sociology of education at the University of London, a position he held until his death. Trained in the Hegelian tradition, Mannheim defies easy categorization: his mature politics became those of a liberal committed to social planning; with his many studies in the sociology of culture, of political ideologies, of social organization, of education, and of knowledge, among others, he founded several subdisciplines in sociology and political science. While his Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940) expressed his own commitment to social planning, his most famous work, Ideology and Utopia (original German edition, 1929; revised English edition, 1936), established sociology of knowledge as a scientific enterprise and simultaneously cast doubt on the possibility of the very scientific knowledge on which social planning was to proceed. As developed by Mannheim, sociology of knowledge attempts to find the social causes of beliefs as contrasted with the reasons people have for them. Mannheim seemed to believe that this investigation both presupposes and demonstrates the impossibility of “objective” knowledge of society, a theme that relates sociology of knowledge to its roots in German philosophy and social theory (especially Marxism) and earlier in the thought of the idéologues of the immediate post–French Revolution decades.
Mansel: philosopher, a prominent defender of Scottish common sense philosophy. Mansel was the Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy and ecclesiastical history at Oxford, and the dean of St. Paul’s. Much of his philosophy was derived from Kant as interpreted by Hamilton. In “Prolegomena Logica,” Mansel defines logic as the science of the laws of thought, while in “Metaphysics,” he argues that human faculties are not suited to know the ultimate nature of things. He drew the religious implications of these views in his most influential work, The Limits of Religious Thought, by arguing that God is rationally inconceivable and that the only available conception of God is an analogical one derived from revelation. From this he concluded that religious dogma is immune from rational criticism. In the ensuing controversy Mansel was criticized by Spenser, Thomas Henry Huxley, and J. S. Mill.
many-valued logic, a logic that rejects the principle of bivalence: every proposition is true or false. However, there are two forms of rejection: the truth-functional mode (many-valued logic proper), where propositions may take many values beyond simple truth and falsity, values functionally determined by the values of their components; and the truth-value gap mode, in which the only values are truth and falsity, but propositions may have neither. What value they do or do not have is not determined by the values or lack of values of their constituents. Many-valued logic has its origins in the work of Lukasiewicz and (independently) Post around 1920, in the first development of truth tables and semantic methods. Lukasiewicz’s philosophical motivation for his three-valued calculus was to deal with propositions whose truth-value was open or “possible” – e.g., propositions about the future. He proposed they might take a third value. Let 1 represent truth, 0 falsity, and the third value be, say, ½. We take Ý (not) and P (implication) as primitive, letting v(ÝA) % 1 † v(A) and v(A P B) % min(1,1 † v(A)!v(B)). These valuations may be displayed: Lukasiewicz generalized the idea in 1922, to allow first any finite number of values, and finally infinitely, even continuum-many values (between 0 and 1). One can then no longer represent the functionality by a matrix; however, the formulas given above can still be applied. Wajsberg axiomatized Lukasiewicz’s calculus in 1931. In 1953 Lukasiewicz published a four-valued extensional modal logic. In 1921, Post presented an m-valued calculus, with values 0 (truth), . . . , m † 1 (falsity), and matrices defined on Ý and v (or): v(ÝA) % 1 ! v(A) (modulo m) and v(AvB) % min (v(A),v(B)). Translating this for comparison into the same framework as above, we obtain the matrices (with 1 for truth and 0 for falsity): The strange cyclic character of Ý makes Post’s system difficult to interpret – though he did give one in terms of sequences of classical propositions. A different motivation led to a system with three values developed by Bochvar in 1939, namely, to find a solution to the logical paradoxes. (Lukasiewicz had noted that his three-valued system was free of antinomies.) The third value is indeterminate (so arguably Bochvar’s system is actually one of gaps), and any combination of values one of which is indeterminate is indeterminate; otherwise, on the determinate values, the matrices are classical. Thus we obtain for Ý and P, using 1, ½, and 0 as above: In order to develop a logic of many values, one needs to characterize the notion of a thesis, or logical truth. The standard way to do this in manyvalued logic is to separate the values into designated and undesignated. Effectively, this is to reintroduce bivalence, now in the form: Every proposition is either designated or undesignated. Thus in Lukasiewicz’s scheme, 1 (truth) is the only designated value; in Post’s, any initial segment 0, . . . , n † 1, where n‹m (0 as truth). In general, one can think of the various designated values as types of truth, or ways a proposition may be true, and the undesignated ones as ways it can be false. Then a proposition is a thesis if and only if it takes only designated values. For example, p P p is, but p 7 Ýp is not, a Lukasiewicz thesis. However, certain matrices may generate no logical truths by this method, e.g., the Bochvar matrices give ½ for every formula any of whose variables is indeterminate. If both 1 and ½ were designated, all theses of classical logic would be theses; if only 1, no theses result. So the distinction from classical logic is lost. Bochvar’s solution was to add an external assertion and negation. But this in turn runs the risk of undercutting the whole philosophical motivation, if the external negation is used in a Russell-type paradox. One alternative is to concentrate on consequence: A is a consequence of a set of formulas X if for every assignment of values either no member of X is designated or A is. Bochvar’s consequence relation (with only 1 designated) results from restricting classical consequence so that every variable in A occurs in some member of X. There is little technical difficulty in extending many-valued logic to the logic of predicates and quantifiers. For example, in Lukasiewicz’s logic, v(E xA) % min {v(A(a/x)): a 1. D}, where D is, say, some set of constants whose assignments exhaust the domain. This interprets the universal quantifier as an “infinite” conjunction. In 1965, Zadeh introduced the idea of fuzzy sets, whose membership relation allows indeterminacies: it is a function into the unit interval [0,1], where 1 means definitely in, 0 definitely out. One philosophical application is to the sorites paradox, that of the heap. Instead of insisting that there be a sharp cutoff in number of grains between a heap and a non-heap, or between red and, say, yellow, one can introduce a spectrum of indeterminacy, as definite applications of a concept shade off into less clear ones. Nonetheless, many have found the idea of assigning further definite values, beyond truth and falsity, unintuitive, and have instead looked to develop a scheme that encompasses truthvalue gaps. One application of this idea is found in Kleene’s strong and weak matrices of 1938. Kleene’s motivation was to develop a logic of partial functions. For certain arguments, these give no definite value; but the function may later be extended so that in such cases a definite value is given. Kleene’s constraint, therefore, was that the matrices be regular: no combination is given a definite value that might later be changed; moreover, on the definite values the matrices must be classical. The weak matrices are as for Bochvar. The strong matrices yield (1 for truth, 0 for falsity, and u for indeterminacy): An alternative approach to truth-value gaps was presented by Bas van Fraassen in the 1960s. Suppose v(A) is undefined if v(B) is undefined for any subformula B of A. Let a classical extension of a truth-value assignment v be any assignment that matches v on 0 and 1 and assigns either 0 or 1 whenever v assigns no value. Then we can define a supervaluation w over v: w(A) % 1 if the value of A on all classical extensions of v is 1, 0 if it is 0 and undefined otherwise. A is valid if w(A) % 1 for all supervaluations w (over arbitrary valuations). By this method, excluded middle, e.g., comes out valid, since it takes 1 in all classical extensions of any partial valuation. Van Fraassen presented several applications of the supervaluation technique. One is to free logic, logic in which empty terms are admitted.
Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976), Chinese Communist leader, founder of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He believed that Marxist ideas must be adapted to China. Contrary to the Marxist orthodoxy, which emphasized workers, Mao organized peasants in the countryside. His philosophical writings include On Practice (1937) and On Contradiction (1937), synthesizing dialectical materialism and traditional Chinese philosophy. In his later years he departed from the gradual strategy of his On New Democracy (1940) and adopted increasingly radical means to change China. Finally he started the Cultural Revolution in 1967 and plunged China into disaster.
Marcel, Gabriel (1889–1973), French philosopher and playwright, a major representative of French existential thought. He was a member of the Academy of Political and Social Science of the Institute of France. Musician, drama critic, and lecturer of international renown, he authored thirty plays and as many philosophic essays. He considered his principal contribution to be that of a philosopher-dramatist. Together, his dramatic and philosophic works cut a path for Mao Tse-tung Marcel, Gabriel 534 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 534 the reasoned exercise of freedom to enhance the dignity of human life. The conflicts and challenges of his own life he brought to the light of the theater; his philosophic works followed as efforts to discern critically through rigorous, reasoned analyses the alternative options life offers. His dramatic masterpiece, The Broken World, compassionately portrayed the devastating sense of emptiness, superficial activities, and fractured relationships that plague the modern era. This play cleared a way for Marcel to transcend nineteenth-century British and German idealism, articulate his distinction between problem and mystery, and evolve an existential approach that reflectively clarified mysteries that can provide depth and meaningfulness to human life. In the essay “On the Ontological Mystery,” a philosophic sequel to The Broken World, Marcel confronted the questions “Who am I? – Is Being empty or full?” He explored the regions of body or incarnate being, intersubjectivity, and transcendence. His research focused principally on intersubjectivity clarifying the requisite attitudes and essential characteristics of I-Thou encounters, interpersonal relations, commitment and creative fidelity – notions he also developed in Homo Viator (1945) and Creative Fidelity (1940). Marcel’s thought balanced despair and hope, infidelity and fidelity, self-deception and a spirit of truth. He recognized both the role of freedom and the role of fundamental attitudes or prephilosophic dispositions, as these influence one’s way of being and the interpretation of life’s meaning. Concern for the presence of loved ones who have died appears in both Marcel’s dramatic and philosophic works, notably in Presence and Immortality. This concern, coupled with his reflections on intersubjectivity, led him to explore how a human subject can experience the presence of God or the presence of loved ones from beyond death. Through personal experience, dramatic imagination, and philosophic investigation, he discovered that such presence can be experienced principally by way of inwardness and depth. “Presence” is a spiritual influx that profoundly affects one’s being, uplifting it and enriching one’s personal resources. While it does depend on a person’s being open and permeable, presence is not something that the person can summon forth. A conferral or presence is always a gratuitous gift, coauthored and marked by its signal benefit, an incitement to create. So Marcel’s reflection on interpersonal communion enabled him to conceive philosophically how God can be present to a person as a life-giving and personalizing force whose benefit is always an incitement to create.
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (from 161) and philosopher. Author of twelve books of Meditations (Greek title, To Himself), Marcus Aurelius is principally interesting in the history of Stoic philosophy (of which he was a diligent student) for his ethical self-portrait. Except for the first book, detailing his gratitude to his family, friends, and teachers, the aphorisms are arranged in no order; many were written in camp during military campaigns. They reflect both the Old Stoa and the more eclectic views of Posidonius, with whom he holds that involvement in public affairs is a moral duty. Marcus, in accord with Stoicism, considers immortality doubtful; happiness lies in patient acceptance of the will of the panentheistic Stoic God, the material soul of a material universe. Anger, like all emotions, is forbidden the Stoic emperor: he exhorts himself to compassion for the weak and evil among his subjects. “Do not be turned into ‘Caesar,’ or dyed by the purple: for that happens” (6.30). “It is the privilege of a human being to love even those who stumble” (7.22). Sayings like these, rather than technical arguments, give the book its place in literary history.
Marcuse: philosopher who reinterpreted the ideas of Marx and Freud. Marcuse’s work is among the most systematic and philosophical of the Frankfurt School theorists. After an initial attempt to unify Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger in an ontology of historicity in his habilitation on Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932), Marcuse was occupied during the 1930s with the problem of truth in a critical historical social theory, defending a contextindependent notion of truth against relativizing tendencies of the sociology of knowledge. Marcuse thought Hegel’s “dialectics” provided an alternative to relativism, empiricism, and positivism and even developed a revolutionary interpretation of the Hegelian legacy in Reason and Revolution (1941) opposed to Popper’s totalitarian one. After World War II, Marcuse appropriated Freud in the same way that he had appropriated Hegel before the war, using his basic concepts for a critical theory of the repressive character of civilization in Eros and Civilization (1955). In many respects, this book comes closer to presenting a positive conception of reason and Enlightenment than any other work of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse argued that civilization has been antagonistic to happiness and freedom through its constant struggle against basic human instincts. According to Marcuse, human existence is grounded in Eros, but these impulses depend upon and are shaped by labor. By synthesizing Marx and Freud, Marcuse holds out the utopian possibility of happiness and freedom in the unity of Eros and labor, which at the very least points toward the reduction of “surplus repression” as the goal of a rational economy and emancipatory social criticism. This was also the goal of his aesthetic theory as developed in The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). In One Dimensional Man (1964) and other writings, Marcuse provides an analysis of why the potential for a free and rational society has never been realized: in the irrationality of the current social totality, its creation and manipulation of false needs (or “repressive desublimation”), and hostility toward nature. Perhaps no other Frankfurt School philosopher has had as much popular influence as Marcuse, as evidenced by his reception in the student and ecology movements.
Mariana: Jesuit historian and political philosopher. Born in Talavera de la Reina, he studied at Alcalá de Henares and taught at Rome, Sicily, and Paris. His political ideas are contained in De rege et regis institutione and De monetae mutatione. Mariana held that political power rests on the community of citizens, and the power of the monarch derives from the people. The natural state of humanity did not include, as Vitoria held, government and other political institutions. The state of nature was one of justice in which all possessions were held in common, and cooperation characterized human relations. Private property is the result of technological advances that produced jealousy and strife. Antedating both Hobbes and Rousseau, Mariana argued that humans made a contract and delegated their political power to leaders in order to eliminate injustice and strife. However, only the people have the right to change the law. A monarch who does not follow the law and ceases to act for the citizens’ welfare may be forcibly removed. Tyrannicide is thus justifiable under some circumstances.
Maritain: philosopher whose innovative interpretation of Aquinas’s philosophy made him a central figure in Neo-Thomism. Bergson’s teaching saved him from metaphysical despair and a suicide pact with his fiancée. After his discovery of Aquinas, he rejected Bergsonism for a realistic account of the concept and a unified theory of knowledge, aligning the empirical sciences with the philosophy of nature, metaphysics, theology, and mysticism in Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge (1932). Maritain opposed the skepticism and idealism that severed the mind from sensibility, typified by the “angelism” of Descartes’s intuitionism. Maritain traced the practical effects of angelism in art, politics, and religion. His Art and Scholasticism (1920) employs ancient and medieval notions of art as a virtue and beauty as a transcendental aspect of being. In politics, especially Man and the State (1961), Maritain stressed the distinction between the person and the individual, the ontological foundation of natural rights, the religious origins of the democratic ideal, and the importance of the common good. He also argued for the possibility of philosophy informed by the data of revelation without compromising its integrity, and an Integral Humanism (1936) that affirms the political order while upholding the eternal destiny of the human person.
Marsilius of Inghen, philosopher, born near Nijmegen, Marsilius studied under Buridan, taught at Paris, then moved to the newly founded ‘studium generale’ at Heidelberg, where he and Albert of Saxony established nominalism in Germany. In logic, he produced an Ockhamist revision of the Tractatus of Peter of Spain, often published as Textus dialectices in early sixteenthcentury Germany, and a commentary on Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. He developed Buridan’s theory of impetus in his own way, accepted Bradwardine’s account of the proportions of velocities, and adopted Nicholas of Oresme’s doctrine of intension and remission of forms, applying the new physics in his commentaries on Aristotle’s physical works. In theology he followed Ockham’s skeptical emphasis on faith, allowing that one might prove the existence of God along Scotistic lines, but insisting that, since natural philosophy could not accommodate the creation of the universe ex nihilo, God’s omnipotence was known only through faith.
Mainardini -- Marsilius of Padua, in Italian, Marsilio dei Mainardini (1275/80–1342), Italian political theorist. He served as rector of the University of Paris between 1312 and 1313; his anti-papal views forced him to flee Paris (1326) for Nuremberg, where he was political and ecclesiastic adviser of Louis of Bavaria. His major work, Defensor pacis (“Defender of Peace,” 1324), attacks the doctrine of the supremacy of the pope and argues that the authority of a secular ruler elected to represent the people is superior to the authority of the papacy and priesthood in both temporal and spiritual affairs. Three basic claims of Marsilius’s theory are that reason, not instinct or God, allows us to know what is just and conduces to the flourishing of human society; that governments need to enforce obedience to the laws by coercive measures; and that political power ultimately resides in the people. He was influenced by Aristotle’s ideal of the state as necessary to foster human flourishing. His thought is regarded as a major step in the history of political philosophy and one of the first defenses of republicanism.
martineau: English philosopher of religion and ethical intuitionist. As a minister and a professor, Martineau defended Unitarianism and opposed pantheism. In A Study of Religion (1888) Martineau agreed with Kant that reality as we experience it is the work of the mind, but he saw no reason to doubt his intuitive conviction that the phenomenal world corresponds to a real world of enduring, causally related objects. He believed that the only intelligible notion of causation is given by willing and concluded that reality is the expression of a divine will that is also the source of moral authority. In Types of Ethical Theory he claimed that the fundamental fact of ethics is the human tendency to approve and disapprove of the motives leading to voluntary actions, actions in which there are two motives present to consciousness. After freely choosing one of the motives, the agent can determine which action best expresses it. Since Martineau thought that agents intuitively know through conscience which motive is higher, the core of his ethical theory is a ranking of the thirteen principal motives, the highest of which is reverence.
Marx: cf. Grice, “Ontological marxism.” German social philosopher, economic theorist, and revolutionary. He lived and worked as a journalist in Cologne, Paris, and Brussels. After the unsuccessful 1848 revolutions in Europe, he settled in London, doing research and writing and earning some money as correspondent for the New York Tribune. In early writings, he articulated his critique of the religiously and politically conservative implications of the then-reigning philosophy of Hegel, finding there an acceptance of existing private property relationships and of the alienation generated by them. Marx understood alienation as a state of radical disharmony (1) among individuals, (2) between them and their own life activity, or labor, and (3) between individuals and their system of production. Later, in his masterwork Capital (1867, 1885, 1894), Marx employed Hegel’s method of dialectic to generate an internal critique of the theory and practice of capitalism, showing that, under assumptions (notably that human labor is the source of economic value) found in such earlier theorists as Adam Smith, this system must undergo increasingly severe crises, resulting in the eventual seizure of control of the increasingly centralized means of production (factories, large farms, etc.) from the relatively small class of capitalist proprietors by the previously impoverished non-owners (the proletariat) in the interest of a thenceforth classless society. Marx’s early writings, somewhat utopian in tone, most never published during his lifetime, emphasize social ethics and ontology. In them, he characterizes his position as a “humanism” and a “naturalism.” In the Theses on Feuerbach, he charts a middle path between Hegel’s idealist account of the nature of history as the selfunfolding of spirit and what Marx regards as the ahistorical, mechanistic, and passive materialist philosophy of Feuerbach; Marx proposes a conception of history as forged by human activity, or praxis, within determinate material conditions that vary by time and place. In later Marxism, this general position is often labeled dialectical materialism. Marx began radically to question the nature of philosophy, coming to view it as ideology, i.e., a thought system parading as autonomous but in fact dependent on the material conditions of the society in which it is produced. The tone of Capital is therefore on the whole less philosophical and moralistic, more social scientific and tending toward historical determinism, than that of the earlier writings, but punctuated by bursts of indignation against the baneful effects of capitalism’s profit orientation and references to the “society of associated producers” (socialism or communism) that would, or could, replace capitalist society. His enthusiastic predictions of immanent worldwide revolutionary changes, in various letters, articles, and the famous Communist Manifesto (1848; jointly authored with his close collaborator, Friedrich Engels), depart from the generally more hypothetical character of the text of Capital itself. The linchpin that perhaps best connects Marx’s earlier and later thought and guarantees his enduring relevance as a social philosopher is his analysis of the role of human labor power as a peculiar type of commodity within a system of commodity exchange (his theory of surplus value). Labor’s peculiarity, according to him, lies in its capacity actively to generate more exchange value than it itself costs employers as subsistence wages. But to treat human beings as profit-generating commodities risks neglecting to treat them as human beings. Marxism, the philosophy of Karl Marx, or any of several systems of thought or approaches to social criticism derived from Marx. The term is also applied, incorrectly, to certain sociopolitical structures created by dominant Communist parties during the mid-twentieth century. Karl Marx himself, apprised of the ideas of certain French critics who invoked his name, remarked that he knew at least that he was not a Marxist. The fact that his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, a popularizer with a greater interest than Marx in the natural sciences, outlived him and wrote, among other things, a “dialectics of nature” that purported to discover certain universal natural laws, added to the confusion. Lenin, the leading Russian Communist revolutionary, near the end of his life discovered previously unacknowledged connections between Marx’s Capital (1867) and Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812–16) and concluded (in his Philosophical Notebooks) that Marxists for a half-century had not understood Marx. Specific political agendas of, among others, the Marxist faction within the turn-of-the-century German Social Democratic Party, the Bolshevik faction of Russian socialists led by Lenin, and later governments and parties claiming allegiance to “Marxist-Leninist principles” have contributed to reinterpretations. For several decades in the Soviet Union and countries allied with it, a broad agreement concerning fundamental Marxist doctrines was established and politically enforced, resulting in a doctrinaire version labeled “orthodox Marxism” and virtually ensuring the widespread, wholesale rejection of Marxism as such when dissidents taught to accept this version as authentic Marxism came to power. Marx never wrote a systematic exposition of his thought, which in any case drastically changed emphases across time and included elements of history, economics, and sociology as well as more traditional philosophical concerns. In one letter he specifically warns against regarding his historical account of Western capitalism as a transcendental analysis of the supposedly necessary historical development of any and all societies at a certain time. It is thus somewhat paradoxical that Marxism is often identified as a “totalizing” if not “totalitarian” system by postmodernist philosophers who reject global theories or “grand narratives” as inherently invalid. However, the evolution of Marxism since Marx’s time helps explain this identification. That “orthodox” Marxism would place heavy emphasis on historical determinism – the inevitability of a certain general sequence of events leading to the replacement of capitalism by a socialist economic system (in which, according to a formula in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, each person would be remunerated according to his/her work) and eventually by a communist one (remuneration in accordance with individual needs) – was foreshadowed by Plekhanov. In The Role of the Individual in History, he portrayed individual idiosyncrasies as accidental: e.g., had Napoleon not existed the general course of history would not have turned out differently. In Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin offered epistemological reinforcement for the notion that Marxism is the uniquely true worldview by defending a “copy” or “reflection” theory of knowledge according to which true concepts simply mirror objective reality, like photographs. Elsewhere, however, he argued against “economism,” the inference that the historical inevitability of communism’s victory obviated political activism. Lenin instead maintained that, at least under the repressive political conditions of czarist Russia, only a clandestine party of professional revolutionaries, acting as the vanguard of the working class and in its interests, could produce fundamental change. Later, during the long political reign of Josef Stalin, the hegemonic Communist Party of the USSR was identified as the supreme interpreter of these interests, thus justifying totalitarian rule. So-called Western Marxism opposed this “orthodox” version, although the writings of one of its foremost early representatives, Georg Lukacs, who brilliantly perceived the close connection between Hegel’s philosophy and the early thought of Marx before the unpublished manuscripts proving this connection had been retrieved from archives, actually tended to reinforce both the view that the party incarnated the ideal interests of the proletariat (see his History and Class Consciousness) and an aesthetics favoring the art of “socialist realism” over more experimental forms. His contemporary, Karl Korsch, in Marxism as Philosophy, instead saw Marxism as above all a heuristic method, pointing to salient phenomena (e.g., social class, material conditioning) generally neglected by other philosophies. His counsel was in effect followed by the Frankfurt School of critical theory, including Walter Benjamin in the area of aesthetics, Theodor Adorno in social criticism, and Wilhelm Reich in psychology. A spate of “new Marxisms” – the relative degrees of their fidelity to Marx’s original thought cannot be weighed here – developed, especially in the wake of the gradual rediscovery of Marx’s more ethically oriented, less deterministic early writings. Among the names meriting special mention in this context are Ernst Bloch, who explored Marxism’s connection with utopian thinking; Herbert Marcuse, critic of the “one-dimensionality” of industrial society; the Praxis school (after the name of their journal and in view of their concern with analyzing social practices) of Yugoslav philosophers; and the later Jean-Paul Sartre. Also worthy of note are the writings, many of them composed in prison under Mussolini’s Italian Fascist rule, of Antonio Gramsci, who stressed the role of cultural factors in determining what is dominant politically and ideologically at any given time. Simultaneous with the decline and fall of regimes in which “orthodox Marxism” was officially privileged has been the recent development of new approaches, loosely connected by virtue of their utilization of techniques favored by British and American philosophers, collectively known as analytic Marxism. Problems of justice, theories of history, and the questionable nature of Marx’s theory of surplus value have been special concerns to these writers. This development suggests that the current unfashionableness of Marxism in many circles, due largely to its understandable but misleading identification with the aforementioned regimes, is itself only a temporary phenomenon, even if future Marxisms are likely to range even further from Marx’s own specific concerns while still sharing his commitment to identifying, explaining, and criticizing hierarchies of dominance and subordination, particularly those of an economic order, in human society. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Ontological marxim.”

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