The Grice Club: IMPLICATVRA, in 12 volumes; vol. X

palæo-Griceian: Within the Oxford group, Grice was the first, and it’s difficult to find a precursor. It’s obviously Grice was not motivated to create or design his manoeuvre to oppose a view by Ryle – who cared about Ryle in the playgroup? None – It is obviously more clear that Grice cared a hoot about Vitters, Benjamin, and Malcolm. So that leaves us with the philosophers Grice personally knew. And we are sure he was more interested in criticizing Austin than his own tutee Strawson. So ths leaves us with Austin. Grice’s manoeuvre was intended for Austin – but he waited for Austin’s demise to present it. Even though the sources were publications that were out there before Austin died (“Other minds,” “A plea for excuses”). So Grice is saying that Austin is wrong, as he is. In order of seniority, the next was Hart (who Grice mocked about ‘carefully’ in Prolegomena. Then came more or less same-generational Hare (who was not too friendly with Grice) and ‘to say ‘x is good’ is to recommend x’ (a ‘performatory fallacy’) and Strawson with ‘true’ and, say, ‘if.’ So, back to the palaeo-Griceian, surely nobody was in a position to feel a motivation to criticise Austin, Hart, Hare, and Strawson! When philosophers mention this or that palaeo-Griceian philosopher, surely the motivation was different. And a philosophical manoevre COMES with a motivation. If we identify some previous (even Oxonian) philosopher who was into the thing Grice is, it would not have Austin, Hart, Hare or Strawson as ‘opponents.’ And of course it’s worse with post-Griceians. Because, as Grice says, there was no othe time than post-war Oxford philosophy where “my manoeuvre would have make sense.’ If it does, as it may, post-Grice, it’s “as derivative” of “the type of thing we were doing back in the day. And it’s no fun anymore.” “Neo-Griceian” is possibly a misnomer. As Grice notes, “usually you add ‘neo-’ to sell; that’s why, jokingly, I call Strawson a neo-traditionalist; as if he were a bit of a neo-con, another oxymoron, as he was!’That is H. P. Grice was the first member of the play group to come up with a system of ‘pragmatic rules.’ Or perhaps he wasn’t. In any case, palaeo-Griceian refers to any attempt by someone who is an Oxonian English philosopher who suggested something like H. P. Grice later did! There are palaeo-Griceian suggestions in Bradley – “Logic” --, Bosanquet, J. C. Wilson (“Statement and inference”) and a few others. Within those who interacted with Grice to provoke him into the ‘pragmatic rule’ account were two members of the play group. One was not English, but a Scot: G. A. Paul. Paul had been to ‘the other place,’ and was at Oxford trying to spread Witters’s doctrine. The bafflement one gets from “I certainly don’t wish to cast any doubt on the matter, but that pillar box seems red to me; and the reason why it is does, it’s because it is red, and its redness causes in my sense of vision the sense-datum that the thing is red.” Grice admits that he first came out with the idea when confronted with this example. Mainly Grice’s motivation is to hold that such a ‘statement’ (if statement, it is, -- vide Bar-Hillel) is true. The other member was English: P. F. Strawson. And Grice notes that it was Strawson’s Introduction to logical theory that motivated him to apply a technique which had proved successful in the area of the philosophy of perception to this idea by Strawson that Whitehead and Russell are ‘incorrect.’ Again, Grice’s treatment concerns holding a ‘statement’ to be ‘true.’ Besides these two primary cases, there are others. First, is the list of theses in “Causal Theory.” None of them are assigned to a particular philosopher, so the research may be conducted towards the identification of these. The theses are, besides the one he is himself dealing, the sense-datum ‘doubt or denial’ implicaturum: One, What is actual is not also possible. Two, What is known to be the case is not also believed to be the case. Three, Moore was guilty of misusing the lexeme ‘know.’ Four, To say that someone is responsible is to say that he is accountable for something condemnable. Six, A horse cannot look like a horse. Now, in “Prolegomena” he add further cases. Again, since this are palaeo-Griceian, it may be a matter of tracing the earliest occurrences. In “Prolegomena,” Grice divides the examples in Three Groups. The last is an easy one to identity: the ‘performatory’ approach: for which he gives the example by Strawson on ‘true,’ and mentions two other cases: a performatory use of ‘I know’ for I guarantee; and the performatory use of ‘good’ for ‘I approve’ (Ogden). The second group is easy to identify since it’s a central concern and it is exactly Strawson’s attack on Whitehead and Russell. But Grice is clear here. It is mainly with regard to ‘if’ that he wants to discuss Strawson, and for which he quotes him at large. Before talking about ‘if’, he mentions the co-ordinating connectives ‘and’ and ‘or’, without giving a source. So, here there is a lot to research about the thesis as held by other philosophers even at Oxford (where, however, ‘logic’ was never considered a part of philosophy proper). The first group is the most varied, and easier to generalise, because it refers to any ‘sub-expression’ held to occur in a full expression which is held to be ‘inappropriate.’ Those who judge the utterance to be inappropriate are sometimes named. Grice starts with Ryle and The Concept of Mind – palaeo-Griceian, in that it surely belongs to Grice’s previous generation. It concerns the use of the adverb ‘voluntary’ and Grice is careful to cite Ryle’s description of the case, using words like ‘incorrect,’ and that a ‘sense’ claimed by philosophers is an absurd one. Then there is a third member of the playgroup – other than G. A. Paul and P. F. Strawson – the Master Who Wobbles, J. L. Austin. Grice likes the way Austin offers himself as a good target – Austin was dead by then, and Grice would otherwise not have even tried – Austin uses variables: notably Mly, and a general thesis, ‘no modification without aberration.’ But basically, Grice agrees that it’s all about the ‘philosophy of action.’ So in describing an agent’s action, the addition of an adverb makes the whole thing inappropriate. This may relate to at least one example in “Causal” involving ‘responsible.’ While Grice there used the noun and adjective, surely it can be turned into an adverb. The fourth member of the playgroup comes next: H. L. A. Hart. Grice laughs at Hart’s idea that to add ‘carefully’ in the description of an action the utterer is committed to the idea that the agent THINKS the steps taken for the performance are reasonable. There is a thesis he mentions then which alla “Causal Theory,” gets uncredited – about ‘trying.’ But he does suggest Witters. And then there is his own ‘doubt or denial’ re: G. A. Paul, and another one in the field of the philosophy of perception that he had already mentioned vaguely in “Causal”: a horse cannot look like a horse. Here he quotes Witters in extenso, re: ‘seeing as.’ While Grice mentions ‘philosophy of action,’ there is at least one example involving ‘philosophical psychology’: B. S. Benjamin on C. D. Broad on the factiveness of ‘remember.’ When one thinks of all the applications that the ‘conversational model’ has endured, one realizes that unless your background is philosophical, you are bound not to realise the centrality of Grice’s thesis for philosophical methodology.

paley: English moral philosopher and theologian. He was born in Peterborough and educated at Cambridge, where he lectured in moral philosophy, divinity, and Grecian New Testament before assuming a series of posts in the C. of E., the last as archdeacon of Carlisle. The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy first introduced utilitarianism to a wide public. Moral obligation is created by a divine command “coupled” with the expectation of everlasting rewards or punishments. While God’s commands can be ascertained “from Scripture and the light of nature,” Paley emphasizes the latter. Since God wills human welfare, the rightness or wrongness of actions is determined by their “tendency to promote or diminish the general happiness.” Horae Pauline: Or the Truth of the Scripture History of St Paul Evinced appeared in 1790, A View of the Evidences of Christianity in 1794. The latter defends the authenticity of the Christian miracles against Hume. Natural Theology 1802 provides a design argument for God’s existence and a demonstration of his attributes. Nature exhibits abundant contrivances whose “several parts are framed and put together for a purpose.” These contrivances establish the existence of a powerful, wise, benevolent designer. They cannot show that its power and wisdom are unlimited, however, and “omnipotence” and “omniscience” are mere “superlatives.” Paley’s Principles and Evidences served as textbooks in England and America well into the nineteenth century.

panpsychism, the doctrine that the physical world is pervasively psychical, sentient or conscious understood as equivalent. The idea, usually, is that it is articulated into certain ultimate units or particles, momentary or enduring, each with its own distinct charge of sentience or consciousness, and that some more complex physical units possess a sentience emergent from the interaction between the charges of sentience pertaining to their parts, sometimes down through a series of levels of articulation into sentient units. Animal consciousness is the overall sentience pertaining to some substantial part or aspect of the brain, while each neuron may have its own individual charge of sentience, as may each included atom and subatomic particle. Elsewhere the only sentient units may be at the atomic and subatomic level. Two differently motivated versions of the doctrine should be distinguished. The first implies no particular view about the nature of matter, and regards the sentience pertaining to each unit as an extra to its physical nature. Its point is to explain animal and human consciousness as emerging from the interaction and perhaps fusion of more pervasive sentient units. The better motivated, second version holds that the inner essence of matter is unknown. We know only structural facts about the physical or facts about its effects on sentience like our own. Panpsychists hypothesize that the otherwise unknown inner essence of matter consists in sentience or consciousness articulated into the units we identify externally as fundamental particles, or as a supervening character pertaining to complexes of such or complexes of complexes, etc. Panpsychists can thus uniquely combine the idealist claim that there can be no reality without consciousness with rejection of any subjectivist reduction of the physical world to human experience of it. Modern versions of panpsychism e.g. of Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Sprigge are only partly akin to hylozoism as it occurred in ancient thought. Note that neither version need claim that every physical object possesses consciousness; no one supposes that a team of conscious cricketers must itself be conscious.

pantheism, the view that God is identical with everything. It may be seen as the result of two tendencies: an intense religious spirit and the belief that all reality is in some way united. Pantheism should be distinguished from panentheism, the view that God is in all things. Just as water might saturate a sponge and in that way be in the entire sponge, but not be identical with the sponge, God might be in everything without being identical with everything. Spinoza is the most distinguished pantheist in Western philosophy. He argued that since substance is completely self-sufficient, and only God is self-sufficient, God is the only substance. In other words, God is everything. Hegel is also sometimes considered a pantheist since he identifies God with the totality of being. Many people think that pantheism is tantamount to atheism, because they believe that theism requires that God transcend ordinary, sensible reality at least to some degree. It is not obvious that theism requires a transcendent or Panaetius pantheism 640 640 personal notion of God; and one might claim that the belief that it does is the result of an anthropomorphic view of God. In Eastern philosophy, especially the Vedic tradition of philosophy, pantheism is part of a rejection of polytheism. The apparent multiplicity of reality is illusion. What is ultimately real or divine is Brahman.

pantheismusstreit: a debate primarily between Jacobi and Mendelssohn, although it also included Lessing, Kant, and Goethe. The basic issue concerned what pantheism is and whether every pantheists is an atheist. In particular, it concerned whether Spinoza was a pantheist, and if so, whether he was an atheist; and how close Lessing’s thought was to Spinoza’s. The standard view, propounded by Bayle and Leibniz, was that Spinoza’s pantheism was a thin veil for his atheism. Lessing and Goethe did not accept this harsh interpretation of him. They believed that his pantheism avoided the alienating transcendence of the standard Judeo-Christian concept of God. It was debated whether Lessing was a Spinozist or some form of theistic pantheist. Lessing was critical of dogmatic religions and denied that there was any revelation given to all people for rational acceptance. He may have told Jacobi that he was a Spinozist; but he may also have been speaking ironically or hypothetically.

paracelsus, pseudonym of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, philosopher. He pursued medical studies at various G. and Austrian universities, probably completing them at Ferrara. Thereafter he had little to do with the academic world, apart from a brief and stormy period as professor of medicine at Basle 152728. Instead, he worked first as a military surgeon and later as an itinerant physician in G.y, Austria, and Switzerland. His works were mainly in G. rather than Latin, and only a few were published during his lifetime. His importance for medical practice lay in his insistence on observation and experiment, and his use of chemical methods for preparing drugs. The success of Paracelsian medicine and chemistry in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, however, largely due to the theoretical background he provided. He firmly rejected the classical medical inheritance, particularly Galen’s explanation of disease as an imbalance of humors; he drew on a combination of biblical sources, G. mysticism, alchemy, and Neoplatonic magic as found in Ficino to present a unified view of humankind and the universe. He saw man as a microcosm, reflecting the nature of the divine world through his immortal soul, the sidereal world through his astral body or vital principle, and the terrestrial world through his visible body. Knowledge requires union with the object, but because elements of all the worlds are found in man, he can acquire knowledge of the universe and of God, as partially revealed in nature. The physician needs knowledge of vital principles called astra in order to heal. Disease is caused by external agents that can affect the human vital principle as well as the visible body. Chemical methods are employed to isolate the appropriate vital principles in minerals and herbs, and these are used as antidotes. Paracelsus further held that matter contains three principles, sulfur, mercury, and salt. As a result, he thought it was possible to transform one metal into another by varying the proportions of the fundamental principles; and that such transformations could also be used in the production of drugs.

para-consistency: cf. paralogism -- the property of a logic in which one cannot derive all statements from a contradiction. What is objectionable about contradictions, from the standpoint of classical logic, is not just that they are false but that they imply any statement whatsoever: one who accepts a contradiction is thereby committed to accepting everything. In paraconsistent logics, however, such as relevance logics, contradictions are isolated inferentially and thus rendered relatively harmless. The interest in such logics stems from the fact that people sometimes continue to work in inconsistent theories even after the inconsistency has been exposed, and do so without inferring everything. Whether this phenomenon can be explained satisfactorily by the classical logician or shows instead that the underlying logic of, e.g., science and mathematics is some non-classical paraconsistent logic, is disputed. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Implicatura as para-semantic.”

para-philosophy – used by Austin, borrowed (but never returned) by Grice.

para-semantic -- before vowels, par-, word-forming element, originally in Greek-derived words, meaning "alongside, beyond; altered; contrary; irregular, abnormal," from Greek para- from para (prep.) "beside, near; issuing from; against, contrary to," from PIE *prea, from root *per- (1) "forward," hence "toward, near; against." Cognate with Old English for- "off, away." Mostly used in scientific and technical words; not usually regarded as a naturalized formative element in English.

paradigm-case argument: Grice tries to give the general form of this argument, as applied to Urmson, and Grice and Strawson. I wonder if Grice thought that STRAWSON’s appeal to resentment to prove freewill is paradigm case? The idiom was coined by Grice’s first tutee at St. John’s, G. N. A. Flew, and he applied it to ‘free will.’ Grice later used it to describe the philosophising by Urmson (in “Retrospetive”). he issue of analyticity is, as Locke puts it, the issue of whats trifle. That a triangle is trilateral Locke considers a trifling proposition, like Saffron is yellow. Lewes (who calls mathematical propositions analytic) describes the Kantian problem. The reductive analysis of meaning Grice offers depends on the analytic. Few Oxonian philosophers would follow Loar, D. Phil Oxon, under Warnock, in thinking of Grices conversational maxims as empirical inductive generalisations over functional states! Synthesis may do in the New World,but hardly in the Old! The locus classicus for the ordinary-language philosophical response to Quine in Two dogmas of empiricism. Grice and Strawson claim that is analytic does have an ordinary-language use, as attached two a type of behavioural conversational response. To an analytically false move (such as My neighbours three-year-old son is an adult) the addressee A is bound to utter, I dont understand you! You are not being figurative, are you? To a synthetically false move, on the other hand (such as My neighbours three-year-old understands Russells Theory of Types), the addressee A will jump with, Cant believe it! The topdogma of analyticity is for Grice very important to defend. Philosophy depends on it! He knows that to many his claim to fame is his In defence of a dogma, the topdogma of analyticity, no less. He eventually turns to a pragmatist justification of the distinction. This pragmatist justification is still in accordance with what he sees as the use of analytic in ordinary language. His infamous examples are as follows. My neighbours three-year old understands Russells Theory of Types. A: Hard to believe, but I will. My neighbours three-year old is an adult. Metaphorically? No. Then I dont understand you, and what youve just said is, in my scheme of things, analytically false. Ultimately, there are conversational criteria, based on this or that principle of conversational helfpulness. Grice is also circumstantially concerned with the synthetic a priori, and he would ask his childrens playmates: Can a sweater be red and green all over? No stripes allowed! The distinction is ultimately Kantian, but it had brought to the fore by the linguistic turn, Oxonian and other! In defence of a dogma, Two dogmas of empiricism, : the analytic-synthetic distinction. For Quine, there are two. Grice is mainly interested in the first one: that there is a distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. Grice considers Empiricism as a monster on his way to the Rationalist City of Eternal Truth. Grice came back time and again to explore the analytic-synthetic distinction. But his philosophy remained constant. His sympathy is for the practicality of it, its rationale. He sees it as involving formal calculi, rather than his own theory of conversation as rational co-operation which does not presuppose the analytic-synthetic distinction, even if it explains it! Grice would press the issue here: if one wants to prove that such a theory of conversation as rational co-operation has to be seen as philosophical, rather than some other way, some idea of analyticity may be needed to justify the philosophical enterprise. Cf. the synthetic a priori, that fascinated Grice most than anything Kantian else! Can a sweater be green and red all over? No stripes allowed. With In defence of a dogma, Grice and Strawson attack a New-World philosopher. Grice had previously collaborated with Strawson in an essay on Met. (actually a three-part piece, with Pears as the third author). The example Grice chooses to refute attack by Quine of the top-dogma is the Aristotelian idea of the peritrope, as Aristotle refutes Antiphasis in Met. (v. Ackrill, Burnyeat and Dancy). Grice explores chapter Γ 8 of Aristotles Met. . In Γ 8, Aristotle presents two self-refutation arguments against two theses, and calls the asserter, Antiphasis, T1 = Everything is true, and T2 = Everything is false, Metaph. Γ 8, 1012b13–18. Each thesis is exposed to the stock objection that it eliminates itself. An utterer who explicitly conveys that everything is true also makes the thesis opposite to his own true, so that his own is not true (for the opposite thesis denies that his is true), and any utterer U who explicitly conveys that everything is false also belies himself. Aristotle does not seem to be claiming that, if everything is true, it would also be true that it is false that everything is true and, that, therefore, Everything is true must be false: the final, crucial inference, from the premise if, p, ~p to the conclusion ~p is missing. But it is this extra inference that seems required to have a formal refutation of Antiphasiss T1 or T2 by consequentia mirabilis. The nature of the argument as a purely dialectical silencer of Antiphasis is confirmed by the case of T2, Everything is false. An utterer who explicitly conveys that everything is false unwittingly concedes, by self-application, that what he is saying must be false too. Again, the further and different conclusion Therefore; it is false that everything is false is missing. That proposal is thus self-defeating, self-contradictory (and comparable to Grices addressee using adult to apply to three-year old, without producing the creature), oxymoronic, and suicidal. This seems all that Aristotle is interested in establishing through the self-refutation stock objection. This is not to suggest that Aristotle did not believe that Everything is true or Everything is false is false, or that he excludes that he can prove its falsehood. Grice notes that this is not what Aristotle seems to be purporting to establish in 1012b13–18. This holds for a περιτροπή (peritrope) argument, but not for a περιγραφή (perigraphe) argument (συμβαίνει δὴ καὶ τὸ θρυλούμενον πᾶσι τοῖς τοιούτοις λόγοις, αὐτοὺς ἑαυτοὺς ἀναιρεῖν. ὁ μὲν γὰρ πάντα ἀληθῆ λέγων καὶ τὸν ἐναντίον αὑτοῦ λόγον ἀληθῆ ποιεῖ, ὥστε τὸν ἑαυτοῦ οὐκ ἀληθῆ (ὁ γὰρ ἐναντίος οὔ φησιν αὐτὸν ἀληθῆ), ὁ δὲ πάντα ψευδῆ καὶ αὐτὸς αὑτόν.) It may be emphasized that Aristotles argument does not contain an explicit application of consequentia mirabilis. Indeed, no extant self-refutation argument before Augustine, Grice is told by Mates, contains an explicit application of consequentia mirabilis. This observation is a good and important one, but Grice has doubts about the consequences one may draw from it. One may take the absence of an explicit application of consequentia mirabilis to be a sign of the purely dialectical nature of the self-refutation argument. This is questionable. The formulation of a self-refutation argument (as in Grices addressee, Sorry, I misused adult.) is often compressed and elliptical and involves this or that implicaturum. One usually assumes that this or that piece in a dialectical context has been omitted and should be supplied (or worked out, as Grice prefers) by the addressee. But in this or that case, it is equally possible to supply some other, non-dialectical piece of reasoning. In Aristotles arguments from Γ 8, e.g., the addressee may supply an inference to the effect that the thesis which has been shown to be self-refuting is not true. For if Aristotle takes the argument to establish that the thesis has its own contradictory version as a consequence, it must be obvious to Aristotle that the thesis is not true (since every consequence of a true thesis is true, and two contradictory theses cannot be simultaneously true). On the further assumption (that Grice makes explicit) that the principle of bivalence is applicable, Aristotle may even infer that the thesis is false. It is perfectly plausible to attribute such an inference to Aristotle and to supply it in his argument from Γ 8. On this account, there is no reason to think that the argument is of an intrinsically dialectical nature and cannot be adequately represented as a non-dialectical proof of the non-truth, or even falsity, of the thesis in question. It is indeed difficult to see signs of a dialectical exchange between two parties (of the type of which Grice and Strawson are champions) in Γ8, 1012b13–18. One piece of evidence is Aristotles reference to the person, the utterer, as Grice prefers who explicitly conveys or asserts (ὁ λέγων) that T1 or that T2. This reference by the Grecian philosopher to the Griceian utterer or asserter of the thesis that everything is true would be irrelevant if Aristotles aim is to prove something about T1s or T2s propositional content, independently of the act by the utterer of uttering its expression and thereby explicitly conveying it. However, it is not clear that this reference is essential to Aristotles argument. One may even doubt whether the Grecian philosopher is being that Griceian, and actually referring to the asserter of T1 or T2. The *implicit* (or implicated) grammatical Subjects of Aristotles ὁ λέγων (1012b15) might be λόγος, instead of the utterer qua asserter. λόγος is surely the implicit grammatical Subjects of ὁ λέγων shortly after ( 1012b21–22. 8). The passage may be taken to be concerned with λόγοι ‒ this or that statement, this or that thesis ‒ but not with its asserter. In the Prior Analytics, Aristotle states that no thesis (A three-year old is an adult) can necessarily imply its own contradictory (A three-year old is not an adult) (2.4, 57b13–14). One may appeal to this statement in order to argue for Aristotles claim that a self-refutation argument should NOT be analyzed as involving an implicit application of consequentia mirabilis. Thus, one should deny that Aristotles self-refutation argument establishes a necessary implication from the self-refuting thesis to its contradictory. However, this does not explain what other kind of consequence relation Aristotle takes the self-refutation argument to establish between the self-refuting thesis and its contradictory, although dialectical necessity has been suggested. Aristotles argument suffices to establish that Everything is false is either false or liar-paradoxical. If a thesis is liar-paradoxical (and Grice loved, and overused the expression), the assumption of its falsity leads to contradiction as well as the assumption of its truth. But Everything is false is only liar-paradoxical in the unlikely, for Aristotle perhaps impossible, event that everything distinct from this thesis is false. So, given the additional premise that there is at least one true item distinct from the thesis Everything is false, Aristotle can safely infer that the thesis is false. As for Aristotles ὁ γὰρ λέγων τὸν ἀληθῆ λόγον ἀληθῆ ἀληθής,, or eliding the γὰρ, ὁ λέγων τὸν ἀληθῆ λόγον ἀληθῆ ἀληθής, (ho legon ton alethe logon alethe alethes) may be rendered as either: The statement which states that the true statement is true is true, or, more alla Grice, as He who says (or explicitly conveys, or indicates) that the true thesis is true says something true. It may be argued that it is quite baffling (and figurative or analogical or metaphoric) in this context, to take ἀληθής to be predicated of the Griceian utterer, a person (true standing for truth teller, trustworthy), to take it to mean that he says something true, rather than his statement stating something true, or his statement being true. But cf. L and S: ἀληθής [α^], Dor. ἀλαθής, [α^], Dor. ἀλαθής, ές, f. λήθω, of persons, truthful, honest (not in Hom., v. infr.), ἀ. νόος Pi. O.2.92; κατήγορος A. Th. 439; κριτής Th. 3.56; οἶνος ἀ. `in vino veritas, Pl. Smp. 217e; ὁ μέσος ἀ. τις Arist. EN 1108a20. Admittedly, this or that non-Griceian passage in which it is λόγος, and not the utterer, which is the implied grammatical Subjects of ὁ λέγων can be found in Metaph. Γ7, 1012a24–25; Δ6, 1016a33; Int. 14, 23a28–29; De motu an. 10, 703a4; Eth. Nic. 2.6, 1107a6–7. 9. So the topic is controversial. Indeed such a non-Griceian exegesis of the passage is given by Alexander of Aphrodisias (in Metaph. 340. 26–29):9, when Alexander observes that the statement, i.e. not the utterer, that says that everything is false (ὁ δὲ πάντα ψευδῆ εἶναι λέγων λόγος) negates itself, not himself, because if everything is false, this very statement, which, rather than, by which the utterer, says that everything is false, would be false, and how can an utterer be FALSE? So that the statement which, rather than the utterer who, negates it, saying that not everything is false, would be true, and surely an utterer cannot be true. Does Alexander misrepresent Aristotles argument by omitting every Griceian reference to the asserter or utterer qua rational personal agent, of the thesis? If the answer is negative, even if the occurrence of ὁ λέγων at 1012b15 refers to the asserter, or utterer, qua rational personal agent, this is merely an accidental feature of Aristotles argument that cannot be regarded as an indication of its dialectical nature. None of this is to deny that some self-refutation argument may be of an intrinsically dialectical nature; it is only to deny that every one is This is in line with Burnyeats view that a dialectical self-refutation, even if qualified, as Aristotle does, as ancient, is a subspecies of self-refutation, but does not exhaust it. Granted, a dialectical approach may provide a useful interpretive framework for many an ancient self-refutation argument. A statement like If proof does not exist, proof exists ‒ that occurs in an anti-sceptical self-refutation argument reported by Sextus Empiricus ‒ may receive an attractive dialectical re-interpretation. It may be argued that such a statement should not be understood at the level of what is explicated, but should be regarded as an elliptical reminder of a complex dialectical argument which can be described as follows. Cf. If thou claimest that proof doth not exist, thou must present a proof of what thou assertest, in order to be credible, but thus thou thyself admitest that proof existeth. A similar point can be made for Aristotles famous argument in the Protrepticus that one must philosophise. A number of sources state that this argument relies on the implicaturum, If one must not philosophize, one must philosophize. It may be argued that this implicaturum is an elliptical reminder of a dialectical argument such as the following. If thy position is that thou must not philosophise, thou must reflect on this choice and argue in its support, but by doing so thou art already choosing to do philosophy, thereby admitting that thou must philosophise. The claim that every instance of an ancient self-refutation arguments is of an intrinsically dialectical nature is thus questionable, to put it mildly. V also 340.19–26, and A. Madigan, tcomm., Alexander of Aphrodisias: On Aristotles Met. 4, Ithaca, N.Y., Burnyeat, Protagoras and Self-Refutation in Later Greek Philosophy,. Grices implicaturum is that Quine should have learned Greek before refuting Aristotle. But then *I* dont speak Greek! Strawson refuted. Refs.: The obvious keyword is ‘analytic,’ in The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC. : For one, Grice does not follow Aristotle, but Philo. the conditional If Alexander exists, Alexander talks or If Alexander exists, he has such-and-such an age is not true—not even if he is in fact of such-and-such an age when the proposition is said. (in APr 175.34–176.6)⁴³ ⁴³ … δείκνυσιν ὅτι μὴ οἷόν τε δυνατῷ τι ἀδύνατον ἀκολουθεῖν, ἀλλ᾿ ἀνάγκη ἀδύνατον εἶναι ᾧ τὸ ἀδύνατον ἀκολουθεῖ, ἐπὶ πάσης ἀναγκαίας ἀκολουθίας. ἔστι δὲ ἀναγκαία ἀκολουθία οὐχ ἡ πρόσκαιρος, ἀλλὰ ἐν ᾗ ἀεὶ τὸ ἑπόμενον ἕπεσθαι ἔστι τῷ τὸ εἰλημμένον ὡς ἡγούμενον εἶναι. οὐ γὰρ ἀληθὲς συνημμένον τὸ εἰ ᾿Αλέξανδρος ἔστιν, ᾿Αλέξανδρος διαλέγεται, ἢ εἰ ᾿Αλέξανδρος ἔστι, τοσῶνδε ἐτῶν ἐστι, καὶ εἰ εἴη ὅτε λέγεται ἡ πρότασις τοσούτων ἐτῶν. vide Barnes. ... έχη δε και επιφοράν το 5 αντικείμενον τώ ήγουμένω, τότε ο τοιούτος γίνεται δεύτερος αναπόδεικτος, ώς το ,,ει ημέρα έστι, φώς έστιν ουχί δέ γε φώς έστιν ουκ άρα ...εί ημέρα εστι , φως έστιν ... eine unrichtige ( μοχθηρόν ) bezeichnet 142 ) , und Zwar war es besonders Philo ... οίον , , εί ημέρα εστι , φως έστιν , ή άρχεται από ψεύδους και λήγει επί ψεύδος ... όπερ ήν λήγον . bei der Obwaltende Conditional - Nexus gar nicht in Betracht ...Philo: If it is day, I am talking. One of Grice’s favorite paradoxes, that display the usefulness of the implicaturum are the so-called ‘paradoxes of implication.’ Johnson, alas, uses ‘paradox’ in the singular. So there must be earlier accounts of this in the history of philosophy. Notably in the ancient commentators to Philo! (Greek “ei” and Roman “si”). Misleading but true – could do.” Note that Grice has an essay on the ‘paradoxes of entailment’. As Strawson notes, this is misleading. For Strawson these are not paradoxes. The things are INCORRECT. For Grice, the Philonian paradoxes are indeed paradoxical because each is a truth. Now, Strawson and Wiggins challenge this. For Grice, to utter “if p, q” implicates that the utterer is not in a position to utter anything stronger. He implicates that he has NON-TRUTH-FUNCTIONAL REASON or grounds to utter “if p, q.” For Strawson, THAT is precisely what the ‘consequentialist’ is holding. For Strawson, the utterer CONVENTIONALLY IMPLIES that the consequent or apodosis follows, in some way, from the antecedent or protasis. Not for Grice. For Grice, what the utterer explicitly conveys is that the conditions that obtain are those of the Philonian conditional. He implicitly conveys that there is n inferrability, and this is cancellable. If Strawson holds that it is a matter of a conventional implicaturum, the issue of cancellation becomes crucial. For Grice, to add that “But I don’t want to covey that there is any inferrability between the protasis and the apodosis” is NOT a contradiction. The utterer or emissor is NOT self-contradicting. And he isn’t! The first to use the term ‘paracox’ here is a genius. Possibly Philo. It was W. E. Johnson who first used the expression 'paradox of implication', explaining that a paradox of this sort arises when a logician proceeds step by step, using accepted principles, until a formula is reached which conflicts with common sense [Johnson, 1921, 39].The paradox of implication assumes many forms, some of which are not easily recognised as involving mere varieties of the same fundamental principle. But COMPOUND PROPOSITIONS 47 I believe that they can all be resolved by the consideration that we cannot ivithotd qjialification apply a com- posite and (in particular) an implicative proposition to the further process of inference. Such application is possible only when the composite has been reached irrespectively of any assertion of the truth or falsity of its components. In other words, it is a necessary con- dition for further inference that the components of a composite should really have been entertained hypo- thetically when asserting that composite. § 9. The theory of compound propositions leads to a special development when in the conjunctives the components are taken — not, as hitherto, assertorically — but hypothetically as in the composites. The conjunc- tives will now be naturally expressed by such words as possible or compatible, while the composite forms which respectively contradict the conjunctives will be expressed by such words as necessary or impossible. If we select the negative form for these conjunctives, we should write as contradictory pairs : Conjunctives {possible) Composites {fiecessary) a. p does not imply q 1, p is not implied by q c. p is not co-disjunct to q d. p is not co-alternate to q a, p implies q b, p is implied by q c, p is co-disjunct to q d, p is co-alternate to q Or Otherwise, using the term 'possible' throughout, the four conjunctives will assume the form that the several conjunctions — pq^pq, pq ^-nd pq — are respectively /^i*- sidle. Here the word possible is equivalent to being merely hypothetically entertained, so that the several conjunctives are now qualified in the same way as are the simple components themselves. Similarly the four CHAPTER HI corresponding composites may be expressed negatively by using the term 'impossible,' and will assume the form that the ^^;yunctions pq^ pq, pq and pq are re- spectively impossible, or (which means the same) that the ^zVjunctions/^, ^^, pq Rnd pq are necessary. Now just as 'possible* here means merely 'hypothetically entertained/ so 'impossible' and 'necessary' mean re- spectively 'assertorically denied' and 'assertorically affirmed/ The above scheme leads to the consideration of the determinate relations that could subsist of p to q when these eight propositions (conjunctives and composites) are combined in everypossibleway without contradiction. Prima facie there are i6 such combinations obtained by selecting a or ay b or 3, c or c, d or J for one of the four constituent terms. Out of these i6 combinations, how- ever, some will involve a conjunction of supplementaries (see tables on pp. 37, 38), which would entail the as- sertorical affirmation or denial of one of the components / or q, and consequently would not exhibit a relation of p to q. The combinations that, on this ground, must be disallowed are the following nine : cihcd, abed, abed, abed] abed, bacd, cabd, dabc\ abed. The combinations that remain to be admitted are therefore the followino- seven : abld, cdab\ abed, bald, cdab^ dcab\ abed. In fact, under the imposed restriction, since a or b cannot be conjoined with c or d, it follows that we must always conjoin a with c and d\ b with e and d\ c with a and b\ ^with a and b. This being understood, the COMPOUND PROPOSITIONS 49 seven permissible combinations that remain are properly to be expressed in the more simple forms: ab, cd\ ab, ba, cd, dc\ and abed These will be represented (but re-arranged for purposes of symmetry) in the following table giving all the possible relations of any proposition/ to any proposition q. The technical names which 1 propose to adopt for the several relations are printed in the second column of the table. Table of possible relations of propositio7i p to proposition q. 1. {a,b)\ p implies and is implied by q 2. (a, b) : p implies but is not implied by q, 3. {b^d): p is implied by but does not imply q, 4. {djb^'c^d): p is neither implicans nor impli cate nor co-disjunct nor co-alternate to g. 5. {dy c)\ /is co-alternate but not co-disjunct to $r, 6. {Cyd): /isco-disjunctbutnotco-alternateto$^. 7. {Cjd)'. p is co-disjunct and co-alternate to q, p is co-implicant to q p is super-implicant to q. p is sub-implicant to q. p is independent of q p is sub-opponent to q p is super-opponent to q, p is co-opponent to q, Here the symmetry indicated by the prefixes, co-, super-, sub-, is brought out by reading downwards and upwards to the middle line representing independence. In this order the propositional forms range from the supreme degree of consistency to the supreme degree of opponency, as regards the relation of/ to ^. In tradi- tional logic the seven forms of relation are known respec- tively by the names equipollent, superaltern, subaltern, independent, sub-contrary, contrary, contradictory. This latter terminology, however, is properly used to express the formal relations of implication and opposition, whereas the terminology which I have adopted will apply indifferently both for formal and for material relations. One of Grice’s claims to fame is his paradox, under ‘Yog and Zog.’ Another paradox that Grice examines at length is paradox by Moore. For Grice, unlike Nowell-Smith, an utterer who, by uttering The cat is on the mat explicitly conveys that the cat is on the mat does not thereby implicitly convey that he believes that the cat is on the mat. He, more crucially expresses that he believes that the cat is on the mat ‒ and this is not cancellable. He occasionally refers to Moores paradox in the buletic mode, Close the door even if thats not my desire. An imperative still expresses someones desire. The sergeant who orders his soldiers to muster at dawn because he is following the lieutenants order. Grices first encounter with paradox remains his studying Malcolms misleading exegesis of Moore. Refs.: The main sources given under ‘heterologicality,’ above. ‘Paradox’ is a good keyword in The H. P. Grice Papers, since he used ‘paradox’ to describe his puzzle about ‘if,’ but also Malcolm on Moore on the philosopher’s paradox, and paradoxes of material implication and paradoxes of entailment. Grice’s point is that a paradox is not something false. For Strawson it is. “The so-called paradoxes of ‘entailment’ and ‘material implication’ are a misnomer. They statements are not paradoxical, they are false.” Not for Grice! Cf. aporia. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

The Griceian paradigm -- paradigm: as used by physicist – Grice: “Kuhn ain’t a philosopher – his BA was in physics!” -- Kuhn in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” 2, a set of scientific and metaphysical beliefs that make up a theoretical framework within which scientific theories can be tested, evaluated, and if necessary revised. Kuhn’s principal thesis, in which the notion of a paradigm plays a central role, is structured around an argument against the logical empiricist view of scientific theory change. Empiricists viewed theory change as an ongoing smooth and cumulative process in which empirical facts, discovered through observation or experimentation, forced revisions in our theories and thus added to our ever-increasing knowledge of the world. It was claimed that, combined with this process of revision, there existed a process of intertheoretic reduction that enabled us to understand the macro in terms of the micro, and that ultimately aimed at a unity of science. Kuhn maintains that this view is incompatible with what actually happens in case after case in the history of science. Scientific change occurs by “revolutions” in which an older paradigm is overthrown and is replaced by a framework incompatible or even incommensurate with it. Thus the alleged empirical “facts,” which were adduced to support the older theory, become irrelevant to the new; the questions asked and answered in the new framework cut across those of the old; indeed the vocabularies of the two frameworks make up different languages, not easily intertranslatable. These episodes of revolution are separated by long periods of “normal science,” during which the theories of a given paradigm are honed, refined, and elaborated. These periods are sometimes referred to as periods of “puzzle solving,” because the changes are to be understood more as fiddling with the details of the theories to “save the phenomena” than as steps taking us closer to the truth. A number of philosophers have complained that Kuhn’s conception of a paradigm is too imprecise to do the work he intended for it. In fact, Kuhn, fifteen years later, admitted that at least two distinct ideas were exploited by the term: i the “shared elements [that] account for the relatively unproblematic character of professional communication and for the relative unanimity of professional judgment,” and ii “concrete problem solutions, accepted by the group [of scientists] as, in a quite usual sense, paradigmatic” Kuhn, “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” 7. Kuhn offers the terms ‘disciplinary matrix’ and ‘exemplar’, respectively, for these two ideas. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why Kuhn could never explain the ‘minor revolution’ in philosophy we had at Oxford!; H. P. Grice, “The Griceian paradigm – crisis – revolution – resolution: some implicatura from Kuhn (from Merton to St. John’s).”

paradigm-case argument: an argument designed by A. G. N. Flew, Grice’s first tutee at St. John’s – almost -- to yield an affirmative answer to the following general type of skeptically motivated question: Are A’s really B? E.g., Do material objects really exist? Are any of our actions really free? Does induction really provide reasonable grounds for one’s beliefs? The structure of the argument is simple: in situations that are “typical,” “exemplary,” or “paradigmatic,” standards for which are supplied by common sense, or ordinary language, part of what it is to be B essentially involves A. Hence it is absurd to doubt if A’s are ever B, or to doubt if in general A’s are B. More commonly, the argument is encountered in the linguistic mode: part of what it means for something to be B is that, in paradigm cases, it be an A. Hence the question whether A’s are ever B is meaningless. An example may be found in the application of the argument to the problem of induction. See Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory, 2. When one believes a generalization of the form ‘All F’s are G’ on the basis of good inductive evidence, i.e., evidence constituted by innumerable and varied instances of F all of which are G, one would thereby have good reasons for holding this belief. The argument for this claim is based on the content of the concepts of reasonableness and of strength of evidence. Thus according to Strawson, the following two propositions are analytic: 1 It is reasonable to have a degree of belief in a proposition that is proportional to the strength of the evidence in its favor. 2 The evidence for a generalization is strong in proportion as the number of instances, and the variety of circumstances in which they have been found, is great. Hence, Strawson concludes, “to ask whether it is reasonable to place reliance on inductive procedures is like asking whether it is reasonable to proportion the degree of one’s convictions to the strength of the evidence. Doing this is what ‘being reasonable’ means in such a context” p. 257. In such arguments the role played by the appeal to paradigm cases is crucial. In Strawson’s version, paradigm cases are constituted by “innumerable and varied instances.” Without such an appeal the argument would fail completely, for it is clear that not all uses of induction are reasonable. Even when this appeal is made clear though, the argument remains questionable, for it fails to confront adequately the force of the word ‘really’ in the skeptical challenges. paradigm case argument paradigm case argument. H. P. Grice, “Paradigm-case arguments in Urmson and other play group members,” H. P. Grice, “A. G. N. Flew and how I taught him the paradigm-case argument for free-will.”

H. P. Grice’s para-doxon -- παράδοξον, Liddell and Scott render it as “contrary to expectation [doxa, belief], incredible, [unbelievable]” – πaradoxos λόγος they render, unhelpfully, as “a paradox,” Pl.R.472a; “πaradoxos τε καὶ ψεῦδος” – the paradoxical and the false -- Id.Plt.281a; “παράδοξα λέγειν” – to utter a paradox -- X.Cyr.7.2.16; “ἂν παράδοξον εἴπω” D.3.10; ἐκ τοῦ παραδόξου καὶ παραλόγου – Liddell and Scott render as “contrary to all expectation,” contrary to all belief and dicta! -- ἐκ τοῦ παρα-δόξου καὶ παρα-λόγου – cf. Kant’s paralogism -- -- -- Id.25.32, cf. Phld.Vit.p.23 J.; “πολλὰ ποικίλλει χρόνος πaradoxa καὶ θαυμαστά” Men.593; “πaradoxon μοι τὸ πρᾶγμα” Thphr.Char.1.6; “τὸ ἔνδοξον ἐκ τοῦ πaradoxon θηρώμενος” Plu.Pomp.14; παράδοξα Stoical paradoxes, Id.2.1060b sq.: Comp., Phld.Mus.p.72 K., Plot.4.9.2: Sup., LXX Wi.16.17. Adv. “-ξως” Aeschin.2.40, Plb.1.21.11, Dsc.4.83: Sup. “-ότατα” D.C.67.11; “-οτάτως” Gal.7.876. II. παράδοξος, title of distinguished athletes, musicians, and artists of all kinds, the Admirable, IG3.1442, 14.916, Arr.Epict.2.18.22, IGRom.4.468 (Pergam., iii A. D.), PHamb.21.3 (iv A. D.), Rev.Ét.Gr.42.434 (Delph.), etc. For Grice, ‘unbelievable’ as opposed to ‘unthinkable’ or ‘unintelligible’ is the paradigm-case response for a non-analytically false utterance. “Paradoxical, but true.”

para-doxon: a seemingly sound piece of reasoning based on seemingly true assumptions that leads to a contradiction or other obviously false conclusion. A paradox reveals that either the principles of reasoning or the assumptions on which it is based are faulty. It is said to be solved when the mistaken principles or assumptions are clearly identified and rejected. The philosophical interest in paradoxes arises from the fact that they sometimes reveal fundamentally mistaken assumptions or erroneous reasoning techniques. Two groups of paradoxes have received a great deal of attention in modern philosophy. Known as the semantic paradoxes and the logical or settheoretic paradoxes, they reveal serious difficulties in our intuitive understanding of the basic notions of semantics and set theory. Other well-known paradoxes include the barber paradox and the prediction or hangman or unexpected examination paradox. The barber paradox is mainly useful as an example of a paradox that is easily resolved. Suppose we are told that there is an Oxford barber who shaves all and only the Oxford men who do not shave themselves. Using this description, we can apparently derive the contradiction that this barber both shaves and does not shave himself. If he does not shave himself, then according to the description he must be one of the people he shaves; if he does shave himself, then according to the description he is one of the people he does not shave. This paradox can be resolved in two ways. First, the original claim that such a barber exists can simply be rejected: perhaps no one satisfies the alleged description. Second, the described barber may exist, but not fall into the class of Oxford men: a woman barber, e.g., could shave all and only the Oxford men who do not shave themselves. The prediction paradox takes a variety of forms. Suppose a teacher tells her students on Friday that the following week she will give a single quiz. But it will be a surprise: the students will not know the evening before that the quiz will take place the following day. They reason that she cannot give such a quiz. After all, she cannot wait until Friday to give it, since then they would know Thursday evening. That leaves Monday through Thursday as the only possible days for it. But then Thursday can be ruled out for the same reason: they would know on Wednesday evening. Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday can be ruled out by similar reasoning. Convinced by this seemingly correct reasoning, the students do not study for the quiz. On Wednesday morning, they are taken by surprise when the teacher distributes it. It has been pointed out that the students’ reasoning has this peculiar feature: in order to rule out any of the days, they must assume that the quiz will be given and that it will be a surprise. But their alleged conclusion is that it cannot be given or else will not be a surprise, undermining that very assumption. Kaplan and Montague have argued in “A Paradox Regained,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 0 that at the core of this puzzle is what they call the knower paradox a paradox that arises when intuitively plausible principles about knowledge and its relation to logical consequence are used in conjunction with knowledge claims whose content is, or entails, a denial of those very claims. Paradoxa A philosophical treatise of Cicero setting forth six striking theorems of the Stoic system. It was composed in B.C. 46. Edited by Orelli (with the Tusculans) (Zürich, 1829); and by Möser (Göttingen, 1846).

The three modals: Grice: “We have, in all, then, three varieties of acceptability statement (each with alethic and practical sub-types), associated with the modals "It is fully acceptable that . . . " (non-defeasible), 'it is ceteris paribus acceptable that . . . ', and 'it is to such-and-such a degree acceptable that . . . ', both of the latter pair being subject to defeasibility. (I should re-emphasize that, on the practical side, I am so far concerned to represent only statements which are analogous with Kant's Technical Imperatives ('Rules of Skill').) I am now visited by a temptation, to which of course I shall yield, to link these varieties of acceptability statement with common modals; however, to preserve a façade of dignity I shall mark the modals I thus define with a star, to indicate that the modals so defined are only candidates for identification with the common modals spelled in the same way. I am tempted to introduce 'it must* be that' as a modal whose sense is that of 'It is fully acceptable that' and 'it ought* to be that' as a modal whose sense is that of 'It is ceteris paribus (other things being equal) acceptable that'; for degree-variant acceptability I can think of no appealing vernacular counterpart other than 'acceptable' itself. After such introduction, we could allow the starred modals to become idiomatically embedded in the sentences in which they occur; as in "A bishop must* get fed up with politicians", and in "To keep his job, a bishop ought* not to show his irritation with politicians". end p.78 But I now confess that I am tempted to plunge even further into conceptual debauchery than I have already; having just, at considerable pains, got what might turn out to be common modals into my structures, I am at once inclined to get them out again. For it seems to me that one might be able, without change of sense, to employ forms of sentence which eliminate reference to acceptability, and so do not need the starred modals. One might be able, to this end, to exploit "if-then" conditionals (NB 'if . . . then', not just 'if') together with suitable modifiers. One might, for example, be able to re-express "A bishop must* get fed up with politicians" as "If one is a bishop, then (unreservedly) one will get fed up with the politicians"; and "To keep his job, a bishop ought* not to show his irritation with politicians" as "If one is to keep one's job and if one is a bishop, then, other things being equal, one is not to show one's irritation with politicians". Of course, when it comes to applying detachment to corresponding singular conditionals, we may need to have some way of indicating the character of the generalization from which the detached singular non-conditional sentence has been derived; the devising of such indices should not be beyond the wit of man. So far as generalizations of these kinds are concerned, it seems to me that one needs to be able to mark five features: (1) conditionality; (2) generality; (3) type of generality (absolute, ceteris paribus, etc., thereby, ipso facto, discriminating with respect to defeasibility or indefeasibility); (4) mode; (5) (not so far mentioned) whether or not the generalization in question has or has not been derived from a simple enumeration of instances; because of their differences with respect to direction of fit, any such index will do real work in the case of alethic generalities, not in the case of practical generalities. So long as these features are marked, we have all we need for our purposes. Furthermore, they are all (in some legitimate and intelligible sense) formal features, and indeed features which might be regarded as, in some sense, 'contained in' or 'required by' the end p.79 concept of a rational being, since it would hardly be possible to engage in any kind of reasoning without being familiar with them. So, on the assumption that the starred modals are identifiable with their unstarred counterparts, we would seem to have reached the following positions. (1) We have represented practical and alethic generalizations, and their associated conditionals, and with them certain common modals such as 'must' and 'ought', under a single notion of acceptability (with specific variants). (2) We have decomposed acceptability itself into formal features. (3) We have removed mystery from the alleged logical fact that acceptable practical 'ought' statements have to be derivable from an underlying generalization. (4) Though these achievements (if such they be) might indeed not settle the 'univocality' questions, they can hardly be irrelevant to them. I suspect that, if we were to telephone the illustrious Kant at his Elysian country club in order to impart to him this latest titbit of philosophical gossip, we might get the reply, "Big deal! Isn't that what I've been telling you all along?"

paradoxes of omnipotence – Grice: “a favourite with the second Wilde.” – Grice means first Wilde, reader in philosophical psychology, second Wilde, reader in natural religion -- a series of paradoxes in philosophical theology that maintain that God could not be omnipotent because the concept is inconsistent, alleged to result from the intuitive idea that if God is omnipotent, then God must be able to do anything. 1 Can God perform logically contradictory tasks? If God can, then God should be able to make himself simultaneously omnipotent and not omnipotent, which is absurd. If God cannot, then it appears that there is something God cannot do. Many philosophers have sought to avoid this consequence by claiming that the notion of performing a logically contradictory task is empty, and that question 1 specifies no task that God can perform or fail to perform. 2 Can God cease to be omnipotent? If God can and were to do so, then at any time thereafter, God would no longer be completely sovereign over all things. If God cannot, then God cannot do something that others can do, namely, impose limitations on one’s own powers. A popular response to question 2 is to say that omnipotence is an essential attribute of a necessarily existing being. According to this response, although God cannot cease to be omnipotent any more than God can cease to exist, these features are not liabilities but rather the lack of liabilities in God. 3 Can God create another being who is omnipotent? Is it logically possible for two beings to be omnipotent? It might seem that there could be, if they never disagreed in fact with each other. If, however, omnipotence requires control over all possible but counterfactual situations, there could be two omnipotent beings only if it were impossible for them to disagree. 4 Can God create a stone too heavy for God to move? If God can, then there is something that God cannot do move such a stone and if God cannot, then there is something God cannot do create such a stone. One reply is to maintain that ‘God cannot create a stone too heavy for God to move’ is a harmless consequence of ‘God can create stones of any weight and God can move stones of any weight.’

paradox of analysis: Grice: “One (not I, mind – I don’t take anything seriously) must take the paradox of analysis very seriously.” an argument that it is impossible for an analysis of a meaning to be informative for one who already understands the meaning. Consider: ‘An F is a G’ e.g., ‘A circle is a line all points on which are equidistant from some one point’ gives a correct analysis of the meaning of ‘F’ only if ‘G’ means the same as ‘F’; but then anyone who already understands both meanings must already know what the sentence says. Indeed, that will be the same as what the trivial ‘An F is an F’ says, since replacing one expression by another with the same meaning should preserve what the sentence says. The conclusion that ‘An F is a G’ cannot be informative for one who already understands all its terms is paradoxical only for cases where ‘G’ is not only synonymous with but more complex than ‘F’, in such a way as to give an analysis of ‘F’. ‘A first cousin is an offspring of a parent’s sibling’ gives an analysis, but ‘A dad is a father’ does not and in fact could not be informative for one who already knows the meaning of all its words. The paradox appears to fail to distinguish between different sorts of knowledge. Encountering for the first time and understanding a correct analysis of a meaning one already grasps brings one from merely tacit to explicit knowledge of its truth. One sees that it does capture the meaning and thereby sees a way of articulating the meaning one had not thought of before. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Dissolving the paradox of analysis via the principle of conversational helpfulness – How helpful is ‘unmarried male’ as an analysis of ‘bachelor’?”

paradox of omniscience: Grice: “A favourite with the second Wilde,” i. e. the Wilde reader in natural religion, as opposed to the Wilde reader in philosophical psychology -- an objection to the possibility of omniscience, developed by Patrick Grim, that appeals to an application of Cantor’s power set theorem. Omniscience requires knowing all truths; according to Grim, that means knowing every truth in the set of all truths. But there is no set of all truths. Suppose that there were a set T of all truths. Consider all the subsets of T, that is, all members of the power set 3T. Take some truth T1. For each member of 3T either T1 is a member of that set or T1 is not a member of that set. There will thus correspond to each member of 3T a further truth specifying whether T1 is or is not a member of that set. Therefore there are at least as many truths as there are members of 3T. By the power set theorem, there are more members of 3T than there are of T. So T is not the set of all truths. By a parallel argument, no other set is, either. So there is no set of all truths, after all, and therefore no one who knows every member of that set. The objection may be countered by denying that the claim ‘for every proposition p, if p is true God knows that p’ requires that there be a set of all true propositions.

paraphilosophy: “I phoned Gellner: you chould entitle your essay, an attack on ordinary language PARA-philosophy, since that is what Austin asks us to do.”

para-psychology, the study of certain anomalous phenomena and ostensible causal connections neither recognized nor clearly rejected by traditional science. Parapsychology’s principal areas of investigation are extrasensory perception ESP, psychokinesis PK, and cases suggesting the survival of mental functioning following bodily death. The study of ESP has traditionally focused on two sorts of ostensible phenomena, telepathy the apparent anomalous influence of one person’s mental states on those of another, commonly identified with apparent communication between two minds by extrasensory means and clairvoyance the apparent anomalous influence of a physical state of affairs on a person’s mental states, commonly identified with the supposed ability to perceive or know of objects or events not present to the senses. The forms of ESP may be viewed either as types of cognition e.g., the anomalous knowledge of another person’s mental states or as merely a form of anomalous causal influence e.g., a distant burning house causing one to have possibly incongruous thoughts about fire. The study of PK covers the apparent ability to produce various physical effects independently of familiar or recognized intermediate sorts of causal links. These effects include the ostensible movement of remote objects, materializations the apparently instantaneous production of matter, apports the apparently instantaneous relocation of an object, and in laboratory experiments statistically significant non-random behavior of normally random microscopic processes such as radioactive decay. Survival research focuses on cases of ostensible reincarnation and mental mediumship i.e., “channeling” of information from an apparently deceased communicator. Cases of ostensible precognition may be viewed as types of telepathy and clairvoyance, and suggest the causal influence of some state of affairs on an earlier event an agent’s ostensible precognitive experience. However, those opposed to backward causation may interpret ostensible precognition either as a form of unconscious inference based on contemporaneous information acquired by ESP, or else as a form of PK possibly in conjunction with telepathic influence by which the precognizer brings about the events apparently precognized. The data of parapsychology raise two particularly deep issues. The evidence suggesting survival poses a direct challenge to materialist theories of the mental. And the evidence for ESP and PK suggests the viability of a “magical” worldview associated usually with so-called primitive societies, according to which we have direct and intimate access to and influence on the thoughts and bodily states of others. H. P. Grice: "When, in the late 1940s, J. L. Austin instituted his *second* playgroup, for full-time philosophy dons -- my *first*, in a way --, its official rationale, given by its founder, was that all its members were hacks, spending our weekdays wrestling with the dissolution of this or that philosophical pseudo-problem, and that we deserved to be spending our Saturday mornings -- my Saturday afternoons were consacrated to the Demi-Johns -- in restorative para-philosophy. And so we started on such topics as maps and diagrams and (in another term) rules of games." Refs.: H. P. Grice, “What J. L Austin meant by ‘paraphilosophy’!,” H. P. Grice, “Philosophy and para-philosophy.”

Pareto efficiency, also called Pareto optimality, a state of affairs in which no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. “If you are provided information, the one who gives you information loses.” “If you give information, you lose.” “If you influence, you win.” “If you get influenced,” you lose.” The economist Vilfredo Pareto referred to ‘optimality,’ as used by Grice, rather than efficiency, but usage has drifted toward the less normative term, ‘efficiency.’ Pareto supposes that the utilitarian addition of welfare across conversationalist A and conversationalist B is meaningless. Pareto concludes that the only useful aggregate measures of welfare must be ordinal. One state of affairs is what Pareto calls “Pareto-superior” to another if conversationalist A cannot move to the second state without making his co-conversationalist B worse off. Although Pareto’s criterion is generally thought to be positive or descriptive (‘empiricist’) rather than normative (‘quasi-contractual, or rational’), it is often used as a normative principles for justifying particular changes or refusals to make changes. Some philosophers, such as Grice’s tutee Nozick, for example, take the Pareto criterion as a moral constraint and therefore oppose certain government policies. In the context of a voluntary exchange, it makes sense to suppose that every exchange is “Pareto-improving,” at least for the direct parties to the exchange, conversationalists A and B. If, however, we fail to account for any external effect of A’s and B’s conversational exchange on a third party, the conversational exchange may *not* be Pareto-improving (Grice’s example, “Mrs. Smith is a bag.”. Moreover, we may fail to provide collective, or intersubjective benefits that require the co-operation or co-ordination of A’s and B’s individual efforts (A may be more ready to volunteer than B, say). Hence, even in a conversational exchange, we cannot expect to achieve “Pareto efficiency,” but what Grice calls “Grice efficiency.” We might therefore suppose we should invite thet intervention of the voice of reason to help us helping each other. But in a typical conversational context, it is often hard to believe that a significant policy change can be Pareto-improving: there are sure to be losers from any change – “but the it’s gentlemanly to accept a loss.” – H. P. Grice. Refs.: “Conversational efficiency and conversational optimality: Pareto and I.”

Griceian-cum-Parfitian identity: “Parfait identity” – Grice: “Oddly, the Strawsons enjoy to involve themselves with issues of identity.” Parfit cites H. P. Grice on “Personal identity,” philosopher internationally known for his major contributions to the metaphysics of persons, moral theory, and practical reasoning. Parfit first rose to prominence by challenging the prevalent view that personal identity is a “deep fact” that must be all or nothing and that matters greatly in rational and moral deliberations. Exploring puzzle cases involving fission and fusion, Parfit propounded a reductionist account of personal identity, arguing that what matters in survival are physical and psychological continuities. These are a matter of degree, and sometimes there may be no answer as to whether some future person would be me. Parfit’s magnum opus, Reasons and Persons 4, is a strikingly original book brimming with startling conclusions that have significantly reshaped the philosophical agenda. Part One treats different theories of morality, rationality, and the good; blameless wrongdoing; moral immorality; rational irrationality; imperceptible harms and benefits; harmless torturers; and the self-defeatingness of certain theories. Part Two introduces a critical present-aim theory of individual rationality, and attacks the standard selfinterest theory. It also discusses the rationality of different attitudes to time, such as caring more about the future than the past, and more about the near than the remote. Addressing the age-old conflict between self-interest and morality, Parfit illustrates that contrary to what the self-interest theory demands, it can be rational to care about certain other aims as much as, or more than, about our own future well-being. In addition, Parfit notes that the self-interest theory is a hybrid position, neutral with respect to time but partial with respect to persons. Thus, it can be challenged from one direction by morality, which is neutral with respect to both persons and time, and from the other by a present-aim theory, which is partial with respect to both persons and time. Part Three refines Parfit’s views regarding personal identity and further criticizes the self-interest theory: personal identity is not what matters, hence reasons to be specially concerned about our future are not provided by the fact that it will be our future. Part Four presents puzzles regarding future generations and argues that the moral principles we need when considering future people must take an impersonal form. Parfit’s arguments deeply challenge our understanding of moral ideals and, some believe, the possibility of comparing outcomes. Parfit has three forthcoming manuscripts, tentatively titled Rediscovering Reasons, The Metaphysics of the Self, and On What Matters. His current focus is the normativity of reasons. A reductionist about persons, he is a non-reductionist about reasons. He believes in irreducibily normative beliefs that are in a strong sense true. A realist about reasons for acting and caring, he challenges the views of naturalists, noncognitivists, and constructivists. Parfit contends that internalists conflate normativity with motivating force, that contrary to the prevalent view that all reasons are provided by desires, no reasons are, and that Kant poses a greater threat to rationalism than Hume. Parfit is Senior Research Fellow of All Souls , Oxford, and a regular visiting professor at both Harvard and New York . Legendary for monograph-length criticisms of book manuscripts, he is editor of the Oxford Ethics Series, whose goal is to make definite moral progress, a goal Parfit himself is widely believed to have attained. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “A parfit identity.”

Parmenides: a Grecian philosopher, the most influential of the pre-socratics, active in Elea Roman and modern Velia, an Ionian Grecian colony in southern Italy. He was the first Grecian thinker who can properly be called an ontologist or metaphysician. Plato refers to him as “venerable and awesome,” as “having magnificent depth” Theaetetus 183e 184a, and presents him in the dialogue Parmenides as a searching critic in a fictional and dialectical transposition of Plato’s own theory of Forms. Nearly 150 lines of a didactic poem by Parmenides have been preserved, assembled into about twenty fragments. The first part, “Truth,” provides the earliest specimen in Grecian intellectual history of a sustained deductive argument. Drawing on intuitions concerning thinking, knowing, and language, Parmenides argues that “the real” or “what-is” or “being” to eon must be ungenerable and imperishable, indivisible, and unchanging. According to a Plato-inspired tradition, Parmenides held that “all is one.” But the phrase does not occur in the fragments; Parmenides does not even speak of “the One”; and it is possible that either a holistic One or a plurality of absolute monads might conform to Parmenides’ deduction. Nonetheless, it is difficult to resist the impression that the argument converges on a unique entity, which may indifferParfit, Derek Parmenides 646 646 ently be referred to as Being, or the All, or the One. Parmenides embraces fully the paradoxical consequence that the world of ordinary experience fails to qualify as “what-is.” Nonetheless, in “Opinions,” the second part of the poem, he expounds a dualist cosmology. It is unclear whether this is intended as candid phenomenology a doctrine of appearances or as an ironic foil to “Truth.” It is noteworthy that Parmenides was probably a physician by profession. Ancient reports to this effect are borne out by fragments from “Opinions” with embryological themes, as well as by archaeological findings at Velia that link the memory of Parmenides with Romanperiod remains of a medical school at that site. Parmenides’ own attitude notwithstanding, “Opinions” recorded four major scientific breakthroughs, some of which, doubtless, were Parmenides’ own discoveries: that the earth is a sphere; that the two tropics and the Arctic and Antarctic circles divide the earth into five zones; that the moon gets its light from the sun; and that the morning star and the evening star are the same planet. The term Eleatic School is misleading when it is used to suggest a common doctrine supposedly held by Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Melissus of Samos, and anticipating Parmenides Xenophanes of Colophon. The fact is, many philosophical groups and movements, from the middle of the fifth century onward, were influenced, in different ways, by Parmenides, including the “pluralists,” Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. Parmenides’ deductions, transformed by Zeno into a repertoire of full-blown paradoxes, provided the model both for the eristic of the Sophists and for Socrates’ elenchus. Moreover, the Parmenidean criteria for “whatis” lie unmistakably in the background not only of Plato’s theory of Forms but also of salient features of Aristotle’s system, notably, the priority of actuality over potentiality, the unmoved mover, and the man-begets-man principle. Indeed, all philosophical and scientific systems that posit principles of conservation of substance, of matter, of matter-energy are inalienably the heirs to Parmenides’ deduction. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Negation and privation,” “Lectures on negation.”

parsing: the process of determining the syntactic structure of a sentence according to the rules of a given grammar, say Gricese. This is to be distinguished from the generally simpler task of recognition, which is merely the determination of whether or not a given string is well-formed grammatical. In general, many different parsing strategies can be employed for grammars of a particular type, and a great deal of attention has been given to the relative efficiencies of these techniques. The most thoroughly studied cases center on the contextfree phrase structure grammars, which assign syntactic structures in the form of singly-rooted trees with a left-to-right ordering of “sister” nodes. Parsing procedures can then be broadly classified according to the sequence of steps by which the parse tree is constructed: top-down versus bottom-up; depth-first versus breadthfirst; etc. In addition, there are various strategies for exploring alternatives agendas, backtracking, parallel processing and there are devices such as “charts” that eliminate needless repetitions of previous steps. Efficient parsing is of course important when language, whether natural or artificial e.g., a programming language, is being processed by computer. Human beings also parse rapidly and with apparently little effort when they comprehend sentences of a natural language. Although little is known about the details of this process, psycholinguists hope that study of mechanical parsing techniques might provide insights. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Parsing in Gricese.”

partition: Grice: “the division of a set into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subsets (e. g., ‘philosopher’ and ‘non-philosopher’ – whether we define ‘philosopher’ as engaged in philosophical exploration,’ or ‘addicted to general reflections about his life.’ -- Derivatively, ‘partition’ can mean any set P whose members are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subsets of set S. Each subset of a partition P is called a partition class of S with respect to P. Partitions are intimately associated with equivalence relations, i.e. with relations that are transitive, symmetric, and reflexive. Given an equivalence relation R defined on a set S, R induces a partition P of S in the following natural way: members s1 and s2 belong to the same partition class of P if and only if s1 has the relation R to s2. Conversely, given a partition P of a set S, P induces an equivalence relation R defined on S in the following natural way: members s1 and s2 are such that s1 has the relation R to s2 if and only if s1 and s2 belong to the same partition class of P. For obvious reasons, then, partition classes are also known as equivalence classes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “My love for Venn.”

pascal: cited by H. P. Grice, philosopher known for his brilliance as a polemicist and a stylist. Born at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne, Pascal is educated by his father, Étienne, and first gains note for his contribution to semantics when he produced, under the influence of Desargues, a work on the projective geometry of one cone. This was published as “Essai pour les coniques,” and includes what has since become known as Pascal’s theorem. Pascal’s other semantical accomplishments include the original development of probability theory, worked out in correspondence with Fermat, and a method of infinitesimal analysis to which Leibniz gave credit for inspiring his own development of the calculus. Pascal’s fame rests on his work on hydrostatics, “Traités de l’équilibre des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l’air,” and his experiments with the barometer, which attempted to establish the possibility of a vacuum and the weight of air as the cause of the mercury’s suspension. Pascal’s fame as a stylist rests primarily on his “Lettres provinciales,” which were an anonymous contribution to a dispute between the Jansenists, headed by Arnauld, and the Jesuits. Jansenism was a Catholic religious movement that emphasized an Augustinian position on questions of grace and free will. Pascal, who was not himself a Jansenist, wrote a series of scathing satirical letters ridiculing both Jesuit casuistry and the persecution of the Jansenists for their purported adherence to five propositions in Jansen’s Augustinus. Pascal’s philosophical contributions are found throughout his oeuvre, but primarily in his “Pensées,” an intended apology for Christianity. The influence of the Pensées on religious thought and later existentialism has been profound because of their extraordinary insight, passion, and depth. At the time of Pascal’s death some of the fragments were sewn together in clusters; many others were left unorganized, but recent scholarship has recovered much of the original plan of organization. Pascal’s “Pensées” raise sceptical arguments that had become part of philosophical parlance since Montaigne. While these arguments were originally raised in order to deny the possibility of knowledge, Pascal, like Descartes in the Meditations, tries to utilize them toward a positive end. Pascal argues that what scepticism shows us is not that knowledge is impossible, but that there is a certain paradox about human nature. Humans possess knowledge yet recognize that this knowledge cannot be rationally justified and that rational arguments can even be directed against it (fragments 109, 131, and 110). This peculiarity can be explained only through the Christian doctrine of the fall (e.g., fragment 117). Pascal extends his sceptical considerations by undermining the possibility of demonstrative proof of God’s existence. Such knowledge is impossible on philosophical grounds because such a proof could be successful only if an absurdity followed from denying God’s existence, and nature furnishes us with no knowledge incompatible with unbelief (fragments 429 and 781). Furthermore, demonstrative proof of God’s existence is incompatible with the epistemological claims of Christianity, which make God’s personal agency essential to religious knowledge (fragments 460, 449). Pascal’s use of skepticism and his refusal to admit proofs of God’s existence have led some commentators, like Richard Popkin “Fideism,” and Terence Penelhum “Skepticism and Fideism,” to interpret Pascal as a fideist, i.e., one who denies that religious belief can be based on anything other than pragmatic reasons. But such an interpretation disregards Pascal’s attempts to show that Christian belief is rational because of the explanatory power of its doctrines, particularly its doctrine of the fall (e.g., fragments 131, 137, 149, 431, 449, and 482)/ These purported demonstrations of the explanatory superiority of Christianity prepare the way for Pascal’s famous “wager” (fragment 418). The wager is among the fragments that Pascal had not classified at the time of his death, but textual evidence shows that it would have been included in Section 12, entitled “Commencement,” after the demonstrations of the superior explanatory power of Christianity. The wager is a direct application of the principles developed in Pascal’s earlier work on probability, where he discovered a calculus that could be used to determine the most rational action when faced with uncertainty about future events, or what is now known as decision theory. In this case the uncertainty is the truth of Christianity and its claims about afterlife; and the actions under consideration are whether to believe or not. The choice of the most rational action depends on what would now be called its “expected value.” The expected value of an action is determined by assigning a value, s, to each possible outcome of the action, and subtracting the cost of the action, c, from this value, and multiplying the difference by the probability of the respective outcomes and adding these products together. Pascal invites the reader to consider Christian faith and unbelief as if they were acts of wagering on the truth of Christianity. If one does believes, there are two possible outcomes: It is the case that God exists or it is not the case that God exists. If it is the case that God exists, the stake to be gained is infinite life. If it is not the case that God exists, there are no winnings. Because the potential winnings are infinite, religious belief is more rational than unbelief because of its greater expected value. The wager has been subjected to numerous criticisms. William James argues that it is indecisive, because it would apply with equal validity to any religion that offers a promise of infinite rewards (The Will to Believe). But this ignores Pascal’s careful attempt to show that only Christianity has adequate explanatory power, so that the choice is intended to be between Christianity and unbelief. A stronger objection to the wager arises from contemporary work in decision theory that prohibits the introduction of an ‘infinite value’ because they have the counter-intuitive result of making even the slightest risk irrational. While this objection is valid, it does not refute Pascal’s strategy in the Pensées, in which the proofs of Christianity’s explanatory power and the wager have only the preliminary role of inducing the reader to seek the religious certainty that comes only from a saving religious experience which he calls “inspiration” fragments 110, 381, 382, 588, 808. Consider two conversations -- one of which begins by someone (X) making the claim: (i) "My neighbor's three-year-old child understands Russell's Theory of Types," and the other of which begins by someone (Y) making the claim: (I') "My neighbor's three-year-old child is an adult." It would not be inappropriate to reply to X, taking the remark as a hyperbole: (2) "You mean the child is a particularly bright lad." If X were to say: (3) "No, I mean what I say-he really does understand it," one might be inclined to reply: (4) "I don't believe you-the thing's impossible." But if the child were then produced, and did (as one knows he would not) expound the theory correctly, answer questions on it, criticize it, and so on, one would in the end be forced to acknowledge that the claim was literally true and that the child was a prodigy. Now consider one's reaction to Y's claim. To begin with, it might be somewhat similar to the previous case. One might say: (2') "You mean he's uncommonly sensible or very advanced for his age." If Y replies: (3') "No, I mean what I say," we might reply: (4') "Perhaps you mean that he won't grow any more, or that he's a sort of freak, that he's already fully developed." Y replies: (5') "No, he's not a freak, he's just an adult." At this stage -- or possibly if we are patient, a little later -- we shall be inclined to say that I just do not understand what Y is saying, and to suspect that he just does not know the ‘meaning’ of some of the words he is using – even th copula. For unless he is prepared to admit that he is using words in a figurative or unusual way, I shall say, not that I do not ‘believe’ him, but that I do not ‘understand’ what he means – if anything at all – He is being ‘absurd.’. And whatever kind of creature is ultimately produced for my inspection – ‘this adult three-year old’, it will not lead me to say that what Y explicitly conveys is true, but at most to say that I now see what he communicates or means, notably, that the three-year-old child is an adult. As a summary of the difference between the two imaginary conversations, I may say that in both cases I would tend to begin by supposing that my co-conversationalist is using words in a figurative or unusual or restricted way. But in the face of his repeated claim to not be doing so, it would be appropriate, in the first case, of a synthetic falsehood, to say that I do not believe him, and in the second case, of the absurdity or categorial falsity, to say that I do not understand him. (Mrs. Grice: “You’re the cream in my coffee” – Grice: “I do not understand you.” -- If, like Pascal, one thinks it prudent to prepare against a very long chance, I should, in the first case, of the synthetic falsehood, know what to prepare for. In the second, I should have no idea.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Pascal.”

paternalism, interference with the liberty or autonomy of another person, with justifications referring to the promotion of the person’s good or the prevention of harm to the person. More precisely, P acts paternalistically toward Q if and only if a P acts with the intent of averting some harm or promoting some benefit for Q; b P acts contrary to or is indifferent to the current preferences, desires or values of Q; and c P’s act is a limitation on Q’s autonomy or liberty. The presence of both autonomy and liberty in clause c is to allow for the fact that lying to someone is not clearly an interference with liberty. Notice that one can act paternalistically by telling people the truth as when a doctor insists that a patient know the exact nature of her illness, contrary to her wishes. Note also that the definition does not settle any questions about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of paternalistic interventions. Typical examples of paternalistic actions are 1 laws requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets; 2 court orders allowing physicians to transfuse Jehovah’s Witnesses against their wishes; 3 deception of a patient by physicians to avoid upsetting the patient; 4 civil commitment of persons judged dangerous to themselves; and 5 laws forbidding swimming while lifeguards are not on duty. Soft weak paternalism is the view that paternalism is justified only when a person is acting non-voluntarily or one needs time to determine whether the person is acting voluntarily or not. Hard strong paternalism is the view that paternalism is sometimes justified even when the person being interfered with is acting voluntarily. The analysis of the term is relative to some set of problems. If one were interested in the organizational behavior of large corporations, one might adopt a different definition than if one were concerned with limits on the state’s right to exercise coercion. The typical normative problems about paternalistic actions are whether, and to what extent, the welfare of individuals may outweigh the need to respect their desire to lead their own lives and make their own decisions even when mistaken. J. S. Mill is the best example of a virtually absolute antipaternalism, at least with respect to the right of the state to act paternalistically. He argued that unless we have reason to believe that a person is not acting voluntarily, as in the case of a man walking across a bridge that, unknown to him, is about to collapse, we ought to allow adults the freedom to act even if their acts are harmful to themselves.

patristic authors, also called church fathers, a group of early Christian authors originally so named because they were considered the “fathers” patres of the orthodox Christian churches. The term is now used more broadly to designate the Christian writers, orthodox or heterodox, who were active in the first six centuries or so of the Christian era. The chronological division is quite flexible, and it is regularly moved several centuries later for particular purposes. Moreover, the study of these writers has traditionally been divided by languages, of which the principal ones are Grecian, Latin, and Syriac. The often sharp divisions among patristic scholarships in the different languages are partly a reflection of the different histories of the regional churches, partly a reflection of the sociology of modern scholarship. Grecians. The patristic period in Grecian is usually taken as extending from the first writers after the New Testament to such figures as Maximus the Confessor 579/580662 or John of Damascus c.650c.750. The period is traditionally divided around the Council of Nicea 325. PreNicean Grecian authors of importance to the history of philosophy include Irenaeus 130/140 after ?, Clement of Alexandria c.150after 215, and Origen c.180c.254. Important Nicean and post-Nicean authors include Athanasius c.295373; the Cappadocians, i.e., Gregory of Nazianzus c.33090, Basil of Cesarea c.33079, and his brother, Gregory of Nyssa 335/340c.394; and John Chrysostom c.350 407. Philosophical topics and practices are constantly engaged by these Grecian authors. Justin Martyr second century, e.g., describes his conversion to Christianity quite explicitly as a transit through lower forms of philosophy into the true philosophy. Clement of Alexandria, again, uses the philosophic genre of the protreptic and a host of ancient texts to persuade his pagan readers that they ought to come to Christianity as to the true wisdom. Origen devotes his Against Celsus to the detailed rebuttal of one pagan philosopher’s attack on Christianity. More importantly, if more subtly, the major works of the Cappadocians appropriate and transform the teachings of any number of philosophic authors Plato and the Neoplatonists in first place, but also Aristotle, the Stoics, and Galen. Latins. The Latin churches came to count four post-Nicean authors as its chief teachers: Ambrose 337/33997, Jerome c.347419, Augustine 354430, and Gregory the Great c.540604. Other Latin authors of philosophical interest include Tertullian fl. c.c.220, Lactantius c.260c.330, Marius Victorinus 280/285before 386, and Hilary of Poitiers fl. 35664. The Latin patristic period is typically counted from the second century to the fifth or sixth, i.e., roughly from Tertullian to Boethius. The Latin authors share with their Grecian contemporaries a range of relations to the pagan philosophic schools, both as rival institutions and as sources of useful teaching. Tertullian’s Against the Nations and Apology, for example, take up pagan accusations against Christianity and then counterattack a number of pagan beliefs, including philosophical ones. By contrast, the writings of Marius Victorinus, Ambrose, and Augustine enact transformations of philosophic teachings, especially from the Neoplatonists. Because philosophical erudition was generally not as great among the Latins as among the Grecians, they were both more eager to accept philosophical doctrines and freer in improvising variations on them.

nicoletti -- paolo di venezia: philosopher, the son of Andrea Nicola, of Venice – He was born in Fliuli Venezia Giulia, a hermit of Saint Augustine O.E.S.A., he spent three years as a student at St. John’s, where the order of St. Augustine had a ‘studium generale,’ at Oxford and taught at Padova, where he became a doctor of arts. Paolo also held appointments at the universities of Parma, Siena, and Bologna. Paolo is active in the administration of his order, holding various high offices. He composed ommentaries on several logical, ethical, and physical works of Aristotle. His name is connected especially with his best-selling “Logica parva.” Over 150 manuscripts survive, and more than forty printed editions of it were made, His huge sequel, “Logica magna,” was a flop. These Oxford-influenced tracts contributed to the favorable climate enjoyed by Oxonian semantics in northern Italian universities. Grice: “My favourite of Paul’s tracts is his “Sophismata aurea” – how peaceful for a philosopher to die while commentingon Aristotle’s “De anima.”!” His nom de plum is “Paulus Venetus.”-- Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Paolo da Harborne, and Paolo da Venezia,” lecture for the Club Griceiano Anglo-Italiano, Bordighera.

Peano postulates, also called Peano axioms, a list of assumptions from which the integers can be defined from some initial integer, equality, and successorship, and usually seen as defining progressions. The Peano postulates for arithmetic were produced by G. Peano in 9. He took the set N of integers with a first term 1 and an equality relation between them, and assumed these nine axioms: 1 belongs to N; N has more than one member; equality is reflexive, symmetric, and associative, and closed over N; the successor of any integer in N also belongs to N, and is unique; and a principle of mathematical induction applying across the members of N, in that if 1 belongs to some subset M of N and so does the successor of any of its members, then in fact M % N. In some ways Peano’s formulation was not clear. He had no explicit rules of inference, nor any guarantee of the legitimacy of inductive definitions which Dedekind established shortly before him. Further, the four properties attached to equality were seen to belong to the underlying “logic” rather than to arithmetic itself; they are now detached. It was realized by Peano himself that the postulates specified progressions rather than integers e.g., 1, ½, ¼, 1 /8, . . . , would satisfy them, with suitable interpretations of the properties. But his work was significant in the axiomatization of arithmetic; still deeper foundations would lead with Russell and others to a major role for general set theory in the foundations of mathematics. In addition, with O. Veblen, T. Skolem, and others, this insight led in the early twentieth century to “non-standard” models of the postulates being developed in set theory and mathematical analysis; one could go beyond the ‘. . .’ in the sequence above and admit “further” objects, to produce valuable alternative models of the postulates. These procedures were of great significance also to model theory, in highlighting the property of the non-categoricity of an axiom system. A notable case was the “non-standard analysis” of A. Robinson, where infinitesimals were defined as arithmetical inverses of transfinite numbers without incurring the usual perils of rigor associated with them. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Definite descriptions in Peano and in the vernacular.”

pearsianism – after D. F. Pears, one of Grice’s collaborators in the Play Group. “In them days, we would never publish, since the only philosophers we were interested in communicating with we saw at least every Saturday!” – With D. F. Pears, and J. F. Thomson, H. P. Grice explored topics in the philosophy of action and ‘philosophical psychology.’ Actually, Grice carefully writes ‘philosophy of action.’ Why? Well, because while with Pears and Thomson he explored toopics like ‘intending’ and ‘deciding,’ it was always with a vew towards ‘acting,’ or ‘doing.’ Grice is very clear on this, “even fastidiously so,” as Blackburn puts it. In the utterance of an imperative, or an intention, which may well be other-directed, the immediate response or effect in your co-conversationalist is a ‘recognition,’ i. e. what Grice calls an ‘uptake,’ some sort of ‘understanding.’ In the case of these ‘desiderative’ moves, the recognition is that the communicator WILLS something. Grice uses a ‘that’-clause attached to ‘will,’ so that he can formulate the proposition “p” – whose realization is in question. Now, this ‘will’ on the part of the ‘communicator’ needs to be ‘transmitted.’ So the communicator’s will includes his will that his emissee will adopt this will. “And eventually act upon it!” So, you see, while it looks as if Pears and Thomson and Grice are into ‘philosophical psychology,’ they are into ‘praxis.’ Not alla Althuser, but almost! Pears explored the idea of the conversational implicaturum in connection, obviously, with action. There is a particular type of conditional that relates to action. Grice’s example, “If I COULD do it, I would climb Mt. Everest on hands and knees.” Grice and Pears, and indeed Thomson, analysed this ‘if.’ Pears thinks that ‘if’ conversationally implicates ‘if and only if.’ Grice called that “Perfecct pears.”

peirce: c. s. – H. P. Grice, “Lectures on C. S. Peirce’s general theory of signs,” Oxford; philosopher, the founder of the philosophical movement called pragmatism. Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second son of Benjamin Peirce, who was professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard and one of America’s leading mathematicians. Charles Peirce studied at Harvard and in 1863 received a degree in chemistry. In 1861 he began work with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and remained in this service for thirty years. Simultaneously with his professional career as a scientist, Peirce worked in logic and philosophy. He lectured on philosophy and logic at various universities and institutes, but was never able to obtain a permanent academic position as a teacher of philosophy. In 7 he retired to Milford, Pennsylvania, and devoted the rest of his life to philosophical work. He earned a meager income from occasional lectures and by writing articles for periodicals and dictionaries. He spent his last years in extreme poverty and ill health. Pragmatism. Peirce formulated the basic principles of pragmatism in two articles, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” 187778. The title of the latter paper refers to Descartes’s doctrine of clear and distinct ideas. According to Peirce, the criteria of clarity and distinctness must be supplemented by a third condition of meaningfulness, which states that the meaning of a proposition or an “intellectual conception” lies in its “practical consequences.” In his paper “Pragmatism” 5 he formulated the “Principle of Pragmatism” or the “Pragmatic Maxim” as follows: In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception we should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception. By “practical consequences” Peirce means conditional propositions of the form ‘if p, then q’, where the antecedent describes some action or experimental condition, and the consequent describes an observable phenomenon or a “sensible effect.” According to the Pragmatic Maxim, the meaning of a proposition or of an “intellectual conception” can be expressed as a conjunction of such “practical conditionals.” The Pragmatic Maxim might be criticized on the ground that many meaningful sentences e.g., theoretical hypotheses do not entail any “practical consequences” in themselves, but only in conjunction with other hypotheses. Peirce anticipated this objection by observing that “the maxim of pragmatism is that a conception can have no logical effect or import differing from that of a second conception except so far as, taken in connection with other conceptions and intentions, it might conceivably modify our practical conduct differently from that of the second conception” “Pragmatism and Abduction,” 3. Theory of inquiry and philosophy of science. Peirce adopted Bain’s definition of belief as “that which a man is prepared to act upon.” Belief guides action, and as a content of belief a proposition can be regarded as a maxim of conduct. According to Peirce, belief is a satisfactory and desirable state, whereas the opposite of belief, the state of doubt, is an unsatisfactory state. The starting point of inquiry is usually some surprising phenomenon that is inconsistent with one’s previously accepted beliefs, and that therefore creates a state of doubt. The purpose of inquiry is the replacement of this state by that of belief: “the sole aim of inquiry is the settlement of opinion.” A successful inquiry leads to stable opinion, a state of belief that need not later be given up. Peirce regarded the ultimate stability of opinion as a criterion of truth and reality: “the real . . . is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me.” He accepted, however, an objectivist conception of truth and reality: the defining characteristic of reality is its independence of the opinions of individual persons. In “The Fixation of Belief” Peirce argued that the scientific method, a method in which we let our beliefs be determined by external reality, “by something upon which our thinking has no effect,” is the best way of settling opinion. Much of his philosophical work was devoted to the analysis of the various forms of inference and argument employed in science. He studied the concept of probability and probabilistic reasoning in science, criticized the subjectivist view of probability, and adopted an objectivist conception, according to which probability can be defined as a relative frequency in the long run. Peirce distinguished between three main types of inference, which correspond to three stages of inquiry: i abduction, a tentative acceptance of an explanatory hypothesis which, if true, would make the phenomenon under investigation intelligible; ii deduction, the derivation of testable consequences from the explanatory hypothesis; and iii induction, the evaluation of the hypothesis in the light of these consequences. He called this method of inquiry the inductive method; in the contemporary philosophy of science it is usually called the hypothetico-deductive method. According to Peirce, the scientific method can be viewed as an application of the pragmatic maxim: the testable consequences derived from an explanatory hypothesis constitute its concrete “meaning” in the sense of the Pragmatic Maxim. Thus the Maxim determines the admissibility of a hypothesis as a possible meaningful explanation. According to Pierce, inquiry is always dependent on beliefs that are not subject to doubt at the time of the inquiry, but such beliefs might be questioned on some other occasion. Our knowledge does not rest on indubitable “first premises,” but all beliefs are dependent on other beliefs. According to Peirce’s doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth. Logic, the theory of signs, and the philosophy of language. In “The Logic of Relatives,” published in 3 in a collection of papers by himself and his students at the Johns Hopkins Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins , Peirce formalized relational statements by using subscript indices for individuals individual variables, and construed the quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘every’ as variable binding operators; thus Peirce can be regarded together Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Sanders 652 652 with the G. logician Frege as one of the founders of quantification theory predicate logic. In his paper “On the Algebra of Logic A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation” 5 he interpreted propositional logic as a calculus of truth-values, and defined logically necessary truth in propositional logic as truth for all truth-value assignments to sentential letters. He studied the logic of modalities and in the 0s he invented a system of logical graphs called “existential graphs”, based on a diagrammatic representation of propositions, in which he anticipated some basic ideas of the possible worlds semantics of modal logic. Peirce’s letters and notebooks contain significant logical and philosophical insights. For example, he examined three-valued truth tables “Triadic Logic”, and discovered in 6 the possibility of representing the truth-functional connectives of propositional logic by electrical switching circuits. Peirce regarded logic as a part of a more general area of inquiry, the theory of signs, which he also called semeiotic nowadays usually spelled ‘semiotics’. According to Peirce, sign relations are triadic, involving the sign itself, its object or what the sign stands for, and an interpretant which determines how the sign represents the object; the interpretant can be regarded as the meaning of the sign. The interpretant of a sign is another sign which in turn has its own interpretant or interpretants; such a sequence of interpretants ends in an “ultimate logical interpretant,” which is “a change of habit of conduct.” On the basis of the triadic character of the sign relation Peirce distinguished three divisions of signs. These divisions were based on i the character of the sign itself, ii the relation between the sign and its object, and iii the way in which the interpretant represents the object. These divisions reflect Peirce’s system of three fundamental ontological categories, which he termed Quality or Firstness, Relation or Secondness, and Representation or Thirdness. Thus, according to the first division, a sign can be a a qualisign, a mere quality or appearance a First; b a sinsign or token, an individual object, or event a Second; or c a legisign or a general type a Third. Secondly, signs can be divided into icons, indices, and symbols on the basis of their relations to their objects: an icon refers to an object on the basis of its similarity to the object in some respect; an index stands in a dynamic or causal relation to its object; whereas a symbol functions as a sign of an object by virtue of a rule or habit of interpretation. Peirce’s third division divides signs into rhemes predicative signs, propositional signs propositions, and arguments. Some of the concepts and distinctions introduced by Peirce, e.g., the distinction between “types” and “tokens” and the division of signs into “icons,” “indices,” and “symbols,” have become part of the standard conceptual repertoire of philosophy and semiotics. In his philosophy of language Peirce made a distinction between a proposition and an assertion, and studied the logical character of assertive speech acts. Metaphysics. In spite of his critical attitude toward traditional metaphysics, Peirce believed that metaphysical questions can be discussed in a meaningful way. According to Peirce, metaphysics studies the most general traits of reality, and “kinds of phenomena with which every man’s experience is so saturated that he usually pays no particular attention to them.” The basic categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness mentioned above occupy a central position in Peirce’s metaphysics. Especially in his later writings he emphasized the reality and metaphysical irreducibility of Thirdness, and defended the view that general phenomena for example, general laws cannot be regarded as mere conjunctions of their actual individual instances. This view was associated with Peirce’s synechism, the doctrine that the world contains genuinely continuous phenomena. He regarded synechism as a new form of Scholastic realism. In the area of modalities Peirce’s basic categories appear as possibility, actuality, and necessity. Here he argued that reality cannot be identified with existence or actuality, but comprises real objective possibilities. This view was partly based on his realization that many conditional statements, for instance the “practical” conditionals expressing the empirical import of a proposition in the sense of the Pragmatic Maxim, cannot be construed as material or truth-functional conditionals, but must be regarded as modal subjunctive conditionals. In his cosmology Peirce propounded the doctrine of tychism, according to which there is absolute chance in the universe, and the basic laws of nature are probabilistic and inexact. Peirce’s position in contemporary philosophy. Peirce had few disciples, but some of his students and colleagues became influential figures in philosophy and science, e.g., the philosophers James, Royce, and Dewey and the economist Thorstein Veblen. Peirce’s pragmatism Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Sanders 653 653 became widely known through James’s lectures and writings, but Peirce was dissatisfied with James’s version of pragmatism, and renamed his own form of it ‘pragmaticism’, which term he considered to be “ugly enough to keep it safe from kidnappers.” Pragmatism became an influential philosophical movement during the twentieth century through Dewey philosophy of science and philosophy of education, C. I. Lewis theory of knowledge, Ramsey, Ernest Nagel, and Quine philosophy of science. Peirce’s work in logic influenced, mainly through his contacts with the G. logician Ernst Schröder, the model-theoretic tradition in twentieth-century logic. There are three comprehensive collections of Peirce’s papers: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce 158, vols. 16 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. 78 edited by Arthur Burks; The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce 6, edited by Carolyn Eisele; and Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition 2.

peirce’s law -- the principle ‘A P B P A P A’, which holds in classical logic but fails in the eyes of relevance logicians when ‘ P’ is read as ‘entails’.

pelagianism: the doctrine in Christian theology that, through the exercise of free will, human beings can attain moral perfection. A broad movement devoted to this proposition was only loosely associated with its eponymous leader. Pelagius c.354c.425, a lay theologian from Britain or Ireland, taught in Rome prior to its sacking in 410. He and his disciple Celestius found a forceful adversary in Augustine, whom they provoked to stiffen his stance on original sin, the bondage of the will, and humanity’s total reliance upon God’s grace and predestination for salvation. To Pelagius, this constituted fatalism and encouraged moral apathy. God would not demand perfection, as the Bible sometimes suggested, were that impossible to attain. Rather grace made the struggle easier for a sanctity that would not be unreachable even in its absence. Though in the habit of sinning, in consequence of the fall, we have not forfeited the capacity to overcome that habit nor been released from the imperative to do so. For all its moral earnestness this teaching seems to be in conflict with much of the New Testament, especially as interpreted by Augustine, and it was condemned as heresy in 418. The bondage of the will has often been reaffirmed, perhaps most notably by Luther in dispute with Erasmus. Yet Christian theology and practice have always had their sympathizers with Pelagianism and with its reluctance to attest the loss of free will, the inevitability of sin, and the utter necessity of God’s grace.

izzing/hazzing – per-essentiam/per-accidentem: literally, “by, as, or being an accident or non-essential feature.” A “per accidens” predication Grice calls a hazzing (not an izzing) and is one in which an accident is predicated of a substance. The terminology is medieval. Note that the accident and substance themselves, and not expressions standing for them, are the terms of the predication relation. An “ens per accidentem” is either an accident or the “accidental unity” of a substance and an accident. Descartes, e.g., insists that a person is not a “per accidentem” union of body and mind. H. P. Grice, “Izzing, hazzing: the per-essentiam/per-accidentem distinction.”

perceptum: the traditional distinction is perceptum-conceptum: nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu. this is Grice on sense-datum. Grice feels that the kettle is hot; Grice sees that the kettle is hot; Grice perceives that the kettle is hot. WoW:251 uses this example. It may be argued that the use of ‘see’ is there NOT factive. Cf. “I feel hot but it’s not hot.” Grice modifies the thing to read, “DIRECTLY PERCEIVING”: Grice only indirectly perceives that the kettle is hot’ if what he is doing is ‘seeing’ that the kettle is hot. When Grice sees that the kettle is hot, it is a ‘secondary’ usage of ‘see,’ because it means that Grice perceives that the kettle has some visual property that INDICATES the presence of hotness (Grice uses phi for the general formula). Cf. sensum. Lewis and Short have “sentĭo,” which they render, aptly, as “to sense,” ‘to discern by the senses; to feel, hear, see, etc.; to perceive, be sensible of (syn. percipio).” Note that Price is also cited by Grice in Personal identity. Grice: That pillar box seems red to me. The locus classicus in the philosophical literature for Grices implicaturum. Grice introduces a dout-or-denial condition for an utterance of a phenomenalist report (That pillar-box seems red to me). Grice attacks neo-Wittgensteinian approaches that regard the report as _false_. In a long excursus on implication, he compares the phenomenalist report with utterances like He has beautiful handwriting (He is hopeless at philosophy), a particularised conversational implicaturum; My wife is in the kitchen or the garden (I have non-truth-functional grounds to utter this), a generalised conversational implicaturum; She was poor but she was honest (a Great-War witty (her poverty and her honesty contrast), a conventional implicaturum; and Have you stopped beating your wife? an old Oxonian conundrum. You have been beating your wife, cf. Smith has not ceased from eating iron, a presupposition. More importantly, he considers different tests for each concoction! Those for the conversational implicaturum will become crucial: cancellability, calculability, non-detachability, and indeterminacy. In the proceedings he plays with something like the principle of conversational helpfulness, as having a basis on a view of conversation as rational co-operation, and as giving the rationale to the implicaturum. Past the excursus, and back to the issue of perception, he holds a conservative view as presented by Price at Oxford. One interesting reprint of Grices essay is in Daviss volume on Causal theories, since this is where it belongs! White’s response is usually ignored, but shouldnt. White is an interesting Australian philosopher at Oxford who is usually regarded as a practitioner of ordinary-language philosophy. However, in his response, White hardly touches the issue of the implicaturum with which Grice is primarily concerned. Grice found that a full reprint from the PAS in a compilation also containing the James Harvard would be too repetitive. Therefore, he omits the excursus on implication. However, the way Grice re-formulates what that excursus covers is very interesting. There is the conversational implicaturum, particularised (Smith has beautiful handwriting) and generalised (My wife is in the kitchen or in the garden). Then there is the præsuppositum, or presupposition (You havent stopped beating your wife). Finally, there is the conventional implicaturum (She was poor, but she was honest). Even at Oxford, Grices implicaturum goes, philosophers ‒ even Oxonian philosophers ‒ use imply for all those different animals! Warnock had attended Austins Sense and Sensibilia (not to be confused with Sense and Sensibility by Austen), which Grice found boring, but Warnock didnt because Austin reviews his "Berkeley." But Warnock, for obvious reasons, preferred philosophical investigations with Grice. Warnock reminisces that Grice once tells him, and not on a Saturday morning, either, How clever language is, for they find that ordinary language does not need the concept of a visum. Grice and Warnock spent lovely occasions exploring what Oxford has as the philosophy of perception. While Grice later came to see philosophy of perception as a bit or an offshoot of philosophical psychology, the philosophy of perception is concerned with that treasured bit of the Oxonian philosophers lexicon, the sense-datum, always in the singular! The cause involved is crucial. Grice plays with an evolutionary justification of the material thing as the denotatum of a perceptual judgement. If a material thing causes the sense-datum of a nut, that is because the squarrel (or squirrel) will not be nourished by the sense datum of the nut; only by the nut! There are many other items in the Grice Collection that address the topic of perception – notably with Warnock, and criticizing members of the Ryle group like Roxbee-Cox (on vision, cf. visa ‒ taste, and perception, in general – And we should not forget that Grice contributed a splendid essay on the distinction of the senses to Butlers Analytic philosophy, which in a way, redeemed a rather old-fashioned discipline by shifting it to the idiom of the day, the philosophy of perception: a retrospective, with Warnock, the philosophy of perception, : perception, the philosophy of perception, visum. Warnock was possibly the only philosopher at Oxford Grice felt congenial enough to engage in different explorations in the so-called philosophy of perception. Their joint adventures involved the disimplicaturum of a visum. Grice later approached sense data in more evolutionary terms: a material thing is to be vindicated transcendentally, in the sense that it is a material thing (and not a sense datum or collection thereof) that nourishes a creature like a human. Grice was particularly grateful to Warnock. By reprinting the full symposium on “Causal theory” of perception in his influential s. of Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Warnock had spread Grices lore of implicaturum all over! In some parts of the draft he uses more on visa, vision, vision, with Warnock, vision. Of the five senses, Grice and Warnock are particularly interested in seeing. As Grice will put it later, see is a factive. It presupposes the existence of the event reported after the that-clause; a visum, however, as an intermediary between the material thing and the perceiver does not seem necessary in ordinary discourse. Warnock will reconsider Grices views too (On what is seen, in Sibley). While Grice uses vision, he knows he is interested in Philosophers paradox concerning seeing, notably Witters on seeing as, vision, taste and the philosophy of perception, vision, seeing. As an Oxonian philosopher, Grice was of course more interested in seeing than in vision. He said that Austin would criticise even the use of things like sensation and volition, taste, The Grice Papers, keyword: taste, the objects of the five senses, the philosophy of perception, perception, the philosophy of perception; philosophy of perception, vision, taste, perception. Mainly with Warnock. Warnock repr. Grice’s “Causal theory” in his influential Reading in Philosophy, The philosophy of perception, perception, with Warnock, with Warner; perception. Warnock learns about perception much more from Grice than from Austin, taste, The philosophy of perception, the philosophy of perception, notes with Warnock on visum, : visum, Warnock, Grice, the philosophy of perception. Grice kept the lecture notes to a view of publishing a retrospective. Warnock recalled Grice saying, how clever language is! Grice took the offer by Harvard University Press, and it was a good thing he repr. part of “Causal theory.” However, the relevant bits for his theory of conversation as rational co-operation lie in the excursus which he omitted. What is Grices implicaturum: that one should consider the topic rather than the method here, being sense datum, and causation, rather than conversational helpfulness. After all, That pillar box seems red to me, does not sound very helpful. But the topic of Causal theory is central for his view of conversation as rational co-operation. Why? P₁ gets an impression of danger as caused by the danger out there. He communicates the danger to P₁, causing in P₂ some behaviour. Without causation, or causal links, the very point of offering a theory of conversation as rational co-operation seems minimized. On top, as a metaphysician, he was also concerned with cause simpliciter. He was especially proud that Price’s section on the casual theory of perception, from his Belief, had been repr. along with his essay in the influential volume by Davis on “Causal theories.” In “Actions and events,” Grice further explores cause now in connection with Greek aitia. As Grice notes, the original usage of this very Grecian item is the one we find in rebel without a cause, cause-to, rather than cause-because. The two-movement nature of causing is reproduced in the conversational exchange: a material thing causes a sense datum which causes an expression which gets communicated, thus causing a psychological state which will cause a behaviour. This causation is almost representational. A material thing or a situation cannot govern our actions and behaviours, but a re-præsentatum of it might. Govern our actions and behaviour is Grices correlate of what a team of North-Oxfordshire cricketers can do for North-Oxfordshire: what North Oxfordshire cannot do for herself, Namesly, engage in a game of cricket! In Retrospective epilogue he casts doubts on the point of his causal approach. It is a short paragraph that merits much exploration. Basically, Grice is saying his causalist approach is hardly an established thesis. He also proposes a similar serious objection to his view in Some remarks about the senses, the other essay in the philosophy of perception in Studies. As he notes, both engage with some fundamental questions in the philosophy of perception, which is hardly the same thing as saying that they provide an answer to each question! Grice: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. Examples which occur to me are the following six. You cannot see a knife ‘as’ a knife, though you may see what is not a knife ‘as’ a knife (keyword: ‘seeing as’). When he said he ‘knew’ that the objects before him were human hands, Moore was guilty of misusing ‘know.’ For an occurrence to be properly said to have a ‘cause,’ it must be something abnormal or unusual (keyword: ‘cause’). For an action to be properly described as one for which the agent is ‘responsible,’ it must be the sort of action for which people are condemned (keyword: responsibility). What is actual is not also possible (keyword: actual). What is known by me to be the case is not also believed by me to be the case (keyword: ‘know’ – cf. Urmson on ‘scalar set’). And cf. with the extra examples he presents in “Prolegomena.” I have no doubt that there will be other candidates besides the six which I have mentioned. I must emphasize that I am not saying that all these examples are importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know, they may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detectcd, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are. “Causal theory”, knowledge and belief, knowledge, belief, philosophical psychology. Grice: the doxastic implicaturum. I know only implicates I do not believe. The following is a mistake by a philosopher. What is known by me to be the case is not also believed by me to be the case. The topic had attracted the attention of some Oxonian philosophers such as Urmson in Parenthetical verbs. Urmson speaks of a scale: I know can be used parenthetically, as I believe can. For Grice, to utter I believe is obviously to make a weaker conversational move than you would if you utter I know. And in this case, an approach to informativeness in terms of entailment is in order, seeing that I know entails I believe. A is thus allowed to infer that the utterer is not in a position to make the stronger claim. The mechanism is explained via his principle of conversational helpfulness. Philosophers tend two over-use these two basic psychological states, attitudes, or stances. Grice is concerned with Gettier-type cases, and also the factivity of know versus the non-factivity of believe. Grice follows the lexicological innovations by Hintikka: the logic of belief is doxastic; the logic of knowledge is epistemic. The last thesis that Grice lists in Causal theory that he thinks rests on a big mistake he formulates as: What is known by me to be the case is NOT also believed by me to be the case. What are his attending remarks? Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. An example which occurs to me is the following: What is known by me to be the case is not also believed by me to be the case. I must emphasise that I am not saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticising, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what SORT of nuances they are! The ætiological implicaturum. Grice. For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be something abnormal or unusual. This is an example Grice lists in Causal theory but not in Prolegomena. But cf. ‘responsible’ – and Hart and Honoré on accusation -- accusare "call to account, make complaint against," from ad causa, from “ad,” with regard to, as in ‘ad-’) + causa, a cause; a lawsuit,’ v. cause. For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be something abnormal or unusual. Similar commentary to his example on responsible/condemnable apply. The objector may stick with the fact that he is only concerned with proper utterances. Surely Grice wants to go to a pre-Humeian account of causation, possible Aristotelian, aetiologia. Where everything has a cause, except, for Aristotle, God! What are his attending remarks? Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. An example which occurs to me is the following: What is known by me to be the case is not also believed by me to be the case. I must emphasise that I am not saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophising. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are! Causal theory, cause, causality, causation, conference, colloquium, Stanford, cause, metaphysics, the abnormal/unusual implicaturum, ætiology, ætiological implicaturum. Grice: the ætiological implicaturum. Grices explorations on cause are very rich. He is concerned with some alleged misuse of cause in ordinary language. If as Hume suggests, to cause is to will, one would say that the decapitation of Charles I wills his death, which sounds harsh, if not ungrammatical, too. Grice later relates cause to the Greek aitia, as he should. He notes collocations like rebel without a cause. For the Greeks, or Grecians, as he called them, and the Griceians, it is a cause to which one should be involved in elucidating. A ‘cause to’ connects with the idea of freedom. Grice was constantly aware of the threat of mechanism, and his idea was to provide philosophical room for the idea of finality, which is not mechanistically derivable. This leads him to discussion of overlap and priority of, say, a physical-cum-physiological versus a psychological theory explaining this or that piece of rational behaviour. Grice can be Wittgensteinian when citing Anscombes translation: No psychological concept without the behaviour the concept is brought to explain. It is best to place his later treatment of cause with his earlier one in Causal theory. It is surprising Grice does not apply his example of a mistake by a philosopher to the causal bit of his causal theory. Grice states the philosophical mistake as follows: For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be something abnormal or unusual. This is an example Grice lists in Causal theory but not in Prolegomena. For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be something abnormal or unusual. A similar commentary to his example on responsible/condemnable applies: The objector may stick with the fact that he is only concerned with PROPER utterances. Surely Grice wants to embrace a pre-Humeian account of causation, possible Aristotelian. Keyword: Aitiologia, where everything has a cause, except, for Aristotle, God! What are his attending remarks? Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would Grice thinks need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which Grice has been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. One example which occurs to Grice is the following: For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be something abnormal or unusual. Grice feels he must emphasise that he is not saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are! Re: responsibility/condemnation. Cf. Mabbott, Flew on punishment, Philosophy. And also Hart. At Corpus, Grice enjoys his tutor Hardies resourcefulness in the defence of what may be a difficult position, a characteristic illustrated by an incident which Hardie himself once told Grice about himself. Hardie had parked his car and gone to a cinema. Unfortunately, Hardie had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights were, at the time, controlled by the passing traffic. As a result, the lights are jammed, and it requires four policemen to lift Hardies car off the strip. The police decides to prosecute. Grice indicated to Hardie that this hardly surprised him and asked him how he fared. Oh, Hardie says, I got off. Then Grice asks Hardie how on earth he managed that! Quite simply, Hardie answers. I just invoked Mills method of difference. The police charged me with causing an obstruction at 4 p.m. I told the police that, since my car was parked at 2 p.m., it could not have been my car which caused the obstruction at 4 p.m. This relates to an example in Causal theory that he Grice does not discuss in Prolegomena, but which may relate to Hart, and closer to Grice, to Mabbotts essay on Flew on punishment, in Philosophy. Grice states the philosophical mistake as follows: For an action to be properly described as one for which the agent is responsible, it must be thc sort of action for which people are condemned. As applied to Hardie. Is Hardie irresponsible? In any case, while condemnable, he was not! Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. An example which occurs to me is the following: For an action to be properly described as one for which the agent is responsible, it must be the sort of action for which people are condemned. I must emphasise that I am not saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are. The modal example, what is actual is not also possible, should discussed under Indicative conditonals, Grice on Macbeth’s implicaturum: seeing a dagger as a dagger. Grice elaborates on this in Prolegomena, but the austerity of Causal theory is charming, since he does not give a quote or source. Obviously, Witters. Grice writes: Witters might say that one cannot see a knife as a knife, though one may see what is not a knife as a knife. The issue, Grice notes, with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. An example which occurs to Grice is the following: You cannot see a knife as a knife, though you may see what is not a knife as a knife. Grice feels that he must emphasise that he is not saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. I am merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are! Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable as this which now I draw. Thou marshallst me the way that I was going; and such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o the other senses, Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, and on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, which was not so before. Theres no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. Now oer the one halfworld Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtaind sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecates offerings, and witherd murder, Alarumd by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howls his watch, thus with his stealthy pace. With Tarquins ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives. I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell. The Moore example is used both in “Causal theory” and “Prolegomena.” But the use in “Causal Theory” is more austere: Philosophers mistake: Malcolm: When Moore said he knew that the objects before him were human hands, he was guilty of misusing the word know. Grice writes: The issue with which I have been mainly concerned may be thought rather a fine point, but it is certainly not an isolated one. There are several philosophical theses or dicta which would I think need to be examined in order to see whether or not they are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which I have been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind. An example which occurs to me is the following: When Moore said he knew that the objects before him were human hands, he was guilty of misusing the word know. I must emphasise that I am not saying that this example is importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all I know, it may be. To put the matter more generally, the position adopted by my objector seems to me to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing. I am not condemning this kind of manoeuvre. Grice is merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts. Before we rush ahead to exploit the linguistic nuances which we have detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of nuances they are! So surely Grice is meaning: I know that the objects before me are human hands as uttered by Moore is possibly true. Grice was amused by the fact that while at Madison, Wisc., Moore gave the example: I know that behind those curtains there is a window. Actually he was wrong, as he soon realised when the educated Madisonians corrected him with a roar of unanimous laughter. You see, the lecture hall of the University of Wisconsin at Madison is a rather, shall we say, striking space. The architect designed the lecture hall with a parapet running around the wall just below the ceiling, cleverly rigged with indirect lighting to create the illusion that sun light is pouring in through windows from outside. So, Moore comes to give a lecture one sunny day. Attracted as he was to this eccentric architectural detail, Moore gives an illustration of certainty as attached to common sense. Pointing to the space below the ceiling, Moore utters. We know more things than we think we know. I know, for example, that the sunlight shining in from outside proves At which point he was somewhat startled (in his reserved Irish-English sort of way) when his audience burst out laughing! Is that a proof of anything? Grice is especially concerned with I seem He needs a paradeigmatic sense-datum utterance, and intentionalist as he was, he finds it in I seem to see a red pillar box before me. He is relying on Paul. Grice would generalise a sense datum by φ I seem to perceive that the alpha is phi. He agrees that while cause may be too much, any sentence using because will do: At a circus: You seem to be seeing that an elephant is coming down the street because an elephant is coming down the street. Grice found the causalist theory of perception particularly attractive since its objection commits one same mistake twice: he mischaracterises the cancellable implicaturum of both seem and cause! While Grice is approaching the philosophical item in the philosophical lexicon, perceptio, he is at this stage more interested in vernacular that- clauses such as sensing that, or even more vernacular ones like seeming that, if not seeing that! This is of course philosophical (cf. aesthetikos vs. noetikos). L and S have “perceptĭo,” f. perceptio, as used by Cicero (Ac. 2, 7, 22) translating catalepsis, and which they render as “a taking, receiving; a gathering in, collecting;’ frugum fruetuumque reliquorum, Cic. Off. 2, 3, 12: fructuum;’ also as perception, comprehension, cf.: notio, cognition; animi perceptiones, notions, ideas; cognitio aut perceptio, aut si verbum e verbo volumus comprehensio, quam κατάληψιν illi vocant; in philosophy, direct apprehension of an object by the mind, Zeno Stoic.1.20, Luc. Par. 4, al.; τῶν μετεώρων;” ἀκριβὴς κ. Certainty; pl., perceptions, Stoic.2.30, Luc. Herm.81, etc.; introduced into Latin by Cicero, Plu. Cic. 40. As for “causa” Grice is even more sure he was exploring a time-honoured philosophical topic. The entry in L and S is “causa,’ perh. root “cav-“ of “caveo,” prop. that which is defended or protected; cf. “cura,” and that they render as, unhelpfully, as “cause,” “that by, on account of, or through which any thing takes place or is done;” “a cause, reason, motive, inducement;” also, in gen., an occasion, opportunity; oeffectis; factis, syn. with ratio, principium, fons, origo, caput; excusatio, defensio; judicium, controversia, lis; partes, actio; condicio, negotium, commodum, al.); correlated to aition, or aitia, cause, δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν,” cf. Pl. Ti. 68e, Phd. 97a sq.; on the four causes of Arist. v. Ph. 194b16, Metaph. 983a26: αἰ. τοῦ γενέσθαι or γεγονέναι Pl. Phd. 97a; τοῦ μεγίστου ἀγαθοῦ τῇ πόλει αἰτία ἡ κοινωνία Id. R. 464b: αἰτίᾳ for the sake of, κοινοῦ τινος ἀγαθοῦ.” Then there is “αἴτιον” (cf. ‘αἴτιος’) is used like “αἰτία” in the sense of cause, not in that of ‘accusation.’ Grice goes back to perception at a later stage, reminiscing on his joint endeavours with akin Warnock, Ps karulise elatically, potching and cotching obbles, Pirotese, Pirotese, creature construction, philosophical psychology. Grice was fascinated by Carnaps Ps which karulise elatically. Grice adds potching for something like perceiving and cotching for something like cognising. With his essay Some remarks about the senses, Grice introduces the question by which criterion we distinguish our five senses into the contemporary philosophy of perception. The literature concerning this question is not very numerous but the discussion is still alive and was lately inspired by the volume The Senses2. There are four acknowledged possible answers to the question how we distinguish the senses, all of them already stated by Grice. First, the senses are distinguished by the properties we perceive by them. Second, the senses are distinguished by the phenomenal qualities of the perception itself or as Grice puts it “by the special introspectible character of the experiences” Third, the senses are distinguished by the physical stimuli that are responsible for the relevant perceptions. Fourth, The senses are distinguished by the sense-organs that are (causally) involved in the production of the relevant perceptions. Most contributions discussing this issue reject the third and fourth answers in a very short argumentation. Nearly all philosophers writing on the topic vote either for the first or the second answer. Accordingly, most part of the debate regarding the initial question takes the form of a dispute between these two positions. Or” was a big thing in Oxford philosophy. The only known published work of Wood, our philosophy tutor at Christ Church, was an essay in Mind, the philosophers journal, entitled “Alternative Uses of “Or” ”, a work which was every bit as indeterminate as its title. Several years later he published another paper, this time for the Aristotelian Society, entitled On being forced to a conclusion. Cf. Grice and Wood on the demands of conversational reason. Wood, The force of linguistic rules. Wood, on the implicaturum of or in review in Mind of Connor, Logic. The five senses, as Urmson notes, are to see that the sun is shining, to hear that the car collided, to feel that her pulse is beating, to smell that something has been smoking and to taste that. An interesting piece in that it was commissioned by Butler, who knew Grice from his Oxford days. Grice cites Wood and Albritton. Grice is concerned with a special topic in the philosophy of perception, notably the identification of the traditional five senses: vision, audition, taste, smell, and tact. He introduces what is regarded in the philosophical literature as the first thought-experiment, in terms of the senses that Martians may have. They have two pairs of eyes: are we going to allow that they see with both pairs? Grice introduces a sub-division of seeing: a Martian x-s an object with his upper pair of eyes, but he y-s an object with the lower pair of eyes. In his exploration, he takes a realist stance, which respects the ordinary discursive ways to approach issues of perception. A second interesting point is that in allowing this to be repr. in Butlers Analytic philosophy, Grice is demonstrating that analytic philosophers should NOT be obsessed with ordinary language. Butlers compilation, a rather dry one, is meant as a response to the more linguistic oriented ones by Flew (Grices first tutee at St. Johns, as it happens), also published by Blackwell, and containing pieces by Austin, and company. One philosopher who took Grice very seriously on this was Coady, in his The senses of the Martians. Grice provides a serious objection to his own essay in Retrospective epilogue We see with our eyes. I.e. eye is teleologically defined. He notes that his way of distinguishing the senses is hardly an established thesis. Grice actually advances this topic in his earlier Causal theory. Grice sees nothing absurd in the idea that a non-specialist concept should contain, so to speak, a blank space to be filled in by the specialist; that this is so, e.g., in the case of the concept of seeing is perhaps indicated by the consideration that if we were in doubt about the correctness of speaking of a certain creature with peculiar sense-organs as seeing objects, we might well wish to hear from a specialist a comparative account of the human eye and the relevant sense-organs of the creature in question. He returns to the point in Retrospective epilogue with a bit of doxastic humility, We see with our eyes is analytic ‒ but philosophers should take that more seriously. Grice tested the playmates of his children, aged 7 and 9, with Nothing can be green and red all over. Instead, Morley Bunker preferred philosophy undergrads. Aint that boring? To give examples: Summer follows Spring was judged analytic by Morley-Bunkers informants, as cited by Sampson, in Making sense (Clarendon) by highly significant majorities in each group of Subjectss, while We see with our eyes was given near-even split votes by each group. Over all, the philosophers were somewhat more consistent with each other than the non-philosophers. But that global finding conceals results for individual sentences that sometimes manifested the opposed tendency. Thus, Thunderstorms are electrical disturbances in the atmosphere is judged analytic by a highly significant majority of the non-philosophers, while a non-significant majority of the philosophers deemed it non-analytic or synthetic. In this case, it seems, philosophical training, surely not brain-washing, induces the realisation that well-established results of contemporary science are not necessary truths. In other cases, conversely, cliches of current philosophical education impose their own mental blinkers on those who undergo it: Nothing can be completely red and green all over is judged analytic by a significant majority of philosophers but only by a non-significant majority of non-philosophers. All in all, the results argue strongly against the notion that our inability to decide consistently whether or not some statement is a necessary truth derives from lack of skill in articulating our underlying knowledge of the rules of our language. Rather, the inability comes from the fact that the question as posed is unreal. We choose to treat a given statement as open to question or as unchallengeable in the light of the overall structure of beliefs which we have individually evolved in order to make sense of our individual experience. Even the cases which seem clearly analytic or synthetic are cases which individuals judge alike because the relevant experiences are shared by the whole community, but even for such cases one can invent hypothetical or suppositional future experiences which, if they should be realised, would cause us to revise our judgements. This is not intended to call into question the special status of the truths of logic, such as either Either it is raining or it is not. He is of course inclined to accept the traditional view according to which logical particles such as not and or are distinct from the bulk of the vocabulary in that the former really are governed by clear-cut inference rules. Grice does expand on the point. Refs.: Under sense-datum, there are groups of essays. The obvious ones are the two essays on the philosophy of perception in WOW. A second group relates to his research with G. J. Warnock, where the keywords are ‘vision,’ ‘taste,’ and ‘perception,’ in general. There is a more recent group with this research with R. Warner. ‘Visum’ and ‘visa’ are good keywords, and cf. the use of ‘senses’ in “Some remarks about the senses,” in BANC.Philo: Grice’s favourite philosopher, after Ariskant. The [Greek: protos logos anapodeiktos] of the Stoic logic ran thus [Greek: ei hemera esti, phos estin ... alla men hemera estin phos ara estin] (Sext. _P.H._ II. 157, and other passages qu. Zeller 114). This bears a semblance of inference and isnot so utterly tautological as Cic.'s translation, which merges [Greek: phos] and [Greek: hemera] into one word, or that of Zeller (114, note). Si dies est lucet: a better trans of Greek: ei phos estin, hemera estin] than was given in 96, where see n. _Aliter Philoni_: not Philo of Larissa, but a noted dialectician, pupil of Diodorus the Megarian, mentioned also in 75. The dispute between Diodorus and Philo is mentioned in Sext. _A.M._ VIII. 115--117 with the same purpose as here, see also Zeller 39. Conexi = Gr. “synemmenon,” cf. Zeller 109. This was the proper term for the hypothetical judgment. _Superius_: the Greek: synemmenon consists of two parts, the hypothetical part and the affirmative--called in Greek [Greek: hegoumenon] and [Greek: legon]; if one is admitted the other follows of course.Philo's criterion for the truth of “if p, q” is truth-functional. Philo’s truth-functional criterion is generally accepted as a minimal condition.Philo maintains that “If Smith is in London, he, viz. Smith, is attending the meeting there, viz. in London” is true (i) when the antecedens (“Smith is in London”) is true and the consequens (“Smith is in London at a meeting”) is true (row 1) and (ii) when the antecedent is false (rows 3 and 4); false only when the antecedens (“Smith is in London”) is true and the consequens (“Smith is in London, at a meeting”) is false. (Sext. Emp., A. M., 2.113-114).

Philo’s “if p, q” is what Whitehead and Russell call, misleadingly, ‘material’ implication, for it’s neither an implication, nor materia.In “The Influence of Grice on Philo,” Shropshire puts forward the thesis that Philo was aware of Griceian ideas on relative identity, particularly time-relative identity. Accordingly, Philo uses subscript for temporal indexes. Once famous discussion took place one long winter night.“If it is day, it is night.”“False!” Diodorus screamed.“True,” his tutee Philo courteously responded. “But true at night only.”Philo's suggestion is remarkable – although not that remarkable if we assume he read the now lost Griceian tract.Philo’s “if,” like Grice’s “if,” – on a bad day -- deviates noticeably from what Austin (and indeed, Austen) used to refer to as ‘ordinary’ language.As Philo rotundly says: “The Griceian ‘if’ requires abstraction on the basis of a concept of truth-functionality – and not all tutees will succeed in GETTING that.” The hint was on Strawson.Philo's ‘if’ has been criticised on two counts. First, as with Whitehead’s and Russell’s equally odd ‘if,’ – which they symbolise with an ‘inverted’ C, to irritate Johnson, -- “They think ‘c’ stands for either ‘consequentia’ or ‘contentum’ -- in the case of material implication, for the truth of the conditional no connection (or better, Kant’s relation) of content between antecedent and consequent is required. Uttered or emitted during the day, e. g. ‘If virtue benefits, it is day’ is Philonianly true. This introduces a variant of the so-called ‘paradoxes’ of material implication (Relevance Logic, Conditionals 2.3; also, English Oxonian philosopher Lemmon 59-60, 82). This or that ancient philosopher was aware of what he thought was a ‘problem’ for Philo’s ‘if.’ Vide: SE, ibid. 113-117). On a second count, due to the time-dependency or relativity of the ‘Hellenistic’ ‘proposition,’ Philo's truth-functional criterion implies that ‘if p, q’ changes its truth-value over time, which amuses Grice, but makes Strawson sick. In Philo’s infamous metalinguistic disquotational version that Grice finds genial:‘If it is day, it is night’ is true if it is night, but false if it is day. This is counter-intuitive in Strawson’s “London,” urban, idiolect (Grice is from the Heart of England) as regards an utterance in ‘ordinary-language’ involving ‘if.’“We are not THAT otiose at busy London!On a third count, as the concept of “if” (‘doubt’ in Frisian) also meant to provide for consequentia between from a premise to a conclusio, this leads to the “rather” problematic result – Aquinas, S. T. ix. 34) that an ‘argumentum,’ as Boethius calls it, can in principle change from being valid to being invalid and vice versa, which did not please the Saint Thomas (Aquinas), “or God, matter of fact.”From Sextus: A. M., 2.113ffA non-simple proposition is such composed of a duplicated proposition or of this or that differing proposition. A complex proposition is controlled by this or that conjunction. 109. Of these let us take the hypo-thetical proposition, so-called. This, then, is composed of a duplicated proposition or of differing propositions, by means of the conjunction “if” (Gr. ‘ei,’ L. ‘si’, German ‘ob’). Thus, e. g. from a duplicated proposition and the conjunction “if” (Gr. ‘ei,’ L. ‘si,’ G. ‘ob’) there is composed such a hypothetical proposition as this. “If it is day, it is day’ (110) and from differing propositions, and by means of the conjunction “if” , one in this form, “If it is day, it is light.” “Si dies est, lucet.” And of the two propositions contained in the hypo-thetical proposition, or subordinating clause that which is placed immediately AFTER the conjunction or subordinating particle “if” is called “ante-cedent,” or “first;” and ‘if’ being ‘noncommutative,’ and the other one “consequent” or “second,” EVEN if the whole proposition is reversed IN ORDER OF EXPRESSION – this is a conceptual issue, not a grammatical one! -- as thus — “It is light, if it is day.” For in this, too, the proposition, “It is light,” (lucet) is called consequent although it is UTTERED first, and ‘It is day’ antecedent, although it is UTTERED second, owing to the fact that it is placed after the conjunction or subordinating particle “if.” 111. Such then is the construction of the hypothetical proposition, and a proposition of this kind seems to “promise” (or suggest, or implicate) that the ‘consequent’ (or super-ordinated or main proposition) logically follows the ‘antecedens,’ or sub-ordinated proposition. If the antecedens is true, the consequens is true. Hence, if this sort of “promise,” suggestio, implicaturum, or what have you, is fulfilled and the consequens follows the antecedent, the hypothetical proposition is true. If the promise is not fulfilled, it is false (This is something Strawson grants as a complication in the sentence exactly after the passage that Grice extracts – Let’s revise Strawson’s exact wording. Strawson writes:“There is much more to be noted about ‘if.’ In particular, about whether the antecedens has to be a ‘GOOD’ antecedens, i. e. a ‘good’ ground – not inadmissible evidence, say -- or good reason for accepting the consequens, and whether THIS is a necessary condition for the whole ‘if’ utterance to be TRUE.’ Surely not for Philo. Philo’s criterion is that an ‘if’ utterance is true iff it is NOT the case that the antecedens is true and it is not the case that the consequens is true. 112. Accordingly, let us begin at once with this problem, and consider whether any hypothetical proposition can be found which is true and which fulfills the promise or suggestio or implicaturum described. Now all philosophers agree that a hypothetical proposition is true when the consequent follows the antecedent. As to when the consequens follows from the antecedens philosophers such as Grice and his tutee Strawson disagree with one another and propound conflicting criteria. 113. Philo and Grice declares that the ‘if’ utterance is true whenever it is not the case that the antecedens (“Smith is in London”) is true and it is not the case that the consequens (“Smith is in London attending a meeting”) is true. So that, according to Grice and Philo (vide, “The influence of Grice on Philo”), the hypothetical is true in three ways or rows (row 1, row 3, and row 4) and false in one way or row (second row, antecedens T and consequence F). For the first row, whenever the ‘if’ utterance begins with truth and ends in truth it is true. E. g. “If it is day, it is light.” “Si dies est, lux est.”For row 4: the ‘if’ utterance is also true whenever the antecedens is false and the consequens is false. E. g. “If the earth flies, the earth has wings.” ει πέταται ή γή, πτέρυγας έχει ή γή (“ei petatai he ge, pteguras ekhei he ge”) (Si terra volat, habet alas.”)114. Likewise also that which begins with what is false and ends with what is true is true, as thus — If the earth flies, the earth exists. “Si terra volat, est terra”. dialecticis, in quibus ſubtilitatem nimiam laudando, niſi fallimur, tradu xit Callimachus. 2 Cujus I. ſpecimen nobis fervavit se XTVS EMPI . RIC V S , a qui de Diodori, Philonis & Chryſippi diſſenſu circa propofi tiones connexas prolixe diſſerit. Id quod paucis ita comprehendit ci . CERO : 6 In hoc ipfo , quod in elementis dialectici docent, quomodo judi care oporteat, verum falſumne fit , fi quid ita connexum eſt , ut hoc: fi dies eft, lucet, quanta contentio eft, aliter Diodoro, aliter Philoni, Chry fappo aliter placet. Quæ ut clarius intelligantur, obſervandum eſt, Dia lecticos in propofitionum conditionatarum , quas connexas vocabant, explicatione in eo convenisse, verum esse consequens, si id vera consequentia deducatur ex antecedente; falsum, si non ſequatur; in criterio vero , ex quo dijudicanda est consequentiæ veritas, definiendo inter se diſſenſiſſe. Et Philo quidem veram esse propoſitionem connexam putabat, fi & antecedens & consequens verum esset , & ſi antecedens atque conſequens falsum eſſet, & fi a falſo incipiens in verum defineret, cujus primi exemplum eſt : “Si dies est, lux est,” secondi. “Si terra volat, habet alas.” Tertii. “Si terra volat, est terra.” Solum vero falsum , quando incipiens a vero defineret in falſum . Diodorus autem hoc falſum interdum eſſe, quod contingere pof ſet, afferens, omne quod contigit , ex confequentiæ complexu removit , ficque, quod juxta Philonem verum eft, fi dies eſt, ego diſſero, falſum eſſe pronunciavit, quoniam contingere poffit, ut quis, ſi dies fit, non differat, ſed fileat. Ex qua Dialecticorum diſceptatione Sextus infert, incertum eſſe criterium propoſitionum hypotheticarum . Ex quibus parca , ut de bet, manu prolatis, judicium fieri poteſt , quam miſeranda facies fuerit shia lecticæ eriſticæ , quæ ad materiam magis argumentorum , quam ad formam - & ad verba magis, quam ideas, quæ ratiocinia conſtituunt refpiciens, non potuit non innumeras ſine modo & ratione technias & difficultates ftruere, facile fumi inſtar diſſipandas, fi ad ipſam ratiocinandi & ideas inter ſe con ferendi & ex tertia judicandi formam attendatur. Quod fi enim inter ve ritate conſequentiæ & confequentis, ( liceat pauliſper cum ſcholaſticis barbare loqui diſtinxiffent, inanis diſputatio in pulverem abiiffet, & eva nuiſſet; nam de prima Diodorus, de altera Philo , & hic quidem inepte & minus accurate loquebatur. Sed hæc ws šv zapóów . Ceterum II. in fo phiſma t) Coutra Gramm . S.309.Log. I. II.S. 115.Seqq. ) Catalogum Diodororum ſatis longum exhi # Nominateas CLEM . ALE X. Strom . I. IV . ber FABRIC. Bibl.Gr. vol. II. p . 775. pag. 522. % ) Cujusverſus vide apud LAERT. & SEXT. * Contra Iovinian . I. I. conf. MENAG. ad l. c. H . cc. Laërt . & Hiſt. phil. mal. Ø . 60 . ubi tamen quatuor A ) Adv. Logic. I. c . noininat, cum quinque fuerint. b ) Acad. 29. I. IV . 6. 47. DE SECTAM E GARICA phiſinatibus ftruendis Diodorum excelluiffe, non id folum argumentum eft, nuod is quibusdam auctor argumenti, quod velatum dicitur , fuifle aflera tur, fed & quod argumentum dominans invexerit, de quo, ne his nugis lectori moleſti fimus, Epictetum apud ARRIANVM conſuli velimus. Er ad hæc quoque Dialecticæ peritiæ acumina referendum eſt argumentum , quo nihilmoveri probabat. Quod ita sexTvs enarrat: Si quid move tur, aut in eo , in quo eft , loco movetur, aut in eo , in quo non eſt. At neque in quo eſt movetur, manet enim in eo , fi in eo eft ; nec vero , in quo non eſt,movetur; ubi enim aliquid non eſt, ibi neque agere quidquam ne que pati poteft. Non ergo movetur quicquam . Quo argumento non ideo ufus eſt Diodorus, quod putat Sextus, ut more Eleaticorum probaret : non darimotum in rerum natura, & nec interire quicquam nec oriri ; fed ut ſubtilitatem ingenii dialecticam oftenderet, verbisque circumveniret. Qua ratione Diodorum mire depexum dedit Herophilusmedicus. Cum enim luxato humero ad eum veniffet Diodorus, ut ipſum curaret , facete eum irriſit, eodem argumento probando humerum non excidiffe : adeo ut precaretur fophifta , omiffis iis cavillationibus adhiberet ei congruens ex artemedica remedium . f . . Tandem & III . inter atomiſticæ p hiloſophiæ ſectatores numerari folet Diodorus, eo quod énocy iso xei dueen CÁMata minima & indiviſibilia cor pora Itatuerit,numero infinita , magnitudine finita , ut ex veteribus afferunt præter SEXTVM , & EVSEBIVŠ, \ CHALCIDIVS, ISTOBAEVS k alii , quibus ex recentioribus concinunt cvDWORTHVS 1 & FABRICIV'S. * Quia vero veteres non addunt, an indiviſibilia & minima ifta corpuſcula , omnibus qualitatibus præter figuram & fitum fpoliata poſuerit, fine formi dine oppoſiti inter ſyſtematis atomiſtici fectatores numerari non poteſt. Nam alii quoque philoſophi ejusmodi infecabilia corpuſcula admiſerunt ; nec tamen atomos Democriticos ſtatuerunt. "Id quod acute monuit cel. MOSHEMIV S . n . irAnd it is false only in this one way, when it begins with truth and ends in what is false, as in a proposition of this kind. “If it is day, it is night.” “Si dies est, nox est”. (Cf. Cole Porter, “Night and day, day and night!”.For if it IS day, the clause ‘It is day’ is true, and this is the antecedent, but the clause ‘It is night,’ which is the consequens, is false. But when uttered at night, it is true. 115. — But Diodorus asserts that the hypothetical proposition is true which neither admitted nor admits of beginning with truth and ending in falsehood. And this is in conflict with the statement of Philo. For a hypothetical of this kind — If it is day, I am conversing, when at the present moment it is day and I am conversing, is true according to Philo since it begins with the true clause It is day and ends with the true I am conversing; but according to Diodorus it is false, for it admits of beginning with a clause that is, at one time, true and ending in the false clause I am conversing, when I have ceased speaking; also it admitted of beginning with truth and ending with the falsehood I am conversing, 116. for before I began to converse it began with the truth It is day and ended in the falsehood I am conversing. Again, a proposition in this form — If it is night, I am conversing, when it is day and I am silent, is likewise true according to Philo, for it begins with what is false and ends in what is false; but according to Diodorus it is false, for it admits of beginning with truth and ending in falsehood, after night has come on, and when I, again, am not conversing but keeping silence. 117. Moreover, the proposition If it is night, it is day, when it is day, is true according to Philo for the reason that it begins with the false It is night and ends in the true It is day; but according to Diodorus it is false for the reason that it admits of beginning, when night comes on, with the truth It is night and ending in the falsehood It is day.Philo is sometimes called ‘Philo of Megara,’ where ‘of’ is used alla Nancy Mitford, of Chatworth. Although no essay by Philo is preserved (if he wrote it), there are a number of reports of his doctrine, not all positive!Some think Philo made a groundbreaking contribution to the development of semantics (influencing Peirce, but then Peirce was influenced by the World in its totality), in particular to the philosophy of “as if” (als ob), or “if.”A conditional (sunêmmenon), as Philo calls it, is a non-simple, i. e. molecular, non atomic, proposition composed of two propositions, a main, or better super-ordinated proposition, or consequens, and a sub-ordinated proposition, the antecedens, and the subordinator ‘if’. Philo invented (possibly influenced by Frege) what he (Frege, not Philo) calls truth-functionality.Philo puts forward a criterion of truth as he called what Witters will have as a ‘truth table’ for ‘if’ (or ‘ob,’ cognate with Frisian gif, doubt).A conditional is is true in three truth-value combinations, and false when and only when its antecedent is true and its consequent is false.The Philonian ‘if’ Whitehead and Russell re-labelled ‘material’ implication – irritating Johnson who published a letter in The Times, “… and dealing with the paradox of implication.”For Philo, like Grice, a proposition is a function of time that can have different truth-values at different times—it may change its truth-value over time. In Philo’s disquotational formula for ‘if’:“If it is day, ‘if it is day, it is night’ is false; if it is night, ‘if it is day, it is night’ is true.”(Tarski translated to Polish, in which language Grice read it).Philo’s ramblings on ‘if’ lead to foreshadows of Whitehead’s and Russell’s ‘paradox of implication’ that infuriated Johnson – In Russell’s response in the Times, he makes it plain: “Johnson shouldn’t be using ‘paradox’ in the singular. Yours, etc. Baron Russell, Belgravia.”Sextus Empiricus [S. E.] M. 8.109–117, gives a precis of Johnson’s paradox of implication, without crediting Johnson. Philo and Diodorus each considered the four modalities possibility, impossibility, necessity and non-necessity. These were conceived of as modal properties or modal values of propositions, not as modal operators. Philo defined them as follows: ‘Possible is that which is capable of being true by the proposition’s own nature … necessary is that which is true, and which, as far as it is in itself, is not capable of being false. Non-necessary is that which as far as it is in itself, is capable of being false, and impossible is that which by its own nature is not capable of being true.’ Boethius fell in love with Philo, and he SAID it! (In Arist. De Int., sec. ed., 234–235 Meiser).Cf. (Epict. Diss. II.19). Aristotle’s De Interpretatione 9 (Aulus Gellius 11.12.2–3). Grice: “Vision was always held by philosophers to be the superior sense.” Grice: “Perception is, strictly, the extraction and use of information about one’s environment exteroception and one’s own body interoception. “ he various external senses sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste though they overlap to some extent, are distinguished by the kind of information e.g., about light, sound, temperature, pressure they deliver. Proprioception, perception of the self, concerns stimuli arising within, and carrying information about, one’s own body e.g., acceleration, position, and orientation of the limbs. There are distinguishable stages in the extraction and use of sensory information, one an earlier stage corresponding to our perception of objects and events, the other, a later stage, to the perception of facts about these objects. We see, e.g., both the cat on the sofa an object and that the cat is on the sofa a fact. Seeing an object or event a cat on the sofa, a person on the street, or a vehicle’s movement does not require that the object event be identified or recognized in any particular way perhaps, though this is controversial, in any way whatsoever. One can, e.g., see a cat on the sofa and mistake it for a rumpled sweater. Airplane lights are often misidentified as stars, and one can see the movement of an object either as the movement of oneself or under some viewing conditions as expansion or contraction. Seeing objects and events is, in this sense, non-epistemic: one can see O without knowing or believing that it is O that one is seeing. Seeing facts, on the other hand, is epistemic; one cannot see that there is a cat on the sofa without, thereby, coming to know that there is a cat on the sofa. Seeing a fact is coming to know the fact in some visual way. One can see objects the fly in one’s soup, e.g., without realizing that there is a fly in one’s soup thinking, perhaps, it is a bean or a crouton; but to see a fact, the fact that there is a fly in one’s soup is, necessarily, to know it is a fly. This distinction applies to the other sense modalities as well. One can hear the telephone ringing without realizing that it is the telephone perhaps it’s the TV or the doorbell, but to hear a fact, that it is the telephone that is ringing, is, of necessity, to know that it is the telephone that is ringing. The other ways we have of describing what we perceive are primarily variations on these two fundamental themes. In seeing where he went, when he left, who went with him, and how he was dressed, e.g., we are describing the perception of some fact of a certain sort without revealing exactly which fact it is. If Martha saw where he went, then Martha saw hence, came to know some fact having to do with where he went, some fact of the form ‘he went there’. In speaking of states and conditions the condition of his room, her injury, and properties the color of his tie, the height of the building, we sometimes, as in the case of objects, mean to be describing a non-epistemic perceptual act, one that carries no implications for what if anything is known. In other cases, as with facts, we mean to be describing the acquisition of some piece of knowledge. One can see or hear a word without recognizing it as a word it might be in a foreign language, but can one see a misprint and not know it is a misprint? It obviously depends on what one uses ‘misprint’ to refer to: an object a word that is misprinted or a fact the fact that it is misprinted. In examining and evaluating theories whether philosophical or psychological of perception it is essential to distinguish fact perception from object perception. For a theory might be a plausible theory about the perception of objects e.g., psychological theories of “early vision” but not at all plausible about our perception of facts. Fact perception, involving, as it does, knowledge and, hence, belief brings into play the entire cognitive system memory, concepts, etc. in a way the former does not. Perceptual relativity e.g., the idea that what we perceive is relative to our language, our conceptual scheme, or the scientific theories we have available to “interpret” phenomena is quite implausible as a theory about our perception of objects. A person lacking a word for, say, kumquats, lacking this concept, lacking a scientific way of classifying these objects are they a fruit? a vegetable? an animal?, can still see, touch, smell, and taste kumquats. Perception of objects does not depend on, and is therefore not relative to, the observer’s linguistic, conceptual, cognitive, and scientific assets or shortcomings. Fact perception, however, is another matter. Clearly one cannot see that there are kumquats in the basket as opposed to seeing the objects, the kumquats, in the basket if one has no idea of, no concept of, what a kumquat is. Seeing facts is much more sensitive and, hence, relative to the conceptual resources, the background knowledge and scientific theories, of the observer, and this difference must be kept in mind in evaluating claims about perceptual relativity. Though it does not make objects invisible, ignorance does tend to make facts perceptually inaccessible. There are characteristic experiences associated with the different senses. Tasting a kumquat is not at all like seeing a kumquat although the same object is perceived indeed, the same fact that it is a kumquat may be perceived. The difference, of course, is in the subjective experience one has in perceiving the kumquat. A causal theory of perception of objects holds that the perceptual object, what it is we see, taste, smell, or whatever, is that object that causes us to have this subjective experience. Perceiving an object is that object’s causing in the right way one to have an experience of the appropriate sort. I see a bean in my soup if it is, in fact whether I know it or not is irrelevant, a bean in my soup that is causing me to have this visual experience. I taste a bean if, in point of fact, it is a bean that is causing me to have the kind of taste experience I am now having. If it is unknown to me a bug, not a bean, that is causing these experiences, then I am unwittingly seeing and tasting a bug perhaps a bug that looks and tastes like a bean. What object we see taste, smell, etc. is determined by the causal facts in question. What we know and believe, how we interpret the experience, is irrelevant, although it will, of course, determine what we say we see and taste. The same is to be said, with appropriate changes, for our perception of facts the most significant change being the replacement of belief for experience. I see that there is a bug in my soup if the fact that there is a bug in my soup causes me to perception perception 655 655 believe that there is a bug in my soup. I can taste that there is a bug in my soup when this fact causes me to have this belief via some taste sensation. A causal theory of perception is more than the claim that the physical objects we perceive cause us to have experiences and beliefs. This much is fairly obvious. It is the claim that this causal relation is constitutive of perception, that necessarily, if S sees O, then O causes a certain sort of experience in S. It is, according to this theory, impossible, on conceptual grounds, to perceive something with which one has no causal contact. If, e.g., future events do not cause present events, if there is no backward causation, then we cannot perceive future events and objects. Whether or not future facts can be perceived or known depends on how liberally the causal condition on knowledge is interpreted. Though conceding that there is a world of mind-independent objects trees, stars, people that cause us to have experiences, some philosophers traditionally called representative realists argue that we nonetheless do not directly perceive these external objects. What we directly perceive are the effects these objects have on us an internal image, idea, or impression, a more or less depending on conditions of observation accurate representation of the external reality that helps produce it. This subjective, directly apprehended object has been called by various names: a sensation, percept, sensedatum, sensum, and sometimes, to emphasize its representational aspect, Vorstellung G., ‘representation’. Just as the images appearing on a television screen represent their remote causes the events occurring at some distant concert hall or playing field, the images visual, auditory, etc. that occur in the mind, the sensedata of which we are directly aware in normal perception, represent or sometimes, when things are not working right, misrepresent their external physical causes. The representative realist typically invokes arguments from illusion, facts about hallucination, and temporal considerations to support his view. Hallucinations are supposed to illustrate the way we can have the same kind of experience we have when as we commonly say we see a real bug without there being a real bug in our soup or anywhere else causing us to have the experience. When we hallucinate, the bug we “see” is, in fact, a figment of our own imagination, an image i.e., sense-datum in the mind that, because it shares some of the properties of a real bug shape, color, etc., we might mistake for a real bug. Since the subjective experiences can be indistinguishable from that which we have when as we commonly say we really see a bug, it is reasonable to infer the representative realist argues that in normal perception, when we take ourselves to be seeing a real bug, we are also directly aware of a buglike image in the mind. A hallucination differs from a normal perception, not in what we are aware of in both cases it is a sense-datum but in the cause of these experiences. In normal perception it is an actual bug; in hallucination it is, say, drugs in the bloodstream. In both cases, though, we are caused to have the same thing: an awareness of a buglike sense-datum, an object that, in normal perception, we naively take to be a real bug thus saying, and encouraging our children to say, that we see a bug. The argument from illusion points to the fact that our experience of an object changes even when the object that we perceive or say we perceive remains unchanged. Though the physical object the bug or whatever remains the same color, size, and shape, what we experience according to this argument changes color, shape, and size as we change the lighting, our viewing angle, and distance. Hence, it is concluded, what we experience cannot really be the physical object itself. Since it varies with changes in both object and viewing conditions, what we experience must be a causal result, an effect, of both the object we commonly say we see the bug and the conditions in which we view it. This internal effect, it is concluded, is a sense-datum. Representative realists have also appealed to the fact that perceiving a physical object is a causal process that takes time. This temporal lag is most dramatic in the case of distant objects e.g., stars, but it exists for every physical object it takes time for a neural signal to be transmitted from receptor surfaces to the brain. Consequently, at the moment a short time after light leaves the object’s surface we see a physical object, the object could no longer exist. It could have ceased to exist during the time light was being transmitted to the eye or during the time it takes the eye to communicate with the brain. Yet, even if the object ceases to exist before we become aware of anything before a visual experience occurs, we are, or so it seems, aware of something when the causal process reaches its climax in the brain. This something of which we are aware, since it cannot be the physical object it no longer exists, must be a sense-datum. The representationalist concludes in this “time-lag argument,” therefore, that even when the physperception perception 656 656 ical object does not cease to exist this, of course, is the normal situation, we are directly aware, not of it, but of its slightly later-occurring representation. Representative realists differ among themselves about the question of how much if at all the sense-data of which we are aware resemble the external objects of which we are not aware. Some take the external cause to have some of the properties the so-called primary properties of the datum e.g., extension and not others the so-called secondary properties e.g., color. Direct or naive realism shares with representative realism a commitment to a world of independently existing objects. Both theories are forms of perceptual realism. It differs, however, in its view of how we are related to these objects in ordinary perception. Direct realists deny that we are aware of mental intermediaries sensedata when, as we ordinarily say, we see a tree or hear the telephone ring. Though direct realists differ in their degree of naïveté about how and in what respect perception is supposed to be direct, they need not be so naive as sometimes depicted as to deny the scientific facts about the causal processes underlying perception. Direct realists can easily admit, e.g., that physical objects cause us to have experiences of a particular kind, and that these experiences are private, subjective, or mental. They can even admit that it is this causal relationship between object and experience that constitutes our seeing and hearing physical objects. They need not, in other words, deny a causal theory of perception. What they must deny, if they are to remain direct realists, however, is an analysis of the subjective experience that objects cause us to have into an awareness of some object. For to understand this experience as an awareness of some object is, given the wholly subjective mental character of the experience itself, to interpose a mental entity what the experience is an awareness of between the perceiver and the physical object that causes him to have this experience, the physical object that is supposed to be directly perceived. Direct realists, therefore, avoid analyzing a perceptual experience into an act sensing, being aware of, being acquainted with and an object the sensum, sense-datum, sensation, mental representation. The experience we are caused to have when we perceive a physical object or event is, instead, to be understood in some other way. The adverbial theory is one such possibility. As the name suggests, this theory takes its cue from the way nouns and adjectives can sometimes be converted into adverbs without loss of descriptive content. So, for instance, it comes to pretty much the same thing whether we describe a conversation as animated adjective or say that we conversed animatedly an adverb. So, also, according to an adverbialist, when, as we commonly say, we see a red ball, the red ball causes in us a moment later an experience, yes, but not as the representative realist says an awareness mental act of a sense-datum mental object that is red and circular adjectives. The experience is better understood as one in which there is no object at all, as sensing redly and circularly adverbs. The adverbial theorist insists that one can experience circularly and redly without there being, in the mind or anywhere else, red circles this, in fact, is what the adverbialist thinks occurs in dreams and hallucinations of red circles. To experience redly is not to have a red experience; nor is it to experience redness in the mind. It is, says the adverbialist, a way or a manner of perceiving ordinary objects especially red ones seen in normal light. Just as dancing gracefully is not a thing we dance, so perceiving redly is not a thing and certainly not a red thing in the mind that we experience. The adverbial theory is only one option the direct realist has of acknowledging the causal basis of perception while, at the same time, maintaining the directness of our perceptual relation with independently existing objects. What is important is not that the experience be construed adverbially, but that it not be interpreted, as representative realists interpret it, as awareness of some internal object. For a direct realist, the appearances, though they are subjective mind-dependent are not objects that interpose themselves between the conscious mind and the external world. As classically understood, both naive and representative realism are theories about object perception. They differ about whether it is the external object or an internal object an idea in the mind that we most directly apprehend in ordinary sense perception. But they need not although they usually do differ in their analysis of our knowledge of the world around us, in their account of fact perception. A direct realist about object perception may, e.g., be an indirect realist about the facts that we know about these objects. To see, not only a red ball in front of one, but that there is a red ball in front of one, it may be necessary, even on a direct theory of object perception, to infer or in some way derive this fact from facts that are known more directly perception perception about one’s experiences of the ball. Since, e.g., a direct theorist may be a causal theorist, may think that seeing a red ball is in part constituted by the having of certain sorts of experience, she may insist that knowledge of the cause of these experiences must be derived from knowledge of the experience itself. If one is an adverbialist, e.g., one might insist that knowledge of physical objects is derived from knowledge of how redly? bluely? circularly? squarely? one experiences these objects. By the same token, a representative realist could adopt a direct theory of fact perception. Though the objects we directly see are mental, the facts we come to know by experiencing these subjective entities are facts about ordinary physical objects. We do not infer at least at no conscious level that there is a bug in our soup from facts known more directly about our own conscious experiences from facts about the sensations the bug causes in us. Rather, our sensations cause us, directly, to have beliefs about our soup. There is no intermediate belief; hence, there is no intermediate knowledge; hence, no intermediate fact perception. Fact perception is, in this sense, direct. Or so a representative realist can maintain even though committed to the indirect perception of the objects bug and soup involved in this fact. This merely illustrates, once again, the necessity of distinguishing object perception from fact perception. Refs.: H. P. Grice and A. R. White, “The causal theory of perception,” a symposium for the Aristotelian Socieety, in G. J. Warnock, “The philosophy of perception,” Oxford readings in philosophy.

percival, T.: English physician and author of Medical Ethics 1803. He was central in bringing the Western traditions of medical ethics from prayers and oaths e.g., the Hippocratic oath toward more detailed, modern codes of proper professional conduct. His writing on the normative aspects of medical practice was part ethics, part prudential advice, part professional etiquette, and part jurisprudence. Medical Ethics treated standards for the professional conduct of physicians relative to surgeons and apothecaries pharmacists and general practitioners, as well as hospitals, private practice, and the law. The issues Percival addressed include privacy, truth telling, rules for professional consultation, human experimentation, public and private trust, compassion, sanity, suicide, abortion, capital punishment, and environmental nuisances. Percival had his greatest influence in England and America. At its founding in 1847, the Medical Association used Medical Ethics to guide its own first code of medical ethics.

perdurance, in one common philosophical use, the property of being temporally continuous and having temporal parts. There are at least two conflicting theories about temporally continuous substances. According to the first, temporally continuous substances have temporal parts they perdure, while according to the second, they do not. In one ordinary philosophical use, endurance is the property of being temporally continuous and not having temporal parts. There are modal versions of the aforementioned two theories: for example, one version of the first theory is that necessarily, temporally continuous substances have temporal parts, while another version implies that possibly, they do not. Some versions of the first theory hold that a temporally continuous substance is composed of instantaneous temporal parts or “object-stages,” while on other versions these object-stages are not parts but boundaries.

perfect competition: perfect co-operation: the state of an ideal market under the following conditions: a every consumer in the market is a perfectly rational maximizer of utility; every producer is a perfect maximizer of profit; there is a very large ideally infinite number of producers of the good in question, which ensures that no producer can set the price for its output otherwise, an imperfect competitive state of oligopoly or monopoly obtains; and every producer provides a product perfectly indistinguishable from that of other producers if consumers could distinguish products to the point that there was no longer a very large number of producers for each distinguishable good, competition would again be imperfect. Under these conditions, the market price is equal to the marginal cost of producing the last unit. This in turn determines the market supply of the good, since each producer will gain by increasing production when price exceeds marginal cost and will generally cut losses by decreasing production when marginal cost exceeds price. Perfect competition is sometimes thought to have normative implications for political philosophy, since it results in Pareto optimality. The concept of perfect competition becomes extremely complicated when a market’s evolution is considered. Producers who cannot equate marginal cost with the market price will have negative profit and must drop out of the market. If this happens very often, then the number of producers will no longer be large enough to sustain perfect competition, so new producers will need to enter the market.

Perfectus – finitum – complete -- perfectionism, an ethical view according to which individuals and their actions are judged by a maximal standard of achievement specifically, the degree to which they approach ideals of aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, or physical “perfection.” Perfectionism, then, may depart from, or even dispense with, standards of conventional morality in favor of standards based on what appear to be non-moral values. These standards reflect an admiration for certain very rare levels of human achievement. Perhaps the most characteristic of these standards are artistic and other forms of creativity; but they prominently include a variety of other activities and emotional states deemed “noble” e.g., heroic endurance in the face of great suffering. The perfectionist, then, would also tend toward a rather non-egalitarian even aristocratic view of humankind. The rare genius, the inspired few, the suffering but courageous artist these examples of human perfection are genuinely worthy of our estimation, according to this view. Although no fully worked-out system of “perfectionist philosophy” has been attempted, aspects of all of these doctrines may be found in such philosophers as Nietzsche. Aristotle, as well, appears to endorse a perfectionist idea in his characterization of the human good. Just as the good lyre player not only exhibits the characteristic activities of this profession but achieves standards of excellence with respect to these, the good human being, for Aristotle, must achieve standards of excellence with respect to the virtue or virtues distinctive of human life in general.

peripatetic – lycaeum -- School, also called Peripatos, the philosophical playgroup founded by Aristotle at the Lycaeum gymnasium in Athens. The derivation of ‘Peripatetic’ from the alleged Aristotelian custom of “walking about, “peripatein,” is, while colourful, wrong. ‘Peripatos’ is in Griceian a “covered walking hall” – which is among the facilities, “as the excavations show,” as Grice notes. A scholarch or head-master presided over roughly two classes of members. One is the “presbyteroi” or seniors, who have this or that teaching dutu, and the “neaniskoi” or juniors. Grice: “When Austin instituted the playgroup he saw himself as *the* presbyteros, while I, like the others, was a ‘neaniskos.”” No females were allowed, to avoid disruption. During Aristotle’s lifetime his own lectures, whether for the inner circle of the school (what Aristotle calls ‘the gown’) or for Athens (‘the town’) at large, are probably the key attraction and core activity. Given Aristotle’s celebrated knack for organizing group research projects, we may assume that Peripatetics spent much of their time working on their own specific assignments either at the swimming-pool library, or at some kind of repository for specimens used in zoological and botanical investigations. As a foreigner, Aristotle cannot possibly own any property in Athens. When he left Athens (pretty much as when Austin died) Theophrastus of Eresus (pretty much like Grice did) succeeded him as scholarch. Theophrastus is s an able Aristotelian (whereas Grice started to criticise Austin) who wrote extensively on metaphysics, psychology, physiology, botany, ethics, politics, and the history of philosophy. With the help of the Peripatetic dictator Demetrius of Phaleron, Theophrastus was able to secure property rights over the physical facilities of the school. Under Theophrastus, the Peripatos continued to flourish and is said to have had 2,000 students. Theophrastus’s successor, Strato of Lampsakos, has much narrower interests and abandoned key Aristotelian tenets (such as the syllogism – “I won’t force Aristotle to teach me how to reason with a middle term in the middle!” – Diog. Laert. v. 673b-c. With Strato, a progressive decline set in, to which the moving of Aristotle’s swimming-pool library out of Athens (minus the swimming-pool) by Neleus of Skepsis, certainly contributed. By the first century B.C. the Peripatos had ceased to exist. “Philosophers of later periods sympathetic to Aristotle’s views have also been called Peripatetics; I fact, *I* have, by A. D. Code, of all people!” – Refs.: H. P. Grice, “How to become a Peripatetic – and not die in the attempt.”

perry: Harvard philosopher who explored the theory of knowledge, ethics, and social philosophy. Perry received a Pulitzer Prize for “The Thought and Character of William James,” (a sequel to “The Thought and Character of H. P. Grice, M. A. Lit. Hum. Oxon.”), a biography of his teacher and colleague. Perry’s other major works include: “The Moral Economy,” “General Theory of Value,’ ‘Puritanism and Democracy,” “Puritan philosophy, or the lack thereof,” “A comparison of Puritan philosophy and Roman philosophy – or the lack thereof.” – and “Realms of Value “ He is perhaps best known for his views on value. Perry writes in General Theory of Value in a passage Grice treasured (“The conception of value”): “Any object, whatever it be, acquires value when any interest, whatever it be, is taken in it; just as anything whatsoever becomes a target when anyone whosoever aims at it.” Something’s having value is nothing but its being the object of some interest, and to know whether it has value one need only know whether it is the object of someone’s interest. Morality aims at the promotion of the moral good, which he defines as “harmonious happiness.” This consists in the reconciliation, harmonizing, and fulfillment of all interests. Perry’s epistemological and metaphysical views (much as Grice’s) are part of a revolt against idealism and dualism. Along with five other philosophers, all from The New World, he wrote The New Realism – “where ‘new’ is meant as a reference to the ‘new’ world.” -- The “New Realists” (or ‘neo-realists,’ as Grice prefers) held that the objects of perception and memory are directly presented to consciousness and are just what they appear to be; nothing intervenes between the knower and the external world. The view that the objects of perception and memory are presented by means of ideas leads, they argued, to idealism, skepticism, and absurdity. Perry is also known for having developed, along with E. B. Holt, the “specific response” theory, which is an attempt to construe belief and perception in terms of bodily adjustment and behaviour. Grice borrowed, but never returned, the term ‘response’ from Perry – “although I wasn’t thinking specifically about him.” Refs: H. P. Grice, “Meaning: stimulus and response.”

Idem: Grice: “A very Roman notion – no translation – but Peano’s = may do.” personal identity: explored by H. P. Grice in “Personal Identity,” Mind – and H. P. Grice, “The logical construction theory of personal identity,” and “David Hume on the vagaries of personal identity.” -- the numerical identity over time of persons. The question of what personal identity consists in is the question of what it is what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for a person existing at one time and a person existing at another time to be one and the same person. Here there is no question of there being any entity that is the “identity” of a person; to say that a person’s identity consists in such and such is just shorthand for saying that facts about personal identity, i.e., facts to the effect that someone existing at one time is the same as someone existing at another time, consist in such and such. This should not be confused with the usage, common in ordinary speech and in psychology, in which persons are said to have identities, and, sometimes, to seek, lose, or regain their identities, where one’s “identity” intimately involves a set of values and goals that structure one’s life. The words ‘identical’ and ‘same’ mean nothing different in judgments about persons than in judgments about other things. The problem of personal identity is therefore not one of defining a special sense of ‘identical,’ and it is at least misleading to characterize it as defining a particular kind of identity. Applying Quine’s slogan “no entity without identity,” one might say that characterizing any sort of entity involves indicating what the identity conditions for entities of that sort are so, e.g., part of the explanation of the concept of a set is that sets having the same members are identical, and that asking what the identity of persons consists in is just a way of asking what sorts of things persons are. But the main focus in traditional discussions of the topic has been on one kind of identity judgment about persons, namely those asserting “identity over time”; the question has been about what the persistence of persons over time consists in. What has made the identity persistence of persons of special philosophical interest is partly its epistemology and partly its connections with moral and evaluative matters. The crucial epistemological fact is that persons have, in memory, an access to their own past histories that is unlike the access they have to the histories of other things including other persons; when one remembers doing or experiencing something, one normally has no need to employ any criterion of identity in order to know that the subject of the remembered action or experience is i.e., is identical with oneself. The moral and evaluative matters include moral responsibility someone can be held responsible for a past action only if he or she is identical to the person who did it and our concern for our own survival and future well-being since it seems, although this has been questioned, that what one wants in wanting to survive is that there should exist in the future someone who is identical to oneself. The modern history of the topic of personal identity begins with Locke, who held that the identity of a person consists neither in the identity of an immaterial substance as dualists might be expected to hold nor in the identity of a material substance or “animal body” as materialists might be expected to hold, and that it consists instead in “same consciousness.” His view appears to have been that the persistence of a person through time consists in the fact that certain actions, thoughts, experiences, etc., occurring at different times, are somehow united in memory. Modern theories descended from Locke’s take memory continuity to be a special case of something more general, psychological continuity, and hold that personal identity consists in this. This is sometimes put in terms of the notion of a “person-stage,” i.e., a momentary “time slice” of the history of a person. A series of person-stages will be psychologically continuous if the psychological states including memories occurring in later members of the series grow out of, in certain characteristic ways, those occurring in earlier members of it; and according to the psychological continuity view of personal identity, person-stages occurring at different times are stages of the same person provided they belong to a single, non-branching, psychologically continuous series of person-stages. Opponents of the Lockean and neo-Lockean psychological continuity view tend to fall into two camps. Some, following Butler and Reid, hold that personal identity is indefinable, and that nothing informative can be said about what it consists in. Others hold that the identity of a person consists in some sort of physical continuity perhaps the identity of a living human organism, or the identity of a human brain. In the actual cases we know about putting aside issues about non-bodily survival of death, psychological continuity and physical continuity go together. Much of the debate between psychological continuity theories and physical continuity theories has centered on the interpretation of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain-state transfers, etc., in which these come apart. Such examples make vivid the question of whether our fundamental criteria of personal identity are psychological, physical, or both. Recently philosophical attention has shifted somewhat from the question of what personal identity consists in to questions about its importance. The consideration of hypothetical cases of “fission” in which two persons at a later time are psychologically continuous with one person at an earlier time has suggested to some that we can have survival or at any rate what matters in survival without personal identity, and that our self-interested concern for the future is really a concern for whatever future persons are psychologically continuous with us.

Grice’s personalism: Grice: “I finished the thing and did not know what to title – my mother said, “Try ‘personal identity.’ She was a personal trinitarian.” -- a version of personal idealism that flourished in the United States principally at Boston from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Its principal proponents were Borden Parker Bowne 1847 0 and three of his students: Albert Knudson 18733; Ralph Flewelling 18710, who founded The Personalist; and, most importantly, Edgar Sheffield Brightman 43. Their personalism was both idealistic and theistic and was influential in philosophy and in theology. Personalism traced its philosophical lineage to Berkeley and Leibniz, and had as its foundational insight the view that all reality is ultimately personal. God is the transcendent person and the ground or creator of all other persons; nature is a system of objects either for or in the minds of persons. Both Bowne and Brightman considered themselves empiricists in the tradition of Berkeley. Immediate experience is the starting point, but this experience involves a fundamental knowledge of the self as a personal being with changing states. Given this pluralism, the coherence, order, and intelligibility of the universe are seen to derive from God, the uncreated person. Bowne’s God is the eternal and omnipotent being of classical theism, but Brightman argued that if God is a real person he must be construed as both temporal and finite. Given the fact of evil, God is seen as gradually gaining control over his created world, with regard to which his will is intrinsically limited. Another version of personalism developed in France out of the neo-Scholastic tradition. E. Mounier 550, Maritain, and Gilson identified themselves as personalists, inasmuch as they viewed the infinite person God and finite persons as the source and locus of intrinsic value. They did not, however, view the natural order as intrinsically personal.

Grice’s personhood: Grice: “I finished the thing and did not know how to title. My mother, a confessed personal trinitarian, suggested, ‘personal identity.’’ -- the condition or property of being a person, especially when this is considered to entail moral and/or metaphysical importance. Personhood has been thought to involve various traits, including moral agency; reason or rationality; language, or the cognitive skills language may support such as intentionality and self-consciousness; and ability to enter into suitable relations with other persons viewed as members of a self-defining group. Buber emphasized the difference between the I-It relationship holding between oneself and an object, and the IThou relationship, which holds between oneself and another person who can be addressed. Dennett has construed persons in terms of the “intentional stance,” which involves explaining another’s behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Questions about when personhood begins and when it ends have been central to debates about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, since personhood has often been viewed as the mark, if not the basis, of a being’s possession of special moral status.

Petrus Longobardo – He was born in Novara, then reckoned as Lombardia! -- theologian and author of the Book of Sentences Liber sententiarum, a renowned theological sourcebook in the later Middle Ages. Peter was educated at Bologna, Reims, and Paris before teaching in the school of Notre Dame in Paris. He became a canon at Notre Dame in 114445 and was elected bishop of Paris in 1159. His extant works include commentaries on the Psalms written in the mid-1130s and on the epistles of Paul c.113941; a collection of sermons; and his one-volume summary of Christian doctrine, the Sentences completed by 1158. The Sentences consists of four books: Book I, On the Trinity; Book II, On the Creation of Things; Book III, On the Incarnation; and Book IV, “On the Doctrine of Signs or Sacraments.” His discussion is organized around particular questions or issues e.g., “On Knowledge, Foreknowledge, and Providence” Book I, “Is God the Cause of Evil and Sin?” Book II. For a given issue Peter typically presents a brief summary, accompanied by short quotations, of main positions found in Scripture and in the writings of the church fathers and doctors, followed by his own determination or adjudication of the matter. Himself a theological conservative, Peter seems to have intended this sort of compilation of scriptural and ancient doctrinal teaching as a counter to the popularity, fueled by the recent recovery of important parts of Aristotle’s logic, of the application of dialectic to theological matters. The Sentences enjoyed wide circulation and admiration from the beginning, and within a century of its composition it became a standard text in the theology curriculum. From the midthirteenth through the mid-fourteenth century every student of theology was required, as the last stage in obtaining the highest academic degree, to lecture and comment on Peter’s text. Later medieval thinkers often referred to Peter as “the Master” magister, thereby testifying to the Sentences’ preeminence in theological training. In lectures and commentaries, the greatest minds of this period used Peter’s text as a framework in which to develop their own original positions and debate with their contemporaries. As a result the Sentences-commentary tradition is an extraordinarily rich repository of later medieval philosophical and theological thought.

Peter of Spain. It is now thought that there were two Peters of Spain. The prelate and philosopher was born in Lisbon, studied at Paris, and taught medicine at Siena 124850. He served in various ecclesiastical posts in Portugal and Italy 125073 before being elected pope as John XXI in 1276. He wrote several books on philosophical psychology and compiled the famous medical work Thesaurus pauperum. The second Peter of Spain was a Dominican who lived during the first half of the thirteenth century. His Tractatus, later called Summulae logicales, received over 166 printings during subsequent centuries. The Tractatus presents the essentials of Aristotelian logic propositions, universals, categories, syllogism, dialectical topics, and the sophistical fallacies and improves on the mnemonic verses of William Sherwood; he then introduces the subjects of the so-called parva logicalia supposition, relatives, ampliation, personality Peter of Spain 662 662 appellation, restriction, distribution, all of which were extensively developed in the later Middle Ages. There is not sufficient evidence to claim that Peter wrote a special treatise on consequences, but his understanding of conditionals as assertions of necessary connection undoubtedly played an important role in the rules of simple, as opposed to as-of-now, consequences.

phantasia: Grice: “ “Phantasia,” as any Clifton schoolboy knows, is cognate with ‘phainomenon,’ as Cant forgot!” -- Grecian, ‘appearance’, ‘imagination’, 1 the state we are in when something appears to us to be the case; 2 the capacity in virtue of which things appear to us. Although frequently used of conscious and imagistic experiences, ‘phantasia’ is not limited to such states; in particular, it can be applied to any propositional attitude where something is taken to be the case. But just as the English ‘appears’ connotes that one has epistemic reservations about what is actually the case, so ‘phantasia’ suggests the possibility of being misled by appearances and is thus often a subject of criticism. According to Plato, phantasia is a “mixture” of sensation and belief; in Aristotle, it is a distinct faculty that makes truth and falsehood possible. The Stoics take a phantasia to constitute one of the most basic mental states, in terms of which other mental states are to be explained, and in rational animals it bears the propositional content expressed in language. This last use becomes prominent in ancient literary and rhetorical theory to designate the ability of language to move us and convey subjects vividly as well as to range beyond the bounds of our immediate experience. Here lie the origins of the modern concept of imagination although not the Romantic distinction between fancy and imagination. Later Neoplatonists, such as Proclus, take phantasia to be necessary for abstract studies such as geometry, by enabling us to envision spatial relations.

phenomenalism: one of the twelve labours of H. P. Grice – very fashionable at Oxford – “until Austin demolished it with his puritanical “Sense and sensibilia,” – Grice: “Strictly, it should be ‘sense and sensibile,’ since ‘sensibilia’ is plural – which invokes Ryle’s paradox of the speckled hen!” -- the view that propositions asserting the existence of physical objects are equivalent in meaning to propositions asserting that subjects would have certain sequences of sensations were they to have certain others. The basic idea behind phenomenalism is compatible with a number of different analyses of the self or conscious subject. A phenomenalist might understand the self as a substance, a particular, or a construct out of actual and possible experience. The view also is compatible with any number of different analyses of the visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and kinesthetic sensations described in the antecedents and consequents of the subjunctive conditionals that the phenomenalist uses to analyze physical object propositions as illustrated in the last paragraph. Probably the most common analysis of sensations adopted by traditional phenomenalists is a sense-datum theory, with the sense-data construed as mind-dependent entities. But there is nothing to prevent a phenomenalist from accepting an adverbial theory or theory of appearing instead. The origins of phenomenalism are difficult to trace, in part because early statements of the view were usually not careful. In his Dialogues, Berkeley hinted at phenomenalism when he had Philonous explain how he could reconcile an ontology containing only minds and ideas with the story of a creation that took place before the existence of people. Philonous imagines that if he had been present at the creation he should have seen things, i.e., had sensations, in the order described in the Bible. It can also be argued, however, that J. S. Mill in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy was the first to put forth a clearly phenomenalistic analysis when he identified matter with the “permanent possibility of sensation.” When Mill explained what these permanent possibilities are, he typically used conditionals that describe the sensations one would have if one were placed in certain conditions. The attraction of classical phenomenalism grew with the rise of logical positivism and its acceptance of the verifiability criterion of meaning. Phenomenalists were usually foundationalists who were convinced that justified belief in the physical world rested ultimately on our noninferentially justified beliefs about our sensations. Implicitly committed to the view that only deductive and inductive inferences are legitimate, and further assuming that to be justified in believing one proposition P on the basis of another E, one must be justified in believing both E and that E makes P probable, the phenomenalist saw an insuperable difficulty in justifying belief in ordinary statements about the physical world given prevalent conceptions of physical petitio principii phenomenalism 663 663 objects. If all we ultimately have as our evidence for believing in physical objects is what we know about the occurrence of sensation, how can we establish sensation as evidence for the existence of physical objects? We obviously cannot deduce the existence of physical objects from any finite sequence of sensations. The sensations could, e.g., be hallucinatory. Nor, it seems, can we observe a correlation between sensation and something else in order to generate the premises of an inductive argument for the conclusion that sensations are reliable indicators of physical objects. The key to solving this problem, the phenomenalist argues, is to reduce assertions about the physical world to complicated assertions about the sequences of sensations a subject would have were he to have certain others. The truth of such conditionals, e.g., that if I have the clear visual impression of a cat, then there is one before me, might be mind-independent in the way in which one wants the truth of assertions about the physical world to be mind-independent. And to the phenomenalist’s great relief, it would seem that we could justify our belief in such conditional statements without having to correlate anything but sensations. Many philosophers today reject some of the epistemological, ontological, and metaphilosophical presuppositions with which phenomenalists approached the problem of understanding our relation to the physical world through sensation. But the argument that was historically most decisive in convincing many philosophers to abandon phenomenalism was the argument from perceptual relativity first advanced by Chisholm in “The Problem of Perception.” Chisholm offers a strategy for attacking any phenomenalistic analysis. The first move is to force the phenomenalist to state a conditional describing only sensations that is an alleged consequence of a physical object proposition. C. I. Lewis, e.g., in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, claims that the assertion P that there is a doorknob before me and to the left entails C that if I were to seem to see a doorknob and seem to reach out and touch it then I would seem to feel it. Chisholm argues that if P really did entail C then there could be no assertion R that when conjoined with P did not entail C. There is, however, such an assertion: I am unable to move my limbs and my hands but am subject to delusions such that I think I am moving them; I often seem to be initiating a grasping motion but with no feeling of contacting anything. Chisholm argues, in effect, that what sensations one would have if one were to have certain others always depends in part on the internal and external physical conditions of perception and that this fact dooms any attempt to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of a physical object proposition couched in terms that describe only connections between sensations.

phenomenology – Grice: “Strictly, my area – the science of appearances!” -- referred ironically by J. L. Austin as “linguistic phenomenology,” in the twentieth century, the philosophy developed by Husserl and some of his followers. The term has been used since the mideighteenth century and received a carefully defined technical meaning in the works of both Kant and Hegel, but it is not now used to refer to a homogeneous and systematically developed philosophical position. The question of what phenomenology is may suggest that phenomenology is one among the many contemporary philosophical conceptions that have a clearly delineated body of doctrines and whose essential characteristics can be expressed by a set of wellchosen statements. This notion is not correct, however. In contemporary philosophy there is no system or school called “phenomenology,” characterized by a clearly defined body of teachings. Phenomenology is neither a school nor a trend in contemporary philosophy. It is rather a movement whose proponents, for various reasons, have propelled it in many distinct directions, with the result that today it means different things to different people. While within the phenomenological movement as a whole there are several related currents, they, too, are by no means homogeneous. Though these currents have a common point of departure, they do not project toward the same destination. The thinking of most phenomenologists has changed so greatly that their respective views can be presented adequately only by showing them in their gradual development. This is true not only for Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, but also for such later phenomenologists as Scheler, N. Hartmann, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. To anyone who studies the phenomenological movement without prejudice the differences among its many currents are obvious. It has been phenomenal property phenomenology 664 664 said that phenomenology consists in an analysis and description of consciousness; it has been claimed also that phenomenology simply blends with existentialism. Phenomenology is indeed the study of essences, but it also attempts to place essences back into existence. It is a transcendental philosophy interested only in what is “left behind” after the phenomenological reduction is performed, but it also considers the world to be already there before reflection begins. For some philosophers phenomenology is speculation on transcendental subjectivity, whereas for others it is a method for approaching concrete existence. Some use phenomenology as a search for a philosophy that accounts for space, time, and the world, just as we experience and “live” them. Finally, it has been said that phenomenology is an attempt to give a direct description of our experience as it is in itself without taking into account its psychological origin and its causal explanation; but Husserl speaks of a “genetic” as well as a “constitutive” phenomenology. To some people, finding such an abundance of ideas about one and the same subject constitutes a strange situation; for others it is annoying to contemplate the “confusion”; and there will be those who conclude that a philosophy that cannot define its own scope does not deserve the discussion that has been carried on in its regard. In the opinion of many, not only is this latter attitude not justified, but precisely the opposite view defended by Thevenaz should be adopted. As the term ‘phenomenology’ signifies first and foremost a methodical conception, Thevenaz argues that because this method, originally developed for a very particular and limited end, has been able to branch out in so many varying forms, it manifests a latent truth and power of renewal that implies an exceptional fecundity. Speaking of the great variety of conceptions within the phenomenological movement, Merleau-Ponty remarked that the responsible philosopher must recognize that phenomenology may be practiced and identified as a manner or a style of thinking, and that it existed as a movement before arriving at a complete awareness of itself as a philosophy. Rather than force a living movement into a system, then, it seems more in keeping with the ideal of the historian as well as the philosopher to follow the movement in its development, and attempt to describe and evaluate the many branches in and through which it has unfolded itself. In reality the picture is not as dark as it may seem at first sight. Notwithstanding the obvious differences, most phenomenologists share certain insights that are very important for their mutual philosophical conception as a whole. In this connection the following must be mentioned: 1 Most phenomenologists admit a radical difference between the “natural” and the “philosophical” attitude. This leads necessarily to an equally radical difference between philosophy and science. In characterizing this difference some phenomenologists, in agreement with Husserl, stress only epistemological issues, whereas others, in agreement with Heidegger, focus their attention exclusively on ontological topics. 2 Notwithstanding this radical difference, there is a complicated set of relationships between philosophy and science. Within the context of these relationships philosophy has in some sense a foundational task with respect to the sciences, whereas science offers to philosophy at least a substantial part of its philosophical problematic. 3 To achieve its task philosophy must perform a certain reduction, or epoche, a radical change of attitude by which the philosopher turns from things to their meanings, from the ontic to the ontological, from the realm of the objectified meaning as found in the sciences to the realm of meaning as immediately experienced in the “life-world.” In other words, although it remains true that the various phenomenologists differ in characterizing the reduction, no one seriously doubts its necessity. 4 All phenomenologists subscribe to the doctrine of intentionality, though most elaborate this doctrine in their own way. For Husserl intentionality is a characteristic of conscious phenomena or acts; in a deeper sense, it is the characteristic of a finite consciousness that originally finds itself without a world. For Heidegger and most existentialists it is the human reality itself that is intentional; as Being-in-the-world its essence consists in its ek-sistence, i.e., in its standing out toward the world. 5 All phenomenologists agree on the fundamental idea that the basic concern of philosophy is to answer the question concerning the “meaning and Being” of beings. All agree in addition that in trying to materialize this goal the philosopher should be primarily interested not in the ultimate cause of all finite beings, but in how the Being of beings and the Being of the world are to be constituted. Finally, all agree that in answering the question concerning the meaning of Being a privileged position is to be attributed to subjectivity, i.e., to that being which questions the Being of beings. Phenomenologists differ, however, the moment they have to specify what is meant by subjectivity. As noted above, whereas Husserl conceives it as a worldless monad, Heidegger and most later phenomenologists conceive it as being-in-the-world. Referring to Heidegger’s reinterpretation of his phenomenology, Husserl writes: one misinterprets my phenomenology backwards from a level which it was its very purpose to overcome, in other words, one has failed to understand the fundamental novelty of the phenomenological reduction and hence the progress from mundane subjectivity i.e., man to transcendental subjectivity; consequently one has remained stuck in an anthropology . . . which according to my doctrine has not yet reached the genuine philosophical level, and whose interpretation as philosophy means a lapse into “transcendental anthropologism,” that is, “psychologism.” 6 All phenomenologists defend a certain form of intuitionism and subscribe to what Husserl calls the “principle of all principles”: “whatever presents itself in ‘intuition’ in primordial form as it were in its bodily reality, is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself.” Here again, however, each phenomenologist interprets this principle in keeping with his general conception of phenomenology as a whole. Thus, while phenomenologists do share certain insights, the development of the movement has nevertheless been such that it is not possible to give a simple definition of what phenomenology is. The fact remains that there are many phenomenologists and many phenomenologies. Therefore, one can only faithfully report what one has experienced of phenomenology by reading the phenomenologists. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “J. L. Austin’s linguistic phenomenology – and conversational implicatura,” “Conversational phenomenology.”

Philo Judaeus, philosopher who composed the bulk of his work in the form of commentaries and discourses on Scripture. He made the first known sustained attempt to synthesize its revealed teachings with the doctrines of classical philosophy. Although he was not the first to apply the methods of allegorical interpretation to Scripture, the number and variety of his interpretations make Philo unique. With this interpretive tool, he transformed biblical narratives into Platonic accounts of the soul’s quest for God and its struggle against passion, and the Mosaic commandments into specific manifestations of general laws of nature. Philo’s most influential idea was his conception of God, which combines the personal, ethical deity of the Bible with the abstract, transcendentalist theology of Platonism and Pythagoreanism. The Philonic deity is both the loving, just God of the Hebrew Patriarchs and the eternal One whose essence is absolutely unknowable and who creates the material world by will from primordial matter which He creates ex nihilo. Besides the intelligible realm of ideas, which Philo is the earliest known philosopher to identify as God’s thoughts, he posited an intermediate divine being which he called, adopting scriptural language, the logos. Although the exact nature of the logos is hard to pin down Philo variously and, without any concern for consistency, called it the “first-begotten Son of the uncreated Father,” “Second God,” “idea of ideas,” “archetype of human reason,” and “pattern of creation” its main functions are clear: to bridge the huge gulf between the transcendent deity and the lower world and to serve as the unifying law of the universe, the ground of its order and rationality. A philosophical eclectic, Philo was unknown to medieval Jewish philosophers but, beyond his anticipations of Neoplatonism, he had a lasting impact on Christianity through Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ambrose.

Philolaus, pre-Socratic Grecian philosopher from Croton in southern Italy, the first Pythagorean to write a book. The surviving fragments of it are the earliest primary texts for Pythagoreanism, but numerous spurious fragments have also been preserved. Philolaus’s book begins with a cosmogony and includes astronomical, medical, and psychological doctrines. His major innovation was to argue that the cosmos and everything in it is a combination not just of unlimiteds what is structured and ordered, e.g. material elements but also of limiters structural and ordering elements, e.g. shapes. These elements are held together in a harmonia fitting together, which comes to be in accord with perspicuous mathematical relationships, such as the whole number ratios that correspond to the harmonic intervals e.g. octave % phenotext Philolaus 666 666 1 : 2. He argued that secure knowledge is possible insofar as we grasp the number in accordance with which things are put together. His astronomical system is famous as the first to make the earth a planet. Along with the sun, moon, fixed stars, five planets, and counter-earth thus making the perfect number ten, the earth circles the central fire a combination of the limiter “center” and the unlimited “fire”. Philolaus’s influence is seen in Plato’s Philebus; he is the primary source for Aristotle’s account of Pythagoreanism. H. P. Grice, “Pythagoras: the written and the unwritten doctrines.”

philosophical biology: Grice, “What is ‘life’?” “How come the Grecians had two expressions for this: ‘zoon’ and ‘bios’?” “Why could the Romans just do with ‘vivere’?’ -- Grice liked to regard himself as a philosophical biologist, and indeed philosophical physiologist. bioethics, the subfield of ethics that concerns the ethical issues arising in medicine and from advances in biological science. One central area of bioethics is the ethical issues that arise in relations between health care professionals and patients. A second area focuses on broader issues of social justice in health care. A third area concerns the ethical issues raised by new biological knowledge or technology. In relations between health care professionals and patients, a fundamental issue is the appropriate role of each in decision making about patient care. More traditional views assigning principal decision-making authority to physicians have largely been replaced with ideals of shared decision making that assign a more active role to patients. Shared decision making is thought to reflect better the importance of patients’ self-determination in controlling their care. This increased role for patients is reflected in the ethical and legal doctrine of informed consent, which requires that health care not be rendered without the informed and voluntary consent of a competent patient. The requirement that consent be informed places a positive responsibility on health care professionals to provide their patients with the information they need to make informed decisions about care. The requirement that consent be voluntary requires that treatment not be forced, nor that patients’ decisions be coerced or manipulated. If patients lack the capacity to make competent health care decisions, e.g. young children or cognitively impaired adults, a surrogate, typically a parent in the case of children or a close family member in the case of adults, must decide for them. Surrogates’ decisions should follow the patient’s advance directive if one exists, be the decision the patient would have made in the circumstances if competent, or follow the patient’s best interests if the patient has never been competent or his or her wishes are not known. A major focus in bioethics generally, and treatment decision making in particular, is care at or near the end of life. It is now widely agreed that patients are entitled to decide about and to refuse, according to their own values, any lifesustaining treatment. They are also entitled to have desired treatments that may shorten their lives, such as high doses of pain medications necessary to relieve severe pain from cancer, although in practice pain treatment remains inadequate for many patients. Much more controversial is whether more active means to end life such as physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia are morally permissible in indibhavanga bioethics 88 88 vidual cases or justified as public policy; both remain illegal except in a very few jurisdictions. Several other moral principles have been central to defining professionalpatient relationships in health care. A principle of truth telling requires that professionals not lie to patients. Whereas in the past it was common, especially with patients with terminal cancers, not to inform patients fully about their diagnosis and prognosis, studies have shown that practice has changed substantially and that fully informing patients does not have the bad effects for patients that had been feared in the past. Principles of privacy and confidentiality require that information gathered in the professionalpatient relationship not be disclosed to third parties without patients’ consent. Especially with highly personal information in mental health care, or information that may lead to discrimination, such as a diagnosis of AIDS, assurance of confidentiality is fundamental to the trust necessary to a wellfunctioning professionalpatient relationship. Nevertheless, exceptions to confidentiality to prevent imminent and serious harm to others are well recognized ethically and legally. More recently, work in bioethics has focused on justice in the allocation of health care. Whereas nearly all developed countries treat health care as a moral and legal right, and ensure it to all their citizens through some form of national health care system, in the United States about 15 percent of the population remains without any form of health insurance. This has fed debates about whether health care is a right or privilege, a public or individual responsibility. Most bioethicists have supported a right to health care because of health care’s fundamental impact on people’s well-being, opportunity, ability to plan their lives, and even lives themselves. Even if there is a moral right to health care, however, few defend an unlimited right to all beneficial health care, no matter how small the benefit and how high the cost. Consequently, it is necessary to prioritize or ration health care services to reflect limited budgets for health care, and both the standards and procedures for doing so are ethically controversial. Utilitarians and defenders of cost-effectiveness analysis in health policy support using limited resources to maximize aggregate health benefits for the population. Their critics argue that this ignores concerns about equity, concerns about how health care resources and health are distributed. For example, some have argued that equity requires giving priority to treating the worst-off or sickest, even at a sacrifice in aggregate health benefits; moreover, taking account in prioritization of differences in costs of different treatments can lead to ethically problematic results, such as giving higher priority to providing very small benefits to many persons than very large but individually more expensive benefits, including life-saving interventions, to a few persons, as the state of Oregon found in its initial widely publicized prioritization program. In the face of controversy over standards for rationing care, it is natural to rely on fair procedures to make rationing decisions. Other bioethics issues arise from dramatic advances in biological knowledge and technology. Perhaps the most prominent example is new knowledge of human genetics, propelled in substantial part by the worldwide Human Genome Project, which seeks to map the entire human genome. This project and related research will enable the prevention of genetically transmitted diseases, but already raises questions about which conditions to prevent in offspring and which should be accepted and lived with, particularly when the means of preventing the condition is by abortion of the fetus with the condition. Looking further into the future, new genetic knowledge and technology will likely enable us to enhance normal capacities, not just prevent or cure disease, and to manipulate the genes of future children, raising profoundly difficult questions about what kinds of persons to create and the degree to which deliberate human design should replace “nature” in the creation of our offspring. A dramatic example of new abilities to create offspring, though now limited to the animal realm, was the cloning in Scotland in 7 of a sheep from a single cell of an adult sheep; this event raised the very controversial future prospect of cloning human beings. Finally, new reproductive technologies, such as oocyte egg donation, and practices such as surrogate motherhood, raise deep issues about the meaning and nature of parenthood and families. Philosophical biology -- euthanasia, broadly, the beneficent timing or negotiation of the death of a sick person; more narrowly, the killing of a human being on the grounds that he is better off dead. In an extended sense, the word ‘euthanasia’ is used to refer to the painless killing of non-human animals, in our interests at least as much as in theirs. Active euthanasia is the taking of steps to end a person’s especially a patient’s life. Passive euthanasia is the omission or termination of means of prolonging life, on the grounds that the person is better off without them. The distinction between active and passive euthanasia is a rough guide for applying the more fundamental distinction between intending the patient’s death and pursuing other goals, such as the relief of her pain, with the expectation that she will die sooner rather than later as a result. Voluntary euthanasia is euthanasia with the patient’s consent, or at his request. Involuntary euthanasia is euthanasia over the patient’s objections. Non-voluntary euthanasia is the killing of a person deemed incompetent with the consent of someone say a parent authorized to speak on his behalf. Since candidates for euthanasia are frequently in no condition to make major decisions, the question whether there is a difference between involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia is of great importance. Few moralists hold that life must be prolonged whatever the cost. Traditional morality forbids directly intended euthanasia: human life belongs to God and may be taken only by him. The most important arguments for euthanasia are the pain and indignity suffered by those with incurable diseases, the burden imposed by persons unable to take part in normal human activities, and the supposed right of persons to dispose of their lives however they please. Non-theological arguments against euthanasia include the danger of expanding the principle of euthanasia to an everwidening range of persons and the opacity of death and its consequent incommensurability with life, so that we cannot safely judge that a person is better off dead. H. P. Grice, “The roman problem: ‘vita’ for ‘bios’ and ‘zoe.’”

philosophical historian – Grice as – longitudinal unity -- Danto, A. C. philosopher of art and art history who has also contributed to the philosophies of history, action, knowledge, science, and metaphilosophy. Among his influential studies in the history of philosophy are books on Nietzsche, Sartre, and thought. Danto arrives at his philosophy of art through his “method of indiscernibles,” which has greatly influenced contemporary philosophical aesthetics. According to his metaphilosophy, genuine philosophical questions arise when there is a theoretical need to differentiate two things that are perceptually indiscernible such as prudential actions versus moral actions Kant, causal chains versus constant conjunctions Hume, and perfect dreams versus reality Descartes. Applying the method to the philosophy of art, Danto asks what distinguishes an artwork, such as Warhol’s Brillo Box, from its perceptually indiscernible, real-world counterparts, such as Brillo boxes by Proctor and Gamble. His answer his partial definition of art is that x is a work of art only if 1 x is about something and 2 x embodies its meaning i.e., discovers a mode of presentation intended to be appropriate to whatever subject x is about. These two necessary conditions, Danto claims, enable us to distinguish between artworks and real things between Warhol’s Brillo Box and Proctor and Gamble’s. However, critics have pointed out that these conditions fail, since real Brillo boxes are about something Brillo about which they embody or convey meanings through their mode of presentation viz., that Brillo is clean, fresh, and dynamic. Moreover, this is not an isolated example. Danto’s theory of art confronts systematic difficulties in differentiating real cultural artifacts, such as industrial packages, from artworks proper. In addition to his philosophy of art, Danto proposes a philosophy of art history. Like Hegel, Danto maintains that art history as a developmental, progressive process has ended. Danto believes that modern art has been primarily reflexive i.e., about itself; it has attempted to use its own forms and strategies to disclose the essential nature of art. Cubism and abstract expressionism, for example, exhibit saliently the two-dimensional nature of painting. With each experiment, modern art has gotten closer to disclosing its own essence. But, Danto argues, with works such as Warhol’s Brillo Box, artists have taken the philosophical project of self-definition as far as they can, since once an artist like Warhol has shown that artworks can be perceptually indiscernible from “real things” and, therefore, can look like anything, there is nothing further that the artist qua artist can show through the medium of appearances about the nature of art. The task of defining art must be reassigned to philosophers to be treated discursively, and art history as the developmental, progressive narrative of self-definition ends. Since that turn of events was putatively precipitated by Warhol in the 0s, Danto calls the present period of art making “post-historical.” As an art critic for The Nation, he has been chronicling its vicissitudes for a decade and a half. Some dissenters, nevertheless, have been unhappy with Danto’s claim that art history has ended because, they maintain, he has failed to demonstrate that the only prospects for a developmental, progressive history of art reside in the project of the self-definition of art. “There are two concerns by the philosopher with history – the history of philosophy as a philosophical discipline – and the philosophy of history per se. In the latter, in what way can we say that decapitation willed the death of Charles II?” – Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Philosophy’s Two Co-Ordinate Unities: Lat. and Long.,” “Kantotle or Ariskant? The Co-Ordinate Unity of Philosophy.”

philosophical mathematics: Grice: “Not for nothing Plato’s academy motto was, “Lascite ogni non-geometria voi ch’entrate!” ΑΓΕΩΜΕΤΡΗΤΟΣ ΜΗΔΕΙΣ ΕΙΣΙΤΩ – “a-gemetretos medeis eiseto” Grice thought that “7 + 5 = 12” was either synthetic or analytic – “but hardly both”. Grice on real numbers -- continuum problem, an open question that arose in Cantor’s theory of infinite cardinal numbers. By definition, two sets have the same cardinal number if there is a one-to-one correspondence between them. For example, the function that sends 0 to 0, 1 to 2, 2 to 4, etc., shows that the set of even natural numbers has the same cardinal number as the set of all natural numbers, namely F0. That F0 is not the only infinite cardinal follows from Cantor’s theorem: the power set of any set i.e., the set of all its subsets has a greater cardinality than the set itself. So, e.g., the power set of the natural numbers, i.e., the set of all sets of natural numbers, has a cardinal number greater than F0. The first infinite number greater than F0 is F1; the next after that is F2, and so on. When arithmetical operations are extended into the infinite, the cardinal number of the power set of the natural numbers turns out to be 2F0. By Cantor’s theorem, 2F0 must be greater than F0; the conjecture that it is equal to F1 is Cantor’s continuum hypothesis in symbols, CH or 2F0 % F1. Since 2F0 is also the cardinality of the set of points on a continuous line, CH can also be stated in this form: any infinite set of points on a line can be brought into one-to-one correspondence either with the set of natural numbers or with the set of all points on the line. Cantor and others attempted to prove CH, without success. It later became clear, due to the work of Gödel and Cohen, that their failure was inevitable: the continuum hypothesis can neither be proved nor disproved from the axioms of set theory ZFC. The question of its truth or falsehood the continuum problem remains open. Philosophical mathematics: Grice on “7 + 5 = 12” -- Dedekind, R. G. mathematician, one of the most important figures in the mathematical analysis of foundational questions that took place in the late nineteenth century. Philosophically, three things are interesting about Dedekind’s work: 1 the insistence that the fundamental numerical systems of mathematics must be developed independently of spatiotemporal or geometrical notions; 2 the insistence that the numbers systems rely on certain mental capacities fundamental to thought, in particular on the capacity of the mind to “create”; and 3 the recognition that this “creation” is “creation” according to certain key properties, properties that careful mathematical analysis reveals as essential to the subject matter. 1 is a concern Dedekind shared with Bolzano, Cantor, Frege, and Hilbert; 2 sets Dedekind apart from Frege; and 3 represents a distinctive shift toward the later axiomatic position of Hilbert and somewhat away from the concern with the individual nature of the central abstract mathematical objects which is a central concern of Frege. Much of Dedekind’s position is sketched in the Habilitationsrede of 1854, the procedure there being applied in outline to the extension of the positive whole numbers to the integers, and then to the rational field. However, the two works best known to philosophers are the monographs on irrational numbers Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen, 1872 and on natural numbers Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, 8, both of which pursue the procedure advocated in 1854. In both we find an “analysis” designed to uncover the essential properties involved, followed by a “synthesis” designed to show that there can be such systems, this then followed by a “creation” of objects possessing the properties and nothing more. In the 1872 work, Dedekind suggests that the essence of continuity in the reals is that whenever the line is divided into two halves by a cut, i.e., into two subsets A1 and A2 such that if p 1 A1 and q 1 A2, then p ‹ q and, if p 1 A1 and q ‹ p, then q 1 A1, and if p 1 A2 and q p, then q 1 A2 as well, then there is real number r which “produces” this cut, i.e., such that A1 % {p; p ‹ r}, and A2 % {p: r m p}. The task is then to characterize the real numbers so that this is indeed true of them. Dedekind shows that, whereas the rationals themselves do not have this property, the collection of all cuts in the rationals does. Dedekind then “defines” the irrationals through this observation, not directly as the cuts in the rationals themselves, as was done later, but rather through the “creation” of “new irrational numbers” to correspond to those rational cuts not hitherto “produced” by a number. The 8 work starts from the notion of a “mapping” of one object onto another, which for Dedekind is necessary for all exact thought. Dedekind then develops the notion of a one-toone into mapping, which is then used to characterize infinity “Dedekind infinity”. Using the fundamental notion of a chain, Dedekind characterizes the notion of a “simply infinite system,” thus one that is isomorphic to the natural number sequence. Thus, he succeeds in the goal set out in the 1854 lecture: isolating precisely the characteristic properties of the natural number system. But do simply infinite systems, in particular the natural number system, exist? Dedekind now argues: Any infinite system must Dedekind, Richard Dedekind, Richard 210 210 contain a simply infinite system Theorem 72. Correspondingly, Dedekind sets out to prove that there are infinite systems Theorem 66, for which he uses an infamous argument reminiscent of Bolzano’s from thirty years earlier involving “my thought-world,” etc. It is generally agreed that the argument does not work, although it is important to remember Dedekind’s wish to demonstrate that since the numbers are to be free creations of the human mind, his proofs should rely only on the properties of the mental. The specific act of “creation,” however, comes in when Dedekind, starting from any simply infinite system, abstracts from the “particular properties” of this, claiming that what results is the simply infinite system of the natural numbers. Philosophical mathematics -- mathematical analysis, also called standard analysis, the area of mathematics pertaining to the so-called real number system, i.e. the area that can be based on an axiom set whose intended interpretation (standard model) has the set of real numbers as its domain (universe of discourse). Thus analysis includes, among its many subbranches, elementary algebra, differential and integral calculus, differential equations, the calculus of variations, and measure theory. Analytic geometry involves the application of analysis to geometry. Analysis contains a large part of the mathematics used in mathematical physics. The real numbers, which are representable by the ending and unending decimals, are usefully construed as (or as corresponding to) distances measured, relative to an arbitrary unit length, positively to the right and negatively to the left of an arbitrarily fixed zero point along a geometrical straight line. In particular, the class of real numbers includes as increasingly comprehensive proper subclasses the natural numbers, the integers (positive, negative, and zero), the rational numbers (or fractions), and the algebraic numbers (such as the square root of two). Especially important is the presence in the class of real numbers of non-algebraic (or transcendental) irrational numbers such as pi. The set of real numbers includes arbitrarily small and arbitrarily large, finite quantities, while excluding infinitesimal and infinite quantities. Analysis, often conceived as the mathematics of continuous magnitude, contrasts with arithmetic (natural number theory), which is regarded as the mathematics of discrete magnitude. Analysis is often construed as involving not just the real numbers but also the imaginary (complex) numbers. Traditionally analysis is expressed in a second-order or higher-order language wherein its axiom set has categoricity; each of its models is isomorphic to (has the same structure as) the standard model. When analysis is carried out in a first-order language, as has been increasingly the case since the 1950s, categoricity is impossible and it has nonstandard mass noun mathematical analysis models in addition to its standard model. A nonstandard model of analysis is an interpretation not isomorphic to the standard model but nevertheless satisfying the axiom set. Some of the nonstandard models involve objects reminiscent of the much-despised “infinitesimals” that were essential to the Leibniz approach to calculus and that were subject to intense criticism by Berkeley and other philosophers and philosophically sensitive mathematicians. These non-standard models give rise to a new area of mathematics, non-standard analysis, within which the fallacious arguments used by Leibniz and other early analysts form the heuristic basis of new and entirely rigorous proofs. -- mathematical function, an operation that, when applied to an entity (set of entities) called its argument(s), yields an entity known as the value of the function for that argument(s). This operation can be expressed by a functional equation of the form y % f(x) such that a variable y is said to be a function of a variable x if corresponding to each value of x there is one and only one value of y. The x is called the independent variable (or argument of the function) and the y the dependent variable (or value of the function). (Some definitions consider the relation to be the function, not the dependent variable, and some definitions permit more than one value of y to correspond to a given value of x, as in x2 ! y2 % 4.) More abstractly, a function can be considered to be simply a special kind of relation (set of ordered pairs) that to any element in its domain relates exactly one element in its range. Such a function is said to be a one-to-one correspondence if and only if the set {x,y} elements of S and {z,y} elements of S jointly imply x % z. Consider, e.g., the function {(1,1), (2,4), (3,9), (4,16), (5,25), (6,36)}, each of whose members is of the form (x,x2) – the squaring function. Or consider the function {(0,1), (1,0)} – which we can call the negation function. In contrast, consider the function for exclusive alternation (as in you may have a beer or glass of wine, but not both). It is not a one-to-one correspondence. For, 0 is the value of (0,1) and of (1,0), and 1 is the value of (0,0) and of (1,1). If we think of a function as defined on the natural numbers – functions from Nn to N for various n (most commonly n % 1 or 2) – a partial function is a function from Nn to N whose domain is not necessarily the whole of Nn (e.g., not defined for all of the natural numbers). A total function from Nn to N is a function whose domain is the whole of Nn (e.g., all of the natural numbers). -- mathematical induction, a method of definition and a method of proof. A collection of objects can be defined inductively. All members of such a collection can be shown to have a property by an inductive proof. The natural numbers and the set of well-formed formulas of a formal language are familiar examples of sets given by inductive definition. Thus, the set of natural numbers is inductively defined as the smallest set, N, such that: (B) 0 is in N and (I) for any x in N the successor of x is in N. (B) is the basic clause and (I) the inductive clause of this definition. Or consider a propositional language built on negation and conjunction. We start with a denumerable class of atomic sentence symbols ATOM = {A1, A2, . . .}. Then we can define the set of well-formed formulas, WFF, as the smallest set of expressions such that: (B) every member of ATOM is in WFF and (I) if x is in WFF then (- x) is in WFF and if x and y are in WFF then (x & y) is in WFF. We show that all members of an inductively defined set have a property by showing that the members specified by the basis have that property and that the property is preserved by the induction. For example, we show that all WFFs have an even number of parentheses by showing (i) that all ATOMs have an even number of parentheses and (ii) that if x and y have an even number of parentheses then so do (- x) and (x & y). This shows that the set of WFFs with an even number of parentheses satisfies (B) and (I). The set of WFFs with an even number of parentheses must then be identical to WFF, since – by definition – WFF is the smallest set that satisfies (B) and (I). Ordinary proof by mathematical induction shows that all the natural numbers, or all members of some set with the order type of the natural numbers, share a property. Proof by transfinite induction, a more general form of proof by mathematical induction, shows that all members of some well-ordered set have a certain property. A set is well-ordered if and only if every non-empty subset of it has a least element. The natural numbers are well-ordered. It is a consequence of the axiom of choice that every set can be well-ordered. Suppose that a set, X, is well-ordered and that P is the subset of X whose mathematical constructivism mathematical induction 541 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 541 members have the property of interest. Suppose that it can be shown for any element x of X, if all members of X less that x are in P, then so is x. Then it follows by transfinite induction that all members of X have the property, that X % P. For if X did not coincide with P, then the set of elements of x not in P would be non-empty. Since X is well-ordered, this set would have a least element, x*. But then by definition, all members of X less than x* are in P, and by hypothesis x* must be in P after all.. -- mathematical intuitionism, a twentieth-century movement that reconstructs mathematics in accordance with an epistemological idealism and a Kantian metaphysics. Specifically, Brouwer, its founder, held that there are no unexperienced truths and that mathematical objects stem from the a priori form of those conscious acts which generate empirical objects. Unlike Kant, however, Brouwer rejected the apriority of space and based mathematics solely on a refined conception of the intuition of time. Intuitionistic mathematics. According to Brouwer, the simplest mathematical act is to distinguish between two diverse elements in the flow of consciousness. By repeating and concatenating such acts we generate each of the natural numbers, the standard arithmetical operations, and thus the rational numbers with their operations as well. Unfortunately, these simple, terminating processes cannot produce the convergent infinite sequences of rational numbers that are needed to generate the continuum (the nondenumerable set of real numbers, or of points on the line). Some “proto-intuitionists” admitted infinite sequences whose elements are determined by finitely describable rules. However, the set of all such algorithmic sequences is denumerable and thus can scarcely generate the continuum. Brouwer’s first attempt to circumvent this – by postulating a single intuition of an ever growing continuum – mirrored Aristotle’s picture of the continuum as a dynamic whole composed of inseparable parts. But this approach was incompatible with the set-theoretic framework that Brouwer accepted, and by 1918 he had replaced it with the concept of an infinite choice sequence. A choice sequence of rational numbers is, to be sure, generated by a “rule,” but the rule may leave room for some degree of freedom in choosing the successive elements. It might, e.g., simply require that the n ! 1st choice be a rational number that lies within 1/n of the nth choice. The set of real numbers generated by such semideterminate sequences is demonstrably non-denumerable. Following his epistemological beliefs, Brouwer admitted only those properties of a choice sequence which are determined by its rule and by a finite number of actual choices. He incorporated this restriction into his version of set theory and obtained a series of results that conflict with standard (classical) mathematics. Most famously, he proved that every function that is fully defined over an interval of real numbers is uniformly continuous. (Pictorially, the graph of the function has no gaps or jumps.) Interestingly, one corollary of this theorem is that the set of real numbers cannot be divided into mutually exclusive subsets, a property that rigorously recovers the Aristotelian picture of the continuum. The clash with classical mathematics. Unlike his disciple Arend Heyting, who considered intuitionistic and classical mathematics as separate and therefore compatible subjects, Brouwer viewed them as incompatible treatments of a single subject matter. He even occasionally accused classical mathematics of inconsistency at the places where it differed from intuitionism. This clash concerns the basic concept of what counts as a mathematical object. Intuitionism allows, and classical mathematics rejects, objects that may be indeterminate with respect to some of their properties. Logic and language. Because he believed that mathematical constructions occur in prelinguistic consciousness, Brouwer refused to limit mathematics by the expressive capacity of any language. Logic, he claimed, merely codifies already completed stages of mathematical reasoning. For instance, the principle of the excluded middle stems from an “observational period” during which mankind catalogued finite phenomena (with decidable properties); and he derided classical mathematics for inappropriately applying this principle to infinitary aspects of mathematics. Formalization. Brouwer’s views notwithstanding, in 1930 Heyting produced formal systems for intuitionistic logic (IL) and number theory. These inspired further formalizations (even of the theory of choice sequences) and a series of proof-theoretic, semantic, and algebraic studies that related intuitionistic and classical formal systems. Stephen Kleene, e.g., interpreted IL and other intuitionistic formal systems using the classical theory of recursive functions. Gödel, who showed that IL cannot coincide with any finite many-valued logic, demonstrated its relation to the modal logic, S4; and Kripke provided a formal semantics for IL similar to the possible worlds semantics for S4. For a while the study of intuitionistic formal systems used strongly classical methods, but since the 1970s intuitionistic methods have been employed as well. Meaning. Heyting’s formalization reflected a theory of meaning implicit in Brouwer’s epistemology and metaphysics, a theory that replaces the traditional correspondence notion of truth with the notion of constructive proof. More recently Michael Dummett has extended this to a warranted assertability theory of meaning for areas of discourse outside of mathematics. He has shown how assertabilism provides a strategy for combating realism about such things as physical objects, mental objects, and the past. -- mathematical structuralism, the view that the subject of any branch of mathematics is a structure or structures. The slogan is that mathematics is the science of structure. Define a “natural number system” to be a countably infinite collection of objects with one designated initial object and a successor relation that satisfies the principle of mathematical induction. Examples of natural number systems are the Arabic numerals and an infinite sequence of distinct moments of time. According to structuralism, arithmetic is about the form or structure common to natural number systems. Accordingly, a natural number is something like an office in an organization or a place in a pattern. Similarly, real analysis is about the real number structure, the form common to complete ordered fields. The philosophical issues concerning structuralism concern the nature of structures and their places. Since a structure is a one-over-many of sorts, it is something like a universal. Structuralists have defended analogues of some of the traditional positions on universals, such as realism and nominalism. Philosophical mathematics -- metamathematics, the study and establishment, by restricted (and, in particular, finitary) means, of the consistency or reliability of the various systems of classical mathematics. The term was apparently introduced, with pejorative overtones relating it to ‘metaphysics’, in the 1870s in connection with the discussion of non-Euclidean geometries. It was introduced in the sense given here, shorn of negative connotations, by Hilbert (see his “Neubegründung der Mathematik. Erste Mitteilung,” 1922), who also referred to it as Beweistheorie or proof theory. A few years later (specifically, in the 1930 papers “Über einige fundamentale Begriffe der Metamathematik” and “Fundamentale Begriffe der Methodologie der deduktiven Wissenschaften. I”) Tarski fitted it with a somewhat broader, less restricted sense: broader in that the scope of its concerns was increased to include not only questions of consistency, but also a host of other questions (e.g. questions of independence, completeness and axiomatizability) pertaining to what Tarski referred to as the “methodology of the deductive sciences” (which was his synonym for ‘metamathematics’); less restricted in that the standards of proof were relaxed so as to permit other than finitary – indeed, other than constructive – means. On this broader conception of Tarski’s, formalized deductive disciplines form the field of research of metamathematics roughly in the same sense in which spatial entities form the field of research in geometry or animals that of zoology. Disciplines, he said, are to be regarded as sets of sentences to be investigated from the point of view of their consistency, axiomatizability (of various types), completeness, and categoricity or degree of categoricity, etc. Eventually (see the 1935 and 1936 papers “Grundzüge des Systemenkalkül, Erster Teil” and “Grundzüge der Systemenkalkül, Zweiter Teil”) Tarski went on to include all manner of semantical questions among the concerns of metamathematics, thus diverging rather sharply from Hilbert’s original syntactical focus. Today, the terms ‘metatheory’ and ‘metalogic’ are used to signify that broad set of interests, embracing both syntactical and semantical studies of formal languages and systems, which Tarski came to include under the general heading of metamathematics. Those having to do specifically with semantics belong to that more specialized branch of modern logic known as model theory, while those dealing with purely syntactical questions belong to what has come to be known as proof theory (where this latter is now, however, permitted to employ other than finitary methods in the proofs of its theorems). Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Philosophical geometry, Plato, and Walter Pater.”

Animatum -- philosophical psychology – Grice: “Someone at Oxford had the bad idea of calling the Wilde lecturer the Wilde lecturer in mental philosophy – and the sad thing is that Ryle did nothing to stop it!” -- Eckhart, Johannes, called Meister Eckhart c.12601328, G. mystic, theologian, and preacher. Eckhart entered the Dominican order early and began an academic circuit that took him several times to Paris as a student and master of theology and that initiated him into ways of thinking much influenced by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. At Paris, Eckhart wrote the required commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and finished for publication at least three formal disputations. But he had already held office within the Dominicans, and he continued to alternate work as administrator and as teacher. Eckhart preached throughout these years, and he continued to write spiritual treatises in the vernacular, of which the most important is the Book of Divine Consolation. Only about a third of Eckhart’s main project in Latin, the Opus tripartitum, seems ever to have been completed. Beginning in the early 1320s, questions were raised about Eckhart’s orthodoxy. The questions centered on what was characteristic of his teaching, namely the emphasis on the soul’s attaining “emptiness” so as to “give birth to God.” The soul is ennobled by its emptying, and it can begin to “labor” with God to deliver a spark that enacts the miraculous union-and-difference of their love. After being acquitted of heresy once, Eckhart was condemned on 108 propositions drawn from his writings by a commission at Cologne. The condemnation was appealed to the Holy See, but in 1329 Eckhart was there judged “probably heretical” on 17 of 28 propositions drawn from both his academic and popular works. The condemnation clearly limited Eckhart’s explicit influence in theology, though he was deeply appropriated not only by mystics such as Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, but by church figures such as Nicholas of Cusa and Martin Luther. He has since been taken up by thinkers as different as Hegel, Fichte, and Heidegger. Philosophical psychology – “soul-to-soul transfer” – the problem of other minds, the question of what rational basis a person can have for the belief that other persons are similarly conscious and have minds. Every person, by virtue of being conscious, is aware of her own state of consciousness and thus knows she has a mind; but the mental states of others are not similarly apparent to her. An influential attempt to solve this problem was made by philosophical behaviorists. According to Ryle in “The Concept of Mind,”(first draft entitled, “The concept of psyche,” second draft, “The concept of the soul” -- a mind (Ryle means ‘soul’) is not a ghost in the physical machine but roughly speaking an aggregate of dispositions to behave intelligently and to respond overtly to sensory stimulation. Since the behavior distinctive of these mentalistic dispositions is readily observable in other human beings, the so-called problem of other minds is easily solved: it arose from mere confusion about the concept of mind. Ryle’s opponents were generally willing to concede that such dispositions provide proof that another person has a “mind” or is a sentient being, but they were not willing to admit that those dispositions provide proof that other people actually have feelings, thoughts, and sensory experiences. Their convictions on this last matter generated a revised version of the otherminds problem; it might be called the problem of other-person experiences. Early efforts to solve the problem of other minds can be viewed as attempts to solve the problem of other-person experiences. According to J. S. Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, one can defend one’s conviction that others have feelings and other subjective experiences by employing an argument from analogy. To develop that analogy one first attends to how one’s own experiences are related to overt or publicly observable phenomena. One might observe that one feels pain when pricked by a pin and that one responds to the pain by wincing and saying “ouch.” The next step is to attend to the behavior and circumstances of others. Since other people are physically very similar to oneself, it is reasonable to conclude that if they are pricked by a pin and respond by wincing and saying “ouch,” they too have felt pain. Analogous inferences involving other sorts of mental states and other sorts of behavior and circumstances add strong support, Mill said, to one’s belief in other-person experiences. Although arguments from analogy are generally conceded to provide rationally acceptable evidence for unobserved phenomena, the analogical argument for other-person experiences was vigorously attacked in the 0s by philosophers influenced by Vitters’s Philosophical Investigations 3. Their central contention was that anyone employing the argument must assume that, solely from her own case, she knows what feelings and thoughts are. This assumption was refuted, they thought, by Vitters’s private language argument, which proved that we learn what feelings and thoughts are only in the process of learning a publicly understandable language containing an appropriate psychological vocabulary. To understand this latter vocabulary, these critics said, one must be able to use its ingredient words correctly in relation to others as well as to oneself; and this can be ascertained only because words like ‘pain’ and ‘depression’ are associated with behavioral criteria. When such criteria are satisfied by the behavior of others, one knows that the words are correctly applied to them and that one is justified in believing that they have the experiences in question. The supposed problem of other-person experiences is thus “dissolved” by a just appreciation of the preconditions for coherent thought about psychological states. Vitters’s claim that, to be conceivable, “an inner process stands in need of external criteria,” lost its hold on philosophers during the 0s. An important consideration was this: if a feeling of pain is a genuine reality different from the behavior that typically accompanies it, then so-called pain behavior cannot be shown to provide adequate evidence for the presence of pain by a purely linguistic argument; some empirical inductive evidence is needed. Since, contrary to Vitters, one knows what the feeling of pain is like only by having that feeling, one’s belief that other people occasionally have feelings that are significantly like the pain one feels oneself apparently must be supported by an argument in which analogy plays a central role. No other strategy seems possible. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Method in philosophical psychology: from the bizarre to the banal,” repr. in “The Conception of Value,” Oxford, Clarendon Press.

philosophical theology: Grice: “My mother was High Church, but my father was a non-conformist, and the fact that my resident paternal aunt was a converted Roman certainly did not help!” -- Philosophical theology -- deism, the view that true religion is natural religion. Some self-styled Christian deists accepted revelation although they argued that its content is essentially the same as natural religion. Most deists dismissed revealed religion as a fiction. God wants his creatures to be happy and has ordained virtue as the means to it. Since God’s benevolence is disinterested, he will ensure that the knowledge needed for happiness is universally accessible. Salvation cannot, then, depend on special revelation. True religion is an expression of a universal human nature whose essence is reason and is the same in all times and places. Religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam originate in credulity, political tyranny, and priestcraft, which corrupt reason and overlay natural religion with impurities. Deism is largely a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century phenomenon and was most prominent in England. Among the more important English deists were John Toland 16701722, Anthony Collins 16761729, Herbert of Cherbury 15831648, Matthew Tindal 16571733, and Thomas Chubb 16791747. Continental deists included Voltaire and Reimarus. Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer 17641806 were prominent deists. Orthodox writers in this period use ‘deism’ as a vague term of abuse. By the late eighteenth century, the term came to mean belief in an “absentee God” who creates the world, ordains its laws, and then leaves it to its own devices. Philosophical theology -- de Maistre, Joseph-Marie, political theorist, diplomat, and Roman Catholic exponent of theocracy. He was educated by the Jesuits in Turin. His counterrevolutionary political philosophy aimed at restoring the foundations of morality, the family, society, and the state in postrevolutionary Europe. Against Enlightenment ideals, he reclaimed Thomism, defended the hereditary and absolute monarchy, and championed ultramontanism The Pope, 1821. Considerations on France 1796 argues that the decline of moral and religious values was responsible for the “satanic” 1789 revolution. Hence Christianity and Enlightenment philosophy were engaged in a fight to the death that he claimed the church would eventually win. Deeply pessimistic about human nature, the Essay on the Generating Principle of Political Constitutions 1810 traces the origin of authority in the human craving for order and discipline. Saint Petersburg Evenings 1821 urges philosophy to surrender to religion and reason to faith. Philosophical theology -- divine attributes, properties of God; especially, those properties that are essential and unique to God. Among properties traditionally taken to be attributes of God, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence are naturally taken to mean having, respectively, power, knowledge, and moral goodness to the maximum degree. Here God is understood as an eternal or everlasting being of immense power, knowledge, and goodness, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe and is worthy of human worship. Omnipotence is maximal power. Some philosophers, notably Descartes, have thought that omnipotence requires the ability to do absolutely anything, including the logically impossible. Most classical theists, however, understood omnipotence as involving vast powers, while nevertheless being subject to a range of limitations of ability, including the inability to do what is logically impossible, the inability to change the past or to do things incompatible with what has happened, and the inability to do things that cannot be done by a being who has other divine attributes, e.g., to sin or to lie. Omniscience is unlimited knowledge. According to the most straightforward account, omniscience is knowledge of all true propositions. But there may be reasons for recognizing a limitation on the class of true propositions that a being must know in order to be omniscient. For example, if there are true propositions about the future, omniscience would then include foreknowledge. But some philosophers have thought that foreknowledge of human actions is incompatible with those actions being free. This has led some to deny that there are truths about the future and others to deny that such truths are knowable. In the latter case, omniscience might be taken to be knowledge of all knowable truths. Or if God is eternal and if there are certain tensed or temporally indexical propositions that can be known only by someone who is in time, then omniscience presumably does not extend to such propositions. It is a matter of controversy whether omniscience includes middle knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what an agent would do if other, counterfactual, conditions were to obtain. Since recent critics of middle knowledge in contrast to Báñez and other sixteenth-century Dominican opponents of Molina usually deny that the relevant counterfactual conditionals alleged to be the object of such knowledge are true, denying the possibility of middle knowledge need not restrict the class of true propositions a being must know in order to be omniscient. Finally, although the concept of omniscience might not itself constrain how an omniscient being acquires its knowledge, it is usually held that God’s knowledge is neither inferential i.e., derived from premises or evidence nor dependent upon causal processes. Omnibenevolenceis, literally, complete desire for good; less strictly, perfect moral goodness. Traditionally it has been thought that God does not merely happen to be good but that he must be so and that he is unable to do what is wrong. According to the former claim God is essentially good; according to the latter he is impeccable. It is a matter of controversy whether God is perfectly good in virtue of complying with an external moral standard or whether he himself sets the standard for goodness. Divine sovereignty is God’s rule over all of creation. According to this doctrine God did not merely create the world and then let it run on its own; he continues to govern it in complete detail according to his good plan. Sovereignty is thus related to divine providence. A difficult question is how to reconcile a robust view of God’s control of the world with libertarian free will. Aseity or perseity is complete independence. In a straightforward sense, God is not dependent on anyone or anything for his existence. According to stronger interpretation of aseity, God is completely independent of everything else, including his properties. This view supports a doctrine of divine simplicity according to which God is not distinct from his properties. Simplicity is the property of having no parts of any kind. According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God not only has no spatial or temporal parts, but there is no distinction between God and his essence, between his various attributes in him omniscience and omnipotence, e.g., are identical, and between God and his attributes. Attributing simplicity to God was standard in medieval theology, but the doctrine has seemed to many contemporary philosophers to be baffling, if not incoherent. divine command ethics, an ethical theory according to which part or all of morality divine attributes divine command ethics 240 240 depends upon the will of God as promulgated by divine commands. This theory has an important place in the history of Christian ethics. Divine command theories are prominent in the Franciscan ethics developed by John Duns Scotus and William Ockham; they are also endorsed by disciples of Ockham such as d’Ailly, Gerson, and Gabriel Biel; both Luther and Calvin adopt divine command ethics; and in modern British thought, important divine command theorists include Locke, Berkeley, and Paley. Divine command theories are typically offered as accounts of the deontological part of morality, which consists of moral requirements obligation, permissions rightness, and prohibitions wrongness. On a divine command conception, actions forbidden by God are morally wrong because they are thus forbidden, actions not forbidden by God are morally right because they are not thus forbidden, and actions commanded by God are morally obligatory because they are thus commanded. Many Christians find divine command ethics attractive because the ethics of love advocated in the Gospels makes love the subject of a command. Matthew 22:3740 records Jesus as saying that we are commanded to love God and the neighbor. According to Kierkegaard, there are two reasons to suppose that Christian love of neighbor must be an obligation imposed by divine command: first, only an obligatory love can be sufficiently extensive to embrace everyone, even one’s enemies; second, only an obligatory love can be invulnerable to changes in its objects, a love that alters not when it alteration finds. The chief objection to the theory is that dependence on divine commands would make morality unacceptably arbitrary. According to divine command ethics, murder would not be wrong if God did not exist or existed but failed to forbid it. Perhaps the strongest reply to this objection appeals to the doctrines of God’s necessary existence and essential goodness. God could not fail to exist and be good, and so God could not fail to forbid murder. In short, divine commands are not arbitrary fiats. divine foreknowledge, God’s knowledge of the future. It appears to be a straightforward consequence of God’s omniscience that he has knowledge of the future, for presumably omniscience includes knowledge of all truths and there are truths about the future. Moreover, divine foreknowledge seems to be required by orthodox religious commitment to divine prophecy and divine providence. In the former case, God could not reliably reveal what will happen if he does know what will happen. And in the latter case, it is difficult to see how God could have a plan for what happens without knowing what that will be. A problem arises, however, in that it has seemed to many that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action. Some philosophers notably Boethius have reasoned as follows: If God knows that a person will do a certain action, then the person must perform that action, but if a person must perform an action, the person does not perform the action freely. So if God knows that a person will perform an action, the person does not perform the action freely. This reason for thinking that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action commits a simple modal fallacy. What must be the case is the conditional that if God knows that a person will perform an action then the person will in fact perform the action. But what is required to derive the conclusion is the implausible claim that from the assumption that God knows that a person will perform an action it follows not simply that the person will perform the action but that the person must perform it. Perhaps other attempts to demonstrate the incompatibility, however, are not as easily dismissed. One response to the apparent dilemma is to say that there really are no such truths about the future, either none at all or none about events, like future free actions, that are not causally necessitated by present conditions. Another response is to concede that there are truths about the future but to deny that truths about future free actions are knowable. In this case omniscience may be understood as knowledge, not of all truths, but of all knowable truths. A third, and historically important, response is to hold that God is eternal and that from his perspective everything is present and thus not future. These responses implicitly agree that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom, but they provide different accounts of omniscience according to which it does not include foreknowledge, or, at any rate, not foreknowledge of future free actions. Philosophical theology -- double truth, the theory that a thing can be true in philosophy or according to reason while its opposite is true in theology or according to faith. It serves as a response to conflicts between reason and faith. For example, on one interpretation of Aristotle, there is only one rational human soul, whereas, according to Christian theology, there are many rational human souls. The theory of double truth was attributed to Averroes and to Latin Averroists such as Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia by their opponents, but it is doubtful that they actually held it. Averroes seems to have held that a single truth is scientifically formulated in philosophy and allegorically expressed in theology. Latin Averroists apparently thought that philosophy concerns what would have been true by natural necessity absent special divine intervention, and theology deals with what is actually true by virtue of such intervention. On this view, there would have been only one rational human soul if God had not miraculously intervened to multiply what by nature could not be multiplied. No one clearly endorsed the view that rational human souls are both only one and also many in number. H. P. Grice, “Must the Articles be 39 – and if we add one more, what might it say?.”

philosophism: birrellism – general refelction on life. Grice defines a philosopher as someone ‘addicted to general reflections on life,’ like Birrell did. f. paraphilosophy – philosophical hacks. “Austin’s expressed view -- the formulation of which no doubt involves some irony -- is that we ‘philosophical hacks’ spend the week making, for the benefit of our tutees, direct attacks on this or that philosophical issue, and that we need to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen ‘para-philosophy’ in which some non-philosophical conception is to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency.” His feeling of superiority as a philosopher is obvious in various fields. He certaintly would not get involved in any ‘empirical’ survey (“We can trust this, qua philosophers, as given.”) Grice held a MA (Lit. Hum.) – Literae Humaniores (Philosophy). So he knew what he was talking about. The curriculum was an easy one. He plays with the fact that empiricists don’t regard philosophy as a sovereign monarch: philosophia regina scientiarum, provided it’s queen consort. In “Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy,” he plays with the idea that Philosophy is the Supreme Science. Grice was somewhat obsessed as to what ‘philosohical’ stood for, which amused the members of his play group! His play group once spends five weeks in an effort to explain why, sometimes, ‘very’ allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of ‘highly’ (as in ‘very unusual’) and sometimes does not (as in ‘very depressed’ or ‘very wicked’); and we reached no conclusion. This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity. But that response is as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, ‘How many angels can dance on a needle’s point?’” A needless point?For much as this medieval question is raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so The Play Group discussion is directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examination, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which is generally agreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries. Grice is fortunate that the Lit. Hum. programme does not have much philosophy! He feels free! In fact, the lack of a philosophical background is felt as a badge of honour. It is ‘too clever’ and un-English to ‘know’ things. A pint of philosophy is all Grice wanted. Figurative. This is Harvardite Gordon’s attempt to formulate a philosophy of the minimum fundamental ideas that all people on the earth should come to know. Reviewed by A. M. Honoré: Short measure. Gordon, a Stanley Plummer scholar, e: Bowdoin and Harvard, in The Eastern Gazette. Grice would exclaim: I always loved Alfred Brooks Gordon! Grice was slightly disapppointed that Gordon had not included the fundamental idea of implicaturum in his pint. Short measure, indeed. Grice gives seminars on Ariskant (“the first part of this individual interested some of my tutees; the second, others.” Ariskant philosophised in Grecian, but also in the pure Teutonic, and Grice collaborated with Baker in this area. Curiously, Baker majors in French and philosophy and does research at the Sorbonne. Grice would sometimes define ‘philoosphy.’ Oddly, Grice gives a nice example of ‘philosopher’ meaning ‘addicted to general, usually stoic, reflections about life.’ In the context where it occurs, the implicaturum is Stevensonian. If Stevenson says that an athlete is usually tall, a philosopher may occasionally be inclined to reflect about life in general, as a birrelist would. Grice’s gives an alternate meaning, intended to display circularity: ‘engaged in philosophical studies.’ The idea of Grice of philosophy is the one the Lit. Hum. instills. It is a unique experience, unknown in the New World, our actually outside Oxford, or post-Grice, where a classicist is not seen as a philosopher. Once a tutorial fellow in philosophy (rather than classics) and later university lecturer in philosophy (rather than classics) strengthens his attachment. Grice needs to regarded by his tutee as a philosopher simpliciter, as oppoosed to a prof: the Waynflete is a metaphysician; the White is a moralist, the Wykeham a logician, and the Wilde a ‘mental’. For Grice’s “greatest living philosopher,” Heidegger, ‘philosophy’ is a misnomer. While philology merely discourses (logos) on love, the philosopher claims to be a wizard (sophos) of love. Liddell and Scott have “φιλοσοφία,” which they render as “love of knowledge, pursuit thereof, speculation,” “ἡ φ. κτῆσις ἐπιστήμης.” Then there’s “ἡ πρώτη φ.,” with striking originality, metaphysic, Arist. Metaph. 1026a24. Just one sense, but various ambiguities remain in ‘philosopher,’ as per Grice’s two usages. As it happens, Grice is both addicted to general, usually stoic, speculations about life, and he is a member of The Oxford Philosophical Society.Refs.: The main sources in the Grice Papers are under series III, of the doctrines. See also references under ‘lingusitic botany,’ and Oxonianism. Grice liked to play with the adage of ‘philosophia’ as ‘regina scientiarum.’ A specific essay in his update of “post-war Oxford philosophy,” in WoW on “Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy,” BANC, H. P. Grice, “My friend Birrell.”

philosophia perennis: a supposed body of truths that appear in the writings of the great philosophers, or the truths common to opposed philosophical viewpoints. The term is derived from the title of a book De perenni philosophia published by Agostino Steuco of Gubbio in 1540. It suggests that the differences between philosophers are inessential and superficial and that the common essential truth emerges, however partially, in the major philosophical schools. Aldous Huxley employed it as a title. L. Lavelle, N. Hartmann, and K. Jaspers also employ the phrase. M. De Wulf and many others use the phrase to characterize Neo-Thomism as the chosen vehicle of essential philosophical truths. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “All that remains is mutability.”

philosophical anthropology: “What is man?” Grice: “I would distinguish between what is human, and what is person.” -- philosophical inquiry concerning human nature, often starting with the question of what generally characterizes human beings in contrast to other kinds of creatures and things. Thus broadly conceived, it is a kind of inquiry as old as philosophy itself, occupying philosophers from Socrates to Sartre; and it embraces philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and existentialism. Such inquiry presupposes no immutable “essence of man,” but only the meaningfulness of distinguishing between what is “human” and what is not, and the possibility that philosophy as well as other disciplines may contribute to our self-comprehension. It leaves open the question of whether other kinds of naturally occurring or artificially produced entity may possess the hallmarks of our humanity, and countenances the possibility of the biologically evolved, historically developed, and socially and individually variable character of everything about our attained humanity. More narrowly conceived, philosophical anthropology is a specific movement in recent European philosophy associated initially with Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, and subsequently with such figures as Arnold Gehlen, Cassirer, and the later Sartre. It initially emerged in Germany simultaneously with the existential philosophy of Heidegger and the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, with which it competed as G. philosophers turned their attention to the comprehension of human life. This movement was distinguished from the outset by its attempt to integrate the insights of phenomenological analysis with the perspectives attainable through attention to human and comparative biology, and subsequently to social inquiry as well. This turn to a more naturalistic approach to the understanding of ourselves, as a particular kind of living creature among others, is reflected in the titles of the two works published in 8 that inaugurated the movement: Scheler’s Man’s Place in Nature and Plessner’s The Levels of the Organic and Man. For both Scheler and Plessner, however, as for those who followed them, our nature must be understood by taking further account of the social, cultural, and intellectual dimensions of human life. Even those like Gehlen, whose Der Mensch 0 exhibits a strongly biological orientation, devoted much attention to these dimensions, which our biological nature both constrains and makes possible. For all of them, the relation between the biological and the social and cultural dimensions of human life is a central concern and a key to comprehending our human nature. One of the common themes of the later philosophical-anthropological literature e.g., Cassirer’s An Essay on Man 5 and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason 0 as well as Plessner’s Contitio Humana 5 and Gehlen’s Early Man and Late Culture 3 is the plasticity of human nature, made possible by our biological constitution, and the resulting great differences in the ways human beings live. Yet this is not taken to preclude saying anything meaningful about human nature generally; rather, it merely requires attention to the kinds of general features involved and reflected in human diversity and variability. Critics of the very idea and possibility of a philosophical anthropology e.g., Althusser and Foucault typically either deny that there are any such general features or maintain that there are none outside the province of the biological sciences to which philosophy can contribute nothing substantive. Both claims, however, are open to dispute; and the enterprise of a philosophical anthropology remains a viable and potentially significant one. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Gehlen and the idea that man is sick – homo infirmus.”

philosophical biology: v. H. P. Grice, “The roman problem: doing with ‘vivere’ for ‘zoe’ and bios’” -- vide: H. P. Grice, “Philosophical biology and philosophical psychology” -- the philosophy of science applied to biology. On a conservative view of the philosophy of science, the same principles apply throughout science. Biology supplies additional examples but does not provide any special problems or require new principles. For example, the reduction of Mendelian genetics to molecular biology exemplifies the same sort of relation as the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, and the same general analysis of reduction applies equally to both. More radical philosophers argue that the subject matter of biology has certain unique features; hence, the philosophy of biology is itself unique. The three features of biology most often cited by those who maintain that philosophy of biology is unique are functional organization, embryological development, and the nature of selection. Organisms are functionally organized. They are capable of maintaining their overall organization in the face of fairly extensive variation in their envisonments. Organisms also undergo ontogenetic development resulting from extremely complex interactions between the genetic makeup of the organism and its successive environments. At each step, the course that an organism takes is determined by an interplay between its genetic makeup, its current state of development, and the environment it happens to confront. The complexity of these interactions produces the naturenurture problem. Except for human artifacts, similar organization does not occur in the non-living world. The species problem is another classic issue in the philosophy of biology. Biological species have been a paradigm example of natural kinds since Aristotle. According to nearly all pre-Darwinian philosophers, species are part of the basic makeup of the universe, like gravity and gold. They were held to be as eternal, immutable, and discrete as these other examples of natural kinds. If Darwin was right, species are not eternal. They come and go, and once gone can no more reemerge than Aristotle can once again walk the streets of Athens. Nor are species immutable. A sample of lead can be transmuted into a sample of gold, but these elements as elements remain immutable in the face of such changes. However, Darwin insisted that species themselves, not merely their instances, evolved. Finally, because Darwin thought that species evolved gradually, the boundaries between species are not sharp, casting doubt on the essentialist doctrines so common in his day. In short, if species evolve, they have none of the traditional characteristics of species. Philosophers and biologists to this day are working out the consequences of this radical change in our worldview. The topic that has received the greatest attention by philosophers of biology in the recent literature is the nature of evolutionary theory, in particular selection, adaptation, fitness, and the population structure of species. In order for selection to operate, variation is necessary, successive generations must be organized genealogically, and individuals must interact differentially with their environments. In the simplest case, genes pass on their structure largely intact. In addition, they provide the information necessary to produce organisms. Certain of these organisms are better able to cope with their environments and reproduce than are other organisms. As a result, genes are perpetuated differentially through successive generations. Those characteristics that help an organism cope with its environments are termed adaptations. In a more restricted sense, only those characteristics that arose through past selective advantage count as adaptations. Just as the notion of IQ was devised as a single measure for a combination of the factors that influence our mental abilities, fitness is a measure of relative reproductive success. Claims about the tautological character of the principle philosophical behaviorism philosophy of biology of the survival of the fittest stem from the blunt assertion that fitness just is relative reproductive success, as if intelligence just is what IQ tests measure. Philosophers of biology have collaborated with biologists to analyze the notion of fitness. This literature has concentrated on the role that causation plays in selection and, hence, must play in any adequate explication of fitness. One important distinction that has emerged is between replication and differential interaction with the environment. Selection is a function of the interplay between these two processes. Because of the essential role of variation in selection, all the organisms that belong to the same species either at any one time or through time cannot possibly be essentially the same. Nor can species be treated adequately in terms of the statistical covariance of either characters or genes. The populational structure of species is crucial. For example, species that form numerous, partially isolated demes are much more likely to speciate than those that do not. One especially controversial question is whether species themselves can function in the evolutionary process rather than simply resulting from it. Although philosophers of biology have played an increasingly important role in biology itself, they have also addressed more traditional philosophical questions, especially in connection with evolutionary epistemology and ethics. Advocates of evolutionary epistemology argue that knowledge can be understood in terms of the adaptive character of accurate knowledge. Those organisms that hold false beliefs about their environment, including other organisms, are less likely to reproduce themselves than those with more accurate beliefs. To the extent that this argument has any force at all, it applies only to humansized entities and events. One common response to evolutionary epistemology is that sometimes people who hold manifestly false beliefs flourish at the expense of those who hold more realistic views of the world in which we live. On another version of evolutionary epistemology, knowledge acquisition is viewed as just one more instance of a selection process. The issue is not to justify our beliefs but to understand how they are generated and proliferated. Advocates of evolutionary ethics attempt to justify certain ethical principles in terms of their survival value. Any behavior that increases the likelihood of survival and reproduction is “good,” and anything that detracts from these ends is “bad.” The main objection to evolutionary ethics is that it violates the isought distinction. According to most ethical systems, we are asked to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others. If these others were limited to our biological relatives, then the biological notion of inclusive fitness might be adequate to account for such altruistic behavior, but the scope of ethical systems extends past one’s biological relatives. Advocates of evolutionary ethics are hard pressed to explain the full range of behavior that is traditionally considered as virtuous. Either biological evolution cannot provide an adequate justification for ethical behavior or else ethical systems must be drastically reduced in their scope.

philosophical economics: Grice: “The oikos is the house – and a house is not a home unless there’s a cat around.” -- the study of methodological issues facing positive economic theory and normative problems on the intersection of welfare economics and political philosophy. Methodological issues. Applying approaches and questions in the philosophy of science specifically to economics, the philosophy of economics explores epistemological and conceptual problems raised by the explanatory aims and strategy of economic theory: Do its assumptions about individual choice constitute laws, and do they explain its derived generalizations about markets and economies? Are these generalizations laws, and if so, how are they tested by observation of economic processes, and how are theories in the various compartments of economics microeconomics, macroeconomics related to one another and to econometrics? How are the various schools neoclassical, institutional, Marxian, etc. related to one another, and what sorts of tests might enable us to choose between their theories? Historically, the chief issue of interest in the development of the philosophy of economics has been the empirical adequacy of the assumptions of rational “economic man”: that all agents have complete and transitive cardinal or ordinal utility rankings or preference orders and that they always choose that available option which maximizes their utility or preferences. Since the actual behavior of agents appears to disconfirm these assumptions, the claim that they constitute causal laws governing economic behavior is difficult to sustain. On the other hand, the assumption of preference-maximizing behavior is indispensable to twentieth-century economics. These two considerations jointly undermine the claim that economic theory honors criteria on explanatory power and evidential probity drawn philosophy of economics philosophy of economics 669 669 from physical science. Much work by economists and philosophers has been devoted therefore to disputing the claim that the assumptions of rational choice theory are false or to disputing the inference from this claim to the conclusion that the cognitive status of economic theory as empirical science is thereby undermined. Most frequently it has been held that the assumptions of rational choice are as harmless and as indispensable as idealizations are elsewhere in science. This view must deal with the allegation that unlike theories embodying idealization elsewhere in science, economic theory gains little more in predictive power from these assumptions about agents’ calculations than it would secure without any assumptions about individual choice. Normative issues. Both economists and political philosophers are concerned with identifying principles that will ensure just, fair, or equitable distributions of scarce goods. For this reason neoclassical economic theory shares a history with utilitarianism in moral philosophy. Contemporary welfare economics continues to explore the limits of utilitarian prescriptions that optimal economic and political arrangements should maximize and/or equalize utility, welfare, or some surrogate. It also examines the adequacy of alternatives to such utilitarian principles. Thus, economics shares an agenda of interests with political and moral philosophy. Utilitarianism in economics and philosophy has been constrained by an early realization that utilities are neither cardinally measurable nor interpersonally comparable. Therefore the prescription to maximize and/or equalize utility cannot be determinatively obeyed. Welfare theorists have nevertheless attempted to establish principles that will enable us to determine the equity, fairness, or justice of various economic arrangements, and that do not rely on interpersonal comparisons required to measure whether a distribution is maximal or equal in the utility it accords all agents. Inspired by philosophers who have surrendered utilitarianism for other principles of equality, fairness, or justice in distribution, welfare economists have explored Kantian, social contractarian, and communitarian alternatives in a research program that cuts clearly across both disciplines. Political philosophy has also profited as much from innovations in economic theory as welfare economics has benefited from moral philosophy. Theorems from welfare economics that establish the efficiency of markets in securing distributions that meet minimal conditions of optimality and fairness have led moral philosophers to reexamine the moral status of free-market exchange. Moreover, philosophers have come to appreciate that coercive social institutions are sometimes best understood as devices for securing public goods goods like police protection that cannot be provided to those who pay for them without also providing them to free riders who decline to do so. The recognition that everyone would be worse off, including free riders, were the coercion required to pay for these goods not imposed, is due to welfare economics and has led to a significant revival of interest in the work of Hobbes, who appears to have prefigured such arguments.

philosophy of education: Grice: “I taught Peters all he needed to know about this!” -- a branch of philosophy concerned with virtually every aspect of the educational enterprise. It significantly overlaps other, more mainstream branches especially epistemology and ethics, but even logic and metaphysics. The field might almost be construed as a “series of footnotes” to Plato’s Meno, wherein are raised such fundamental issues as whether virtue can be taught; what virtue is; what knowledge is; what the relation between knowledge of virtue and being virtuous is; what the relation between knowledge and teaching is; and how and whether teaching is possible. While few people would subscribe to Plato’s doctrine or convenient fiction, perhaps in Meno that learning by being taught is a process of recollection, the paradox of inquiry that prompts this doctrine is at once the root text of the perennial debate between rationalism and empiricism and a profoundly unsettling indication that teaching passeth understanding. Mainstream philosophical topics considered within an educational context tend to take on a decidedly genetic cast. So, e.g., epistemology, which analytic philosophy has tended to view as a justificatory enterprise, becomes concerned if not with the historical origins of knowledge claims then with their genesis within the mental economy of persons generally in consequence of their educations. And even when philosophers of education come to endorse something akin to Plato’s classic account of knowledge as justified true belief, they are inclined to suggest, then, that the conveyance of knowledge via instruction must somehow provide the student with the justification along with the true philosophy of education philosophy of education 670 670 belief thereby reintroducing a genetic dimension to a topic long lacking one. Perhaps, indeed, analytic philosophy’s general though not universal neglect of philosophy of education is traceable in some measure to the latter’s almost inevitably genetic perspective, which the former tended to decry as armchair science and as a threat to the autonomy and integrity of proper philosophical inquiry. If this has been a basis for neglect, then philosophy’s more recent, postanalytic turn toward naturalized inquiries that reject any dichotomy between empirical and philosophical investigations may make philosophy of education a more inviting area. Alfred North Whitehead, himself a leading light in the philosophy of education, once remarked that we are living in the period of educational thought subject to the influence of Dewey, and there is still no denying the observation. Dewey’s instrumentalism, his special brand of pragmatism, informs his extraordinarily comprehensive progressive philosophy of education; and he once went so far as to define all of philosophy as the general theory of education. He identifies the educative process with the growth of experience, with growing as developing where experience is to be understood more in active terms, as involving doing things that change one’s objective environment and internal conditions, than in the passive terms, say, of Locke’s “impression” model of experience. Even traditionalistic philosophers of education, most notably Maritain, have acknowledged the wisdom of Deweyan educational means, and have, in the face of Dewey’s commanding philosophical presence, reframed the debate with progressivists as one about appropriate educational ends thereby insufficiently acknowledging Dewey’s trenchant critique of the meansend distinction. And even some recent analytic philosophers of education, such as R. S. Peters, can be read as if translating Deweyan insights e.g., about the aim of education into an analytic idiom. Analytic philosophy of education, as charted by Oxford philosopher R. S. Peters, Israel Scheffler, and others in the Anglo- philosophical tradition, has used the tools of linguistic analysis on a wide variety of educational concepts learning, teaching, training, conditioning, indoctrinating, etc. and investigated their interconnections: Does teaching entail learning? Does teaching inevitably involve indoctrinating? etc. This careful, subtle, and philosophically sophisticated work has made possible a much-needed conceptual precision in educational debates, though the debaters who most influence public opinion and policy have rarely availed themselves of that precisification. Recent work in philosophy of education, however, has taken up some major educational objectives moral and other values, critical and creative thinking in a way that promises to have an impact on the actual conduct of education. Philosophy of education, long isolated in schools of education from the rest of the academic philosophical community, has also been somewhat estranged from the professional educational mainstream. Dewey would surely have approved of a change in this status quo. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Peters and I.”

philosophical historian: philosophy of history, the philosophical study of human history and of attempts to record and interpret it. ‘History’ in English and its equivalent in most modern European languages has two primary senses: 1 the temporal progression of large-scale human events and actions, primarily but not exclusively in the past; and 2 the discipline or inquiry in which knowledge of the human past is acquired or sought. This has led to two senses of ‘philosophy of history’, depending on which “history” has been the object of philosophers’ attentions. Philosophy of history in the first sense is often called substantive or speculative, and placed under metaphysics. Philosophy of history in the second sense is called critical or analytic and can be placed in epistemology. Substantive philosophy of history. In the West, substantive philosophy of history is thought to begin only in the Christian era. In the City of God, Augustine wonders why Rome flourished while pagan, yet fell into disgrace after its conversion to Christiantity. Divine reward and punishment should apply to whole peoples, not just to individuals. The unfolding of events in history should exhibit a plan that is intelligible rationally, morally, and for Augustine theologically. As a believer Augustine is convinced that there is such a plan, though it may not always be evident. In the modern period, philosophers such as Vico and Herder also sought such intelligibility in history. They also believed in a long-term direction or purpose of history that is often opposed to and makes use of the purposes of individuals. The most elaborate and best-known example of this approach is found in Hegel, who thought that the gradual realization of human freedom could be discerned in history even if much slavery, tyranny, and suffering are necessary in the process. Marx, too, claimed to know the laws in his case economic according to which history unfolds. Similar searches for overall “meaning” in human history have been undertaken in the twentieth century, notably by Arnold Toynbee 95, author of the twelve-volume Study of History, and Oswald Spengler 06, author of Decline of the West. But the whole enterprise was denounced by the positivists and neo-Kantians of the late nineteenth century as irresponsible metaphysical speculation. This attitude was shared by twentieth-century neopositivists and some of their heirs in the analytic tradition. There is some irony in this, since positivism, explicitly in thinkers like Comte and implicitly in others, involves belief in progressively enlightened stages of human history crowned by the modern age of science. Critical philosophy of history. The critical philosophy of history, i.e., the epistemology of historical knowledge, can be traced to the late nineteenth century and has been dominated by the paradigm of the natural sciences. Those in the positivist, neopositivist, and postpositivist tradition, in keeping with the idea of the unity of science, believe that to know the historical past is to explain events causally, and all causal explanation is ultimately of the same sort. To explain human events is to derive them from laws, which may be social, psychological, and perhaps ultimately biological and physical. Against this reductionism, the neo-Kantians and Dilthey argued that history, like other humanistic disciplines Geisteswissenschaften, follows irreducible rules of its own. It is concerned with particular events or developments for their own sake, not as instances of general laws, and its aim is to understand, rather than explain, human actions. This debate was resurrected in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world. Philosophers like Hempel and Morton White b.7 elaborated on the notion of causal explanation in history, while Collingwood and William Dray b.1 described the “understanding” of historical agents as grasping the thought behind an action or discovering its reasons rather than its causes. The comparison with natural science, and the debate between reductionists and antireductionists, dominated other questions as well: Can or should history be objective and valuefree, as science purportedly is? What is the significance of the fact that historians can never perceive the events that interest them, since they are in the past? Are they not limited by their point of view, their place in history, in a way scientists are not? Some positivists were inclined to exclude history from science, rather than make it into one, relegating it to “literature” because it could never meet the standards of objectivity and genuine explanation; it was often the anti-positivists who defended the cognitive legitimacy of our knowledge of the past. In the non-reductionist tradition, philosophers have increasingly stressed the narrative character of history: to understand human actions generally, and past actions in particular, is to tell a coherent story about them. History, according to W. B. Gallie b.2, is a species of the genus Story. History does not thereby become fiction: narrative remains a “cognitive instrument” Louis Mink, 183 just as appropriate to its domain as theory construction is to science. Nevertheless, concepts previously associated with fictional narratives, such as plot structure and beginning-middle-end, are seen as applying to historical narratives as well. This tradition is carried further by Hayden White b.8, who analyzes classical nineteenth-century histories and even substantive philosophies of history such as Hegel’s as instances of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. In White’s work this mode of analysis leads him to some skepticism about history’s capacity to “represent” the reality of the past: narratives seem to be imposed upon the data, often for ideological reasons, rather than drawn from them. To some extent White’s view joins that of some positivists who believe that history’s literary character excludes it from the realm of science. But for White this is hardly a defect. Some philosophers have criticized the emphasis on narrative in discussions of history, since it neglects search and discovery, deciphering and evaluating sources, etc., which is more important to historians than the way they “write up” their results. Furthermore, not all history is presented in narrative form. The debate between pro- and anti-narrativists among philosophers of history has its parallel in a similar debate among historians themselves. Academic history in recent times has seen a strong turn away from traditional political history toward social, cultural, and economic analyses of the human past. Narrative is associated with the supposedly outmoded focus on the doings of kings, popes, and generals. These are considered e.g. by the historian Fernand Braudel, 285 merely surface ripples compared to the deeper-lying and slower-moving currents of social and economic change. It is the methods and concepts of the social sciences, not the art of the storyteller, on which the historian must draw. This debate has now lost some of its steam and narrative history has made something of a comeback among historians. Among philosophers Paul Ricoeur has tried to show that even ostensibly non-narrative history retains narrative features. Historicity. Historicity or historicality: Geschichtlichkeit is a term used in the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey and Husserl through Heidegger and Gadamer to indicate an essential feature of human existence. Persons are not merely in history; their past, including their social past, figures in their conception of themselves and their future possibilities. Some awareness of the past is thus constitutive of the self, prior to being formed into a cognitive discipine. Modernism and the postmodern. It is possible to view some of the debates over the modern and postmodern in recent Continental philosophy as a new kind of philosophy of history. Philosophers like Lyotard and Foucault see the modern as the period from the Enlightenment and Romanticism to the present, characterized chiefly by belief in “grand narratives” of historical progress, whether capitalist, Marxist, or positivist, with “man” as the triumphant hero of the story. Such belief is now being or should be abandoned, bringing modernism to an end. In one sense this is like earlier attacks on the substantive philosophy of history, since it unmasks as unjustified moralizing certain beliefs about large-scale patterns in history. It goes even further than the earlier attack, since it finds these beliefs at work even where they are not explicitly expressed. In another sense this is a continuation of the substantive philosophy of history, since it makes its own grand claims about largescale historical patterns. In this it joins hands with other philosophers of our day in a general historicization of knowledge e.g., the philosophy of science merges with the history of science and even of philosophy itself. Thus the later Heidegger and more recently Richard Rorty view philosophy itself as a large-scale episode in Western history that is nearing or has reached its end. Philosophy thus merges with the history of philosophy, but only thanks to a philosophical reflection on this history as part of history as a whole.

Jurisprudence, Hartian jurisprudence – Grice on Hartian jurisprudence -- philosophy of law, also called general jurisprudence, the study of conceptual and theoretical problems concerning the nature of law as such, or common to any legal system. Problems in the philosophy of law fall roughly into two groups. The first contains problems internal to law and legal systems as such. These include a the nature of legal rules; the conditions under which they can be said to exist and to influence practice; their normative character, as mandatory or advisory; and the indeterminacy of their language; b the structure and logical character of legal norms; the analysis of legal principles as a class of legal norms; and the relation between the normative force of law and coercion; c the identity conditions for legal systems; when a legal system exists; and when one legal system ends and another begins; d the nature of the reasoning used by courts in adjudicating cases; e the justification of legal decisions; whether legal justification is through a chain of inferences or by the coherence of norms and decisions; and the relation between intralegal and extralegal justification; f the nature of legal validity and of what makes a norm a valid law; the relation between validity and efficacy, the fact that the norms of a legal system are obeyed by the norm-subjects; g properties of legal systems, including comprehensiveness the claim to regulate any behavior and completeness the absence of gaps in the law; h legal rights; under what conditions citizens possess them; and their analytical structure as protected normative positions; i legal interpretation; whether it is a pervasive feature of law or is found only in certain kinds of adjudication; its rationality or otherwise; and its essentially ideological character or otherwise. The second group of problems concerns the philosophy of law philosophy of law 676 676 relation between law as one particular social institution in a society and the wider political and moral life of that society: a the nature of legal obligation; whether there is an obligation, prima facie or final, to obey the law as such; whether there is an obligation to obey the law only when certain standards are met, and if so, what those standards might be; b the authority of law; and the conditions under which a legal system has political or moral authority or legitimacy; c the functions of law; whether there are functions performed by a legal system in a society that are internal to the design of law; and analyses from the perspective of political morality of the functioning of legal systems; d the legal concept of responsibility; its analysis and its relation to moral and political concepts of responsibility; in particular, the place of mental elements and causal elements in the assignment of responsibility, and the analysis of those elements; e the analysis and justification of legal punishment; f legal liberty, and the proper limits or otherwise of the intrusion of the legal system into individual liberty; the plausibility of legal moralism; g the relation between law and justice, and the role of a legal system in the maintenance of social justice; h the relation between legal rights and political or moral rights; i the status of legal reasoning as a species of practical reasoning; and the relation between law and practical reason; j law and economics; whether legal decision making in fact tracks, or otherwise ought to track, economic efficiency; k legal systems as sources of and embodiments of political power; and law as essentially gendered, or imbued with race or class biases, or otherwise. Theoretical positions in the philosophy of law tend to group into three large kinds legal positivism, natural law, and legal realism. Legal positivism concentrates on the first set of problems, and typically gives formal or content-independent solutions to such problems. For example, legal positivism tends to regard legal validity as a property of a legal rule that the rule derives merely from its formal relation to other legal rules; a morally iniquitous law is still for legal positivism a valid legal rule if it satisfies the required formal existence conditions. Legal rights exist as normative consequences of valid legal rules; no questions of the status of the right from the point of view of political morality arise. Legal positivism does not deny the importance of the second set of problems, but assigns the task of treating them to other disciplines political philosophy, moral philosophy, sociology, psychology, and so forth. Questions of how society should design its legal institutions, for legal positivism, are not technically speaking problems in the philosophy of law, although many legal positivists have presented their theories about such questions. Natural law theory and legal realism, by contrast, regard the sharp distinction between the two kinds of problem as an artifact of legal positivism itself. Their answers to the first set of problems tend to be substantive or content-dependent. Natural law theory, for example, would regard the question of whether a law was consonant with practical reason, or whether a legal system was morally and politically legitimate, as in whole or in part determinative of the issue of legal validity, or of whether a legal norm granted a legal right. The theory would regard the relation between a legal system and liberty or justice as in whole or in part determinative of the normative force and the justification for that system and its laws. Legal realism, especially in its contemporary politicized form, sees the claimed role of the law in legitimizing certain gender, race, or class interests as the prime salient property of law for theoretical analysis, and questions of the determinacy of legal rules or of legal interpretation or legal right as of value only in the service of the project of explaining the political power of law and legal systems. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Does Oxford need a chair of jurisprudence” – symposium with H. L. A. Hart, conducted on the Saturday morning following Hart’s appointment as chair of jurisprudence.”

philosophy of literature: Grice: “When I got my Masters in Literae Humaniores, the more human letters, my mather said – which are the less human ones?” -- literary theory. However, while the literary theorist, who is often a literary critic, is primarily interested in the conceptual foundations of practical criticism, philosophy of literature, usually done by philosophers, is more often concerned to place literature in the context of a philosophical system. Plato’s dialogues have much to say about poetry, mostly by way of aligning it with Plato’s metaphysical, epistemological, and ethico-political views. Aristotle’s Poetics, the earliest example of literary theory in the West, is also an attempt to accommodate the practice of Grecian poets to Aristotle’s philosophical system as a whole. Drawing on the thought of philosophers like Kant and Schelling, Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers in his Biographia Literaria a philosophy of literature that is to Romantic poetics what Aristotle’s treatise is to classical poetics: a literary theory that is confirmed both by the poets whose work it legitimates and by the metaphysics that recommends it. Many philosophers, among them Hume, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Sartre, have tried to make room for literature in their philosophical edifices. Some philosophers, e.g., the G. Romantics, have made literature and the other arts the cornerstone of philosophy itself. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 8. Sometimes ‘philosophy of literature’ is understood in a second sense: philosophy and literature; i.e., philosophy and literature taken to be distinct and essentially autonomous activities that may nonetheless sustain determinate relations to each other. Philosophy of literature, understood in this way, is the attempt to identify the differentiae that distinguish philosophy from literature and to specify their relationships to each other. Sometimes the two are distinguished by their subject matter e.g., philosophy deals with objective structures, literature with subjectivity, sometimes by their methods philosophy is an act of reason, literature the product of imagination, inspiration, or the unconscious, sometimes by their effects philosophy produces knowledge, literature produces emotional fulfillment or release, etc. Their relationships then tend to occupy the areas in which they are not essentially distinct. If their subject matters are distinct, their effects may be the same philosophy and literature both produce understanding, the one of fact and the other of feeling; if their methods are distinct, they may be approaching the same subject matter in different ways; and so on. For Aquinas, e.g., philosophy and poetry may deal with the same objects, the one communicating truth about the object in syllogistic form, the other inspiring feelings about it through figurative language. For Heidegger, the philosopher investigates the meaning of being while the poet names the holy, but their preoccupations tend to converge at the deepest levels of thinking. For Sartre, literature is philosophy engagé, existential-political activity in the service of freedom. ’Philosophy of literature’ may also be taken in a third sense: philosophy in literature, the attempt to discover matters of philosophical interest and value in literary texts. The philosopher may undertake to identify, examine, and evaluate the philosophical content of literary texts that contain expressions of philosophical ideas and discussions of philosophical problems e.g., the debates on free will and theodicy in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Many if not most courses on philosophy of literature are taught from this point of view. Much interesting and important work has been done in this vein; e.g., Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets 0, Cavell’s essays on Emerson and Thoreau, and Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge 9. It should be noted, however, that to approach the matter in this way presupposes that literature and philosophy are simply different forms of the same content: what philosophy expresses in the form of argument literature expresses in lyric, dramatic, or narrative form. The philosopher’s treatment of literature implies that he is uniquely positioned to explicate the subject matter treated in both literary and philosophical texts, and that the language of philosophy gives optimal expression to a content less adequately expressed in the language of literature. The model for this approach may well be Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which treats art along with religion as imperfect adumbrations of a truth that is fully and properly articulated only in the conceptual mode of philosophical dialectic. Dissatisfaction with this presupposition and its implicit privileging of philosophy over literature has led to a different view of the relation between philosophy and literature and so to a different program for philosophy of literature. The self-consciously literary form of Kierkegaard’s writing is an integral part of his polemic against the philosophical imperialism of the Hegelians. In this century, the work of philosophers like Derrida and the philosophers and critics who follow his lead suggests that it is mistaken to regard philosophy and literature as alternative expressions of an identical content, and seriously mistaken to think of philosophy as the master discourse, the “proper” expression of a content “improperly” expressed in literature. All texts, on this view, have a “literary” form, the texts of philosophers as well as the texts of novelists and poets, and their content is internally determined by their “means of expression.” There is just as much “literature in philosophy” as there is “philosophy in literature.” Consequently, the philosopher of literature may no longer be able simply to extract philosophical matter from literary form. Rather, the modes of literary expression confront the philosopher with problems that bear on the presuppositions of his own enterprise. E.g., fictional mimesis especially in the works of postmodern writers raises questions about the possibility and the prephilosophy of literature philosophy of literature 678 678 philosophy of logic philosophy of logic 679 sumed normativeness of factual representation, and in so doing tends to undermine the traditional hierarchy that elevates “fact” over “fiction.” Philosophers’ perplexity over the truth-value of fictional statements is an example of the kind of problems the study of literature can create for the practice of philosophy see Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 2, ch. 7. Or again, the self-reflexivity of contemporary literary texts can lead philosophers to reflect critically on their own undertaking and may seriously unsettle traditional notions of self-referentiality. When it is not regarded as another, attractive but perhaps inferior source of philosophical ideas, literature presents the philosopher with epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological problems not encountered in the course of “normal” philosophizing. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why a philosopher is a literary soul at Oxford: the etymological meaning of ‘literae humaniores.’”

Philosophical semanticist -- philosophy of logic – H. P. Grice, “Logic and conversation” – “Meaning,” in P. F. Strawson, “Philosophical Logic,” Oxford -- the arena of philosophy devoted to examining the scope and nature of logic. Aristotle considered logic an organon, or foundation, of knowledge. Certainly, inference is the source of much human knowledge. Logic judges inferences good or bad and tries to justify those that are good. One need not agree with Aristotle, therefore, to see logic as essential to epistemology. Philosophers such as Vitters, additionally, have held that the structure of language reflects the structure of the world. Because inferences have elements that are themselves linguistic or are at least expressible in language, logic reveals general features of the structure of language. This makes it essential to linguistics, and, on a Vittersian view, to metaphysics. Moreover, many philosophical battles have been fought with logical weaponry. For all these reasons, philosophers have tried to understand what logic is, what justifies it, and what it tells us about reason, language, and the world. The nature of logic. Logic might be defined as the science of inference; inference, in turn, as the drawing of a conclusion from premises. A simple argument is a sequence, one element of which, the conclusion, the others are thought to support. A complex argument is a series of simple arguments. Logic, then, is primarily concerned with arguments. Already, however, several questions arise. 1 Who thinks that the premises support the conclusion? The speaker? The audience? Any competent speaker of the language? 2 What are the elements of arguments? Thoughts? Propositions? Philosophers following Quine have found these answers unappealing for lack of clear identity criteria. Sentences are more concrete and more sharply individuated. But should we consider sentence tokens or sentence types? Context often affects interpretation, so it appears that we must consider tokens or types-in-context. Moreover, many sentences, even with contextual information supplied, are ambiguous. Is a sequence with an ambiguous sentence one argument which may be good on some readings and bad on others or several? For reasons that will become clear, the elements of arguments should be the primary bearers of truth and falsehood in one’s general theory of language. 3 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what does ‘support’ mean? Logic evaluates inferences by distinguishing good from bad arguments. This raises issues about the status of logic, for many of its pronouncements are explicitly normative. The philosophy of logic thus includes problems of the nature and justification of norms akin to those arising in metaethics. The solutions, moreover, may vary with the logical system at hand. Some logicians attempt to characterize reasoning in natural language; others try to systematize reasoning in mathematics or other sciences. Still others try to devise an ideal system of reasoning that does not fully correspond to any of these. Logicians concerned with inference in natural, mathematical, or scientific languages tend to justify their norms by describing inferential practices in that language as actually used by those competent in it. These descriptions justify norms partly because the practices they describe include evaluations of inferences as well as inferences themselves. The scope of logic. Logical systems meant to account for natural language inference raise issues of the scope of logic. How does logic differ from semantics, the science of meaning in general? Logicians have often treated only inferences turning on certain commonly used words, such as ‘not’, ‘if’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘all’, and ‘some’, taking them, or items in a symbolic language that correspond to them, as logical constants. They have neglected inferences that do not turn on them, such as My brother is married. Therefore, I have a sister-in-law. Increasingly, however, semanticists have used ‘logic’ more broadly, speaking of the logic of belief, perception, abstraction, or even kinship. Such uses seem to treat logic and semantics as coextensive. Philosophers who have sought to maintain a distinction between the semantics and logic of natural language have tried to develop non-arbitrary criteria of logical constancy. An argument is valid provided the truth of its premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. This definition relies on the notion of truth, which raises philosophical puzzles of its own. Furthermore, it is natural to ask what kind of connection must hold between the premises and conclusion. One answer specifies that an argument is valid provided replacing its simple constituents with items of similar categories while leaving logical constants intact could never produce true premises and a false conclusion. On this view, validity is a matter of form: an argument is valid if it instantiates a valid form. Logic thus becomes the theory of logical form. On another view, an argument is valid if its conclusion is true in every possible world or model in which its premises are true. This conception need not rely on the notion of a logical constant and so is compatible with the view that logic and semantics are coextensive. Many issues in the philosophy of logic arise from the plethora of systems logicians have devised. Some of these are deviant logics, i.e., logics that differ from classical or standard logic while seeming to treat the same subject matter. Intuitionistic logic, for example, which interprets the connectives and quantifiers non-classically, rejecting the law of excluded middle and the interdefinability of the quantifiers, has been supported with both semantic and ontological arguments. Brouwer, Heyting, and others have defended it as the proper logic of the infinite; Dummett has defended it as the correct logic of natural language. Free logic allows non-denoting referring expressions but interprets the quantifiers as ranging only over existing objects. Many-valued logics use at least three truthvalues, rejecting the classical assumption of bivalence that every formula is either true or false. Many logical systems attempt to extend classical logic to incorporate tense, modality, abstraction, higher-order quantification, propositional quantification, complement constructions, or the truth predicate. These projects raise important philosophical questions. Modal and tense logics. Tense is a pervasive feature of natural language, and has become important to computer scientists interested in concurrent programs. Modalities of several sorts alethic possibility, necessity and deontic obligation, permission, for example appear in natural language in various grammatical guises. Provability, treated as a modality, allows for revealing formalizations of metamathematics. Logicians have usually treated modalities and tenses as sentential operators. C. I. Lewis and Langford pioneered such approaches for alethic modalities; von Wright, for deontic modalities; and Prior, for tense. In each area, many competing systems developed; by the late 0s, there were over two hundred axiom systems in the literature for propositional alethic modal logic alone. How might competing systems be evaluated? Kripke’s semantics for modal logic has proved very helpful. Kripke semantics in effect treats modal operators as quantifiers over possible worlds. Necessarily A, e.g., is true at a world if and only if A is true in all worlds accessible from that world. Kripke showed that certain popular axiom systems result from imposing simple conditions on the accessibility relation. His work spawned a field, known as correspondence theory, devoted to studying the relations between modal axioms and conditions on models. It has helped philosophers and logicians to understand the issues at stake in choosing a modal logic and has raised the question of whether there is one true modal logic. Modal idioms may be ambiguous or indeterminate with respect to some properties of the accessibility relation. Possible worlds raise additional ontological and epistemological questions. Modalities and tenses seem to be linked in natural language, but attempts to bring tense and modal logic together remain young. The sensitivity of tense to intra- and extralinguistic context has cast doubt on the project of using operators to represent tenses. Kamp, e.g., has represented tense and aspect in terms of event structure, building on earlier work by Reichenbach. Truth. Tarski’s theory of truth shows that it is possible to define truth recursively for certain languages. Languages that can refer to their own sentences, however, permit no such definition given Tarski’s assumptions for they allow the formulation of the liar and similar paradoxes. Tarski concluded that, in giving the semantics for such a language, we must ascend to a more powerful metalanguage. Kripke and others, however, have shown that it is possible for a language permitting self-reference to contain its own truth 680 predicate by surrendering bivalence or taking the truth predicate indexically. Higher-order logic. First-order predicate logic allows quantification only over individuals. Higher-order logics also permit quantification over predicate positions. Natural language seems to permit such quantification: ‘Mary has every quality that John admires’. Mathematics, moreover, may be expressed elegantly in higher-order logic. Peano arithmetic and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, e.g., require infinite axiom sets in firstorder logic but are finitely axiomatizable and categorical, determining their models up to isomorphism in second-order logic. Because they quantify over properties and relations, higher-order logics seem committed to Platonism. Mathematics reduces to higher-order logic; Quine concludes that the latter is not logic. Its most natural semantics seems to presuppose a prior understanding of properties and relations. Also, on this semantics, it differs greatly from first-order logic. Like set theory, it is incomplete; it is not compact. This raises questions about the boundaries of logic. Must logic be axiomatizable? Must it be possible, i.e., to develop a logical system powerful enough to prove every valid argument valid? Could there be valid arguments with infinitely many premises, any finite fragment of which would be invalid? With an operator for forming abstract terms from predicates, higher-order logics easily allow the formulation of paradoxes. Russell and Whitehead for this reason adopted type theory, which, like Tarski’s theory of truth, uses an infinite hierarchy and corresponding syntactic restrictions to avoid paradox. Type-free theories avoid both the restrictions and the paradoxes, as with truth, by rejecting bivalence or by understanding abstraction indexically. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why I don’t use ‘logic,’ but I use ‘semantic.’”

Philosophical geometer, philosophical mathematician – H. P. Grice, “ΑΓΕΩΜΕΤΡΗΤΟΣ ΜΗΔΕΙΣ ΕΙΣΙΤΩ; or, The school of Plato.” philosophy of mathematics, the study of ontological and epistemological problems raised by the content and practice of mathematics. The present agenda in this field evolved from critical developments, notably the collapse of Pythagoreanism, the development of modern calculus, and an early twentieth-century foundational crisis, which forced mathematicians and philosophers to examine mathematical methods and presuppositions. Grecian mathematics. The Pythagoreans, who represented the height of early demonstrative Grecian mathematics, believed that all scientific relations were measureable by natural numbers 1, 2, 3, etc. or ratios of natural numbers, and thus they assumed discrete, atomic units for the measurement of space, time, and motion. The discovery of irrational magnitudes scotched the first of these beliefs. Zeno’s paradoxes showed that the second was incompatible with the natural assumption that space and time are infinitely divisible. The Grecian reaction, ultimately codified in Euclid’s Elements, included Plato’s separation of mathematics from empirical science and, within mathematics, distinguished number theory a study of discretely ordered entities from geometry, which concerns continua. Following Aristotle and employing methods perfected by Eudoxus, Euclid’s proofs used only “potentially infinite” geometric and arithmetic procedures. The Elements’ axiomatic form and its constructive proofs set a standard for future mathematics. Moreover, its dependence on visual intuition whose consequent deductive gaps were already noted by Archimedes, together with the challenge of Euclid’s infamous fifth postulate about parallel lines, and the famous unsolved problems of compass and straightedge construction, established an agenda for generations of mathematicians. The calculus. The two millennia following Euclid saw new analytical tools e.g., Descartes’s geometry that wedded arithmetic and geometric considerations and toyed with infinitesimally small quantities. These, together with the demands of physical application, tempted mathematicians to abandon the pristine Grecian dichotomies. Matters came to a head with Newton’s and Leibniz’s almost simultaneous discovery of the powerful computational techniques of the calculus. While these unified physical science in an unprecedented way, their dependence on unclear notions of infinitesimal spatial and temporal increments emphasized their shaky philosophical foundation. Berkeley, for instance, condemned the calculus for its unintuitability. However, this time the power of the new methods inspired a decidedly conservative response. Kant, in particular, tried to anchor the new mathematics in intuition. Mathematicians, he claimed, construct their objects in the “pure intuitions” of space and time. And these mathematical objects are the a priori forms of transcendentally ideal empirical objects. For Kant this combination of epistemic empiricism and ontological idealism explained the physical applicability of mathematics and thus granted “objective validity” i.e., scientific legitimacy to mathematical procedures. Two nineteenth-century developments undercut this Kantian constructivism in favor of a more abstract conceptual picture of mathematics. First, Jànos Bolyai, Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, Nikolai Lobachevsky, and others produced consistent non-Euclidean geometries, which undid the Kantian picture of a single a priori science of space, and once again opened a rift between pure mathematics and its physical applications. Second, Cantor and Dedekind defined the real numbers i.e., the elements of the continuum as infinite sets of rational and ultimately natural numbers. Thus they founded mathematics on the concepts of infinite set and natural number. Cantor’s set theory made the first concept rigorously mathematical; while Peano and Frege both of whom advocated securing rigor by using formal languages did that for the second. Peano axiomatized number theory, and Frege ontologically reduced the natural numbers to sets indeed sets that are the extensions of purely logical concepts. Frege’s Platonistic conception of numbers as unintuitable objects and his claim that mathematical truths follow analytically from purely logical definitions the thesis of logicism are both highly anti-Kantian. Foundational crisis and movements. But antiKantianism had its own problems. For one thing, Leopold Kronecker, who following Peter Dirichlet wanted mathematics reduced to arithmetic and no further, attacked Cantor’s abstract set theory on doctrinal grounds. Worse yet, the discovery of internal antinomies challenged the very consistency of abstract foundations. The most famous of these, Russell’s paradox the set of all sets that are not members of themselves both is and isn’t a member of itself, undermined Frege’s basic assumption that every well-formed concept has an extension. This was a full-scale crisis. To be sure, Russell himself together with Whitehead preserved the logicist foundational approach by organizing the universe of sets into a hierarchy of levels so that no set can be a member of itself. This is type theory. However, the crisis encouraged two explicitly Kantian foundational projects. The first, Hilbert’s Program, attempted to secure the “ideal” i.e., infinitary parts of mathematics by formalizing them and then proving the resultant formal systems to be conservative and hence consistent extensions of finitary theories. Since the proof itself was to use no reasoning more complicated than simple numerical calculations finitary reasoning the whole metamathematical project belonged to the untainted “contentual” part of mathematics. Finitary reasoning was supposed to update Kant’s intuition-based epistemology, and Hilbert’s consistency proofs mimic Kant’s notion of objective validity. The second project, Brouwer’s intuitionism, rejected formalization, and was not only epistemologically Kantian resting mathematical reasoning on the a priori intuition of time, but ontologically Kantian as well. For intuitionism generated both the natural and the real numbers by temporally ordered conscious acts. The reals, in particular, stem from choice sequences, which exploit Brouwer’s epistemic assumptions about the open future. These foundational movements ultimately failed. Type theory required ad hoc axioms to express the real numbers; Hilbert’s Program foundered on Gödel’s theorems; and intuitionism remained on the fringes because it rejected classical logic and standard mathematics. Nevertheless the legacy of these movements their formal methods, indeed their philosophical agenda still characterizes modern research on the ontology and epistemology of mathematics. Set theory, e.g. despite recent challenges from category theory, is the lingua franca of modern mathematics. And formal languages with their precise semantics are ubiquitous in technical and philosophical discussions. Indeed, even intuitionistic mathematics has been formalized, and Michael Dummett has recast its ontological idealism as a semantic antirealism that defines truth as warranted assertability. In a similar semantic vein, Paul Benacerraf proposed that the philosophical problem with Hilbert’s approach is inability to provide a uniform realistic i.e., referential, non-epistemic semantics for the allegedly ideal and contentual parts of mathematics; and the problem with Platonism is that its semantics makes its objects unknowable. Ontological issues. From this modern perspective, the simplest realism is the outright Platonism that attributes a standard model consisting of “independent” objects to classical theories expressed in a first-order language i.e., a language whose quantifiers range over objects but not properties. But in fact realism admits variations on each aspect. For one thing, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem shows that formalized theories can have non-standard models. There are expansive non-standard models: Abraham Robinson, e.g., used infinitary non-standard models of Peano’s axioms to rigorously reintroduce infinitesimals. Roughly, an infinitesimal is the reciprocal of an infinite element in such a model. And there are also “constructive” models, whose objects must be explicitly definable. Predicative theories inspired by Poincaré and Hermann Weyl, whose stage-by-stage definitions refer only to previously defined objects, produce one variety of such models. Gödel’s constructive universe, which uses less restricted definitions to model apparently non-constructive axioms like the axiom of choice, exemplifies another variety. But there are also views various forms of structuralism which deny that formal theories have unique standard models at all. These views inspired by the fact, already sensed by Dedekind, that there are multiple equivalid realizations of formal arithmetic allow a mathematical theory to characterize only a broad family of models and deny unique reference to mathematical terms. Finally, some realistic approaches advocate formalization in secondorder languages, and some eschew ordinary semantics altogether in favor of substitutional quantification. These latter are still realistic, for they still distinguish truth from knowledge. Strict finitists inspired by Vitters’s more stringent epistemic constraints reject even the open-futured objects admitted by Brouwer, and countenance only finite or even only “feasible” objects. In the other direction, A. A. Markov and his school in Russia introduced a syntactic notion of algorithm from which they developed the field of “constructive analysis.” And the mathematician Errett Bishop, starting from a Brouwer-like disenchantment with mathematical realism and with strictly formal approaches, recovered large parts of classical analysis within a non-formal constructive framework. All of these approaches assume abstract i.e., causally isolated mathematical objects, and thus they have difficulty explaining the wide applicability of mathematics constructive or otherwise within empirical science. One response, Quine’s “indispensability” view, integrates mathematical theories into the general network of empirical science. For Quine, mathematical objects just like ordinary physical objects exist simply in virtue of being referents for terms in our best scientific theory. By contrast Hartry Field, who denies that any abstract objects exist, also denies that any purely mathematical assertions are literally true. Field attempts to recast physical science in a relational language without mathematical terms and then use Hilbert-style conservative extension results to explain the evident utility of abstract mathematics. Hilary Putnam and Charles Parsons have each suggested views according to which mathematics has no objects proper to itself, but rather concerns only the possibilities of physical constructions. Recently, Geoffrey Hellman has combined this modal approach with structuralism. Epistemological issues. The equivalence proved in the 0s of several different representations of computability to the reasoning representable in elementary formalized arithmetic led Alonzo Church to suggest that the notion of finitary reasoning had been precisely defined. Church’s thesis so named by Stephen Kleene inspired Georg Kreisel’s investigations in the 0s and 70s of the general conditions for rigorously analyzing other informal philosophical notions like semantic consequence, Brouwerian choice sequences, and the very notion of a set. Solomon Feferman has suggested more recently that this sort of piecemeal conceptual analysis is already present in mathematics; and that this rather than any global foundation is the true role of foundational research. In this spirit, the relative consistency arguments of modern proof theory a continuation of Hilbert’s Program provide information about the epistemic grounds of various mathematical theories. Thus, on the one hand, proofs that a seemingly problematic mathematical theory is a conservative extension of a more secure theory provide some epistemic support for the former. In the other direction, the fact that classical number theory is consistent relative to intuitionistic number theory shows contra Hilbert that his view of constructive reasoning must differ from that of the intuitionists. Gödel, who did not believe that mathematics required any ties to empirical perception, suggested nevertheless that we have a special nonsensory faculty of mathematical intuition that, when properly cultivated, can help us decide among formally independent propositions of set theory and other branches of mathematics. Charles Parsons, in contrast, has examined the place of perception-like intuition in mathematical reasoning. Parsons himself has investigated models of arithmetic and of set theory composed of quasi-concrete objects e.g., numerals and other signs. Others consistent with some of Parsons’s observations have given a Husserlstyle phenomenological analysis of mathematical intuition. Frege’s influence encouraged the logical positivists and other philosophers to view mathematical knowledge as analytic or conventional. Poincaré responded that the principle of mathematical induction could not be analytic, and Vitters also attacked this conventionalism. In recent years, various formal independence results and Quine’s attack on analyticity have encouraged philosophers and historians of mathematics to focus on cases of mathematical knowledge that do not stem from conceptual analysis or strict formal provability. Some writers notably Mark Steiner and Philip Kitcher emphasize the analogies between empirical and mathematical discovery. They stress such things as conceptual evolution in mathematics and instances of mathematical generalizations supported by individual cases. Kitcher, in particular, discusses the analogy between axiomatization in mathematics and theoretical unification. Penelope Maddy has investigated the intramathematical grounds underlying the acceptance of various axioms of set theory. More generally, Imre Lakatos argued that most mathematical progress stems from a concept-stretching process of conjecture, refutation, and proof. This view has spawned a historical debate about whether critical developments such as those mentioned above represent Kuhn-style revolutions or even crises, or whether they are natural conceptual advances in a uniformly growing science. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “ΑΓΕΩΜΕΤΡΗΤΟΣ ΜΗΔΕΙΣ ΕΙΣΙΤΩ; or, the school of Plato.”

Animatum -- philosophical psychology, -- vide H. P. Grice: “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre” – in “Conception of Value,” Oxford, Clarendon Press. -- philosophy of mind, the branch of philosophy that includes the philosophy of psychology, philosophical psychology, and the area of metaphysics concerned with the nature of mental phenomena and how they fit into the causal structure of reality. Philosophy of psychology, a branch of the philosophy of science, examines what psychology says about the nature of psychological phenomena; examines aspects of psychological theorizing such as the models used, explanations offered, and laws invoked; and examines how psychology fits with the social sciences and natural sciences. Philosophical psychology investigates folk psychology, a body of commonsensical, protoscientific views about mental phenomena. Such investigations attempt to articulate and refine views found in folk psychology about conceptualization, memory, perception, sensation, consciousness, belief, desire, intention, reasoning, action, and so on. The mindbody problem, a central metaphysical one in the philosophy of mind, is the problem of whether mental phenomena are physical and, if not, how they are related to physical phenomena. Other metaphysical problems in the philosophy of mind include the free will problem, the problem of personal identity, and the problem of how, if at all, irrational phenomena such as akrasia and self-deception are possible. Mindbody dualism Cartesian dualism. The doctrine that the soul is distinct from the body is found in Plato and discussed throughout the history of philosophy, but Descartes is considered the father of the modern mindbody problem. He maintained that the essence of the physical is extension in space. Minds are unextended substances and thus are distinct from any physical substances. The essence of a mental substance is to think. This twofold view is called Cartesian dualism. Descartes was well aware of an intimate relationship between mind and the brain. There is no a priori reason to think that the mind is intimately related to the brain; Aristotle, e.g., did not associate them. Descartes mistakenly thought the seat of the relationship was in the pineal gland. He maintained, however, that our minds are not our brains, lack spatial location, and can continue to exist after the death and destruction of our bodies. Cartesian dualism invites the question: What connects the mind and brain? Causation is Descartes’s answer: states of our minds causally interact with states of our brains. When bodily sensations such as aches, pains, itches, and tickles cause us to moan, wince, scratch, or laugh, they do so by causing brain states events, processes, which in turn cause bodily movements. In deliberate action, we act on our desires, motives, and intentions to carry out our purposes; and acting on these mental states involves their causing brain states, which in turn cause our bodies to move, thereby causally influencing the physical world. The physical world, in turn, influences our minds through its influence on our brains. Perception of the physical world with five senses sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch involves causal transactions from the physical to the mental: what we perceive i.e., see, hear, etc. causes a sense experience i.e., a visual experience, aural experience, etc.. Thus, Descartes held that there is two-way psychophysical causal interaction: from the mental to the physical as in action and from the physical to the mental as in perception. The conjunction of Cartesian dualism and the doctrine of two-way psychophysical causal interaction is called Cartesian interactionism. Perhaps the most widely discussed difficulty for this view is how states of a non-spatial substance a mind can causally interact with states of a substance that is in space a brain. Such interactions have seemed utterly mysterious to many philosophers. Mystery would remain even if an unextended mind is locatable at a point in space say, the center of the pineal gland. For Cartesian interactionism would still have to maintain that causal transactions between mental states and brain states are fundamental, i.e., unmediated by any underlying mechanism. Brain states causally interact with mental states, but there is no answer to the question of how they do so. The interactions are brute facts. Many philosophers, including many of Descartes’s contemporaries, have found that difficult to accept. Parallelism. Malebranche and Leibniz, among others, rejected the possibility of psychophysical causal interaction. They espoused versions of parallelism: the view that the mental and physical realms run in parallel, in that types of mental phenomena co-occur with certain types of physical phenomena, but these co-occurrences never involve causal interactions. On all extant versions, the parallels hold because of God’s creation. Leibniz’s parallelism is preestablished harmony: the explanation of why mental types and certain physical types co-occur is that in the possible world God actualized i.e., this world they co-occur. In discussing the relation between the mental and physical realms, Leibniz used the analogy of two synchronized but unconnected clocks. The analogy is, however, somewhat misleading; suggesting causal mechanisms internal to each clock and intramental and intraphysical causal transactions. But Leibniz’s monadology doctrine excludes the possibility of such transactions: mental and physical phenomena have no effects even within their own realms. Malebranche is associated with occasionalism, according to which only God, through his continuous activities, causes things to happen: non-divine phenomena never cause anything. Occasionalism differs from preestablished harmony in holding that God is continually engaged in acts of creation; each moment creating the world anew, in such a way that the correlations hold. Both brands of parallelism face formidable difficulties. First, both rest on highly contentious, obscure theological hypotheses. The contention that God exists and the creation stories in question require extensive defense and explanation. God’s relationship to the world can seem at least as mysterious as the relationship Descartes posits between minds and brains. Second, since parallelism denies the possibility of psychophysical interaction, its proponents must offer alternatives to the causal theory of perception and the causal theory of action or else deny that we can perceive and that we can act intentionally. Third, since parallelism rejects intramental causation, it must either deny that reasoning is possible or explain how it is possible without causal connections between thoughts. Fourth, since parallelism rejects physical transactions, it is hard to see how it can allow, e.g., that one physical thing ever moves another; for that would require causing a change in location. Perhaps none of these weighty difficulties is ultimately insuperable; in any case, parallelism has been abandoned. Epiphenomenalism. Empirical research gives every indication that the occurrence of any brain state can, in principle, be causally explained by appeal solely to other physical states. To accommodate this, some philosophers espoused epiphenomenalism, the doctrine that physical states cause mental states, but mental states do not cause anything. This thesis was discussed under the name ‘conscious automatism’ by Huxley and Hogeson in the late nineteenth century. William James was the first to use the term ‘epiphenomena’ to mean phenomena that lack causal efficacy. And James Ward coined the term ‘epiphenomenalism’ in 3. Epiphenomenalism implies that there is only one-way psychophysical action from the physical to the mental. Since epiphenomenalism allows such causal action, it can embrace the causal theory of perception. However, when combined with Cartesian dualism, epiphenomenalism, like Cartesian interactionism, implies the problematic thesis that states of an extended substance can affect states of an unextended substance. An epiphenomenalist can avoid this problem by rejecting the view that the mind is an unextended substance while maintaining that mental states and events are nonetheless distinct from physical states and events. Still, formidable problems would remain. It is hard to see how epiphenomenalism can allow that we are ever intentional agents. For intentional agency requires acting on reasons, which, according to the causal theory of action, requires a causal connection between reasons and actions. Since epiphenomenalism denies that such causal connections are possible, it must either maintain that our sense of agency is illusory or offer an alternative to the causal theory of action. Similarly, it must explain how thinking is possible given that there are no causal connections between thoughts. Monism The dual-aspect theory. Many philosophers reject Descartes’s bifurcation of reality into mental and physical substances. Spinoza held a dualattribute theory also called the dual-aspect theory according to which the mental and the physical are distinct modes of a single substance, God. The mental and the physical are only two of infinitely many modes of this one substance. Many philosophers opted for a thoroughgoing monism, according to which all of reality is really of one kind. Materialism, idealism, and neutral monism are three brands of monism. Hobbes, a contemporary of Descartes, espoused materialism, the brand of monism according to which everything is material or physical. Berkeley is associated with idealism, the brand of monism according to which everything is mental. He held that both mental and physical phenomena are perceptions in the mind of God. For Hegel’s idealism, everything is part of the World Spirit. The early twentieth-century British philosophers Bradley and McTaggart also held a version of idealism. Neutral monism is the doctrine that all of reality is ultimately of one kind, which is neither mental nor physical. Hume was a neutral monist, maintaining that mental and physical substances are really just bundles of the neutral entities. Versions of neutral monism were later held by Mach and, for a short time, Russell. Russell called his neutral entities sensibilia and claimed that minds and physical objects are logical constructions out of them. Phenomenalism. This view, espoused in the twentieth century by, among others, Ayer, argues that all empirical statements are synonymous with statements solely about phenomenal appearances. While the doctrine is about statements, phenomenalism is either a neutral monism or an idealism, depending on whether phenomenal appearances are claimed to be neither mental nor physical or, instead, mental. The required translations of physical statements into phenomenal ones proved not to be forthcoming, however. Chisholm offered a reason why they would not be: what appearances a physical state of affairs e.g., objects arrayed in a room has depends both on physical conditions of observation e.g., lighting and physical conditions of the perceiver e.g., of the nervous system. At best, a statement solely about phenomenal appearances is equivalent to one about a physical state of affairs, only when certain physical conditions of observation and certain physical conditions of the perceiver obtain. Materialism. Two problems face any monism: it must characterize the phenomena it takes as basic, and it must explain how the fundamental phenomena make up non-basic phenomena. The idealist and neutral monist theories proposed thus far have faltered on one or both counts. Largely because of scientific successes of the twentieth century, such as the rebirth of the atomic theory of matter, and the successes of quantum mechanics in explaining chemistry and of chemistry in turn in explaining much of biology, many philosophers today hold that materialism will ultimately succeed where idealism and neutral monism apparently failed. Materialism, however, comes in many different varieties and each faces formidable difficulties. Logical behaviorism. Ryle ridiculed Cartesianism as the view that there is a ghost in the machine the body. He claimed that the view that the mind is a substance rests on a category mistake: ‘mind’ is a noun, but does not name an object. Cartesianism confuses the logic of discourse about minds with the logic of discourse about bodies. To have a mind is not to possess a special sort of entity; it is simply to have certain capacities and dispositions. Compare the thesis that to be alive is to possess not a certain entity, an entelechy or élan vital, but rather certain capacities and dispositions. Ryle maintained, moreover, that it was a mistake to regard mental states such as belief, desire, and intention as internal causes of behavior. These states, he claimed, are dispositions to behave in overt ways. In part in response to the dualist point that one can understand our ordinary psychological vocabulary ‘belief’, ‘desire’, ‘pain’, etc. and know nothing about the physical states and events in the brain, logical behaviorism has been proposed as a materialist doctrine that explains this fact. On this view, talk of mental phenomena is shorthand for talk of actual and potential overt bodily behavior i.e., dispositions to overt bodily behavior. Logical behaviorism was much discussed from roughly the 0s until the early 0s. While Ryle is sometimes counted as a logical behaviorist, he was not committed to the thesis that all mental talk can be tr. into behavioral talk. The translations promised by logical behaviorism appear unachievable. As Putnam and others pointed out, one can fake being in pain and one can be in pain and yet not behave or be disposed to behave as if one were in pain e.g., one might be paralyzed or might be a “super-spartan”. Logical behaviorism faces similar difficulties in translating sentences about what Russell called propositional attitudes i.e., beliefs that p, desires that p, hopes that p, intentions that p, and the like. Consider the following sample proposal similar to one offered by Carnap: one believes that the cat is on the mat if and only if one is disposed to assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’. First, the proposed translation meets the condition of being purely behavioral only if assenting is understandable in purely behavioral terms. That is doubtful. The proposal also fails to provide a sufficient or a necessary condition: someone may assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’ and yet not believe the cat is on the mat for the person may be trying to deceive; and a belief that the cat is on the mat will dispose one to assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’ only if one understands what is being asked, wants to indicate that one believes the cat is on the mat, and so on. But none of these conditions is required for believing that the cat is on the mat. Moreover, to invoke any of these mentalistic conditions defeats the attempt to provide a purely behavioral translation of the belief sentence. Although the project of translation has been abandoned, in recent years Dennett has defended a view in the spirit of logical behaviorism, intentional systems theory: belief-desire talk functions to characterize overall patterns of dispositions to overt behavior in an environmental context for the purposes of predicting overt behavior. The theory is sometimes characterized as supervenient behaviorism since it implies that whether an individual has beliefs, desires, intentions and the like supervenes on his dispositions to overt behavior: if two individuals are exactly alike in respect of their dispositions to overt behavior, the one has intentional states if and only if the other does. This view allows, however, that the contents of an individual’s intentional states what the individual believes, desires, etc. may depend on environmental factors. So it is not committed to the supervenience of the contents of intentional states on dispositions to overt behavior.the discussion of content externalism below. One objection to this view, due to Ned Block, is that it would mistakenly count as an intentional agent a giant look-up table “a Blockhead” that has the same dispositions to peripheral behavior as a genuine intentional agent. A look-up table is a simple mechanical device that looks up preprogrammed responses. Identity theories. In the early 0s, Herbert Feigl claimed that mental states are brain states. He pointed out that if mental properties or state types are merely nomologically correlated with physical properties or state types, the connecting laws would be “nomological danglers”: irreducible to physical laws, and thus additional fundamental laws. According to the identity theory, the connecting laws are not fundamental laws and so not nomological danglers since they can be explained by identifying the mental and physical properties in question. In the late 0s and the early 0s, the philosopher Smart and the psychologist U. T. Place defended the materialist view that sensations are identical with brain processes. Smart claimed that while mental terms differ in meaning from physical terms, scientific investigation reveals that they have the same referents as certain physical terms. Compare the fact that while ‘the Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ differ in meaning empirical investigation reveals the same referent: Venus. Smart and Place claimed that feeling pain, e.g., is some brain process, exactly which one to be determined by scientific investigation. Smart claimed that sensation talk is paraphraseable in topic-neutral terms; i.e., in terms that leave open whether sensational properties are mental or physical. ‘I have an orange afterimage’ is paraphraseable roughly as: ‘There is something going on like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, i.e., when I really see an orange’. The description is topic-neutral since it leaves open whether what is going on is mental or physical. Smart maintained that scientific investigation reveals that what in fact meets the topic-neutral description is a brain process. He held that psychophysical identity statements such as ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’ are contingent, likening these to, e.g., ‘Lightning is electrical discharge’, which is contingent and knowable only through empirical investigation. Central state materialism. This brand of materialism was defended in the late 0s and the early 0s by Armstrong and others. On this view, mental states are states that are apt to produce a certain range of behavior. Central state materialists maintain that scientific investigation reveals that such states are states of the central nervous system, and thus that mental states are contingently identical with states of the central nervous system. Unlike logical behaviorism, central state materialism does not imply that mental sentences can be tr. into physical sentences. Unlike both logical behaviorism and philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 687 687 intentional systems theory, central state materialism implies that mental states are actual internal states with causal effects. And unlike Cartesian interactionism, it holds that psychophysical interaction is just physical causal interaction. Some central state materialists held in addition that the mind is the brain. However, if the mind were the brain, every change in the brain would be a change in the mind; and that seems false: not every little brain change amounts to a change of mind. Indeed, the mind ceases to exist when brain death occurs, while the brain continues to exist. The moral that most materialists nowadays draw from such considerations is that the mind is not any physical substance, since it is not a substance of any sort. To have a mind is not to possess a special substance, but rather to have certain capacities to think, feel, etc. To that extent, Ryle was right. However, central state materialists insist that the properly functioning brain is the material seat of mental capacities, that the exercise of mental capacities consists of brain processes, and that mental states are brain states that can produce behavior. Epistemological objections have been raised to identity theories. As self-conscious beings, we have a kind of privileged access to our own mental states. The exact avenue of privileged access, whether it is introspection or not, is controversial. But it has seemed to many philosophers that our access to our own mental states is privileged in being open only to us, whereas we lack any privileged access to the states of our central nervous systems. We come to know about central nervous system states in the same way we come to know about the central nervous system states of others. So, against central state materialism and the identity theory, it is claimed that mental states cannot be states of our central nervous systems. Taking privileged access to imply that we have incorrigible knowledge of our conscious mental states, and despairing of squaring privileged access so understood with materialism, Rorty advocated eliminative materialism, the thesis that there actually are no mental phenomena. A more common materialist response, however, is to deny that privileged access entails incorrigibility and to maintain that privileged access is compatible with materialism. Some materialists maintain that while certain types of mental states e.g., sensations are types of neurological states, it will be knowable only by empirical investigation that they are. Suppose pain is a neural state N. It will be only a posteriori knowable that pain is N. Via the avenue of privileged access, one comes to believe that one is in a pain state, but not that one is in an N-state. One can believe one is in a pain state without believing that one is in an N-state because the concept of pain is different from the concept of N. Nevertheless, pain is N. Compare the fact that while water is H2O, the concept of water is different from that of H2O. Thus, while water is H2O, one can believe there is water in the glass without believing that there is H2O in it. The avenue of privileged access presents N conceptualized as pain, but never as neurological state N. The avenue of privileged access involves the exercise of mental, but not neurophysiological, concepts. However, our mental concepts answer to apply in virtue of the same properties state types as do certain of our neurophysiological concepts. The identity theory and central state materialism both hold that there are contingent psychophysical property and type identities. Some theorists in this tradition tried to distinguish a notion of theoretical identity from the notion of strict identity. They held that mental states are theoretically, but not strictly, identical with brain states. Against any such distinction, Kripke argued that identities are metaphysically necessary, i.e., hold in every possible world. If A % B, then necessarily A % B. Kripke acknowledged that there can be contingent statements of identity. But such statements, he argued, will employ at least one term that is not a rigid designator, i.e., a term that designates the same thing in every world in which it designates anything. Thus, since ‘the inventor of bifocals’ is a non-rigid designator, ‘Benjamin Franklin is the inventor of bifocals’ is contingent. While Franklin is the inventor of bifocals, he might not have been. However, statements of identity in which the identity sign is flanked by rigid designators are, if true, metaphysically necessary. Kripke held that proper names are rigid designators, and hence, the true identity statement ‘Cicero is Tully’ is metaphysically necessary. Nonetheless, a metaphysically necessary identity statement can be knowable only a posteriori. Indeed, ‘Cicero is Tully’ is knowable only a posteriori. Both ‘water’ and ‘H2O’, he maintained, are rigid designators: each designates the same kind of stuff in every possible world. And he thus maintained that it is metaphysically necessary that water is H2O, despite its not being a priori knowable that water is H2O. On Kripke’s view, any psychophysical identity statement that employs mental terms and physical terms that are rigid designators will also be metaphysically necessary, if true. Central state materialists maintain that mental concepts are equivalent to concepts whose descriptive content is the state that is apt to produce such-and-such behavior in such-and-such circumstances. These defining descriptions for mental concepts are intended to be meaning-giving, not contingent reference-fixing descriptions; they are, moreover, not rigid designators. Thus, the central state materialists can concede that all identities are necessary, but maintain that psychophysical claims of identity are contingent claims of identity since the mental terms that figure in those statements are not rigid designators. However, Kripke maintained that our concepts of sensations and other qualitative states are not equivalent to the sorts of descriptions in question. The term ‘pain’, he maintained, is a rigid designator. This position might be refuted by a successful functional analysis of the concept of pain in physical and/or topic-neutral terms. However, no successful analysis of this sort has yet been produced. See the section on consciousness below. A materialist can grant Kripke that ‘pain’ is a rigid designator and claim that a statement such as ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’ will be metaphysically necessary if true, but only a posteriori knowable. However, Kripke raised a formidable problem for this materialism. He pointed out that if a statement is metaphysically necessary but only a posteriori knowable, its appearance of contingency calls for explanation. Despite being metaphysically necessary, ‘Water is H2O’ appears contingent. According to Kripke, we explain this appearance by noting that one can coherently imagine a world in which something has all the phenomenal properties of water, and so is an “epistemic counterpart” of it, yet is not H2O. The fact that we can coherently imagine such epistemic counterparts explains why ‘Water is H2O’ appears contingent. But no such explanation is available for e.g. ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’. For an epistemic counterpart of pain, something with the phenomenal properties of pain the feel of pain is pain. Something can look, smell, taste, and feel like water yet not be water. But whatever feels like pain is pain: pain is a feeling. In contrast, we can explain the apparent contingency of claims like ‘Water is H2O’ because water is not constituted by its phenomenal properties; our concept of water allows that it may have a “hidden essence,” i.e., an essential microstructure. If Kripke is right, then anyone who maintains that a statement of identity concerning a type of bodily sensation and a type of physical state is metaphysically necessary yet a posteriori, must explain the appearance of contingency in a way that differs from the way Kripke explains the appearance of contingency of ‘Water is H2O’. This is a formidable challenge. The final section, on consciousness, sketches some materialist responses to it. The general issue of property and state type identity is controversial. The claim that water is H2O despite the fact that the concept of water is distinct from the concept of H2O seems plausible. However, property or state type identity is more controversial than the identity of types of substances. For properties or state types, there are no generally accepted “non-duplication principles” to use a phrase of David Lewis’s. A nonduplication principle for A’s will say that no two A’s can be exactly alike in a certain respect; e.g., no two sets can have exactly the same members. It is widely denied, for instance, that no two properties can be possessed by exactly the same things. Two properties, it is claimed, can be possessed by the same things; likewise, two state types can occur in the same space-time regions. Even assuming that mental concepts are distinct from physical concepts, the issue of whether mental state types are physical state types raises the controversial issue of the non-duplication principle for state types. Token and type physicalisms. Token physicalism is the thesis that every particular is physical. Type physicalism is the thesis that every type or kind of entity is physical; thus, the identity thesis and central state materialism are type physicalist theses since they imply that types of mental states are types of physical states. Type physicalism implies token physicalism: given the former, every token falls under some physical type, and therefore is token-token identical with some token of a physical type. But token physicalism does not imply type physicalism; the former leaves open whether physical tokens fall under non-physical types. Some doctrines billed as materialist or physicalist embrace token epiphenomenalism, but reject type physicalism. Non-reductive materialism. This form of materialism implies token physicalism, but denies type physicalism and, as well, that mental types properties, etc. are reducible to physical types. This doctrine has been discussed since at least the late nineteenth century and was widely discussed in the first third of the twentieth century. The British philosophers George Henry Lewes, Samuel Alexander, Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad all held or thought plausible a certain version of non-reductive materialism. They held or sympathized with the view that every substance philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 689 689 either is or is wholly made up of physical particles, that the well-functioning brain is the material seat of mental capacities, and that token mental states events, processes, etc. are token neurophysiological states events, processes, etc.. However, they either held or thought plausible the view that mental capacities, properties, etc., emerge from, and thus do not reduce to, physical capacities, properties, etc. Lewes coined the term ‘emergence’; and Broad later labeled the doctrine emergent materialism. Emergent materialists maintain that laws correlating mental and physical properties are irreducible. These laws would be what Feigl called nomological danglers. Emergentists maintain that, despite their untidiness, such laws must be accepted with natural piety. Davidson’s doctrine of anomalous monism is a current brand of non-reductive materialism. He explicitly formulates this materialist thesis for events; and his irreducibility thesis is restricted to intentional mental types e.g., believings, desirings, and intendings. Anomalous monism says that every event token is physical, but that intentional mental predicates and concepts ones expressing propositional attitudes do not reduce, by law or definition, to physical predicates or concepts. Davidson offers an original argument for this irreducibility thesis. Mental predicates and concepts are, he claims, governed by constitutive principles of rationality, but physical predicates and concepts are not. This difference, he contends, excludes the possibility of reduction of mental predicates and concepts to physical ones. Davidson denies, moreover, that there are strict psychological or psychophysical laws. He calls the conjunction of this thesis and his irreducibility thesis the principle of the anomalism of the mental. His argument for token physicalism for events appeals to the principle of the anomalism of the mental and to the principle of the nomological character of causality: when two events are causally related, they are subsumed by a strict law. He maintains that all strict laws are physical. Given that claim, and given the principle of the nomological character of causality, it follows that every event that is a cause or effect is a physical event. On this view, psychophysical causation is just causation between physical events. Stephen Schiffer has also maintained a non-reductive materialism, one he calls ontological physicalism and sentential dualism: every particular is physical, but mental truths are irreducible to physical truths. Non-reductive materialism presupposes that mental state event tokens can fall under physical state types and, thereby, count as physical state tokens. This presupposition is controversial; no uncontroversial non-duplication principle for state tokens settles the issue. Suppose, however, that mental state tokens are physical state tokens, despite mental state types not being physical state types. The issue of how mental state types and physical state types are related remains. Suppose that some physical token x is of a mental type M say, a belief that the cat is on the mat and some other physical token y is not of type M. There must, it seems, be some difference between x and y in virtue of which x is, and y is not, of type M. Otherwise, it is simply a brute fact that x is and y is not of type M. That, however, seems implausible. The claim that certain physical state tokens fall under mental state types simply as a matter of brute fact would leave the difference in question utterly mysterious. But if it is not a brute fact, then there is some explanation of why a certain physical state is a mental state of a certain sort. The non-reductive materialist owes us an explanation that does not imply psychophysical reduction. Moreover, even though the non-reductive materialist can claim that mental states are causes because they are physical states with physical effects, there is some question whether mental state types are relevant to causal relations. Suppose every state is a physical state. Given that physical states causally interact in virtue of falling under physical types, it follows that whenever states causally interact they do so in virtue of falling under physical types. That raises the issue of whether states are ever causes in virtue of falling under mental types. Type epiphenomenalism is the thesis that no state can cause anything in virtue of falling under a mental type. Token epiphenomenalism, the thesis that no mental state can cause anything, implies type epiphenomenalism, but not conversely. Nonreductive materialists are not committed to token physicalism. However, token epiphenomenalism may be false but type epiphenomenalism true since mental states may be causes only in virtue of falling under physical types, never in virtue of falling under mental types. Broad raised the issue of type epiphenomenalism and discussed whether emergent materialism is committed to it. Ted Honderich, Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa, and others have in recent years raised the issue of whether non-reductive materialism is committed to type epiphenomenalism. Brian McLaughlin has argued that the claim that an event acts as a cause in virtue of falling under a certain physical type is consistent with the claim that it also acts as a cause in virtue of falling under a certain mental type, even when the mental type is not identical with the physical type. But even if this is so, the relationship between mental types and physical types must be addressed. Ernest LePore and Barry Loewer, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, Stephen Yablo, and others have attempted to characterize a relation between mental types and physical types that allows for the causal relevance of mental types. But whether there is a relation between mental and physical properties that is both adequate to secure the causal relevance of mental properties and available to non-reductive materialists remains an open question. Davidson’s anomalous monism may appear to be a kind of dual-aspect theory: there are events and they can have two sorts of autonomous aspects, mental and physical. However, while Davidson holds that mental properties or types do not reduce to physical ones, he also holds that the mental properties of an event depend on its physical properties in that the former supervene on the latter in this sense: no two events can be exactly alike in every physical respect and yet differ in some mental respect. This proposal introduced the notion of supervenience into contem- porary philosophy of mind. Often nonreductive materialists argue that mental properties types supervene on physical properties types. Kim, however, has distinguished various supervenience relations, and argues that some are too weak to count as versions of materialism as opposed to, say, dual-aspect theory, while other supervenience relations are too strong to use to formulate non-reductive materialism since they imply reducibility. According to Kim, non-reductive materialism is an unstable position. Materialism as a supervenience thesis. Several philosophers have in recent years attempted to define the thesis of materialism using a global supervenience thesis. Their aim is not to formulate a brand of non-reductive materialism; they maintain that their supervenience thesis may well imply reducibility. Their aim is, rather, to formulate a thesis to which anyone who counts as a genuine materialist must subscribe. David Lewis has maintained that materialism is true if and only if any non-alien possible worlds that are physically indiscernible are mentally indiscernible as well. Non-alien possible worlds are worlds that have exactly the same perfectly natural properties as the actual world. Frank Jackson has offered this proposal: materialism is true if and only if any minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world. A world is a physical duplicate of the actual world if and only if it is exactly like the actual world in every physical respect physical particular for physical particular, physical property for physical property, physical relation for physical relation, etc.; and a world is a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world if and only if it is exactly like the actual world in every respect. A minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a physical duplicate that contains nothing else by way of particulars, kinds, properties, etc. than it must in order to be a physical duplicate of the actual world. Two questions arise for any formulation of the thesis of materialism. Is it adequate to materialism? And, if it is, is it true? Functionalism. The nineteenth-century British philosopher George Henry Lewes maintained that while not every neurological event is mental, every mental event is neurological. He claimed that what makes certain neurological events mental events is their causal role in the organism. This is a very early version of functionalism, nowadays a leading approach to the mindbody problem. Functionalism implies an answer to the question of what makes a state token a mental state of a certain kind M: namely, that it is an instance of some functional state type identical with M. There are two versions of this proposal. On one, a mental state type M of a system will be identical with the state type that plays a certain causal role R in the system. The description ‘the state type that plays R in the system’ will be a nonrigid designator; moreover, different state types may play R in different organisms, in which case the mental state is multiply realizable. On the second version, a mental state type M is identical with a second-order state type, the state of being in some first-order state that plays causal role R. More than one first-order state may play role R, and thus M may be multiply realizable. On either version, if the relevant causal roles are specifiable in physical or topic-neutral terms, then the functional definitions of mental state types will be, in principle, physically reductive. Since the roles would be specified partly in topic-neutral terms, there may well be possible worlds in which the mental states are realized by non-physical states; thus, functionalism does not imply token physicalism. However, functionalists typically maintain that, on the empirical evidence, mental states are realized in our world only by physical states. Functionalism comes in many varieties. philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 691 691 Smart’s topic-neutral analysis of our talk of sensations is in the spirit of functionalism. And Armstrong’s central state materialism counts as a kind of functionalism since it maintains that mental states are states apt to produce a certain range of behavior, and thus identifies states as mental states by their performing this causal role. However, functionalists today typically hold that the defining causal roles include causal roles vis-à-vis input state types, as well as output state types, and also vis-à-vis other internal state types of the system in question. In the 0s David Lewis proposed a functionalist theory, analytical functionalism, according to which definitions of mental predicates such as ‘belief’, ‘desire’, and the like though not predicates such as ‘believes that p’ or ‘desires that q’ can be obtained by conjoining the platitudes of commonsense psychology and formulating the Ramsey sentence for the conjunction. The relevant Ramsey sentence is a second-order quantificational sentence that quantifies over the mental predicates in the conjunction of commonsense psychological platitudes, and from it one can derive definitions of the mental predicates. On this view, it will be analytic that a certain mental state e.g., belief is the state that plays a certain causal role vis-à-vis other states; and it is a matter of empirical investigation what state plays the role. Lewis claimed that such investigation reveals that the state types that play the roles in question are physical states. In the early 0s, Putnam proposed a version of scientific functionalism, machine state functionalism: according to this view, mental states are types of Turing machine table states. Turing machines are mechanical devices consisting of a tape with squares on it that either are blank or contain symbols, and an executive that can move one square to the left, or one square to the right, or stay where it is. And it can either write a symbol on a square, erase a symbol on a square, or leave the square as it is. According to the Church-Turing thesis, every computable function can be computed by a Turing machine. Now there are two functions specifying such a machine: one from input states to output states, the other from input states to input states. And these functions are expressible by counterfactuals e.g., ‘If the machine is in state s 1 and receives input I, it will emit output O and enter state s2’. Machine tables are specified by the counterfactuals that express the functions in question. So the main idea of machine state functionalism is that any given mental type is definable as the state type that participates in certain counterfactual relationships specified in terms of purely formal, and so not semantically interpreted, state types. Any system whose inputs, outputs, and internal states are counterfactually related in the way characterized by a machine table is a realization of that table. This version of machine state functionalism has been abandoned: no one maintains that the mind has the architecture of a Turing machine. However, computational psychology, a branch of cognitive psychology, presupposes a scientific functionalist view of cognitive states: it takes the mind to have a computational architecture. See the section on cognitive psychology below. Functionalism the view that what makes a state a realization of a mental state is its playing a certain causal role remains a leading theory of mind. But functionalism faces formidable difficulties. Block has pinpointed one. On the one hand, if the input and output states that figure in the causal role alleged to define a certain mental state are specified in insufficient detail, the functional definition will be too liberal: it will mistakenly classify certain states as of that mental type. On the other hand, if the input and output states are specified in too much detail, the functional definition will be chauvinistic: it will fail to count certain states as instances of the mental state that are in fact such instances. Moreover, it has also been argued that functionalism cannot capture conscious states since types of conscious states do not admit of functional definitions. Cognitive psychology, content, and consciousness Cognitive psychology. Many claim that one aim of cognitive psychology is to provide explanations of intentional capacities, capacities to be in intentional states e.g., believing and to engage in intentional activities e.g., reasoning. Fodor has argued that classical cognitive psychology postulates a cognitive architecture that includes a language of thought: a system of mental representation with a combinatorial syntax and semantics, and computational processes defined over these mental representations in virtue of their syntactic structures. On this view, cognition is rule-governed symbol manipulation. Mental symbols have meanings, but they participate in computational processes solely in virtue of their syntactic or formal properties. The mind is, so to speak, a syntactic engine. The view implies a kind of content parallelism: syntaxsensitive causal transitions between symbols will preserve semantic coherence. Fodor has mainphilosophy of mind philosophy of mind 692 692 tained that, on this language-of-thought view of cognition the classical view, being in a beliefthat-p state can be understood as consisting in bearing a computational relation one that is constitutive of belief to a sentence in the language of thought that means that p; and similarly for desire, intention, and the like. The explanation of intentional capacities will be provided by a computational theory for mental sentences in conjunction with a psychosemantic theory, a theory of meaning for mental sentences. A research program in cognitive science called connectionism postulates networks of neuron-like units. The units can be either on or off, or can have continuous levels of activation. Units are connected, the connections have various degrees of strength, and the connections can be either inhibitory or excitatory. Connectionism has provided fruitful models for studying how neural networks compute information. Moreover, connectionists have had much success in modeling pattern recognition tasks e.g., facial recognition and tasks consisting of learning categories from examples. Some connectionists maintain that connectionism will yield an alternative to the classical language-of-thought account of intentional states and capacities. However, some favor a mixed-models approach to cognition: some cognitive capacities are symbolic, some connectionist. And some hold that connectionism will yield an implementational architecture for a symbolic cognitive architecture, one that will help explain how a symbolic cognitive architecture is realized in the nervous system. Content externalism. Many today hold that Twin-Earth thought experiments by Putnam and Tyler Burge show that the contents of a subject’s mental states do not supervene on intrinsic properties of the subject: two individuals can be exactly alike in every intrinsic respect, yet be in mental states with different contents. In response to Twin-Earth thought experiments, some philosophers have, however, attempted to characterize a notion of narrow content, a kind of content that supervenes on intrinsic properties of thinkers. Content, externalists claim, depends on extrinsic-contextual factors. If externalism is correct, then a psychosemantic theory must examine the relation between mental symbols and the extrinsic, contextual factors that determine contents. Stephen Stich has argued that psychology should eschew psychosemantics and concern itself only with the syntactic properties of mental sentences. Such a psychology could not explain intentional capacities. But Stich urges that computational psychology also eschew that explanatory goal. If, however, psychology is to explain intentional capacities, a psychosemantic theory is needed. Dretske, Fodor, Ruth Millikan, and David Papineau have each independently attempted to provide, in physicalistically respectable terms, foundations for a naturalized externalist theory of the content of mental sentences or internal physical states. Perhaps the leading problem for these theories of content is to explain how the physical and functional facts about a state determine a unique content for it. Appealing to work by Quine and by Kripke, some philosophers argue that such facts will not determine unique contents. Both causal and epistemic concerns have been raised about externalist theories of content. Such theories invite the question whether the property of having a certain content is ever causally relevant. If content is a contextual property of a state that has it, can states have effects in virtue of their having a certain content? This is an important issue because intentional states figure in explanations not only in virtue of their intentional mode whether they are beliefs, or desires, etc. but also in virtue of their contents. Consider an everyday belief-desire explanation. The fact that the subject’s belief was that there was milk in the refrigerator and the fact that the subject’s desire was for milk are both essential to the belief and desire explaining why the subject went to the refrigerator. Dretske, who maintains that content depends on a causal-historical context, has attempted to explain how the property of having a certain content can be causally relevant even though the possession of the property depends on causal-historical factors. And various other philosophers have attempted to explain how the causal relevance of content can be squared with the fact that it fails to supervene on intrinsic properties of the subject. A further controversial question is whether externalism is consistent with our having privileged access to what we are thinking. Consciousness. Conscious states such as pain states, visual experiences, and so on, are such that it is “like” something for the subject of the state to be in them. Such states have a qualitative aspect, a phenomenological character. The what-it-is-like aspects of experiences are called qualia. Qualia pose a serious difficulty for physicalism. Broad argued that one can know all the physical properties of a chemical and how it causally interacts with other physical phenomena and yet not know what it is like to smell it. He concluded that the smell of the chemical is philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 693 693 not itself a physical property, but rather an irreducible emergent property. Frank Jackson has recently defended a version of the argument, which has been dubbed the knowledge argument. Jackson argues that a super-scientist, Mary, who knows all the physical and functional facts about color vision, light, and matter, but has never experienced redness since she has spent her entire life in a black and white room, would not know what it is like to visually experience red. He concludes that the physical and functional topic-neutral facts do not entail all the facts, and thus materialism is false. In response, Lawrence Nemirow, David Lewis, and others have argued that knowing what it is like to be in a certain conscious state is, in part, a matter of know-how e.g., to be able to imagine oneself in the state rather than factual knowledge, and that the failure of knowledge of the physical and functional facts to yield such know-how does not imply the falsity of materialism. Functionalism seems unable to solve the problem of qualia since qualia seem not to be functionally definable. In the 0s, Fodor and Ned Block argued that two states can have the same causal role, thereby realizing the same functional state, yet the qualia associated with each can be inverted. This is called the problem of inverted qualia. The color spectrum, e.g., might be inverted for two individuals a possibility raised by Locke, despite their being in the same functional states. They further argued that two states might realize the same functional state, yet the one might have qualia associated with it and the other not. This is called the problem of absent qualia. Sydney Shoemaker has argued that the possibility of absent qualia can be ruled out on functionalist grounds. However, he has also refined the inverted qualia scenario and further articulated the problem it poses for functionalism. Whether functionalism or physicalism can avoid the problems of absent and inverted qualia remains an open question. Thomas Nagel claims that conscious states are subjective: to fully understand them, one must understand what it is like to be in them, but one can do that only by taking up the experiential point of view of a subject in them. Physical states, in contrast, are objective. Physical science attempts to characterize the world in abstraction from the experiential point of view of any subject. According to Nagel, whether phenomenal mental states reduce to physical states turns on whether subjective states reduce to objective states; and, at present, he claims, we have no understanding of how they could. Nagel has suggested that consciousness may be explainable only by appeal to as yet undiscovered basic nonmental, non-physical properties “proto-mental properties” the idea being that experiential points of view might be constituted by protomental properties together with physical properties. He thus claims that panphysicism is worthy of serious consideration. Frank Jackson, James Van Cleve, and David Chalmers have argued that conscious properties are emergent, i.e., fundamental, irreducible macro-properties; and Chalmers sympathizes with a brand of panphysicism. Colin McGinn claims that while conscious properties are likely reductively explainable by brain properties, our minds seem conceptually closed to the explaining properties: we are unable to conceptualize them, just as a cat is unable to conceptualize a square root. Dennett attempts to explain consciousness in supervenient behaviorist terms. David Rosenthal argues that consciousness is a special case of intentionality more specifically, that conscious states are just states we can come in a certain direct way to believe we are in. Dretske, William Lycan, and Michael Tye argue that conscious properties are intentional properties and physicalistically reducible. Patricia Churchland argues that conscious phenomena are reducible to neurological phenomena. Brian Loar contends that qualia are identical with either functional or neurological states of the brain; and Christopher Hill argues specifically that qualia are identical with neurological states. Loar and Hill attempt to explain away the appearance of contingency of psychophysical identity claims, but in a way different from the way Kripke attempts to explain the appearance of contingency of ‘Water is H2O’, since they concede that that mode of explanation is unavailable. They appeal to differences in the conceptual roles of neurological and functional concepts by contrast with phenomenal concepts. They argue that while such concepts are different, they answer to the same properties. The nature of consciousness thus remains a matter of dispute. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre,” in The Conception of Value, Oxford, Clarendon.

Animatum – vide: H. P. Grice, “Psychology, folk psychology, etc.” -- philosophy of psychology, the philosophical study of psychology. Psychology began to separate from philosophy with the work of the nineteenth-century G. experimentalists, especially Fechner 180187, Helmholtz 1821 94, and Wundt 18320. In the first half of the twentieth century, the separation was completed in this country insofar as separate psychology departments were set up in most universities, psychologists established their own journals and professional associations, and experimental methods were widely employed, although not in every area of psychology the first experimental study of the effectiveness of a psychological therapy did not occur until 3. Despite this achievement of autonomy, however, issues have remained about the nature of the connections, if any, that should continue between psychology and philosophy. One radical view, that virtually all such connections should be severed, was defended by the behaviorist John Watson in his seminal 3 paper “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Watson criticizes psychologists, even the experimentalists, for relying on introspective methods and for making consciousness the subject matter of their discipline. He recommends that psychology be a purely objective experimental branch of natural science, that its theoretical goal be to predict and control behavior, and that it discard all reference to consciousness. In making behavior the sole subject of psychological inquiry, we avoid taking sides on “those time-honored relics of philosophical speculation,” namely competing theories about the mindbody problem, such as interactionism and parallelism. In a later work, published in 5, Watson claimed that the success of behaviorism threatened the very existence of philosophy: “With the behavioristic point of view now becoming dominant, it is hard to find a place for what has been called philosophy. Philosophy is passing has all but passed, and unless new issues arise which will give a foundation for a new philosophy, the world has seen its last great philosopher.” One new issue was the credibility of behaviorism. Watson gave no argument for his view that prediction and control of behavior should be the only theoretical goals of psychology. If the attempt to explain behavior is also legitimate, as some anti-behaviorists argue, then it would seem to be an empirical question whether that goal can be met without appealing to mentalistic causes. Watson and his successors, such as B. F. Skinner, cited no credible empirical evidence that it could, but instead relied primarily on philosophical arguments for banning postulation of mentalistic causes. As a consequence, behaviorists virtually guaranteed that philosophers of psychology would have at least one additional task beyond wrestling with traditional mind body issues: the analysis and criticism of behaviorism itself. Although behaviorism and the mindbody problem were never the sole subjects of philosophy of psychology, a much richer set of topics developed after 0 when the so-called cognitive revolution occurred in psychology. These topics include innate knowledge and the acquisition of transformational grammars, intentionality, the nature of mental representation, functionalism, mental imagery, the language of thought, and, more recently, connectionism. Such topics are of interest to many cognitive psychologists and those in other disciplines, such as linguistics and artificial intelligence, who contributed to the emerging discipline known as cognitive science. Thus, after the decline of various forms of behaviorism and the consequent rise of cognitivism, many philosophers of psychology collaborated more closely with psychologists. This increased cooperation was probably due not only to a broadening of the issues, but also to a methodological change in philosophy. In the period roughly between 5 and 5, conceptual analysis dominated both and English philosophy of psychology and the closely related discipline, the philosophy of mind. Many philosophers took the position that philosophy was essentially an a priori discipline. These philosophers rarely cited the empirical studies of psychologists. In recent decades, however, philosophy of psychology has become more empirical, at least in the sense that more attention is being paid to the details of the empirical studies of psychologists. The result is more interchanges between philosophers and psychologists. Although interest in cognitive psychology appears to predominate in recent philosophy of psychology, the new emphasis on empirical studies is also reflected in philosophic work on topics not directly related to cognitive psychology. For example, philosophers of psychology have written books in recent years on the clinical foundations of psychoanalysis, the foundations of behavior therapy and behavior modification, and self-deception. The emphasis on empirical data has been taken one step further by naturalists, who argue that in epistemology, at least, and perhaps in all areas of philosophy, philosophical questions should either be replaced by questions from empirical psychology or be answered by appeal to empirical studies in psychology and related disciplines. It is philosophy of psychology philosophy of psychology 695 695 still too early to predict the fruitfulness of the naturalist approach, but this new trend might well have pleased Watson. Taken to an extreme, naturalism would make philosophy dependent on psychology instead of the reverse and thus would further enhance the autonomy of psychology that Watson desired.

Philosophical theology – Grice: “At Oxford, pretentious as they are, they like ‘divinity’ – there are doctors in divinity!” -- philosophy of religion, the subfield of philosophy devoted to the study of religious phenomena. Although religions are typically complex systems of theory and practice, including both myths and rituals, philosophers tend to concentrate on evaluating religious truth claims. In the major theistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the most important of these claims concern the existence, nature, and activities of God. Such traditions commonly understand God to be something like a person who is disembodied, eternal, free, all-powerful, all-knowing, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and the proper object of human obedience and worship. One important question is whether this conception of the object of human religious activity is coherent; another is whether such a being actually exists. Philosophers of religion have sought rational answers to both questions. The major theistic traditions draw a distinction between religious truths that can be discovered and even known by unaided human reason and those to which humans have access only through a special divine disclosure or revelation. According to Aquinas, e.g., the existence of God and some things about the divine nature can be proved by unaided human reason, but such distinctively Christian doctrines as the Trinity and Incarnation cannot be thus proved and are known to humans only because God has revealed them. Theists disagree about how such divine disclosures occur; the main candidates for vehicles of revelation include religious experience, the teachings of an inspired religious leader, the sacred scriptures of a religious community, and the traditions of a particular church. The religious doctrines Christian traditions take to be the content of revelation are often described as matters of faith. To be sure, such traditions typically affirm that faith goes beyond mere doctrinal belief to include an attitude of profound trust in God. On most accounts, however, faith involves doctrinal belief, and so there is a contrast within the religious domain itself between faith and reason. One way to spell out the contrast though not the only way is to imagine that the content of revelation is divided into two parts. On the one hand, there are those doctrines, if any, that can be known by human reason but are also part of revelation; the existence of God is such a doctrine if it can be proved by human reason alone. Such doctrines might be accepted by some people on the basis of rational argument, while others, who lack rational proof, accept them on the authority of revelation. On the other hand, there are those doctrines that cannot be known by human reason and for which the authority of revelation is the sole basis. They are objects of faith rather than reason and are often described as mysteries of faith. Theists disagree about how such exclusive objects of faith are related to reason. One prominent view is that, although they go beyond reason, they are in harmony with it; another is that they are contrary to reason. Those who urge that such doctrines should be accepted despite the fact that, or even precisely because, they are contrary to reason are known as fideists; the famous slogan credo quia absurdum ‘I believe because it is absurd’ captures the flavor of extreme fideism. Many scholars regard Kierkegaard as a fideist on account of his emphasis on the paradoxical nature of the Christian doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate. Modern philosophers of religion have, for the most part, confined their attention to topics treatable without presupposing the truth of any particular tradition’s claims about revelation and have left the exploration of mysteries of faith to the theologians of various traditions. A great deal of philosophical work clarifying the concept of God has been prompted by puzzles that suggest some incoherence in the traditional concept. One kind of puzzle concerns the coherence of individual claims about the nature of God. Consider the traditional affirmation that God is allpowerful omnipotent. Reflection on this doctrine raises a famous question: Can God make a stone so heavy that even God cannot lift it? No matter how this is answered, it seems that there is at least one thing that even God cannot do, i.e., make such a stone or lift such a stone, and so it appears that even God cannot be all-powerful. Such puzzles stimulate attempts by philosophers to analyze the concept of omnipotence in a way that specifies more precisely the scope of the powers coherently attributable to an omnipotent being. To the extent that such attempts succeed, they foster a deeper understanding of the concept of God and, if God exists, of the divine nature. Another sort of puzzle concerns the consistency of attributing two or more properties to philosophy of religion philosophy of religion 696 696 God. Consider the claim that God is both immutable and omniscient. An immutable being is one that cannot undergo internal change, and an omniscient being knows all truths, and believes no falsehoods. If God is omniscient, it seems that God must first know and hence believe that it is now Tuesday and not believe that it is now Wednesday and later know and hence believe that it is now Wednesday and not believe that it is now Tuesday. If so, God’s beliefs change, and since change of belief is an internal change, God is not immutable. So it appears that God is not immutable if God is omniscient. A resolution of this puzzle would further contribute to enriching the philosophical understanding of the concept of God. It is, of course, one thing to elaborate a coherent concept of God; it is quite another to know, apart from revelation, that such a being actually exists. A proof of the existence of God would yield such knowledge, and it is the task of natural theology to evaluate arguments that purport to be such proofs. As opposed to revealed theology, natural theology restricts the assumptions fit to serve as premises in its arguments to things naturally knowable by humans, i.e., knowable without special revelation from supernatural sources. Many people have hoped that such natural religious knowledge could be universally communicated and would justify a form of religious practice that would appeal to all humankind because of its rationality. Such a religion would be a natural religion. The history of natural theology has produced a bewildering variety of arguments for the existence of God. The four main types are these: ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, and moral arguments. The earliest and most famous version of the ontological argument was set forth by Anselm of Canterbury in chapter 2 of his Proslogion. It is a bold attempt to deduce the existence of God from the concept of God: we understand God to be a perfect being, something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Because we have this concept, God at least exists in our minds as an object of the understanding. Either God exists in the mind alone, or God exists both in the mind and as an extramental reality. But if God existed in the mind alone, then we could conceive of a being greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived, namely, one that also existed in extramental reality. Since the concept of a being greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived is incoherent, God cannot exist in the mind alone. Hence God exists not only in the mind but also in extramental reality. The most celebrated criticism of this form of the argument was Kant’s, who claimed that existence is not a real predicate. For Kant, a real predicate contributes to determining the content of a concept and so serves as a part of its definition. But to say that something falling under a concept exists does not add to the content of a concept; there is, Kant said, no difference in conceptual content between a hundred real dollars and a hundred imaginary dollars. Hence whether or not there exists something that corresponds to a concept cannot be settled by definition. The existence of God cannot be deduced from the concept of a perfect being because existence is not contained in the concept or the definition of a perfect being. Contemporary philosophical discussion has focused on a slightly different version of the ontological argument. In chapter 3 of Proslogion Anselm suggested that something than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot be conceived not to exist and so exists necessarily. Following this lead, such philosophers as Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga have contended that God cannot be a contingent being who exists in some possible worlds but not in others. The existence of a perfect being is either necessary, in which case God exists in every possible world, or impossible, in which case God exists in no possible worlds. On this view, if it is so much as possible that a perfect being exists, God exists in every possible world and hence in the actual world. The crucial premise in this form of the argument is the assumption that the existence of a perfect being is possible; it is not obviously true and could be rejected without irrationality. For this reason, Plantinga concedes that the argument does not prove or establish its conclusion, but maintains that it does make it rational to accept the existence of God. The key premises of various cosmological arguments are statements of obvious facts of a general sort about the world. Thus, the argument to a first cause begins with the observation that there are now things undergoing change and things causing change. If something is a cause of such change only if it is itself caused to change by something else, then there is an infinitely long chain of causes of change. But, it is alleged, there cannot be a causal chain of infinite length. Therefore there is something that causes change, but is not caused to change by anything else, i.e., a first cause. Many critics of this form of the argument deny its assumption that there cannot be an infinite causal regress or chain of causes. This argument also fails to show that there is only one first cause and does not prove that a first cause must have such divine attributes as omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness. A version of the cosmological argument that has attracted more attention from contemporary philosophers is the argument from contingency to necessity. It starts with the observation that there are contingent beings beings that could have failed to exist. Since contingent beings do not exist of logical necessity, a contingent being must be caused to exist by some other being, for otherwise there would be no explanation of why it exists rather than not doing so. Either the causal chain of contingent beings has a first member, a contingent being not caused by another contingent being, or it is infinitely long. If, on the one hand, the chain has a first member, then a necessary being exists and causes it. After all, being contingent, the first member must have a cause, but its cause cannot be another contingent being. Hence its cause has to be non-contingent, i.e., a being that could not fail to exist and so is necessary. If, on the other hand, the chain is infinitely long, then a necessary being exists and causes the chain as a whole. This is because the chain as a whole, being itself contingent, requires a cause that must be noncontingent since it is not part of the chain. In either case, if there are contingent beings, a necessary being exists. So, since contingent beings do exist, there is a necessary being that causes their existence. Critics of this argument attack its assumption that there must be an explanation for the existence of every contingent being. Rejecting the principle that there is a sufficient reason for the existence of each contingent thing, they argue that the existence of at least some contingent beings is an inexplicable brute fact. And even if the principle of sufficient reason is true, its truth is not obvious and so it would not be irrational to deny it. Accordingly, William Rowe b.1 concludes that this version of the cosmological argument does not prove the existence of God, but he leaves open the question of whether it shows that theistic belief is reasonable. The starting point of teleological arguments is the phenomenon of goal-directedness in nature. Aquinas, e.g., begins with the claim that we see that things which lack intelligence act for an end so as to achieve the best result. Modern science has discredited this universal metaphysical teleology, but many biological systems do seem to display remarkable adaptations of means to ends. Thus, as William Paley 17431805 insisted, the eye is adapted to seeing and its parts cooperate in complex ways to produce sight. This suggests an analogy between such biological systems and human artifacts, which are known to be products of intelligent design. Spelled out in mechanical terms, the analogy grounds the claim that the world as a whole is like a vast machine composed of many smaller machines. Machines are contrived by intelligent human designers. Since like effects have like causes, the world as a whole and many of its parts are therefore probably products of design by an intelligence resembling the human but greater in proportion to the magnitude of its effects. Because this form of the argument rests on an analogy, it is known as the analogical argument for the existence of God; it is also known as the design argument since it concludes the existence of an intelligent designer of the world. Hume subjected the design argument to sustained criticism in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. If, as most scholars suppose, the character Philo speaks for Hume, Hume does not actually reject the argument. He does, however, think that it warrants only the very weak conclusion that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence. As this way of putting it indicates, the argument does not rule out polytheism; perhaps different minor deities designed lions and tigers. Moreover, the analogy with human artificers suggests that the designer or designers of the universe did not create it from nothing but merely imposed order on already existing matter. And on account of the mixture of good and evil in the universe, the argument does not show that the designer or designers are morally admirable enough to deserve obedience or worship. Since the time of Hume, the design argument has been further undermined by the emergence of Darwinian explanations of biological adaptations in terms of natural selection that give explanations of such adaptations in terms of intelligent design stiff competition. Some moral arguments for the existence of God conform to the pattern of inference to the best explanation. It has been argued that the hypothesis that morality depends upon the will of God provides the best explanation of the objectivity of moral obligations. Kant’s moral argument, which is probably the best-known specimen of this type, takes a different tack. According to Kant, the complete good consists of perfect virtue rewarded with perfect happiness, and virtue deserves to be rewarded with proportional happiness because it makes one worthy to be happy. If morality is to command the allegiance of reason, the complete good must be a real possibility, and so practical reason is entitled to postulate that the conditions necessary to guarantee its possibility obtain. As far as anyone can tell, nature and its laws do not furnish such a guarantee; in this world, apparently, the virtuous often suffer while the vicious flourish. And even if the operation of natural laws were to produce happiness in proportion to virtue, this would be merely coincidental, and hence finite moral agents would not have been made happy just because they had by their virtue made themselves worthy of happiness. So practical reason is justified in postulating a supernatural agent with sufficient goodness, knowledge, and power to ensure that finite agents receive the happiness they deserve as a reward for their virtue, though theoretical reason can know nothing of such a being. Critics of this argument have denied that we must postulate a systematic connection between virtue and happiness in order to have good reasons to be moral. Indeed, making such an assumption might actually tempt one to cultivate virtue for the sake of securing happiness rather than for its own sake. It seems therefore that none of these arguments by itself conclusively proves the existence of God. However, some of them might contribute to a cumulative case for the existence of God. According to Richard Swinburne, cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments individually increase the probability of God’s existence even though none of them makes it more probable than not. But when other evidence such as that deriving from providential occurrences and religious experiences is added to the balance, Swinburne concludes that theism becomes more probable than its negation. Whether or not he is right, it does appear to be entirely correct to judge the rationality of theistic belief in the light of our total evidence. But there is a case to be made against theism too. Philosophers of religion are interested in arguments against the existence of God, and fairness does seem to require admitting that our total evidence contains much that bears negatively on the rationality of belief in God. The problem of evil is generally regarded as the strongest objection to theism. Two kinds of evil can be distinguished. Moral evil inheres in the wicked actions of moral agents and the bad consequences they produce. An example is torturing the innocent. When evil actions are considered theologically as offenses against God, they are regarded as sins. Natural evils are bad consequences that apparently derive entirely from the operations of impersonal natural forces, e.g. the human and animal suffering produced by natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and epidemics. Both kinds of evil raise the question of what reasons an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being could have for permitting or allowing their existence. Theodicy is the enterprise of trying to answer this question and thereby to justify the ways of God to humans. It is, of course, possible to deny the presuppositions of the question. Some thinkers have held that evil is unreal; others have maintained that the deity is limited and so lacks the power or knowledge to prevent the evils that occur. If one accepts the presuppositions of the question, the most promising strategy for theodicy seems to be to claim that each evil God permits is necessary for some greater good or to avoid some alternative to it that is at least as bad if not worse. The strongest form of this doctrine is the claim made by Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds. It is unlikely that humans, with their cognitive limitations, could ever understand all the details of the greater goods for which evils are necessary, assuming that such goods exist; however, we can understand how some evils contribute to achieving goods. According to the soul-making theodicy of John Hick b.2, which is rooted in a tradition going back to Irenaeus, admirable human qualities such as compassion could not exist except as responses to suffering, and so evil plays a necessary part in the formation of moral character. But this line of thought does not seem to provide a complete theodicy because much animal suffering occurs unnoticed by humans and child abuse often destroys rather than strengthens the moral character of its victims. Recent philosophical discussion has often focused on the claim that the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being is logically inconsistent with the existence of evil or of a certain quantity of evil. This is the logical problem of evil, and the most successful response to it has been the free will defense. Unlike a theodicy, this defense does not speculate about God’s reasons for permitting evil but merely argues that God’s existence is consistent with the existence of evil. Its key idea is that moral good cannot exist apart from libertarian free actions that are not causally determined. If God aims to produce moral good, God must create free creatures upon whose cooperation he must depend, and so divine omnipotence is limited by the freedom God confers on creatures. Since such creatures are also free to do evil, it is possible that God could not have created a world containing moral good but no moral evil. Plantinga extends the defense from moral to natural evil by suggesting that it is also possible that all natural evil is due to the free actions of non-human persons such as Satan and his cohorts. Plantinga and Swinburne have also addressed the probabilistic problem of evil, which is the claim that the existence of evil disconfirms or renders improbable the hypothesis that God exists. Both of them argue for the conclusion that this is not the case. Finally, it is worth mentioning three other topics on which contemporary philosophers of religion have worked to good effect. Important studies of the meaning and use of religious language were stimulated by the challenge of logical positivism’s claim that theological language is cognitively meaningless. Defenses of such Christian doctrines as the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement against various philosophical objections have recently been offered by people committed to elaborating an explicitly Christian philosophy. And a growing appreciation of religious pluralism has both sharpened interest in questions about the cultural relativity of religious rationality and begun to encourage progress toward a comparative philosophy of religions. Such work helps to make philosophy of religion a lively and diverse field of inquiry. H. P. Grice, “Why I never pursued a doctorate in divinity!” --.

Scientism: One of the twelve labours of H. P. Grice --. Grice: “When Cicero coined ‘scientia’ out of scire he didn’t know what he was doing!” -- philosophy of science, the branch of philosophy that is centered on a critical examination of the sciences: their methods and their results. One branch of the philosophy of science, methodology, is closely related to the theory of knowledge. It explores the methods by which science arrives at its posited truths concerning the world and critically explores alleged rationales for these methods. Issues concerning the sense in which theories are accepted in science, the nature of the confirmation relation between evidence and hypothesis, the degree to which scientific claims can be falsified by observational data, and the like, are the concern of methodology. Other branches of the philosophy of science are concerned with the meaning and content of the posited scientific results and are closely related to metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Typical problems examined are the nature of scientific laws, the cognitive content of scientific theories referring to unobservables, and the structure of scientific explanations. Finally, philosophy of science explores specific foundational questions arising out of the specific results of the sciences. Typical questions explored might be metaphysical presuppositions of space-time theories, the role of probability in statistical physics, the interpretation of measurement in quantum theory, the structure of explanations in evolutionary biology, and the like. Concepts of the credibility of hypotheses. Some crucial concepts that arise when issues of the credibility of scientific hypotheses are in question are the following: Inductivism is the view that hypotheses can receive evidential support from their predictive success with respect to particular cases falling under them. If one takes the principle of inductive inference to be that the future will be like the past, one is subject to the skeptical objection that this rule is empty of content, and even self-contradictory, if any kind of “similarity” of cases is permitted. To restore content and consistency to the rule, and for other methodological purposes as well, it is frequently alleged that only natural kinds, a delimited set of “genuine” properties, should be allowed in the formulation of scientific hypotheses. The view that theories are first arrived at as creative hypotheses of the scientist’s imagination and only then confronted, for justificatory purposes, with the observational predictions deduced from them, is called the hypotheticodeductive model of science. This model is contrasted with the view that the very discovery of hypotheses is somehow “generated” out of accumulated observational data. The view that hypotheses are confirmed to the degree that they provide the “best explanatory account” of the data is often called abduction and sometimes called inference to the best explanation. The alleged relation that evidence bears to hypothesis, warranting its truth but not, generally, guaranteeing that truth, is called confirmation. Methodological accounts such as inductivism countenance such evidential warrant, frequently speaking of evidence as making a hypothesis probable but not establishing it with certainty. Probability in the confirmational context is supposed to be a relationship holding between propositions that is quantitative and is described by the formal theory of probability. It is supposed to measure the “degree of support” that one proposition gives to another, e.g. the degree of support evidential statements give to a hypothesis allegedly supported by them. Scientific methodologists often claim that science is characterized by convergence. This is the claim that scientific theories in their historical order are converging to an ultimate, final, and ideal theory. Sometimes this final theory is said to be true because it corresponds to the “real world,” as in realist accounts of convergence. In pragmatist versions this ultimate theory is the defining standard of truth. It is sometimes alleged that one ground for choosing the most plausible theory, over and above conformity of the theory with the observational data, is the simplicity of the theory. Many versions of this thesis exist, some emphasizing formal elements of the theory and others, e.g., emphasizing paucity of ontological commitment by the theory as the measure of simplicity. It is sometimes alleged that in choosing which theory to believe, the scientific community opts for theories compatible with the data that make minimal changes in scientific belief necessary from those demanded by previously held theory. The believer in methodological conservatism may also try to defend such epistemic conservatism as normatively rational. An experiment that can decisively show a scientific hypothesis to be false is called a crucial experiment for the hypothesis. It is a thesis of many philosophers that for hypotheses that function in theories and can only confront observational data when conjoined with other theoretical hypotheses, no absolutely decisive crucial experiment can exist. Concepts of the structure of hypotheses. Here are some of the essential concepts encountered when it is the structure of scientific hypotheses that is being explored: In its explanatory account of the world, science posits novel entities and properties. Frequently these are alleged to be not accessible to direct observation. A theory is a set of hypotheses positing such entities and properties. Some philosophers of science divide the logical consequences of a theory into those referring only to observable things and features and those referring to the unobservables as well. Various reductionist, eliminationist, and instrumentalist approaches to theory agree that the full cognitive content of a theory is exhausted by its observational consequences reported by its observation sentences, a claim denied by those who espouse realist accounts of theories. The view that the parts of a theory that do not directly relate observational consequences ought not to be taken as genuinely referential at all, but, rather, as a “mere linguistic instrument” allowing one to derive observational results from observationally specifiable posits, is called instrumentalism. From this point of view terms putatively referring to unobservables fail to have genuine reference and individual non-observational sentences containing such terms are not individually genuinely true or false. Verificationism is the general name for the doctrine that, in one way or another, the semantic content of an assertion is exhausted by the conditions that count as warranting the acceptance or rejection of the assertion. There are many versions of verificationist doctrines that try to do justice both to the empiricist claim that the content of an assertion is its totality of empirical consequences and also to a wide variety of anti-reductionist intuitions about meaning. The doctrine that theoretical sentences must be strictly translatable into sentences expressed solely in observational terms in order that the theoretical assertions have genuine cognitive content is sometimes called operationalism. The “operation” by which a magnitude is determined to have a specified value, characterized observationally, is taken to give the very meaning of attributing that magnitude to an object. The doctrine that the meanings of terms in theories are fixed by the role the terms play in the theory as a whole is often called semantic holism. According to the semantic holist, definitions of theoretical terms by appeal to observational terms cannot be given, but all of the theoretical terms have their meaning given “as a group” by the structure of the theory as a whole. A related doctrine in confirmation theory is that confirmation accrues to whole theories, and not to their individual assertions one at a time. This is confirmational holism. To see another conception of cognitive content, conjoin all the sentences of a theory together. Then replace each theoretical term in the sentence so obtained with a predicate variable and existentially quantify over all the predicate variables so introduced. This is the Ramsey sentence for a finitely axiomatized theory. This sentence has the same logical consequences framable in the observational vocabulary alone as did the original theory. It is often claimed that the Ramsey sentence for a theory exhausts the cognitive content of the theory. The Ramsey sentence is supposed to “define” the meaning of the theoretical terms of the original theory as well as have empirical consequences; yet by asserting the existence of the theoretical properties, it is sometimes alleged to remain a realist construal of the theory. The latter claim is made doubtful, however, by the existence of “merely representational” interpretations of the Ramsey sentence. Theories are often said to be so related that one theory is reducible to another. The study of the relation theories bear to one another in this context is said to be the study of intertheoretic reduction. Such reductive claims can have philosophical origins, as in the alleged reduction of material objects to sense-data or of spatiotemporal relations to causal relations, or they can be scientific discoveries, as in the reduction of the theory of light waves to the theory of electromagnetic radiation. Numerous “models” of the reductive relation exist, appropriate for distinct kinds and cases of reduction. The term scientific realism has many and varied uses. Among other things that have been asserted by those who describe themselves as scientific realists are the claims that “mature” scientific theories typically refer to real features of the world, that the history of past falsifications of accepted scientific theories does not provide good reason for persistent skepticism as to the truth claims of contemporary theories, and that the terms of theories that putatively refer to unobservables ought to be taken at their referential face value and not reinterpreted in some instrumentalistic manner. Internal realism denies irrealist claims founded on the past falsification of accepted theories. Internal realists are, however, skeptical of “metaphysical” claims of “correspondence of true theories to the real world” or of any notion of truth that can be construed in radically non-epistemic terms. While theories may converge to some ultimate “true” theory, the notion of truth here must be understood in some version of a Peircian idea of truth as “ultimate warranted assertability.” The claim that any theory that makes reference to posited unobservable features of the world in its explanatory apparatus will always encounter rival theories incompatible with the original theory but equally compatible with all possible observational data that might be taken as confirmatory of the original theory is the claim of the underdetermination thesis. A generalization taken to have “lawlike force” is called a law of nature. Some suggested criteria for generalizations having lawlike force are the ability of the generalization to back up the truth of claims expressed as counterfactual conditions; the ability of the generalization to be confirmed inductively on the basis of evidence that is only a proper subset of all the particular instances falling under the generality; and the generalization having an appropriate place in the simple, systematic hierarchy of generalizations important for fundamental scientific theories of the world. The application of a scientific law to a given actual situation is usually hedged with the proviso that for the law’s predictions to hold, “all other, unspecified, features of the situation are normal.” Such a qualifying clause is called a ceteris paribus clause. Such “everything else being normal” claims cannot usually be “filled out,” revealing important problems concerning the “open texture” of scientific claims. The claim that the full specification of the state of the world at one time is sufficient, along with the laws of nature, to fix the full state of the world at any other time, is the claim of determinism. This is not to be confused with claims of total predictability, since even if determinism were true the full state of the world at a time might be, in principle, unavailable for knowledge. Concepts of the foundations of physical theories. Here, finally, are a few concepts that are crucial in discussing the foundations of physical theories, in particular theories of space and time and quantum theory: The doctrine that space and time must be thought of as a family of spatial and temporal relations holding among the material constituents of the universe is called relationism. Relationists deny that “space itself” should be considered an additional constituent of the world over and above the world’s material contents. The doctrine that “space itself” must be posited as an additional constituent of the world over and above ordinary material things of the world is substantivalism. Mach’s principle is the demand that all physical phenomena, including the existence of inertial forces used by Newton to argue for a substantivalist position, be explainable in purely relationist terms. Mach speculated that Newton’s explanation for the forces in terms of acceleration with respect to “space itself” could be replaced with an explanation resorting to the acceleration of the test object with respect to the remaining matter of the universe the “fixed stars”. In quantum theory the claim that certain “conjugate” quantities, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously “determined” to arbitrary degrees of accuracy is the uncertainty principle. The issue of whether such a lack of simultaneous exact “determination” is merely a limitation on our knowledge of the system or is, instead, a limitation on the system’s having simultaneous exact values of the conjugate quantities, is a fundamental one in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bell’s theorem is a mathematical result aimed at showing that the explanation of the statistical correlations that hold between causally noninteractive systems cannot always rely on the positing that when the systems did causally interact in the past independent values were fixed for some feature of each of the two systems that determined their future observational behavior. The existence of such “local hidden variables” would contradict the correlational predictions of quantum mechanics. The result shows that quantum mechanics has a profoundly “non-local” nature. Can quantum probabilities and correlations be obtained as averages over variables at some deeper level than those specifying the quantum state of a system? If such quantities exist they are called hidden variables. Many different types of hidden variables have been proposed: deterministic, stochastic, local, non-local, etc. A number of proofs exist to the effect that positing certain types of hidden variables would force probabilistic results at the quantum level that contradict the predictions of quantum theory. Complementarity was the term used by Niels Bohr to describe what he took to be a fundamental structure of the world revealed by quantum theory. Sometimes it is used to indicate the fact that magnitudes occur in conjugate pairs subject to the uncertainty relations. Sometimes it is used more broadly to describe such aspects as the ability to encompass some phenomena in a wave picture of the world and other phenomena in a particle picture, but implying that no one picture will do justice to all the experimental results. The orthodox formalization of quantum theory posits two distinct ways in which the quantum state can evolve. When the system is “unobserved,” the state evolves according to the deterministic Schrödinger equation. When “measured,” however, the system suffers a discontinuous “collapse of the wave packet” into a new quantum state determined by the outcome of the measurement process. Understanding how to reconcile the measurement process with the laws of dynamic evolution of the system is the measurement problem. Conservation and symmetry. A number of important physical principles stipulate that some physical quantity is conserved, i.e. that the quantity of it remains invariant over time. Early conservation principles were those of matter mass, of energy, and of momentum. These became assimilated together in the relativistic principle of the conservation of momentum-energy. Other conservation laws such as the conservation of baryon number arose in the theory of elementary particles. A symmetry in physical theory expressed the invariance of some structural feature of the world under some transformation. Examples are translation and rotation invariance in space and the invariance under transformation from one uniformly moving reference frame to another. Such symmetries express the fact that systems related by symmetry transformations behave alike in their physical evolution. Some symmetries are connected with space-time, such as those noted above, whereas others such as the symmetry of electromagnetism under socalled gauge transformations are not. A very important result of the mathematician Emma Noether shows that each conservation law is derivable from the existence of an associated underlying symmetry. Chaos theory and chaotic systems. In the history of the scientific study of deterministic systems, the paradigm of explanation has been the prediction of the future states of a system from a specification of its initial state. In order for such a prediction to be useful, however, nearby initial states must lead to future states that are close to one another. This is now known to hold only in exceptional cases. In general deterministic systems are chaotic systems, i.e., even initial states very close to one another will lead in short intervals of time to future states that diverge quickly from one another. Chaos theory has been developed to provide a wide range of concepts useful for describing the structure of the dynamics of such chaotic systems. The theory studies the features of a system that will determine if its evolution is chaotic or non-chaotic and provides the necessary descriptive categories for characterizing types of chaotic motion. Randomness. The intuitive distinction between a sequence that is random and one that is orderly plays a role in the foundations of probability theory and in the scientific study of dynamical systems. But what is a random sequence? Subjectivist definitions of randomness focus on the inability of an agent to determine, on the basis of his knowledge, the future occurrences in the sequence. Objectivist definitions of randomness seek to characterize it without reference to the knowledge of any agent. Some approaches to defining objective randomness are those that require probability to be the same in the original sequence and in subsequences “mechanically” selectable from it, and those that define a sequence as random if it passes every “effectively constructible” statistical test for randomness. Another important attempt to characterize objective randomness compares the length of a sequence to the length of a computer program used to generate the sequence. The basic idea is that a sequence is random if the computer programs needed to generate the sequence are as long as the sequence itself. H. P. Grice, “My labour with Scientism.”

Scientism – Grice: “Winch is not only happy with natural science that he wants a social science – linguistics included!” -- philosophy of the social sciences, the study of the logic and methods of the social sciences. Central questions include: What are the criteria of a good social explanation? How if at all are the social sciences distinct from the natural sciences? Is there a distinctive method for social research? Through what empirical procedures are social science assertions to be evaluated? Are there irreducible social laws? Are there causal relations among social phenomena? Do social facts and regularities require some form of reduction to facts about individuals? What is the role of theory in social explanation? The philosophy of social science aims to provide an interpretation of the social sciences that answers these questions. The philosophy of social science, like that of natural science, has both a descriptive and a prescriptive side. On the one hand, the field is about the social sciences the explanations, methods, empirical arguments, theories, hypotheses, etc., that actually occur in the social science literature. This means that the philosopher needs extensive knowledge of several areas of social science research in order to be able to formulate an analysis of the social sciences that corresponds appropriately to scientists’ practice. On the other hand, the field is epistemic: it is concerned with the idea that scientific theories and hypotheses are put forward as true or probable, and are justified on rational grounds empirical and theoretical. The philosopher aims to provide a critical evaluation of existing social science methods and practices insofar as these methods are found to be less truth-enhancing than they might be. These two aspects of the philosophical enterprise suggest that philosophy of social science should be construed as a rational reconstruction of existing social science practice a reconstruction guided by existing practice but extending beyond that practice by identifying faulty assumptions, forms of reasoning, and explanatory frameworks. Philosophers have disagreed over the relation between the social and natural sciences. One position is naturalism, according to which the methods of the social sciences should correspond closely to those of the natural sciences. This position is closely related to physicalism, the doctrine that all higher-level phenomena and regularities including social phenomena are ultimately reducible to physical entities and the laws that govern them. On the other side is the view that the social sciences are inherently distinct from the natural sciences. This perspective holds that social phenomena are metaphysically distinguishable from natural phenomena because they are intentional they depend on the meaningful actions of individuals. On this view, natural phenomena admit of causal explanation, whereas social phenomena require intentional explanation. The anti-naturalist position also maintains that there is a corresponding difference between the methods appropriate to natural and social science. Advocates of the Verstehen method hold that there is a method of intuitive interpretation of human action that is radically distinct from methods of inquiry in the natural sciences. One important school within the philosophy of social science takes its origin in this fact of the meaningfulness of human action. Interpretive sociology maintains that the goal of social inquiry is to provide interpretations of human conduct within the context of culturally specific meaningful arrangements. This approach draws an analogy between literary texts and social phenomena: both are complex systems of meaningful elements, and the goal of the interpreter is to provide an interpretation of the elements that makes sense of them. In this respect social science involves a hermeneutic inquiry: it requires that the interpreter should tease out the meanings underlying a particular complex of social behavior, much as a literary critic pieces together an interpretation of the meaning of a complex philosophy of the social sciences philosophy of the social sciences 704 704 literary text. An example of this approach is Weber’s treatment of the relation between capitalism and the Protestant ethic. Weber attempts to identify the elements of western European culture that shaped human action in this environment in such a way as to produce capitalism. On this account, both Calvinism and capitalism are historically specific complexes of values and meanings, and we can better understand the emergence of capitalism by seeing how it corresponds to the meaningful structures of Calvinism. Interpretive sociologists often take the meaningfulness of social phenomena to imply that social phenomena do not admit of causal explanation. However, it is possible to accept the idea that social phenomena derive from the purposive actions of individuals without relinquishing the goal of providing causal explanations of social phenomena. For it is necessary to distinguish between the general idea of a causal relation between two events or conditions and the more specific idea of “causal determination through strict laws of nature.” It is true that social phenomena rarely derive from strict laws of nature; wars do not result from antecedent political tensions in the way that earthquakes result from antecedent conditions in plate tectonics. However, since non-deterministic causal relations can derive from the choices of individual persons, it is evident that social phenomena admit of causal explanation, and in fact much social explanation depends on asserting causal relations between social events and processes e.g., the claim that the administrative competence of the state is a crucial causal factor in determining the success or failure of a revolutionary movement. A central goal of causal explanation is to discover the conditions existing prior to the event that, given the law-governed regularities among phenomena of this sort, were sufficient to produce this event. To say that C is a cause of E is to assert that the occurrence of C, in the context of a field of social processes and mechanisms F, brought about E or increased the likelihood of the occurrence of E. Central to causal arguments in the social sciences is the idea of a causal mechanism a series of events or actions leading from cause to effect. Suppose it is held that the extension of a trolley line from the central city to the periphery caused the deterioration of public schools in the central city. In order to make out such a claim it is necessary to provide some account of the social and political mechanisms that join the antecedent condition to the consequent. An important variety of causal explanation in social science is materialist explanation. This type of explanation attempts to explain a social feature in terms of features of the material environment in the context of which the social phenomenon occurs. Features of the environment that often appear in materialist explanations include topography and climate; thus it is sometimes maintained that banditry thrives in remote regions because the rugged terrain makes it more difficult for the state to repress bandits. But materialist explanations may also refer to the material needs of society e.g., the need to produce food and other consumption goods to support the population. Thus Marx holds that it is the development of the “productive forces” technology that drives the development of property relations and political systems. In each case the materialist explanation must refer to the fact of human agency the fact that human beings are capable of making deliberative choices on the basis of their wants and beliefs in order to carry out the explanation; in the banditry example, the explanation depends on the fact that bandits are prudent enough to realize that their prospects for survival are better in the periphery than in the core. So materialist explanations too accept the point that social phenomena depend on the purposive actions of individuals. A central issue in the philosophy of social science involves the relation between social regularities and facts about individuals. Methodological individualism is the position that asserts the primacy of facts about individuals over facts about social entities. This doctrine takes three forms: a claim about social entities, a claim about social concepts, and a claim about social regularities. The first version maintains that social entities are reducible to ensembles of individuals as an insurance company might be reduced to the ensemble of employees, supervisors, managers, and owners whose actions constitute the company. Likewise, it is sometimes held that social concepts must be reducible to concepts involving only individuals e.g., the concept of a social class might be defined in terms of concepts pertaining only to individuals and their behavior. Finally, it is sometimes held that social regularities must be derivable from regularities of individual behavior. There are several positions opposed to methodological individualism. At the extreme there is methodological holism the doctrine that social entities, facts, and laws are autonomous and irreducible; for example, that social structures such as the state have dynamic properties independent of the beliefs and purposes of the particular persons who occupy positions within the structure. A third position intermediate between these two holds that every social explanation requires microfoundations an account of the circumstances at the individual level that led individuals to behave in such ways as to bring about the observed social regularities. If we observe that an industrial strike is successful over an extended period of time, it is not sufficient to explain this circumstance by referring to the common interest that members of the union have in winning their demands. Rather, we need information about the circumstances of the individual union member that induce him or her to contribute to this public good. The microfoundations dictum does not require, however, that social explanations be couched in non-social concepts; instead, the circumstances of individual agents may be characterized in social terms. Central to most theories of explanation is the idea that explanation depends on general laws governing the phenomena in question. Thus the discovery of the laws of electrodynamics permitted the explanation of a variety of electromagnetic phenomena. But social phenomena derive from the actions of purposive men and women; so what kinds of regularities are available on the basis of which to provide social explanations? A fruitful research framework in the social sciences is the idea that men and women are rational, so it is possible to explain their behavior as the outcome of a deliberation about means of achieving their individual ends. This fact in turn gives rise to a set of regularities about individual behavior that may be used as a ground for social explanation. We may explain some complex social phenomenon as the aggregate result of the actions of a large number of individual agents with a hypothesized set of goals within a structured environment of choice. Social scientists have often been inclined to offer functional explanations of social phenomena. A functional explanation of a social feature is one that explains the presence and persistence of the feature in terms of the beneficial consequences the feature has for the ongoing working of the social system as a whole. It might be held, e.g., that sports clubs in working-class Britain exist because they give working-class people a way of expending energy that would otherwise go into struggles against an exploitative system, thus undermining social stability. Sports clubs are explained, then, in terms of their contribution to social stability. This type of explanation is based on an analogy between biology and sociology. Biologists explain species traits in terms of their contribution to reproductive fitness, and sociologists sometimes explain social traits in terms of their contribution to “social” fitness. However, the analogy is misleading, because there is a general mechanism establishing functionality in the biological realm that is not present in the social realm. This is the mechanism of natural selection, through which a species arrives at a set of traits that are locally optimal. There is no analogous process at work in the social realm, however; so it is groundless to suppose that social traits exist because of their beneficial consequences for the good of society as a whole or important subsystems within society. So functional explanations of social phenomena must be buttressed by specific accounts of the causal processes that underlie the postulated functional relationships. Grice: “It’s a good thing I studied at Oxford: at other places you HAVE to learn a non-Indo-Euroopean lingo!” --.

phrastic: It is convenient to take Grice mocking Hare in Prolegomena. “To say ‘x is good’ is to recommend x.’ An implicaturum: annullable: “x is good but I don’t recommend it.” Hare was well aware of the implicaturum. Loving Grice’s account of ‘or,’ Hare gives the example: “Post the letter: therefore; post the letter or burn it.” Grice mainly quotes Hare’s duet, the phrastic and the neustic, and spends some time exploring what the phrastic actually is. He seems to prefer ‘radix.’ But then Hare also has then the ‘neustic,’ that Grice is not so concerned with since he has his own terminology for it. And for Urmson’s festschrift, Hare comes up with the tropic and the clistic. So each has a Griceian correlate.

physicalism: One of the twelve labours of H. P. Grice. (“As different from Naturalism, you know.”) - Churchland, p. s., philosopher and advocate of neurophilosophy. She received her B.Phil. from Oxford in 9 and held positions at the Unichün-tzu Churchland, Patricia Smith 140 140 versity of Manitoba and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, settling at the ofCalifornia,SanDiego, with appointments in philosophy and the Institute for Neural Computation. Skeptical of philosophy’s a priori specification of mental categories and dissatisfied with computational psychology’s purely top-down approach to their function, Churchland began studying the brain at the of Manitoba medical school. The result was a unique merger of science and philosophy, a “neurophilosophy” that challenged the prevailing methodology of mind. Thus, in a series of articles that includes “Fodor on Language Learning” 8 and “A Perspective on Mind-Brain Research” 0, she outlines a new neurobiologically based paradigm. It subsumes simple non-linguistic structures and organisms, since the brain is an evolved organ; but it preserves functionalism, since a cognitive system’s mental states are explained via high-level neurofunctional theories. It is a strategy of cooperation between psychology and neuroscience, a “co-evolutionary” process eloquently described in Neurophilosophy 6 with the prediction that genuine cognitive phenomena will be reduced, some as conceptualized within the commonsense framework, others as transformed through the sciences. The same intellectual confluence is displayed through Churchland’s various collaborations: with psychologist and computational neurobiologist Terrence Sejnowski in The Computational Brain 2; with neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas in The Mind-Brain Continuum 6; and with philosopher and husband Paul Churchland in On the Contrary 8 she and Paul Churchland are jointly appraised in R. McCauley, The Churchlands and Their Critics, 6. From the viewpoint of neurophilosophy, interdisciplinary cooperation is essential for advancing knowledge, for the truth lies in the intertheoretic details. Churchland: Paul M. b.2, -born philosopher, leading proponent of eliminative materialism. He received his Ph.D. from the of Pittsburgh in 9 and held positions at the Universities of Toronto, Manitoba, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He is professor of philosophy and member of the Institute for Neural Computation at the of California, San Diego. Churchland’s literary corpus constitutes a lucidly written, scientifically informed narrative where his neurocomputational philosophy unfolds. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind 9 maintains that, though science is best construed realistically, perception is conceptually driven, with no observational given, while language is holistic, with meaning fixed by networks of associated usage. Moreover, regarding the structure of science, higher-level theories should be reduced by, incorporated into, or eliminated in favor of more basic theories from natural science, and, in the specific case, commonsense psychology is a largely false empirical theory, to be replaced by a non-sentential, neuroscientific framework. This skepticism regarding “sentential” approaches is a common thread, present in earlier papers, and taken up again in “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes” 1. When fully developed, the non-sentential, neuroscientific framework takes the form of connectionist network or parallel distributed processing models. Thus, with essays in A Neurocomputational Perspective 9, Churchland adds that genuine psychological processes are sequences of activation patterns over neuronal networks. Scientific theories, likewise, are learned vectors in the space of possible activation patterns, with scientific explanation being prototypical activation of a preferred vector. Classical epistemology, too, should be neurocomputationally naturalized. Indeed, Churchland suggests a semantic view whereby synonymy, or the sharing of concepts, is a similarity between patterns in neuronal state-space. Even moral knowledge is analyzed as stored prototypes of social reality that are elicited when an individual navigates through other neurocomputational systems. The entire picture is expressed in The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul 6 and, with his wife Patricia Churchland, by the essays in On the Contrary 8. What has emerged is a neurocomputational embodiment of the naturalist program, a panphilosophy that promises to capture science, epistemology, language, and morals in one broad sweep of its connectionist net. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Physicalism and naturalism.”

physicalism: one of the twelve labours of Grice. in the widest sense of the term, materialism applied to the question of the nature of mind. So construed, physicalism is the thesis call it ontological physicalism that whatever exists or occurs is ultimately constituted out of physical entities. But sometimes ‘physicalism’ is used to refer to the thesis that whatever exists or occurs can be completely described in the vocabulary of physics. Such a view goes with either reductionism or eliminativism about the mental. Here reductionism is the view that psychological explanations, including explanations in terms of “folk-psychological” concepts such as those of belief and desire, are reducible to explanations formulable in a physical vocabulary, which in turn would imply that entities referred to in psychological explanations can be fully described in physical terms; and elminativism is the view that nothing corresponds to the terms in psychological explanations, and that the only correct explanations are in physical terms. The term ‘physicalism’ appears to have originated in the Vienna Circle, and the reductionist version initially favored there was a version of behaviorism: psychological statements were held to be translatable into behavioral statements, mainly hypothetical conditionals, expressible in a physical vocabulary. The psychophysical identity theory held by Herbert Feigl, Smart, and others, sometimes called type physicalism, is reductionist in a somewhat different sense. This holds that mental states and events are identical with neurophysiological states and events. While it denies that there can be analytic, meaning-preserving translations of mental statements into physicalistic ones, it holds that by means of synthetic “bridge laws,” identifying mental types with physical ones, mental statements can in principle be tr. into physicalistic ones with which they are at least nomologically equivalent if the terms in the bridge laws are rigid designators, the equivalence will be necessary. The possibility of such a translation is typically denied by functionalist accounts of mind, on the grounds that the same mental state may have indefinitely many different physical realizations, and sometimes on the grounds that it is logically possible, even if it never happens, that mental states should be realized non-physically. In his classic paper “The ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’ “ 8, Feigl distinguishes two senses of ‘physical’: ‘physical1’ and ‘physical2’. ‘Physical1’ is practically synonymous with ‘scientific’, applying to whatever is “an essential part of the coherent and adequate descriptive and explanatory account of the spatiotemporal world.” ‘Physical2’ refers to “the type of concepts and laws which suffice in principle for the explanation and prediction of inorganic processes.” It would seem that if Cartesian dualism were true, supposing that possible, then once an integrated science of the interaction of immaterial souls and material bodies had been developed, concepts for describing the former would count as physical1. Construed as an ontological doctrine, physicalism says that whatever exists or occurs is entirely constituted out of those entities that constitute inorganic things and processes. Construed as a reductionist or elminativist thesis about description and explanation, it is the claim that a vocabulary adequate for describing and explaining inorganic things and processes is adequate for describing and explaining whatever exists. While the second of these theses seems to imply the first, the first does not imply the second. It can be questioned whether the notion of a “full” description of what exists makes sense. And many ontological physicalists materialists hold that a reduction to explanations couched in the terminology of physics is impossible, not only in the case of psychological explanations but also in the case of explanations couched in the terminology of such special sciences as biology. Their objection to such reduction is not merely that a purely physical description of e.g. biological or psychological phenomena would be unwieldy; it is that such descriptions necessarily miss important laws and generalizations, ones that can only be formulated in terms of biological, psychological, etc., concepts. If ontological physicalists materialists are not committed to the reducibility of psychology to physics, neither are they committed to any sort of identity theory claiming that entities picked out by mental or psychological descriptions are identical to entities fully characterizable by physical descriptions. As already noted, materialists who are functionalists deny that there are typetype identities between mental entities and physical ones. And some deny that materialists are even committed to token-token identities, claiming that any psychological event could have had a different physical composition and so is not identical to any event individuated in terms of a purely physical taxonomy. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “From Physicalism to Naturalism – and Back: fighting two at once!”

physis, Grecian term for nature, primarily used to refer to the nature or essence of a living thing Aristotle, Metaphysics V.4. Physis is defined by Aristotle in Physics II.1 as a source of movement and rest that belongs to something in virtue of itself, and identified by him primarily with the form, rather than the matter, of the thing. The term is also used to refer to the natural world as a whole. Physis is often contrasted with techne, art; in ethics it is also contrasted with nomos, convention, e.g. by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias 482e ff., who distinguishes natural from conventional justice.

physiologicum: Oddly, among the twelve isms that attack Grice on his ascent to the city of eternal truth, there is Naturalism and Physicalism – but Roman natura is Grecian physis. In “Some remarks about the senses,” Grice distinguishes a physicalist identification of the senses (in terms of the different stimuli and the mechanisms that connects the organs to the brain) versus other criteria, notably one involving introspection and the nature of ‘experience’ – “providing,” he adds, that ‘seeing’ is an experience! Grice would use ‘natural,’ relying on the idea that it’s Grecian ‘physis.’ Liddell and Scott have “φύσις,” from “φύω,” and which they render as “origin.” the natural form or constitution of a person or thing as the result of growth, and hence nature, constitution, and nature as an originating power, “φ. λέγεται . . ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις ἡ πρώτη ἐν ἑκάστῳ τῶν φύσει ὄντων” Arist.Metaph.1014b16; concrete, the creation, 'Nature.’ Grice is casual in his use of ‘natural’ versus ‘non-natural’ in 1948 for the Oxford Philosophical Society. In later works, there’s a reference to naturalism, which is more serious. Refs.: The keyword should be ‘naturalism,’ but also Grice’s diatribes against ‘physicalism,’ and of course the ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural,’ BANC.

lapis philosophorum: alchemy: a quasi-scientific practice and mystical art, mainly ancient and medieval, that had two broad aims: to change baser metals into gold and to develop the elixir of life, the means to immortality. Classical Western alchemy probably originated in Egypt in the first three centuries A.D. with earlier Chin. and later Islamic and variants and was practiced in earnest in Europe by such figures as Paracelsus and Newton until the eighteenth century. Western alchemy addressed concerns of practical metallurgy, but its philosophical significance derived from an early Grecian theory of the relations among the basic elements and from a religious-allegorical understanding of the alchemical transmutation of ores into gold, an understanding that treats this process as a spiritual ascent from human toward divine perfection. The purification of crude ores worldly matter into gold material perfection was thought to require a transmuting agent, the philosopher’s stone, a mystical substance that, when mixed with alcohol and swallowed, was believed to produce immortality spiritual perfection. The alchemical search for the philosopher’s stone, though abortive, resulted in the development of ultimately useful experimental tools e.g., the steam pump and methods e.g., distillation.

piaget: philosopher who profoundly influenced questions, theories, and methods in the study of cognitive development. The philosophical interpretation and implications of his work, however, remain controversial. Piaget regarded himself as engaged in genetic epistemology, the study of what knowledge is through an empirical investigation of how our epistemic relations to objects are improved. Piaget hypothesized that our epistemic relations are constructed through the progressive organization of increasingly complex behavioral interactions with physical objects. The cognitive system of the adult is neither learned, in the Skinnerian sense, nor genetically preprogrammed. Rather, it results from the organization of specific interactions whose character is shaped both by the features of the objects interacted with a process called accommodation and by the current cognitive system of the child a process called assimilation. The tendency toward equilibrium results in a change in the nature of the interaction as well as in the cognitive system. Of particular importance for the field of cognitive development were Piaget’s detailed descriptions and categorizations of changes in the organization of the cognitive system from birth through adolescence. That work focused on changes in the child’s understanding of such things as space, time, cause, number, length, weight, and morality. Among his major works are The Child’s Conception of Number 1, Biology and Knowledge 7, Genetic Epistemology 0, and Psychology and Epistemology 0.

pico della mirandola -- philosopher who wrote a series of 900 theses which he hoped to dispute publicly in Rome. Thirteen of these theses are criticized by a papal commission. When Pico defends himself in his “Apologia,” the pope condemns all 900 theses. Pico flees to France, but is imprisoned. On his escape, he returns to Florence and devotes himself to private study at the swimming-pool at his villa. He hoped to write a Concord of Plato and Aristotle, but the only part he was able to complete was “On Being and the One,” – “Blame it on the Toscana!” -- in which he uses Aquinas and Christianity to reconcile Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about God’s being and unity. Mirandola is often described as a syncretist, but in fact he made it clear that the truth of Christianity has priority over the prisca theologia or ancient wisdom found in the hermetic corpus and the cabala. Though he was interested in magic and astrology, Mirandola adopts a guarded attitude toward them in his “Heptaplus,” which contains a mystical interpretation of Genesis; and in his Disputations Against Astrology, he rejects them both. The treatise is largely technical, and the question of human freedom is set aside as not directly relevant. This fact casts some doubt on the popular thesis that Pico’s philosophy is a celebration of man’s freedom and dignity. Great weight has been placed on Pico’s “On the Dignity of Man.” This is a short oration intended as an introduction to the disputation of his 900 theses – all condemned by the evil pope --, and the title was suggested by his wife (“She actually suggested, “On the dignity of woman,” but I found that otiose.””). Mirandola has been interpreted as saying that man (or woman) is set apart from the rest of creation, and is completely free to form his (or her) own nature. In fact, as The Heptaplus shows, Pico sees man as a microcosm containing elements of the angelic, celestial, and elemental worlds. Man (if not woman) is thus firmly within the hierarchy of nature, and is a bond and link between the worlds. In the oration, the emphasis on freedom is a moral one: man is free to choose between good and evil. Grice: “This irritated Nietzsche so much that he wrote ‘beyond good and evil.’ Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Goodwill and illwill – must we have both?”

pilgrimage: Grice’s pilgrimage. In his pilgrimage towards what he calls the city of Eternal Truth he finds twelve perils – which he lists. The first is Extensionalism (as opposed to Intensionalism – vide intentum -- consequentes rem intellectam: intendere est essentialiter ipsum esse intentio ... quam a concepto sibi adequato: Odint 226; esse intentum est esse non reale: The second is Nominalism (opposite Realism and Conceptualism – Universalism, Abstractionism). It is funny that Grice was criticised for representing each of the perils!The third is Positivism. Opposite to Negativism. Just kidding. Opposite to anything Sir Freddie Ayer was opposite to!The fourth is Naturalism. Opposite Non-Naturalism. Just joking! But that’s the hateful word brought by G. E. Moore, whom Grice liked (“Some like Witters, but Moore’s MY man.”) The fifth is Mechanism. Opposite Libertarianism, or Finalism, But I guess one likes Libertarianism.The sixth is Phenomenalism. You cannot oppose it to Physicalism, beause that comes next. So this is G. A. Paul (“Is there a problem about sense data?). And the opposite is anything this Scots philosopher was against!The seventh is Reductionism. Opposite Reductivism. Grice was proud to teach J. M. Rountree the distinction between a benevolent reductionist and a malignant eliminationist reductionist. The eighth is physicalism.Opposite metaphysicalism. The ninth is materialism. Hyleism. Opposite Formalism. Or Immaterialism. The tenth is Empiricism. Opposite Rationalism. The eleventh is Scepticism.Opposite Dogmatism.and the twelfth is functionalism. Opposite Grice! So now let’s order the twelve perils alphabetically. Empiricism. Extensionalism. Functionalism. MaterialismMechanism. Naturalism. Nominalism. Phenomenalism. Positivism. Physicalism. Reductionism. Scepticism. Now let us see how they apply to the theory of the conversational implicaturum and conversation as rational cooperation. Empiricism – Grice is an avowed rationalist.Extensionalism – His main concern is that the predicate in the proposition which is communicated is void, we yield the counterintuitive result that an emissor who communicates that the S is V, where V is vacuous communicates the same thing he would be communicating for any other vacuous predicate V’Functionalism – There is a purely experiential qualia in some emissor communicating that p that is not covered by the common-or-garden variety of functionalism. E.g. “I love myself.” Materialism – rationalism means dealing with a realm of noumena which goes beyond materialismMechanism – rationalism entails end-setting unweighed finality and freedom. Naturalism – communication involves optimality which is beyond naturalism Nominalism – a predicate is an abstractum. Phenomenalism – there is realism which gives priority to the material thing, not the sense datum. A sense datum of an apple does not nourish us. Positivism – an emissor may communicate a value, which is not positivistically reduced to something verifiable. Physicalism – there must be multiple realization, and many things physicalists say sound ‘harsh’ to Grice’s ears (“Smith’s brain being in state C doesn’t have adequate evidence”). Reductionism – We are not eliminating anything. Scepticism – there are dogmas which are derived from paradigm cases, even sophisticated ones.How to introduce the twelve entriesEmpiricism – from Greek empereia – cf. etymology for English ‘experience.’Extensionalism -- extensumFunctionalism – functum. Materialism -- Mechanism Naturalism Nominalism Phenomenalism Positivism Physicalism Reductionism Scepticism. this section events are reviewed according to principal scenes of action. Place names appear in the order in which major incidents occur. City of Destruction. The city stands as a symbol of the entire world as it is, with all of its sins, corruptions, and sorrows. No one living there can have any hope of salvation. Convinced that the city is about to be blasted by the wrath of God, Christian flees and sets out alone on a pilgrimage which he hopes will lead him to Mount Zion, to the Celestial City, where he can enjoy eternal life in the happy company of God and the Heavenly Host. Slough of Despond. A swamp, a bog, a quagmire, the first obstacle in Christian's course. Pilgrims are apt to get mired down here by their doubts and fears. After much difficulty and with some providential help, Christian finally manages to flounder across the treacherous bog and is on his way again. Village of Morality. Near the village Christian meets Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who, though not religiously inclined, is a friendly and well-disposed person. He tells Christian that it would be foolish of him to continue his pilgrimage, the end of which could only be hunger, pain, and death. Christian should be a sensible fellow and settle down in the Village of Morality. It would be a good place to raise a family, for living was cheap there and they would have honest, well-behaved people as neighbors — people who lived by the Ten Commandments. More than a little tempted by this, Christian decides that he should at least have a look at Morality. But along the way he is stopped by his friend Evangelist, who berates him sharply for having listened to anything Mr. Worldly Wiseman might have to say. If Christian is seriously interested in saving his soul, he would be well advised to get back as quickly as possible on the path to the Wicket Gate which Evangelist had pointed out to him before. Wicket Gate. Arriving almost out of breath, Christian reads the sign on the gate: "Knock and it shall be opened unto you." He knocks a number of times before arousing the gatekeeper, a "grave person" named Good-will, who comes out to ask what Christian wants. After the latter has explained his mission, he is let through the gate, which opens on the Holy Way, a straight and narrow path leading toward the Celestial City. Christian asks if he can now be relieved of the heavy burden — a sack filled with his sins and woes — that he has been carrying on his back for so long. Good-will replies that he cannot help him, but that if all goes well, Christian will be freed of his burden in due course. Interpreter's House. On Good-will's advice, Christian makes his first stop at the large house of Interpreter, a character symbolizing the Holy Spirit. Interpreter shows his guest a number of "excellent things." These include a portrait of the ideal pastor with the Bible in his hand and a crown of gold on his head; a dusty parlor which is like the human heart before it is cleansed with the Gospel; a sinner in an iron cage, an apostate doomed to suffer the torments of Hell through all eternity; a wall with a fire burning against it. A figure (the Devil himself) is busily throwing water on the fire to put it out. But he would never succeed, Interpreter explains, because the fire represents the divine spirit in the human heart and a figure on the far side of the wall keeps the fire burning brightly by secretly pouring oil on it — "the oil of Christ's Grace." The Cross. Beyond Interpreter's House, Christian comes to the Cross, which stands on higher ground beside the Holy Way. Below it, at the foot of the gentle slope, is an open sepulcher. When Christian stops by the Cross, the burden on his back suddenly slips from his shoulders, rolls down the slope, and falls into the open sepulcher, to be seen no more. As Christian stands weeping with joy, three Shining Ones (angels) appear. They tell him all his sins are now forgiven, give him bright new raiment to replace his old ragged clothes, and hand him a parchment, "a Roll with a seal upon it." For his edification and instruction, Christian is to read the Roll as he goes along, and when he reaches the Pearly Gates, he is to present it as his credentials a sort of passport to Heaven, as it were. Difficulty Hill. The Holy Way beyond the Cross is fenced in with a high wall on either side. The walls have been erected to force all aspiring Pilgrims to enter the Holy Way in the proper manner, through the Wicket Gate. As Christian is passing along, two men — Formalist and Hypocrisy — climb over the wall and drop down beside him. Christian finds fault with this and gives the wall-jumpers a lecture on the dangers of trying shortcuts. They have been successfully taking shortcuts all their lives, the intruders reply, and all will go well this time. Not too pleased with his company, Christian proceeds with Hypocrisy and Formalist to the foot of Difficulty Hill, where three paths join and they must make a choice. One path goes straight ahead up the steep slope of the hill; another goes around the base of the hill to the right; the third, around the hill to the left. Christian argues that the right path is the one leading straight ahead up Difficulty Hill. Not liking the prospect of much exertion, Formalist and Hypocrisy decide to take the easier way on the level paths going around the hill. Both get lost and perish. Halfway up Difficulty Hill, so steep in places that he has to inch forward on hands and knees, Christian comes to a pleasant arbor provided for the comfort of weary Pilgrims. Sitting down to rest, Christian reaches into his blouse and takes out his precious Roll. While reading it, he drops off to sleep, being awakened when he hears a voice saying sternly: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." Jumping up, Christian makes with all speed to the top of the hill, where he meets two Pilgrims coming toward him — Timorous and Mistrust. They have been up ahead, they say, and there are lions there. They are giving up their pilgrimage and returning home, and unsuccessfully try to persuade Christian to come with them. Their report about the lions disturbs Christian, who reaches into his blouse to get his Roll so that he may read it and be comforted. To his consternation, the Roll is not there. Carefully searching along the way, Christian retraces his steps to the arbor, where, as he recalls, he had been reading the Roll when he allowed himself to doze off in "sinful sleep." Not finding his treasure immediately, he sits down and weeps, considering himself utterly undone by his carelessness in losing "his pass into the Celestial City." When in deepest despair, he chances to see something lying half-covered in the grass. It is his precious Roll, which he tucks away securely in his blouse. Having offered a prayer of thanks "to God for directing his eye to the place where it lay," Christian wearily climbs back to the top of Difficulty Hill. From there he sees a stately building and as it is getting on toward dark, hastens there. Palace Beautiful. A narrow path leads off the Holy Way to the lodge in front of Palace Beautiful. Starting up the path, Christian sees two lions, stops, and turns around as if to retreat. The porter at the lodge, Watchful, who has been observing him, calls out that there is nothing to be afraid of if one has faith. The lions are chained, one on either side of the path, and anyone with faith can pass safely between them if he keeps carefully to the middle of the path, which Christian does. Arriving at the lodge, he asks if he can get lodging for the night. The porter, Watchful, replies that he will find out from those in charge of Palace Beautiful. Soon, four virgins come out to the lodge, all of them "grave and beautiful damsels": Discretion, Prudence, Piety, and Charity. Satisfied with Christian's answers to their questions, they invite him in, introduce him to the rest of the family, serve him supper, and assign him to a beautiful bedroom — Peace — for the night. Next morning, the virgins show him the "rarities" of the place: First, the library, filled with ancient documents dating back to the beginning of time; next, the armory, packed with swords, shields, helmets, breastplates, and other things sufficient to equip all servants of the Lord, even if they were as numerous as the stars in the sky. Leading their guest to the roof of the palace, the virgins point to mountains in the distance — the Delectable Mountains, which lie on the way to the Celestial City. Before allowing Christian to depart, the virgins give him arms and armor to protect himself during the next stretch of his journey, which they warn will be dangerous. Valley of Humiliation. Here Christian is attacked and almost overcome by a "foul fiend" named Apollyon — a hideous monster with scales like a fish, wings like a dragon, mouth like a lion, and feet like a bear; flames and smoke belch out of a hole in his belly. Christian, after a painful struggle, wounds the fiend with his sword and drives him off. Valley of the Shadow of Death. This is a wilderness, a land of deserts and pits, inhabited only by yowling hobgoblins and other dreadful creatures. The path here is very narrow, edged on one side by a deep, water-filled ditch in which many have drowned; on the other side, by a treacherous bog. Walking carefully, Christian goes on and soon finds himself close to the open mouth of Hell, the Burning Pit, out of which comes a cloud of noxious fumes, long fingers of fire, showers of sparks, and hideous noises. With flames flickering all around and smoke almost choking him, Christian manages to get through by use of "All-prayer." Nearing the end of the valley, he hears a shout raised by someone up ahead: "Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear none ill, for Thou art with me." As only a Pilgrim could have raised that cry, Christian hastens forward to see who it might be. To his surprise and delight he finds that it is an old friend, Faithful, one of his neighbors in the City of Destruction. Vanity Fair. Happily journeying together, exchanging stories about their adventures and misadventures, the two Pilgrims come to the town of Vanity Fair, through which they must pass. Interested only in commerce and money-making, the town holds a year-round fair at which all kinds of things are bought and sold — "houses, lands, trades, titles, . . . lusts, pleasures, . . . bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." Christian and Faithful infuriate the merchandisers by turning up their noses at the wares offered them, saying that they would buy nothing but the Truth. Their presence and their attitude cause a hubbub in the town, which leads the authorities to jail them for disturbing the peace. The prisoners conduct themselves so well that they win the sympathy of many townspeople, producing more strife and commotion in the streets, and the prisoners are held responsible for this, too, though they have done nothing. It is decided to indict them on the charge of disrupting trade, creating dissension, and treating with contempt the customs and laws laid down for the town by its prince, old Beelzebub himself. Brought to trial first, Faithful is convicted and sentenced to be executed in the manner prescribed by the presiding judge, Lord Hate-good. The hapless Faithful is scourged, brutally beaten, lanced with knives, stoned, and then burned to ashes at the stake. Thus, he becomes another of the Christian martyrs assured of enjoying eternal bliss up on high. Doubting Castle and Giant Despair. In a manner only vaguely explained, Christian gets free and goes on his way — but not alone, for he has been joined by Hopeful, a native of Vanity Fair who is fleeing in search of better things. After a few minor adventures, the two reach a sparkling stream, the River of the Water of Life, which meanders through beautiful meadows bright with flowers. For a time the Holy Way follows the river bank but then veers off into rougher ground which is hard on the sore tired feet of the travelers. Wishing there were an easier way, they plod along until they come to another meadow behind a high fence. Having climbed the fence to have a look, Christian persuades Hopeful that they should move over into By-path Meadow, where there is a soft grassy path paralleling theirs. Moving along, they catch up with Vain-confidence, who says that he is bound for the Celestial City and knows the way perfectly. Night comes on, but he continues to push ahead briskly, with Christian and Hopeful following. Suddenly, the latter hear a frightened cry and a loud thud. Vain-confidence has been dashed to pieces by falling into a deep pit dug by the owner of the meadow. Christian and Hopeful retreat, but as they can see nothing in the dark, they decide to lie down in the meadow to pass the night. Next morning, they are surprised and seized by the prince of By-path Meadow, a giant named Despair. Charging them with malicious trespassing, he hauls them to his stronghold, Doubting Castle, and throws them into a deep dark dungeon, where they lie for days without food or drink. At length, Giant Despair appears, beats them almost senseless, and advises them to take their own lives so that he will not have to come back to finish them off himself. When all seems hopeless, Christian suddenly brightens up, "as one half amazed," and exclaims: "What a fool am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon when I may as well walk at liberty. I have a key in my bosom called Promise which will (I am persuaded) open any lock in Doubting Castle." Finding that the magic key works, the prisoners are soon out in the open and running as fast as they can to get back onto the Holy Way, where they erect a sign warning other Pilgrims against being tempted by the apparent ease of traveling by way of By-path Meadow. Delectable Mountains. Christian and Hopeful next come to the Delectable Mountains, where they find gardens, orchards, vineyards, and fountains of water. Four shepherds — Experience, Knowledge, Watchful, and Sincere — come to greet them, telling them that the mountains are the Lord's, as are the flocks of sheep grazing there. Having been escorted around the mountains and shown the sights there, the two Pilgrims on the eve of their departure receive from the shepherds a paper instructing them on what to do and what to avoid on the journey ahead. For one thing, they should not lie down and sleep in the Enchanted Ground, for that would be fatal. Country of Beulah. This is a happy land where the sun shines day and night, flowers bloom continuously, and the sweet and pleasant air is filled with bird-song. There is no lack of grain and wine. Christian and Hopeful stop to rest and enjoy themselves here, pleased that the Celestial City is now within sight, which leads them to assume that the way there is now clear. Dark River. Proceeding, they are amazed when they come to the Dark River, a wide, swift-flowing stream. They look around for a bridge or boat on which to cross. A Shining One appears and tells them that they must make their way across as best they can, that fording the river is a test of faith, that those with faith have nothing to fear. Wading into the river, Hopeful finds firm footing, but Christian does not He is soon floundering in water over his head, fearing that he will be drowned, that he will never see "the land that flows with milk and honey." Hopeful helps Christian by holding his head above water, and the two finally achieve the crossing. Celestial City. On the far side of the river, two Shining Ones are waiting for the Pilgrims and take them by the arm to assist them in climbing the steep slope to the Celestial City, which stands on a "mighty hill . . . higher than the clouds." Coming to the gate of the city, built all of precious stones, Christian and Hopeful present their credentials, which are taken to the King (God). He orders the gate to be opened, and the two weary but elated Pilgrims go in, to find that the streets are paved with gold and that along them walk many men with crowns on their heads and golden harps in their hands.

Plantinga: Grice, “A philosopher of religion – which means he is not possibly good at it! I kid!” – Plantinga’s deas have determined the direction of debate in many aspects of the discipline. He has also contributed substantially to analytic epistemology and the metaphysics of modality. Plantinga is director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion and John O’Brien (an Irishman) Professor of Philosophy at the of Notre Dame. Plantinga’s philosophy of religion has centered on the epistemology of religious belief. His God and Other Minds 7 introduced a defining claim of his career that belief in God may be rational even if it is not supported by successful arguments from natural theology. This claim was fully developed in a series of articles published in the 0s, in which he argued for the position he calls “Reformed Epistemology.” Borrowing from the work of theologians such as Calvin, Bavinck, and Barth, Plantinga reasoned that theistic belief is “properly basic,” justified not by other beliefs but by immediate experience. This position was most thoroughly treated in his article “Reason and Belief in God” Plantinga and Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality, 3. In early work Plantinga assumed an internalist view of epistemic justification. Later he moved to externalism, arguing that basic theistic belief would count as knowledge if true and appropriately produced. He developed this approach in “Justification and Theism” Faith and Philosophy, 7. These ideas led to the development of a full-scale externalist epistemological theory, first presented in his 9 Gifford Lectures and later published in the two-volume set Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function 3. This theory has become the focal point of much contemporary debate in analytic epistemology. Plantinga is also a leading theorist in the metaphysics of modality. The Nature of Necessity 4 developed a possible worlds semantics that has become standard in the literature. His analysis of possible worlds as maximally consistent states of affairs offers a realist compromise between nominalist and extreme reificationist conceptions. In the last two chapters, Plantinga brings his modal metaphysics to bear on two classical topics in the philosophy of religion. He presented what many consider the definitive version of the free will defense against the argument from evil and a modal version of the ontological argument that may have produced more response than any version since Anselm’s original offering.

platonic --: Grice: “At Oxford you HAVE to be platonic! Aristotelian is jaded!” -- H. P. Grice as a Platonian commentator – vide his “Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato’s Republic” -- commentaries on Plato, a term designating the works in the tradition of commentary hypomnema on Plato that may go back to the Old Academy Crantor is attested by Proclus to have been the first to have “commented” on the Timaeus. More probably, the tradition arises in the first century B.C. in Alexandria, where we find Eudorus commenting, again, on the Timaeus, but possibly also if the scholars who attribute to him the Anonymous Theaetetus Commentary are correct on the Theaetetus. It seems also as if the Stoic Posidonius composed a commentary of some sort on the Timaeus. The commentary form such as we can observe in the biblical commentaries of Philo of Alexandria owes much to the Stoic tradition of commentary on Homer, as practiced by the second-century B.C. School of Pergamum. It was normal to select usually consecutive portions of text lemmata for general, and then detailed, comment, raising and answering “problems” aporiai, refuting one’s predecessors, and dealing with points of both doctrine and philology. By the second century A.D. the tradition of Platonic commentary was firmly established. We have evidence of commentaries by the Middle Platonists Gaius, Albinus, Atticus, Numenius, and Cronius, mainly on the Timaeus, but also on at least parts of the Republic, as well as a work by Atticus’s pupil Herpocration of Argos, in twentyfour books, on Plato’s work as a whole. These works are all lost, but in the surviving works of Plutarch we find exegesis of parts of Plato’s works, such as the creation of the soul in the Timaeus 35a36d. The Latin commentary of Calcidius fourth century A.D. is also basically Middle Platonic. In the Neoplatonic period after Plotinus, who did not indulge in formal commentary, though many of his essays are in fact informal commentaries, we have evidence of much more comprehensive exegetic activity. Porphyry initiated the tradition with commentaries on the Phaedo, commentaries on Plato commentaries on Plato 160 160 Cratylus, Sophist, Philebus, Parmenides of which the surviving anonymous fragment of commentary is probably a part, and the Timaeus. He also commented on the myth of Er in the Republic. It seems to have been Porphyry who is responsible for introducing the allegorical interpretation of the introductory portions of the dialogues, though it was only his follower Iamblichus who also commented on all the above dialogues, as well as the Alcibiades and the Phaedrus who introduced the principle that each dialogue should have only one central theme, or skopos. The tradition was carried on in the Athenian School by Syrianus and his pupils Hermeias on the Phaedrus surviving and Proclus Alcibiades, Cratylus, Timaeus, Parmenides all surviving, at least in part, and continued in later times by Damascius Phaedo, Philebus, Parmenides and Olympiodorus Alcibiades, Phaedo, Gorgias also surviving, though sometimes only in the form of pupils’ notes. These commentaries are not now to be valued primarily as expositions of Plato’s thought though they do contain useful insights, and much valuable information; they are best regarded as original philosophical treatises presented in the mode of commentary, as is so much of later Grecian philosophy, where it is not originality but rather faithfulness to an inspired master and a great tradition that is being striven for. Platonism Platonism -- Damascius c.462c.550, Grecian Neoplatonist philosopher, last head of the Athenian Academy before its closure by Justinian in A.D. 529. Born probably in Damascus, he studied first in Alexandria, and then moved to Athens shortly before Proclus’s death in 485. He returned to Alexandria, where he attended the lectures of Ammonius, but came back again to Athens in around 515, to assume the headship of the Academy. After the closure, he retired briefly with some other philosophers, including Simplicius, to Persia, but left after about a year, probably for Syria, where he died. He composed many works, including a life of his master Isidorus, which survives in truncated form; commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories, On the Heavens, and Meteorologics I all lost; commentaries on Plato’s Alcibiades, Phaedo, Philebus, and Parmenides, which survive; and a surviving treatise On First Principles. His philosophical system is a further elaboration of the scholastic Neoplatonism of Proclus, exhibiting a great proliferation of metaphysical entities. Platonism -- Eudoxus, Grecian astronomer and mathematician, a student of Plato. He created a test of the equality of two ratios, invented the method of exhaustion for calculating areas and volumes within curved boundaries, and introduced an astronomical system consisting of homocentric celestial spheres. This system views the visible universe as a set of twenty-seven spheres contained one inside the other and each concentric to the earth. Every celestial body is located on the equator of an ideal eudaimonia Eudoxus of Cnidus 291 291 sphere that revolves with uniform speed on its axis. The poles are embedded in the surface of another sphere, which also revolves uniformly around an axis inclined at a constant angle to that of the first sphere. In this way enough spheres are introduced to capture the apparent motions of all heavenly bodies. Aristotle adopted the system of homocentric spheres and provided a physical interpretation for it in his cosmology. R.E.B. Euler diagram, a logic diagram invented by the mathematician Euler that represents standard form statements in syllogistic logic by two circles and a syllogism by three circles. In modern adaptations of Euler diagrams, distributed terms are represented by complete circles and undistributed terms by partial circles circle segments or circles made with dotted lines: Euler diagrams are more perspicuous ways of showing validity and invalidity of syllogisms than Venn diagrams, but less useful as a mechanical test of validity since there may be several choices of ways to represent a syllogism in Euler diagrams, only one of which will show that the syllogism is invalid. Plato: preeminent Grecian philosopher whose chief contribution consists in his conception of the observable world as an imperfect image of a realm of unobservable and unchanging “Forms,” and his conception of the best life as one centered on the love of these divine objects. Life and influences. Born in Athens to a politically powerful and aristocratic family, Plato came under the influence of Socrates during his youth and set aside his ambitions for a political career after Socrates was executed for impiety. His travels in southern Italy and Sicily brought him into closer contact with the followers of Pythagoras, whose research in mathematics played an important role in his intellectual development. He was also acquainted with Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus, and was influenced by their doctrine that the world is in constant flux. He wrote in opposition to the relativism of Protagoras and the purely materialistic mode of explanation adopted by Democritus. At the urging of a devoted follower, Dion, he became involved in the politics of Syracuse, the wealthiest city of the Grecian world, but his efforts to mold the ideas of its tyrant, Dionysius II, were unmitigated failures. These painful events are described in Plato’s Letters Epistles, the longest and most important of which is the Seventh Letter, and although the authenticity of the Letters is a matter of controversy, there is little doubt that the author was well acquainted with Plato’s life. After returning from his first visit to Sicily in 387, Plato established the Academy, a fraternal association devoted to research and teaching, and named after the sacred site on the outskirts of Athens where it was located. As a center for political training, it rivaled the school of Isocrates, which concentrated entirely on rhetoric. The bestknown student of the Academy was Aristotle, who joined at the age of seventeen when Plato was sixty and remained for twenty years. Chronology of the works. Plato’s works, many of which take the form of dialogues between Socrates and several other speakers, were composed over a period of about fifty years, and this has led scholars to seek some pattern of philosophical development in them. Increasingly sophisticated stylometric tests have been devised to calculate the linguistic similarities among the dialogues. Ancient sources indicate that the Laws was Plato’s last work, and there is now consensus that many affinities exist between the style of this work and several others, which can therefore also be safely regarded as late works; these include the Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus perhaps written in that order. Stylometric tests also support a rough division of Plato’s other works into early and middle periods. For example, the Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, and Protagoras listed alphabetically are widely thought to be early; while the Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus perhaps written in that order are agreed to belong to his middle period. But in some cases it is difficult or impossible to tell which of two works belonging to the same general period preceded the other; this is especially true of the early dialogues. The most controversial chronological question concerns the Timaeus: stylometric tests often place it with the later dialogues, though some scholars think that its philosophical doctrines are discarded in the later dialogues, and they therefore assign it to Plato’s middle period. The underlying issue is whether he abandoned some of the main doctrines of this middle period. Early and middle dialogues. The early dialogues typically portray an encounter between Socrates and an interlocutor who complacently assumes that he understands a common evaluative concept like courage, piety, or beauty. For example, Euthyphro, in the dialogue that bears his name, denies that there is any impiety in prosecuting his father, but repeated questioning by Socrates shows that he cannot say what single thing all pious acts have in common by virtue of which they are rightly called pious. Socrates professes to have no answer to these “What is X?” questions, and this fits well with the claim he makes in the Apology that his peculiarly human form of wisdom consists in realizing how little he knows. In these early dialogues, Socrates seeks but fails to find a philosophically defensible theory that would ground our use of normative terms. The Meno is similar to these early dialogues it asks what virtue is, and fails to find an answer but it goes beyond them and marks a transition in Plato’s thinking. It raises for the first time a question about methodology: if one does not have knowledge, how is it possible to acquire it simply by raising the questions Socrates poses in the early dialogues? To show that it is possible, Plato demonstrates that even a slave ignorant of geometry can begin to learn the subject through questioning. The dialogue then proposes an explanation of our ability to learn in this way: the soul acquired knowledge before it entered the body, and when we learn we are really recollecting what we once knew and forgot. This bold speculation about the soul and our ability to learn contrasts with the noncommittal position Socrates takes in the Apology, where he is undecided whether the dead lose all consciousness or continue their activities in Hades. The confidence in immortality evident in the Meno is bolstered by arguments given in the Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus. In these dialogues, Plato uses metaphysical considerations about the nature of the soul and its ability to learn to support a conception of what the good human life is. Whereas the Socrates of the early dialogues focuses almost exclusively on ethical questions and is pessimistic about the extent to which we can answer them, Plato, beginning with the Meno and continuing throughout the rest of his career, confidently asserts that we can answer Socratic questions if we pursue ethical and metaphysical inquiries together. The Forms. The Phaedo is the first dialogue in which Plato decisively posits the existence of the abstract objects that he often called “Forms” or “Ideas.” The latter term should be used with caution, since these objects are not creations of a mind, but exist independently of thought; the singular Grecian terms Plato often uses to name these abstract objects are eidos and idea. These Forms are eternal, changeless, and incorporeal; since they are imperceptible, we can come to have knowledge of them only through thought. Plato insists that it would be an error to identify two equal sticks with what Equality itself is, or beautiful bodies with what Beauty itself is; after all, he says, we might mistakenly take two equal sticks to be unequal, but we would never suffer from the delusion that Equality itself is unequal. The unchanging and incorporeal Form is the sort of object that is presupposed by Socratic inquiry; what every pious act has in common with every other is that it bears a certain relationship called “participation” to one and the same thing, the Form of Piety. In this sense, what makes a pious act pious and a pair of equal sticks equal are the Forms Piety and Equality. When we call sticks equal or acts pious, we are implicitly appealing to a standard of equality or piety, just as someone appeals to a standard when she says that a painted portrait of someone is a man. Of course, the pigment on the canvas is not a man; rather, it is properly called a man because it bears a certain relationship to a very different sort of object. In precisely this way, Plato claims that the Forms are what many of our words refer to, even though they are radically different sorts of objects from the ones revealed to the senses. For Plato the Forms are not merely an unusual item to be added to our list of existing objects. Rather, they are a source of moral and religious inspiration, and their discovery is therefore a decisive turning point in one’s life. This process is described by a fictional priestess named Diotima in the Symposium, a dialogue containing a series of speeches in praise of love and concluding with a remarkable description of the passionate response Socrates inspired in Alcibiades, his most notorious admirer. According to Diotima’s account, those who are in love are searching for something they do not yet understand; whether they realize it or not, they seek the eternal possession of the good, and they can obtain it only through productive activity of some sort. Physical love perpetuates the species and achieves a lower form of immortality, but a more beautiful kind of offspring is produced by those who govern cities and shape the moral characteristics of future generations. Best of all is the kind of love that eventually attaches itself to the Form of Beauty, since this is the most beautiful of all objects and provides the greatest happiness to the lover. One develops a love for this Form by ascending through various stages of emotional attachment and understanding. Beginning with an attraction to the beauty of one person’s body, one gradually develops an appreciation for the beauty present in all other beautiful bodies; then one’s recognition of the beauty in people’s souls takes on increasing strength, and leads to a deeper attachment to the beauty of customs, laws, and systems of knowledge; and this process of emotional growth and deepening insight eventually culminates in the discovery of the eternal and changeless beauty of Beauty itself. Plato’s theory of erotic passion does not endorse “Platonic love,” if that phrase designates a purely spiritual relationship completely devoid of physical attraction or expression. What he insists on is that desires for physical contact be restrained so that they do not subvert the greater good that can be accomplished in human relationships. His sexual orientation like that of many of his Athenian contemporaries is clearly homosexual, and he values the moral growth that can occur when one man is physically attracted to another, but in Book I of the Laws he condemns genital activity when it is homosexual, on the ground that such activity should serve a purely procreative purpose. Plato’s thoughts about love are further developed in the Phaedrus. The lover’s longing for and physical attraction to another make him disregard the norms of commonplace and dispassionate human relationships: love of the right sort is therefore one of four kinds of divine madness. This fourfold classificatory scheme is then used as a model of proper methodology. Starting with the Phaedrus, classification what Plato calls the “collection and division of kinds” becomes the principal method to be used by philosophers, and this approach is most fully employed in such late works as the Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus. Presumably it contributed to Aristotle’s interest in categories and biological classification. The Republic. The moral and metaphysical theory centered on the Forms is most fully developed in the Republic, a dialogue that tries to determine whether it is in one’s own best interests to be a just person. It is commonly assumed that injustice pays if one can get away with it, and that just behavior merely serves the interests of others. Plato attempts to show that on the contrary justice, properly understood, is so great a good that it is worth any sacrifice. To support this astonishing thesis, he portrays an ideal political community: there we will see justice writ large, and so we will be better able to find justice in the individual soul. An ideal city, he argues, must make radical innovations. It should be ruled by specially trained philosophers, since their understanding of the Form of the Good will give them greater insight into everyday affairs. Their education is compared to that of a prisoner who, having once gazed upon nothing but shadows in the artificial light of a cave, is released from bondage, leaves the cave, eventually learns to see the sun, and is thereby equipped to return to the cave and see the images there for what they are. Everything in the rulers’ lives is designed to promote their allegiance to the community: they are forbidden private possessions, their sexual lives are regulated by eugenic considerations, and they are not to know who their children are. Positions of political power are open to women, since the physical differences between them and men do not in all cases deprive them of the intellectual or moral capacities needed for political office. The works of poets are to be carefully regulated, for the false moral notions of the traditional poets have had a powerful and deleterious impact on the general public. Philosophical reflection is to replace popular poetry as the force that guides moral education. What makes this city ideally just, according to Plato, is the dedication of each of its components to one task for which it is naturally suited and specially trained. The rulers are ideally equipped to rule; the soldiers are best able to enforce their commands; and the economic class, composed of farmers, craftsmen, builders, and so on, are content to do their work and to leave the tasks of making and enforcing the laws to others. Accordingly what makes the soul of a human being just is the same principle: each of its components must properly perform its own task. The part of us that is capable of understanding and reasoning is the part that must rule; the assertive part that makes us capable of anger and competitive spirit must give our understanding the force it needs; and our appetites for food and sex must be trained so that they seek only those objects that reason approves. It is not enough to educate someone’s reason, for unless the emotions and appetites are properly trained they will overpower it. Just individuals are those who have fully integrated these elements of the soul. They do not unthinkingly follow a list of rules; rather, their just treatment of others flows from their own balanced psychological condition. And the paradigm of a just person is a philosopher, for reason rules when it becomes passionately attached to the most intelligible objects there are: the Forms. It emerges that justice pays because attachment to these supremely valuable objects is part of what true justice of the soul is. The worth of our lives depends on the worth of the objects to which we devote ourselves. Those who think that injustice pays assume that wealth, domination, or the pleasures of physical appetite are supremely valuable; their mistake lies in their limited conception of what sorts of objects are worth loving. Late dialogues. The Republic does not contain Plato’s last thoughts on moral or metaphysical matters. For example, although he continues to hold in his final work, the Laws, that the family and private wealth should ideally be abolished, he describes in great detail a second-best community that retains these and many other institutions of ordinary political life. The sovereignty of law in such a state is stressed continually; political offices are to be filled by elections and lots, and magistrates are subject to careful scrutiny and prosecution. Power is divided among several councils and offices, and philosophical training is not a prerequisite for political participation. This second-best state is still worlds apart from a modern liberal democracy poetic works and many features of private life are carefully regulated, and atheism is punished with death but it is remarkable that Plato, after having made no concessions to popular participation in the Republic, devoted so much energy to finding a proper place for it in his final work. Plato’s thoughts about metaphysics also continued to evolve, and perhaps the most serious problem in interpreting his work as a whole is the problem of grasping the direction of these further developments. One notorious obstacle to understanding his later metaphysics is presented by the Parmenides, for here we find an unanswered series of criticisms of the theory of Forms. For example, it is said that if there is reason to posit one Form of Largeness to select an arbitrary example then there is an equally good reason to posit an unlimited number of Forms of this type. The “first” Form of Largeness must exist because according to Plato whenever a number of things are large, there is a Form of Largeness that makes them large; but now, the argument continues, if we consider this Form together with the other large things, we should recognize still another Form, which makes the large things and Largeness itself large. The argument can be pursued indefinitely, but it seems absurd that there should be an unlimited number of Forms of this one type. In antiquity the argument was named the Third Man, because it claims that in addition to a second type of object called “man” the Form of Man there is even a third. What is Plato’s response to this and other objections to his theory? He says in the Parmenides that we must continue to affirm the existence of such objects, for language and thought require them; but instead of responding directly to the criticisms, he embarks on a prolonged examination of the concept of unity, reaching apparently conflicting conclusions about it. Whether these contradictions are merely apparent and whether this treatment of unity contains a response to the earlier critique of the Forms are difficult matters of interpretation. But in any case it is clear that Plato continues to uphold the existence of unchanging realities; the real difficulty is whether and how he modifies his earlier views about them. In the Timaeus, there seem to be no modifications at all a fact that has led some scholars to believe, in spite of some stylometric evidence to the contrary, that this work was written before Plato composed the critique of the Forms in the Parmenides. This dialogue presents an account of how a divine but not omnipotent craftsman transformed the disorderly materials of the universe into a harmonious cosmos by looking to the unchanging Forms as paradigms and creating, to the best of his limited abilities, constantly fluctuating images of those paradigms. The created cosmos is viewed as a single living organism governed by its own divinely intelligent soul; time itself came into existence with the cosmos, being an image of the timeless nature of the Forms; space, however, is not created by the divine craftsman but is the characterless receptacle in which all change takes place. The basic ingredients of the universe are not earth, air, fire, and water, as some thinkers held; rather, these elements are composed of planes, which are in turn made out of elementary triangular shapes. The Timaeus is an attempt to show that although many other types of objects besides the Forms must be invoked in order to understand the orderly nature of the changing universe souls, triangles, space the best scientific explanations will portray the physical world as a purposeful and very good approximation to a perfect pattern inherent in these unchanging and eternal objects. But Forms do not play as important a role in the Philebus, a late dialogue that contains Plato’s fullest answer to the question, What is the good? He argues that neither pleasure not intelligence can by itself be identified with the good, since no one would be satisfied with a life that contained just one of these but totally lacked the other. Instead, goodness is identified with proportion, beauty, and truth; and intelligence is ranked a superior good to pleasure because of its greater kinship to these three. Here, as in the middle dialogues, Plato insists that a proper understanding of goodness requires a metaphysical grounding. To evaluate the role of pleasure in human life, we need a methodology that applies to all other areas of understanding. More specifically, we must recognize that everything can be placed in one of four categories: the limited, the unlimited, the mixture of these two, and the intelligent creation of this mixture. Where Forms are to be located in this scheme is unclear. Although metaphysics is invoked to answer practical questions, as in the Republic, it is not precisely the same metaphysics as before. Though we naturally think of Plato primarily as a writer of philosophical works, he regards the written word as inferior to spoken interchange as an instrument for learning and teaching. The drawbacks inherent in written composition are most fully set forth in the Phaedrus. There is no doubt that in the Academy he participated fully in philosophical debate, and on at least one occasion he lectured to a general audience. We are told by Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, that many in Plato’s audience were baffled and disappointed by a lecture in which he maintained that Good is one. We can safely assume that in conversation Plato put forward important philosophical ideas that nonetheless did not find their way into his writings. Aristotle refers in Physics IV.2 to one of Plato’s doctrines as unwritten, and the enigmatic positions he ascribes to Plato in Metaphysics I.6 that the Forms are to be explained in terms of number, which are in turn generated from the One and the dyad of great and small seem to have been expounded solely in discussion. Some scholars have put great weight on the statement in the Seventh Letter that the most fundamental philosophical matters must remain unwritten, and, using later testimony about Plato’s unwritten doctrines, they read the dialogues as signs of a more profound but hidden truth. The authenticity of the Seventh Letter is a disputed question, however. In any case, since Aristotle himself treats the middle and late dialogues as undissembling accounts of Plato’s philosophy, we are on firm ground in adopting the same approach. H. P. Grice, “Commentary on Plato’s Republic,” H. P. Grice, “Semantics as footnotes to Cratylus.” H. P. Grice, “Plato and Cassirer, Aristotle and I.”

PLAYGROUP

playgroup: Grice: “Strictly, a playgroup is institutional – I wouldn’t say that Tom and Jerry form a playgroup if they played chess together only once!” -- The motivation for the three playgroups were different. Austin’s first playgroup was for fun. Grice never attended. Austin’s new playgroup, or ‘second’ playgroup, if you must, was a sobriquet Grice gave because it was ANYTHING BUT. Grice’s playgroup upon Austin’s death was for fun, like the ‘first’ playgroup. Since Grice participated in the second and third, he expanded. The second playgroup was for ‘philosophical hacks’ who needed ‘para-philosophy.’ The third playgroup was for fun fun. While Austin belonged to the first and the second playgroups, there were notorious differences. In the first playgroup, he was not the master, and his resentment towards Ayer can be seen in “Sense and Sensibilia.” The second playgroup had Austin as the master. It is said that the playgroup survived Austin’s demise with Grice’s leadership – But Grice’s playgroup was still a different thing – some complained about the disorderly and rambling nature – Austin had kept a very tidy organisation and power structure. Since Grice does NOT mention his own playgroup, it is best to restrict playgroup as an ironic sobriquet by Grice to anything but a playgroup, conducted after the war by Austin, by invitation only, to full-time university lecturers in philosophy. Austin would hold a central position, and Austin’s motivation was to ‘reach’ agreement. Usually, when agreement was not reached, Austin could be pretty impolite. Grice found himself IN THE PLAYGROUP. He obviously preferred a friendlier atmosphere, as his own group later testified. But he was also involved in philosophical activity OTHER than the play group. Notably his joint endeavours with Strawson, Warnock, Pears, and Thomson. For some reason he chose each for a specific area: Warnock for the philosophy of perception (Grice’s implicaturum is that he would not explore meta-ethics with Warnock – he wouldn’t feel like, nor Warnock would). Philosophy of action of all things, with J. F. Thomson. Philosophical psychology with D. F. Pears – so this brings Pears’s observations on intending, deciding, predicting, to the fore. And ontology with P. F. Strawson. Certainlty he would not involve with Strawson on endless disagreements about the alleged divergence or lack thereof between truth-functional devices and their vernacular counterparts! Grice also mentions collaboration with Austin in teaching – “an altogether flintier experience,” as Warnock knows and “Grice can testify.” – There was joint seminars with A. M. Quinton, and a few others. One may add the tutorials. Some of his tutees left Griceian traces: A. G. N. Flew, David Bostock, J. L. Ackrill, T. C. Potts. The term was meant ironically. The playgroup activities smack of military or civil service! while this can be safely called Grice’s playgroup, it was founded by Austin at All Souls, where it had only seven members. After the war, Grice joined in. The full list is found elsewhere. With Austin’s death, Grice felt the responsibility to continue with it, and plus, he enjoyed it! In alphabetical order. It is this group that made history. J. L. Austin, A. G. N. Flew, P. L. Gardiner, H. P. Grice, S. N. Hampshire, R. M. Hare, H. L. A. Hart, P. H. Nowell-Smith, G. A. Paul, D. F. Pears, P. F. Strawson, J. F. Thomson, J. O. Urmson, G. J. Warnock, A. D. Woozley. Grice distinguishes it very well from Ryle’s group, and the group of neo-Wittgensteinians. And those three groups were those only involved with ‘ordinary language.’

Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich 18568, a leading theoretician of the Russian revolutionary movement and the father of Russian Marxism. Exiled from his native Russia for most of his adult life, in 3 he founded in Switzerland the first Russian Marxist association the Emancipation of Labor, a forerunner of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party. In philosophy he sought to systematize and disseminate the outlook of Marx and Engels, for which he popularized the name ‘dialectical materialism’. For the most part an orthodox Marxist in his understanding of history, Plekhanov argued that historical developments cannot be diverted or accelerated at will; he believed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution in the first decades of the twentieth century, and consequently he opposed the Bolshevik faction in the Plato, commentaries on Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich 713 713 split 3 of the Social Democratic party. At the same time he was not a simplistic economic determinist: he accepted the role of geographical, psychological, and other non-economic factors in historical change. In epistemology, Plekhanov agreed with Kant that we cannot know things in themselves, but he argued that our sensations may be conceived as “hieroglyphs,” corresponding point by point to the elements of reality without resembling them. In ethics, too, Plekhanov sought to supplement Marx with Kant, tempering the class analysis of morality with the view that there are universally binding ethical principles, such as the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than means. Because in these and other respects Plekhanov’s version of Marxism conflicted with Lenin’s, his philosophy was scornfully rejected by doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists during the Stalin era.

Plotinus, Greco-Roman Neoplatonist philosopher. Born in Egypt, though doubtless of Grecian ancestry, he studied Platonic philosophy in Alexandria with Ammonius Saccas 23243; then, after a brief adventure on the staff of the Emperor Gordian III on an unsuccessful expedition against the Persians, he came to Rome in 244 and continued teaching philosophy there until his death. He enjoyed the support of many prominent people, including even the Emperor Gallienus and his wife. His chief pupils were Amelius and Porphyry, the latter of whom collected and edited his philosophical essays, the Enneads so called because arranged by Porphyry in six groups of nine. The first three groups concern the physical world and our relation to it, the fourth concerns Soul, the fifth Intelligence, and the sixth the One. Porphyry’s arrangement is generally followed today, though a chronological sequence of tractates, which he also provides in his introductory Life of Plotinus, is perhaps preferable. The most important treatises are I.1; I.2; I.6; II.4; II.8; III.23; III.6; III.7; IV.34; V.1; V.3; VI.45; VI.7; VI.8; VI.9; and the group III.8, V.8, V.5, and II.9 a single treatise, split up by Porphyry, that is a wide-ranging account of Plotinus’s philosophical position, culminating in an attack on gnosticism. Plotinus saw himself as a faithful exponent of Plato see especially Enneads V.1, but he is far more than that. Platonism had developed considerably in the five centuries that separate Plato from Plotinus, taking on much from both Aristotelianism and Stoicism, and Plotinus is the heir to this process. He also adds much himself.

pluralism, a philosophical perspective on the world that emphasizes diversity rather than homogeneity, multiplicity rather than unity, difference rather than sameness. The philosophical consequences of pluralism were addressed by Grecian antiquity in its preoccupation with the problem of the one and the many. The proponents of pluralism, represented principally by Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus, maintained that reality was made up of a multiplicity of entities. Adherence to this doctrine set them in opposition to the monism of the Eleatic School Parmenides, which taught that reality was an impermeable unity and an unbroken solidarity. It was thus that pluralism came to be defined as a philosophical alternative to monism. In the development of Occidental thought, pluralism came to be contrasted not only with monism but also with dualism, the philosophical doctrine that there are two, and only two, kinds of existents. Descartes, with his doctrine of two distinct substances extended non-thinking substance versus non-extended thinking substance is commonly regarded as having provided the clearest example of philosophical dualism. Pluralism thus needs to be understood as marking out philosophical alternatives to both monism and dualism. Pluralism as a metaphysical doctrine requires that we distinguish substantival from attributive pluralism. Substantival pluralism views the world as containing a multiplicity of substances that remain irreducible to each other. Attributive pluralism finds the multiplicity of kinds not among the furniture of substances that make up the world but rather among a diversity of attributes and distinguishing properties. However, pluralism came to be defined not only as a metaphysical doctrine but also as a regulative principle of explanation that calls upon differing explanatory principles and conceptual schemes to account for the manifold events of nature and the varieties of human experience. Recent philosophical thought has witnessed a resurgence of interest in pluralism. This was evident in the development of pragmatism, where pluralism received piquant expression in James’s A Pluralistic Universe 9. More recently pluralism was given a voice in the thought of the later Vitters, with its heavy accent on the plurality of language games displayed in our ordinary discourse. Also, in the current developments of philosophical postmodernism Jean-François Lyotard, one finds an explicit pluralistic orientation. Here the emphasis falls on the multiplicity of signifiers, phrase regimens, genres of discourse, and narrational strategies. The alleged unities and totalities of thought, discourse, and action are subverted in the interests of reclaiming the diversified and heterogeneous world of human experience. Pluralism in contemporary thought initiates a move into a postmetaphysical age. It is less concerned with traditional metaphysical and epistemological issues, seeking answers to questions about the nature and kinds of substances and attributes; and it is more attuned to the diversity of social practices and the multiple roles of language, discourse, and narrative in the panoply of human affairs.

pluralitive logic, also called pleonetetic logic, the logic of ‘many’, ‘most’, ‘few’, and similar terms including ‘four out of five’, ‘over 45 percent’ and so on. Consider 1 ‘Almost all F are G’ 2 ‘Almost all F are not G’ 3 ‘Most F are G’ 4 ‘Most F are not G’ 5 ‘Many F are G’ 6 ‘Many F are not G’ 1 i.e., ‘Few F are not G’ and 6 are contradictory, as are 2 and 5 and 3 and 4. 1 and 2 cannot be true together i.e., they are contraries, nor can 3 and 4, while 5 and 6 cannot be false together i.e., they are subcontraries. Moreover, 1 entails 3 which entails 5, and 2 entails 4 which entails 6. Thus 16 form a generalized “square of opposition” fitting inside the standard one. Sometimes 3 is said to be true if more than half the F’s are G, but this makes ‘most’ unnecessarily precise, for ‘most’ does not literally mean ‘more than half’. Although many pluralitive terms are vague, their interrelations are logically precise. Again, one might define ‘many’ as ‘There are at least n’, for some fixed n, at least relative to context. But this not only erodes the vagueness, it also fails to work for arbitrarily large and infinite domains. ‘Few’, ‘most’, and ‘many’ are binary quantifiers, a type of generalized quantifier. A unary quantifier, such as the standard quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘all’, connotes a second-level property, e.g., ‘Something is F’ means ‘F has an instance’, and ‘All F’s are G’ means ‘F and not G has no instance’. A generalized quantifier connotes a second-level relation. ‘Most F’s are G’ connotes a binary relation between F and G, one that cannot be reduced to any property of a truth-functional compound of F and G. In fact, none of the standard pluralitive terms can be defined in first-order logic.

plurality of causes, as used by J. S. Mill, more than one cause of a single effect; i.e., tokens of different event types causing different tokens of the same event type. Plurality of causes is distinct from overdetermination of an event by more than one actual or potential token cause. For example, an animal’s death has a plurality of causes: it may die of starvation, of bleeding, of a blow to the head, and so on. Mill thought these cases were important because he saw that the existence of a plurality of causes creates problems for his four methods for determining causes. Mill’s method of agreement is specifically vulnerable to the problem: the method fails to reveal the cause of an event when the event has more than one type of cause, because the method presumes that causes are necessary for their effects. Actually, plurality of causes is a commonplace fact about the world because very few causes are necessary for their effects. Unless the background conditions are specified in great detail, or the identity of the effect type is defined very narrowly, almost all cases involve a plurality of causes. For example, flipping the light switch is a necessary cause of the light’s going on, only if one assumes that there will be no short circuit across the switch, that the wiring will remain as it is, and so on, or if one assumes that by ‘the light’s going on’ one means the light’s going on in the normal way.

Po-hu tung “White Tiger Hall Consultations”, an important Chin. Confucian work of the later Han dynasty, resulting from discussions at the imperial palace in A.D. 79 on the classics and their commentaries. Divided into forty-three headings, the text sums up the dominant teachings of Confucianism by affirming the absolute position of the monarch, a cosmology and moral psychology based on the yinyang theory, and a comprehensive social and political philosophy. While emphasizing benevolent government, it legitimizes the right of the ruler to use force to quell disorder. A system of “three bonds and six relationships” defines the hierarchical structure of society. Human nature, identified with the yang cosmic force, must be cultivated, while feelings yin are to be controlled especially by rituals and education. The Confucian orthodoxy affirmed also marks an end to the debate between the Old Text school and the New Text school that divided earlier Han scholars.

poiesis Grecian, ‘production’, behavior aimed at an external end. In Aristotle, poiesis is opposed to praxis action. It is characteristic of crafts e.g. building, the end of which is houses. It is thus a kinesis process. For Aristotle, exercising the virtues, since it must be undertaken for its own sake, cannot be poiesis. The knowledge involved in virtue is therefore not the same as that involved in crafts. R.C.

Poincaré: j. h., philosopher of science. Born into a prominent family in Nancy, he showed extraordinary talent in mathematics from an early age. He studied at the École des Mines and worked as a mining engineer while completing his doctorate in mathematics 1879. In 1, he was appointed professor at the of Paris, where he lectured on mathematics, physics, and astronomy until his death. His original contributions to the theory of differential equations, algebraic topology, and number theory made him the leading mathematician of his day. He published almost five hundred technical papers as well as three widely read books on the philosophy of science: Science and Hypothesis 2, The Value of Science 5, and Science and Method 8. Poincaré’s philosophy of science was shaped by his approach to mathematics. Geometric axioms are neither synthetic a priori nor empirical; they are more properly understood as definitions. Thus, when one set of axioms is preferred over another for use in physics, the choice is a matter of “convention”; it is governed by criteria of simplicity and economy of expression rather than by which geometry is “correct.” Though Euclidean geometry is used to describe the motions of bodies in space, it makes no sense to ask whether physical space “really” is Euclidean. Discovery in mathematics resembles discovery in the physical sciences, but whereas the former is a construction of the human mind, the latter has to be fitted to an order of nature that is ultimately independent of mind. Science provides an economic and fruitful way of expressing the relationships between classes of sensations, enabling reliable predictions to be made. These sensations reflect the world that causes them; the limited objectivity of science derives from this fact, but science does not purport to determine the nature of that underlying world. Conventions, choices that are not determinable by rule, enter into the physical sciences at all levels. Such principles as that of the conservation of energy may appear to be empirical, but are in fact postulates that scientists have chosen to treat as implicit definitions. The decision between alternative hypotheses also involves an element of convention: the choice of a particular curve to represent a finite set of data points, e.g., requires a judgment as to which is simpler. Two kinds of hypotheses, in particular, must be distinguished. Inductive generalizations from observation “real generalizations” are hypothetical in the limited sense that they are always capable of further precision. Then there are theories “indifferent hypotheses” that postulate underlying entities or structures. These entities may seem explanatory, but strictly speaking are no more than devices useful in calculation. For atomic theory to explain, atoms would have to exist. But this cannot be established in the only way permissible for a scientific claim, i.e. directly by experiment. Shortly before he died, Poincaré finally allowed that Perrin’s experimental verification of Einstein’s predictions regarding Brownian motion, plus his careful marshaling of twelve other distinct experimental methods of calculating Avogadro’s number, constituted the equivalent of an experimental proof of the existence of atoms: “One can say that we see them because we can count them. . . . The atom of the chemist is now a reality.”

polarity, the relation between distinct phenomena, terms, or concepts such that each inextricably requires, though it is opposed to, the other, as in the relation between the north and south poles of a magnet. In application to terms or concepts, polarity entails that the meaning of one involves the meaning of the other. This is conceptual polarity. Terms are existentially polar provided an instance of one cannot exist unless there exists an instance of the other. The second sense implies the first. Supply and demand and good and evil are instances of conceptual polarity. North and south and buying and selling are instances of existential polarity. Some polar concepts are opposites, such as truth and falsity. Some are correlative, such as question and answer: an answer is always an answer to a question; a question calls for an answer, but a question can be an answer, and an answer can be a question. The concept is not restricted to pairs and can be extended to generate mutual interdependence, multipolarity.

Polish logic, logic as researched, elucidated, and taught in Poland, 939. Between the two wars colleagues Jan Lukasiewicz, Tadeusz Kotarbigki, and Stanislaw Lesniewski, assisted by students-become-collaborators such as Alfred Tarski, Jerzy Slupecki, Stanislaw Jaskowski, and Boleslaw Sobocigski, together with mathematicians in Warsaw and philosophical colleagues elsewhere, like Kasimir Ajdukiewicz and Tadeusz Czezowski, made Warsaw an internationally known center of research in logic, metalogic, semantics, and foundations of mathematics. The Warsaw “school” also dominated Polish philosophy, and made Poland the country that introduced modern logic even in secondary schools. All three founders took their doctorates in Lvov under Kasimir Twardowski 18668, mentor of leading thinkers of independent Poland between the wars. Arriving from Vienna to take the chair of philosophy at twenty-nine, Twardowski had to choose between concentrating on his own research and organizing the study of philosophy in Poland. Dedicating his life primarily to the community task, he became the founder of modern Polish philosophy. Twardowski’s informal distinction between distributive and collective conceptions influenced classification of philosophy and the sciences, and anticipated Lesniewski’s formal axiomatizations in ontology and mereology, respectively. Another common inheritance important in Polish logic was Twardowski’s stress on the processproduct ambiguity. He applied this distinction to disambiguate ‘meaning’ and refine his teacher Brentano’s account of mental acts as meaningful “intentional” events, by differentiating 1 what is meant or “intended” by the act, its objective noema or noematic “intentional object,” from 2 its corresponding noetic meaning or subjective “content,” the correlated characteristic or structure by which it “intends” its “object” or “objective” i.e., means that: suchand-such is so. Twardowski’s teaching especially this careful analysis of “contents” and “objects” of mental acts contributed to Meinong’s theory of objects, and linked it, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Anton Marty’s “philosophical grammar” with the “descriptive psychology” of their common teacher, the Aristotelian and Scholastic empiricist Brentano, and thus with sources of the analytic movements in Vienna and Cambridge. Twardowski’s lectures on the philosophical logic of content and judgment prepared the ground for scientific semantics; his references to Boolean algebra opened the door to mathematical logic; and his phenomenological idea of a general theory of objects pointed toward Lesniewski’s ontology. Twardowski’s maieutic character, integrity, grounding in philosophical traditions, and arduous training lectures began at six a.m., together with his realist defense of the classical Aristotelian correspondence theory of truth against “irrationalism,” dogmatism, skepticism, and psychologism, influenced his many pupils, who became leaders of Polish thought in diverse fields. But more influential than any doctrine was his rigorist ideal of philosophy as a strict scientific discipline of criticism and logical analysis, precise definition, and conceptual clarification. His was a school not of doctrine but of method. Maintaining this common methodological inheritance in their divergent ways, and encouraged to learn more mathematical logic than Twardowski himself knew, his students in logic were early influenced by Frege’s and Husserl’s critique of psychologism in logic, Husserl’s logical investigations, and the logical reconstruction of classical mathematics by Frege, Schröder, Whitehead, and Russell. As lecturer in Lvov from 8 until his appointment to Warsaw in 5, Lukasiewicz introduced mathematical logic into Poland. To Lesniewski, newly arrived from studies in G.y as an enthusiast for Marty’s philosophy of language, Lukasiewicz’s influential 0 Critique of Aristotle’s principle of contradiction was a “revelation” in 1. Among other things it revealed paradoxes like Russell’s, which preoccupied him for the next eleven years as, logically refuting Twardowski’s Platonist theory of abstraction, he worked out his own solutions and, influenced also by Leon Chwistek, outgrew the influence of Hans Cornelius and Leon Petraz´ycki, and developed his own “constructively nominalist” foundations. In 9 Kotarbisski and Lesniewski joined Lukasiewicz in Warsaw, where they attracted students like Tarski, Sobocigski, and Slupecki in the first generation, and Andrzej Mostowski and Czeslaw Lejewski in the next. When the war came, the survivors were scattered and the metalogicians Morchaj Wajsberg, Moritz Presburger, and Adolf Lindenbaum were killed or “disappeared” by the Gestapo. Lukasiewicz concentrated increasingly on history of logic especially in reconstructing the logic of Aristotle and the Stoics and deductive problems concerning syllogistic and propositional logic. His idea of logical probability and development of three- or manyvalued and modal calculi reflected his indeterminist sympathies in prewar exchanges with Kotarbigski and Lesniewski on the status of truths eternal, sempiternal, or both?, especially as concerns future contingencies. Lesniewski concentrated on developing his logical systems. He left elaboration of many of his seminal metalogical and semantic insights to Tarski, who, despite a divergent inclination to simplify metamathematical deductions by expedient postulation, shared with Lesniewski, Lukasiewicz, and Ajdukiewicz the conviction that only formalized languages can be made logically consistent subjects and instruments of rigorous scientific investigation. Kotarbigski drew on Lesniewski’s logic of predication to defend his “reism” as one possible application of Lesniewski’s ontology, to facilitate his “concretist” program for translating abstractions into more concrete terms, and to rationalize his “imitationist” account of mental acts or dispositions. Inheriting Twardowski’s role as cultural leader and educator, Kotarbigski popularized the logical achievements of his colleagues in e.g. his substantial 9 treatise on the theory of knowledge, formal logic, and scientific methodology; this work became required reading for serious students and, together with the lucid textbooks by Lukasiewicz and Ajdukiewicz, raised the level of philosophical discussion in Poland. Jaskowski published a system of “natural deduction” by the suppositional method practiced by Lesniewski since 6. Ajdukiewicz based his syntax on Lesniewski’s logical grammar, and by his searching critiques influenced Kotarbigski’s “reist” and “concretist” formulations. Closest in Poland to the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, Ajdukiewicz brought new sophistication to the philosophy of language and of science by his examination of the role of conventions and meaning postulates in scientific theory and language, distinguishing axiomatic, deductive, and empirical rules of meaning. His evolving and refined conventionalist analyses of theories, languages, “world perspectives,” synonymy, translation, and analyticity, and his philosophical clarification by paraphrase anticipated views of Carnap, Feigl, and Quine. But the Polish thinkers, beyond their common methodological inheritance and general adherence to extensional logic, subscribed to little common doctrine, and in their exchanges with the Vienna positivists remained “too sober” said Lukasiewicz to join in sweeping antimetaphysical manifestos. Like Twardowski, they were critics of traditional formulations, who sought not to proscribe but to reform metaphysics, by reformulating issues clearly enough to advance understanding. Indeed, except for Chwistek, the mathematician Jan Slezygski, and the historians I. M. Bochegski, Z. A. Jordan, and Jan Salamucha, in addition to the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, the key figures in Polish logic were all philosophical descendants of Twardowski.

political philosophy, the study of the nature and justification of coercive institutions. Coercive institutions range in size from the family to the nation-state and world organizations like the United Nations. They are institutions that at least sometimes employ force or the threat of force to control the behavior of their members. Justifying such coercive institutions requires showing that the authorities within them have a right to be obeyed and that their members have a corresponding obligation to obey them, i.e., that these institutions have legitimate political authority over their members. Classical political philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, were primarily interested in providing a justification for city-states like Athens or Sparta. But historically, as larger coercive institutions became possible and desirable, political philosophers sought to justify them. After the seventeenth century, most political philosophers focused on providing a justification for nationstates whose claim to legitimate authority is restricted by both geography and nationality. But from time to time, and more frequently in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some political philosophers have sought to provide a justification for various forms of world government with even more extensive powers than those presently exercised by the United Nations. And quite recently, feminist political philosophers have raised important challenges to the authority of the family as it is presently constituted. Anarchism from Grecian an archos, ‘no government’ rejects this central task of political philosophy. It maintains that no coercive institutions are justified. Proudhon, the first self-described anarchist, believed that coercive institutions should be replaced by social and economic organizations based on voluntary contractual agreement, and he advocated peaceful change toward anarchism. Others, notably Blanqui and Bakunin, advocated the use of violence to destroy the power of coercive institutions. Anarchism inspired the anarcho-syndicalist movement, Makhno and his followers during the Russian Civil War, the anarchists during the Civil War, and the anarchist gauchistes during the 8 “May Events” in France. Most political philosophers, however, have sought to justify coercive institutions; they have simply disagreed over what sort of coercive institutions are justified. Liberalism, which derives from the work of Locke, is the view that coercive institutions are justified when they promote liberty. For Locke, liberty requires a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary government. Over time, however, the ideal of liberty became subject to at least two interpretations. The view that seems closest to Locke’s is classical liberalism, which is now more frequently called political libertarianism. This form of liberalism interprets constraints on liberty as positive acts i.e., acts of commission that prevent people from doing what they otherwise could do. According to this view, failing to help people in need does not restrict their liberty. Libertarians maintain that when liberty is so interpreted only a minimal or night-watchman state that protects against force, theft, and fraud can be justified. In contrast, in welfare liberalism, a form of liberalism that derives from the work of T. H. Green, constraints on liberty are interpreted to include, in addition, negative acts i.e., acts of omission that prevent people from doing what they otherwise could do. According to this view, failing to help people in need does restrict their liberty. Welfare liberals maintain that when liberty is interpreted in this fashion, coercive institutions of a welfare state requiring a guaranteed social minimum and equal opportunity are justified. While no one denies that when liberty is given a welfare liberal interpretation some form of welfare state is required, there is considerable debate over whether a minimal state is required when liberty is given a libertarian interpretation. At issue is whether the liberty of the poor is constrained when they are prevented from taking from the surplus possessions of the rich what they need for survival. If such prevention does constrain the liberty of the poor, it could be argued that their liberty should have priority over the liberty of the rich not to be interfered with when using their surplus possessions for luxury purposes. In this way, it could be shown that even when the ideal of liberty is given a libertarian interpretation, a welfare state, rather than a minimal state, is justified. Both libertarianism and welfare liberalism are committed to individualism. This view takes the rights of individuals to be basic and justifies the actions of coercive institutions as promoting those rights. Communitarianism, which derives from the writings of Hegel, rejects individualism. It maintains that rights of individuals are not basic and that the collective can have rights that are independent of and even opposed to what liberals claim are the rights of individuals. According to communitarians, individuals are constituted by the institutions and practices of which they are a part, and their rights and obligations derive from those same institutions and practices. Fascism is an extreme form of communitarianism that advocates an authoritarian state with limited rights for individuals. In its National Socialism Nazi variety, fascism was also antiSemitic and militarist. In contrast to liberalism and communitarianism, socialism takes equality to be the basic ideal and justifies coercive institutions insofar as they promote equality. In capitalist societies where the means of production are owned and controlled by a relatively small number of people and used primarily for their benefit, socialists favor taking control of the means of production and redirecting their use to the general welfare. According to Marx, the principle of distribution for a socialist society is: from each according to ability, to each according to needs. Socialists disagree among themselves, however, over who should control the means of production in a socialist society. In the version of socialism favored by Lenin, those who control the means of production are to be an elite seemingly differing only in their ends from the capitalist elite they replaced. In other forms of socialism, the means of production are to be controlled democratically. In advanced capitalist societies, national defense, police and fire protection, income redistribution, and environmental protection are already under democratic control. Democracy or “government by the people” is thought to apply in these areas, and to require some form of representation. Socialists simply propose to extend the domain of democratic control to include control of the means of production, on the ground that the very same arguments that support democratic control in these recognized areas also support democratic control of the means of production. In addition, according to Marx, socialism will transform itself into communism when most of the work that people perform in society becomes its own reward, making differential monetary reward generally unnecessary. Then distribution in society can proceed according to the principle, from each according to ability, to each according to needs. It so happens that all of the above political views have been interpreted in ways that deny that women have the same basic rights as men. By contrast, feminism, almost by definition, is the political view that women and men have the same basic rights. In recent years, most political philosophers have come to endorse equal basic rights for women and men, but rarely do they address questions that feminists consider of the utmost importance, e.g., how responsibilities and duties are to be assigned in family structures. Each of these political views must be evaluated both internally and externally by comparison with the other views. Once this is done, their practical recommendations may not be so different. For example, if welfare liberals recognize that the basic rights of their view extend to distant peoples and future generations, they may end up endorsing the same degree of equality socialists defend. Whatever their practical requirements, each of these political views justifies civil disobedience, even revolution, when certain of those requirements have not been met. Civil disobedience is an illegal action undertaken to draw attention to a failure by the relevant authorities to meet basic moral requirements, e.g., the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat in a bus to a white man in accord with the local ordinance in Montgomery, Alabama, in 5. Civil disobedience is justified when illegal action of this sort is the best way to get the relevant authorities to bring the law into better correspondence with basic moral requirements. By contrast, revolutionary action is justified when it is the only way to correct a radical failure of the relevant authorities to meet basic moral requirements. When revolutionary action is justified, people no longer have a political obligation to obey the relevant authorities; that is, they are no longer morally required to obey them, although they may still continue to do so, e.g. out of habit or fear. Recent contemporary political philosophy has focused on the communitarianliberal debate. In defense of the communitarian view, Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that virtually all forms of liberalism attempt to separate rules defining right action from conceptions of the human good. On this account, he contends, these forms of liberalism must fail because the rules defining right action cannot be adequately grounded apart from a conception of the good. Responding to this type of criticism, some liberals have openly conceded that their view is not grounded independently of some conception of the good. Rawls, e.g., has recently made clear that his liberalism requires a conception of the political good, although not a comprehensive conception of the good. It would seem, therefore, that the debate between communitarians and liberals must turn on a comparative evaluation of their competing conceptions of the good. Unfortunately, contemporary communitarians have not yet been very forthcoming about what particular conception of the good their view requires.

political theory, reflection concerning the empirical, normative, and conceptual dimensions of political life. There are no topics that all political theorists do or ought to address, no required procedures, no doctrines acknowledged to be authoritative. The meaning of ‘political theory’ resides in its fluctuating uses, not in any essential property. It is nevertheless possible to identify concerted tendencies among those who have practiced this activity over twenty-five centuries. Since approximately the seventeenth century, a primary question has been how best to justify the political rule of some people over others. This question subordinated the issue that had directed and organized most previous political theory, namely, what constitutes the best form of political regime. Assuming political association to be a divinely ordained or naturally necessary feature of the human estate, earlier thinkers had asked what mode of political association contributes most to realizing the good for humankind. Signaling the variable but intimate relationship between political theory and political practice, the change in question reflected and helped to consolidate acceptance of the postulate of natural human equality, the denial of divinely or naturally given authority of some human beings over others. Only a small minority of postseventeenth-century thinkers have entertained the possibility, perhaps suggested by this postulate, that no form of rule can be justified, but the shift in question altered the political theory agenda. Issues concerning consent, individual liberties and rights, various forms of equality as integral to justice, democratic and other controls on the authority and power of government none of which were among the first concerns of ancient or medieval political thinkers moved to the center of political theory. Recurrent tendencies and tensions in political theory may also be discerned along dimensions that cross-cut historical divisions. In its most celebrated representations, political theory is integral to philosophy. Systematic thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hobbes and Hegel, present their political thoughts as supporting and supported by their ethics and theology, metaphysics and epistemology. Political argumentation must satisfy the same criteria of logic, truth, and justification as any other; a political doctrine must be grounded in the nature of reality. Other political theorists align themselves with empirical science rather than philosophy. Often focusing on questions of power, they aim to give accurate accounts and factually grounded assessments of government and politics in particular times and places. Books IVVI of Aristotle’s Politics inaugurate this conception of political theory; it is represented by Montesquieu, Marx, and much of utilitarianism, and it is the numerically predominant form of academic political theorizing in the twentieth century. Yet others, e.g., Socrates, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and twentieth-century thinkers such as Rawls, mix the previously mentioned modes but understand themselves as primarily pursuing the practical objective of improving their own political societies.

polysyllogism, a series of syllogisms connected by the fact that the conclusion of one syllogism becomes a premise of another. The syllogism whose conclusion is used as a premise in another syllogism within the chain is called the prosyllogism; the syllogism is which the conclusion of another syllogism within the chain is used as a premise is called the episyllogism. To illustrate, take the standard form of the simplest polysyllogism: a 1 Every B is A 2 Every C is B 3 , Every C is A b 4 Every C is A 5 Every D is C 6 , Every D is A. The first member a of this polysyllogism is the prosyllogism, since its conclusion, 3, occurs as a premise, 4, in the second argument. This second member, b, is the episyllogism, since it employs as one of its premises 4 the conclusion 3 of the first syllogism. It should be noted that the terms ‘prosyllogism’ and ‘episyllogism’ are correlative terms. Moreover, a polysyllogism may have more than two members.

Pomponazzi, Pietro 14621525, philosopher, an Aristotelian who taught at the universities of Padua and Bologna. In De incantationibus “On Incantations,” 1556, he regards the world as a system of natural causes that can explain apparently miraculous phenomena. Human beings are subject to the natural order of the world, yet divine predestination and human freedom are compatible De fato, “On Fate,” 1567. Furthermore, he distinguishes between what is proved by natural reason and what is accepted by faith, and claims that, since there are arguments for and against the immortality of the human individual soul, this belief is to be accepted solely on the basis of faith De immortalitate animae, “On the Immortality of the Soul,” He defended his view of immortality in the Apologia 1518 and in the Defensorium 1519. These three works were reprinted as Tractatus acutissimi 1525. Pomponazzi’s work was influential until the seventeenth century, when Aristotelianism ceased to be the main philosophy taught at the universities. The eighteenth-century freethinkers showed new interest in his distinction between natural reason and faith. P.Gar. pons asinorum Latin, ‘asses’ bridge’, a methodological device based upon Aristotle’s description of the ways in which one finds a suitable middle term to demonstrate categorical propositions. Thus, to prove the universal affirmative, one should consider the characters that entail the predicate P and the characters entailed by the subject S. If we find in the two groups of characters a common member, we can use it as a middle term in the syllogistic proof of say ‘All S are P’. Take ‘All men are mortal’ as the contemplated conclusion. We find that ‘organism’ is among the characters entailing the predicate ‘mortal’ and is also found in the group of characters entailed by the subject ‘men’, and thus it may be used in a syllogistic proof of ‘All men are mortal’. To prove negative propositions we must, in addition, consider characters incompatible with the predicate, or incompatible with the subject. Finally, proofs of particular propositions require considering characters that entail the subject.

Popper, Karl Raimund, Austrian-born British philosopher best known for contributions to philosophy of science and to social and political philosophy. Educated at the of Vienna Ph.D., 8, he taught philosophy in New Zealand for a decade before becoming a reader and then professor in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics 669. He was knighted in 5, elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 6, and appointed Companion of Honour in 2 see his autobiography, Unended Quest, 6. In opposition to logical positivism’s verifiability criterion of cognitive significance, Popper proposes that science be characterized by its method: the criterion of demarcation of empirical science from pseudo-science and metaphysics is falsifiability Logik der Forschung, 4, tr. as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 9. According to falsificationism, science grows, and may even approach the truth, not by amassing supporting evidence, but through an unending cycle of problems, tentative solutions unjustifiable conjectures and error elimination; i.e., the vigorous testing of deductive consequences and the refutation of conjectures that fail Conjectures and Refutations, 3. Since conjectures are not inferences and refutations are not inductive, there is no inductive inference or inductive logic. More generally, criticism is installed as the hallmark of rationality, and the traditional justificationist insistence on proof, conclusive or inconclusive, on confirmation, and on positive argument, is repudiated. Popper brings to the central problems of Kant’s philosophy an uncompromising realism and objectivism, the tools of modern logic, and a Darwinian perspective on knowledge, thereby solving Hume’s problem of induction without lapsing into irrationalism Objective Knowledge, 2. He made contributions of permanent importance also to the axiomatization of probability theory The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 9; to its interpretation, especially the propensity interpretation Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 3 vols. 283; and to many other problems The Self and Its Brain, with John C. Eccles, 7. Popper’s social philosophy, like his epistemology, is anti-authoritarian. Since it is a historicist error to suppose that we can predict the future of mankind The Poverty of Historicism, 7, the prime task of social institutions in an open society one that encourages criticism and allows rulers to be replaced without violence must be not large-scale utopian planning but the minimization, through piecemeal reform, of avoidable suffering. This way alone permits proper assessment of success or failure, and thus of learning from experience The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5.

Porphyry, Grecian Neoplatonist philosopher, second to Plotinus in influence. He was born in Tyre, and is thus sometimes called Porphyry the Phoenician. As a young man he went to Athens, where he absorbed the Platonism of Cassius Longinus, who had in turn been influenced by Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. Porphyry went to Rome in 263, where he became a disciple of Plotinus, who had also been influenced by Ammonius. Porphyry lived in Rome until 269, when, urged by Plotinus to pons asinorum Porphyry 722 722 travel as a cure for severe depression, he traveled to Sicily. He remained there for several years before returning to Rome to take over Plotinus’s school. He apparently died in Rome. Porphyry is not noted for original thought. He seems to have dedicated himself to explicating Aristotle’s logic and defending Plotinus’s version of Neoplatonism. During his years in Sicily, Porphyry wrote his two most famous works, the lengthy Against the Christians, of which only fragments survive, and the Isagoge, or “Introduction.” The Isagoge, which purports to give an elementary exposition of the concepts necessary to understand Aristotle’s Categories, was tr. into Latin by Boethius and routinely published in the Middle Ages with Latin editions of Aristotle’s Organon, or logical treatises. Its inclusion in that format arguably precipitated the discussion of the so-called problem of universals in the twelfth century. During his later years in Rome, Porphyry collected Plotinus’s writings, editing and organizing them into a scheme of his own not Plotinus’s design, six groups of nine treatises, thus called the Enneads. Porphyry prefaced his edition with an informative biography of Plotinus, written shortly before Porphyry’s own death.

Port-Royal Logic, originally entitled “La logique, ou L’art de penser,” a treatise on logic, language, and method composed by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole 162595, possibly with the help of Pascal, all of whom were solitaires associated with the convent at Port-Royal-des-Champs, the spiritual and intellectual center of Jansenism. Originally written as an instruction manual for the son of the Duc de Luynes, the Logic was soon expanded and published the first edition appeared in 1662, but it was constantly being modified, augmented, and rewritten by its authors; by 1685 six editions in had appeared. The work develops the linguistic theories presented by Arnauld and Claude Lancelot in the Grammaire générale et raisonnée 1660, and reflects the pedagogical principles embodied in the curriculum of the “little schools” run by PortRoyal. Its content is also permeated by the Cartesianism to which Arnauld was devoted. The Logic’s influence grew beyond Jansenist circles, and it soon became in seventeenth-century France a standard manual for rigorous thinking. Eventually, it was adopted as a textbook in schools. The authors declare their goal to be to make thought more precise for better distinguishing truth from error philosophical and theological and to develop sound judgment. They are especially concerned to dispel the errors and confusions of the Scholastics. Logic is “the art of directing reason to a knowledge of things for the instruction of ourselves and others.” This art consists in reflecting on the mind’s four principal operations: conceiving, judging, reasoning, and ordering. Accordingly, the Logic is divided into four sections: on ideas and conception, on judgments, on reasoning, and on method..

positive and negative freedom, respectively, the area within which the individual is self-determining and the area within which the individual is left free from interference by others. More specifically, one is free in the positive sense to the extent that one has control over one’s life, or rules oneself. In this sense the term is very close to that of ‘autonomy’. The forces that can prevent this self-determination are usually thought of as internal, as desires or passions. This conception of freedom can be said to have originated with Plato, according to whom a person is free when the parts of the soul are rightly related to each other, i.e. the rational part of the soul rules the other parts. Other advocates of positive freedom include Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. One is free in the negative sense if one is not prevented from doing something by another person. One is prevented from doing something if another person makes it impossible for one to do something or uses coercion to prevent one from doing something. Hence persons are free in the negative sense if they are not made unfree in the negative sense. The term ‘negative liberty’ was coined by Bentham to mean the absence of coercion. Advocates of negative freedom include Hobbes, Locke, and Hume.

possible worlds, alternative worlds in terms of which one may think of possibility. The idea of thinking about possibility in terms of such worlds has played an important part, both in Leibnizian philosophical theology and in the development of modal logic and philosophical reflection about it in recent decades. But there are important differences in the forms the idea has taken, and the uses to which it has been put, in the two contexts. Leibniz used it in his account of creation. In his view God’s mind necessarily and eternally contains the ideas of infinitely many worlds that God could have created, and God has chosen the best of these and made it actual, thus creating it. Similar views are found in the thought of Leibniz’s contemporary, Malebranche. The possible worlds are thus the complete alternatives among which God chose. They are possible at least in the sense that they are logically consistent; whether something more is required in order for them to be coherent as worlds is a difficult question in Leibniz interpretation. They are complete in that they are possible totalities of creatures; each includes a whole possible universe, in its whole spatial extent and its whole temporal history if it is spatially and temporally ordered. The temporal completeness deserves emphasis. If “the world of tomorrow” is “a better world” than “the world of today,” it will still be part of the same “possible world” the actual one; for the actual “world,” in the relevant sense, includes whatever actually has happened or will happen throughout all time. The completeness extends to every detail, so that a milligram’s difference in the weight of the smallest bird would make a different possible world. The completeness of possible worlds may be limited in one way, however. Leibniz speaks of worlds as aggregates of finite things. As alternatives for God’s creation, they may well not be thought of as including God, or at any rate, not every fact about God. For this and other reasons it is not clear that in Leibniz’s thought the possible can be identified with what is true in some possible world, or the necessary with what is true in all possible worlds. That identification is regularly assumed, however, in the recent development of what has become known as possible worlds semantics for modal logic the logic of possibility and necessity, and of other conceptions, e.g. those pertaining to time and to morality, that have turned out to be formally analogous. The basic idea here is that such notions as those of validity, soundness, and completeness can be defined for modal logic in terms of models constructed from sets of alternative “worlds.” Since the late 0s many important results have been obtained by this method, whose best-known exponent is Saul Kripke. Some of the most interesting proofs depend on the idea of a relation of accessibility between worlds in the set. Intuitively, one world is accessible from another if and only if the former is possible in or from the point of view of the latter. Different systems of modal logic are appropriate depending on the properties of this relation e.g., on whether it is or is not reflexive and/or transitive and/or symmetrical. The purely formal results of these methods are well established. The application of possible worlds semantics to conceptions occurring in metaphysically richer discourse is more controversial, however. Some of the controversy is related to debates over the metaphysical reality of various sorts of possibility and necessity. Particularly controversial, and also a focus of much interest, have been attempts to understand modal claims de re, about particular individuals as such e.g., that I could not have been a musical performance, in terms of the identity and nonidentity of individuals in different possible worlds. Similarly, there is debate over the applicability of a related treatment of subjunctive conditionals, developed by Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis, though it is clear that it yields interesting formal results. What is required, on this approach, for the truth of ‘If it were the case that A, then it would be the case that B’, is that, among those possible worlds in which A is true, some world in which B is true be more similar, in the relevant respects, to the actual world than any world in which B is false. One of the most controversial topics is the nature of possible worlds themselves. Mathematical logicians need not be concerned with this; a wide variety of sets of objects, real or fictitious, can be viewed as having the properties required of sets of “worlds” for their purposes. But if metaphysically robust issues of modality e.g., whether there are more possible colors than we ever see are to be understood in terms of possible worlds, the question of the nature of the worlds must be taken seriously. Some philosophers would deny any serious metaphysical role to the notion of possible worlds. At the other extreme, David Lewis has defended a view of possible worlds as concrete totalities, things of the same sort as the whole actual universe, made up of entities like planets, persons, and so forth. On his view, the actuality of the actual world consists only in its being this one, the one that we are in; apart from its relation to us or our linguistic acts, the actual is not metaphysically distinguished from the merely possible. Many philosophers find this result counterintuitive, and the infinity of concrete possible worlds an extravagant ontology; but Lewis argues that his view makes possible attractive reductions of modality both logical and causal, and of such notions as that of a proposition, to more concrete notions. Other philosophers are prepared to say there are non-actual possible worlds, but that they are entities of a quite different sort from the actual concrete universe sets of propositions, perhaps, or some other type of “abstract” object. Leibniz himself held a view of this kind, thinking of possible worlds as having their being only in God’s mind, as intentional objects of God’s thought.

post-modern – H. P. Grice plays with the ‘modernists,’ versus the ‘neo-traditionalists.’ Since he sees a neotraditionalist like Strawson (neotraditionalist, like neocon, is a joke) and a modernist like Whitehead as BOTH making the same mistake, it is fair to see Grice as a ‘post-modernist’ -- of or relating to a complex set of reactions to modern philosophy and its presuppositions, as opposed to the kind of agreement on substantive doctrines or philosophical questions that often characterizes a philosophical movement. Although there is little agreement on precisely what the presuppositions of modern philosophy are, and disagreement on which philosophers exemplify these presuppositions, postmodern philosophy typically opposes foundationalism, essentialism, and realism. For Rorty, e.g., the presuppositions to be set aside are foundationalist assumptions shared by the leading sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century philosophers. For Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, the contested presuppositions to be set aside are as old as metaphysics itself, and are perhaps best exemplified by Plato. Postmodern philosophy has even been characterized, by Lyotard, as preceding modern philosophy, in the sense that the presuppositions of philosophical modernism emerge out of a disposition whose antecedent, unarticulated beliefs are already postmodern. Postmodern philosophy is therefore usefully regarded as a complex cluster concept that includes the following elements: an anti- or post- epistemological standpoint; anti-essentialism; anti-realism; anti-foundationalism; opposition to transcendental arguments and transcendental standpoints; rejection of the picture of knowledge as accurate representation; rejection of truth as correspondence to reality; rejection of the very idea of canonical descriptions; rejection of final vocabularies, i.e., rejection of principles, distinctions, and descriptions that are thought to be unconditionally binding for all times, persons, and places; and a suspicion of grand narratives, metanarratives of the sort perhaps best illustrated by dialectical materialism. In addition to these things postmodern philosophy is “against,” it also opposes characterizing this menu of oppositions as relativism, skepticism, or nihilism, and it rejects as “the metaphysics of presence” the traditional, putatively impossible dream of a complete, unique, and closed explanatory system, an explanatory system typically fueled by binary oppositions. On the positive side, one often finds the following themes: its critique of the notion of the neutrality and sovereignty of reason including insistence on its pervasively gendered, historical, and ethnocentric character; its conception of the social construction of wordworld mappings; its tendency to embrace historicism; its critique of the ultimate status of a contrast between epistemology, on the one hand, and the sociology of knowledge, on the other hand; its dissolution of the notion of the autonomous, rational subject; its insistence on the artifactual status of divisions of labor in knowledge acquisition and production; and its ambivalence about the Enlightenment and its ideology. Many of these elements or elective affinities were already surfacing in the growing opposition to the spectator theory of knowledge, in Europe and in the English-speaking world, long before the term ‘postmodern’ became a commonplace. In Anglophone philosophy this took the early form of Dewey’s and pragmatism’s opposition to positivism, early Kuhn’s redescription of scientific practice, and Vitters’s insistence on the language-game character of representation; critiques of “the myth of the given” from Sellars to Davidson and Quine; the emergence of epistemology naturalized; and the putative description-dependent character of data, tethered to the theory dependence of descriptions in Kuhn, Sellars, Quine, and Arthur Fine perhaps in all constructivists in the philosophy of science. In Europe, many of these elective affinities surfaced explicitly in and were identified with poststructuralism, although traces are clearly evident in Heidegger’s and later in Derrida’s attacks on Husserl’s residual Cartesianism; the rejection of essential descriptions Wesensanschauungen in Husserl’s sense; Saussure’s and structuralism’s attack on the autonomy and coherence of a transcendental signified standing over against a selftransparent subject; Derrida’s deconstructing the metaphysics of presence; Foucault’s redescriptions of epistemes; the convergence between - and English-speaking social constructivists; attacks on the language of enabling conditions as reflected in worries about the purchase of necessary and sufficient conditions talk on both sides of the Atlantic; and Lyotard’s many interventions, particularly those against grand narratives. Many of these elective affinities that characterize postmodern philosophy can also be seen in the virtually universal challenges to moral philosophy as it has been understood traditionally in the West, not only in G. and philosophy, but in the reevaluation of “the morality of principles” in the work of MacIntyre, Williams, Nussbaum, John McDowell, and others. The force of postmodern critiques can perhaps best be seen in some of the challenges of feminist theory, as in the work of Judith Butler and Hélène Cixous, and gender theory generally. For it is in gender theory that the conception of “reason” itself as it has functioned in the shared philosophical tradition is redescribed as a conception that, it is often argued, is engendered, patriarchal, homophobic, and deeply optional. The term ‘postmodern’ is less clear in philosophy, its application more uncertain and divided than in some other fields, e.g., postmodern architecture. In architecture the concept is relatively clear. It displaces modernism in assignable ways, emerges as an oppositional force against architectural modernism, a rejection of the work and tradition inaugurated by Walter Gropius, Henri Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, especially the International Style. In postmodern architecture, the modernist principle of abstraction, of geometric purity and simplicity, is displaced by multivocity and pluralism, by renewed interest in buildings as signs and signifiers, interest in their referential potential and resources. The modernist’s aspiration to buildings that are timeless in an important sense is itself read by postmodernists as an iconography that privileges the brave new world of science and technology, an aspiration that glorifies uncritically the industrial revolution of which it is itself a quintessential expression. This aspiration to timelessness is displaced in postmodern architecture by a direct and self-conscious openness to and engagement with history. It is this relative specificity of the concept postmodern architecture that enabled Charles Jencks to write that “Modern Architecture died in St. Louis Missouri on July 15, 2 at 3:32 P.M.” Unfortunately, no remotely similar sentence can be written about postmodern philosophy.

Potentia -- dunamis, also dynamis Grecian, ‘power’, ‘capacity’, as used by pre-Socratics such as Anaximander and Anaxagoras, one of the elementary character-powers, such as the hot or the cold, from which they believed the world was constructed. Plato’s early theory of Forms borrowed from the concept of character-powers as causes present in things; courage, e.g., is treated in the Laches as a power in the soul. Aristotle also used the word in this sense to explain the origins of the elements. In the Metaphysics especially Book IX, Aristotle used dunamis in a different sense to mean ‘potentiality’ in contrast to ‘actuality’ energeia or entelecheia. In the earlier sense of dunamis, matter is treated as potentiality, in that it has the potential to receive form and so be actualized as a concrete substance. In the later Aristotelian sense of dunamis, dormant abilities are treated as potentialities, and dunamis is to energeia as sleeping is to waking, or having sight to seeing. Potentia -- dynamic logic, a branch of logic in which, in addition to the usual category of formulas interpretable as propositions, there is a category of expressions interpretable as actions. Dynamic logic originally called the modal logic of programs emerged in the late 0s as one step in a long tradition within theoretical computer science aimed at providing a way to formalize the analysis of programs and their action. A particular concern here was program verification: what can be said of the effect of a program if started at a certain point? To this end operators [a] and ‹a were introduced with the following intuitive readings: [a]A to mean ‘after every terminating computation according to a it is the case that A’ and ‹aA to mean ‘after some terminating computation according to a it is the case that A’. The logic of these operators may be seen as a generalization of ordinary modal logic: where modal logic has one box operator A and one diamond operator B, dynamic logic has one box operator [a] and one diamond operator ‹a for every program expression a in the language. In possible worlds semantics for modal logic a model is a triple U, R, V where U is a universe of points, R a binary relation, and V a valuation assigning to each atomic formula a subset of U. In dynamic logic, a model is a triple U, R, V where U and V are as before but R is a family of binary relations Ra, one for every program expression a in the language. Writing ‘Xx A’, where x is a point in U, for ‘A is true at x’ in the model in question, we have the following characteristic truth conditions truth-functional compounds are evaluated by truth tables, as in modal logic: Xx P if and only if x is a point in VP, where P is an atomic formula, Xx[a]A if and only if, for all y, if x is Ra- related to y then Xy A, Xx ‹a if and only if, for some y, x is Ra-related to y and Xy A. Traditionally, dynamic logic will contain machinery for rendering the three regular operators on programs: ‘!’ sum, ‘;’ composition, and ‘*’ Kleene’s star operation, as well as the test operator ‘?’, which, operating on a proposition, will yield a program. The action a ! b consists in carrying out a or carrying out b; the action a;b in first carrying out a, then carrying out b; the action a* in carrying out a some finite number of times not excluding 0; the action ?A in verifying that A. Only standard models reflect these intuitions: Ra ! b % Ra 4 Rb, Ra;b % Ra _ Rb, Ra* % Ra*, R?A % {x,x : Xx A} where ‘*’ is the ancestral star The smallest propositional dynamic logic PDL is the set of formulas true at every point in every standard model. Note that dynamic logic analyzes non-deterministic action this is evident at the level of atomic programs p where Rp is a relation, not necessarily a function, and also in the definitions of Ra + b and Ra*. Dynamic logic has been extended in various ways, e.g., to first- and second-order predicate logic. Furthermore, just as deontic logic, tense logic, etc., are referred to as modal logic in the wide sense, so extensions of dynamic logic in the narrow sense such as process logic are often loosely referred to as dynamic logic in the wide sense. Dyad dynamic logic 250 250 The philosophical interest in dynamic logic rests with the expectation that it will prove a fruitful instrument for analyzing the concept of action in general: a successful analysis would be valuable in itself and would also be relevant to other disciplines such as deontic logic and the logic of imperatives.

potency, for Aristotle, a kind of capacity that is a correlative of action. We require no instruction to grasp the difference between ‘X can do Y’ and ‘X is doing Y’, the latter meaning that the deed is actually being done. That an agent has a potency to do something is not a pure prediction so much as a generalization from past performance of individual or kind. Aristotle uses the example of a builder, meaning someone able to build, and then confronts the Megaric objection that the builder can be called a builder only when he actually builds. Clearly one who is doing something can do it, but Aristotle insists that the napping carpenter has the potency to hammer and saw. A potency based on an acquired skill like carpentry derives from the potency shared by those who acquire and those who do not acquire the skill. An unskilled worker can be said to be a builder “in potency,” not in the sense that he has the skill and can employ it, but in the sense that he can acquire the skill. In both acquisition and employment, ‘potency’ refers to the actual either the actual acquisition of the skill or its actual use. These post-structuralism potency 726 726 potentiality, first practical attitude 727 correlatives emerged from Aristotle’s analysis of change and becoming. That which, from not having the skill, comes to have it is said to be “in potency” to that skill. From not having a certain shape, wood comes to have a certain shape. In the shaped wood, a potency is actualized. Potency must not be identified with the unshaped, with what Aristotle calls privation. Privation is the negation of P in a subject capable of P. Parmenides’ identification of privation and potency, according to Aristotle, led him to deny change. How can not-P become P? It is the subject of not-P to which the change is attributed and which survives the change that is in potency to X.

poverty of the stimulus, a psychological phenomenon exhibited when behavior is stimulusunbound, and hence the immediate stimulus characterized in straightforward physical terms does not completely control behavior. Human beings sort stimuli in various ways and hosts of influences seem to affect when, why, and how we respond our background beliefs, facility with language, hypotheses about stimuli, etc. Suppose a person visiting a museum notices a painting she has never before seen. Pondering the unfamiliar painting, she says, “an ambitious visual synthesis of the music of Mahler and the poetry of Keats.” If stimulus painting controls response, then her utterance is a product of earlier responses to similar stimuli. Given poverty of the stimulus, no such control is exerted by the stimulus the painting. Of course, some influence of response must be conceded to the painting, for without it there would be no utterance. However, the utterance may well outstrip the visitor’s conditioning and learning history. Perhaps she had never before talked of painting in terms of music and poetry. The linguist Noam Chomsky made poverty of the stimulus central to his criticism of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior 7. Chomsky argued that there is no predicting, and certainly no critical stimulus control of, much human behavior.

power, a disposition; an ability or capacity to yield some outcome. One tradition which includes Locke distinguishes active and passive powers. A knife has the active power to slice an apple, which has the passive power to be sliced by the knife. The distinction seems largely grammatical, however. Powers act in concert: the power of a grain of salt to dissolve in water and the water’s power to dissolve the salt are reciprocal and their manifestations mutual. Powers or dispositions are sometimes thought to be relational properties of objects, properties possessed only in virtue of objects standing in appropriate relations to other objects. However, if we distinguish, as we must, between a power and its manifestation, and if we allow that an object could possess a power that it never manifested a grain of salt remains soluble even if it never dissolves, it would seem that an object could possess a power even if appropriate reciprocal partners for its manifestation were altogether non-existent. This appears to have been Locke’s view An Essay concerning Human Understanding, 1690 of “secondary qualities” colors, sounds, and the like, which he regarded as powers of objects to produce certain sorts of sensory experience in observers. Philosophers who take powers seriously disagree over whether powers are intrinsic, “built into” properties this view, defended by C. B. Martin, seems to have been Locke’s, or whether the connection between properties and the powers they bestow is contingent, dependent perhaps upon contingent laws of nature a position endorsed by Armstrong. Is the solubility of salt a characteristic built into the salt, or is it a “second-order” property possessed by the salt in virtue of i the salt’s possession of some “firstorder” property and ii the laws of nature? Reductive analyses of powers, though influential, have not fared well. Suppose a grain of salt is soluble in water. Does this mean that if the salt were placed in water, it would dissolve? No. Imagine that were the salt placed in water, a technician would intervene, imposing an electromagnetic field, thereby preventing the salt from dissolving. Attempts to exclude “blocking” conditions by appending “other things equal” clauses perhaps face charges of circularity: in nailing down what other things must be equal we find ourselves appealing to powers. Powers evidently are fundamental features of our world.

practical reason, the capacity for argument or demonstrative inference, considered in its application to the task of prescribing or selecting behavior. Some philosophical concerns in this area pertain to the actual thought processes by which plans of action are formulated and carried out in practical situations. A second major issue is what role, if any, practical reason plays in determining norms of conduct. Here there are two fundamental positions. Instrumentalism is typified by Hume’s claim that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions. According to instrumentalism, reason by itself is incapable of influencing action directly. It may do so indirectly, by disclosing facts that arouse motivational impulses. And it fulfills an indispensable function in discerning meansend relations by which our objectives may be attained. But none of those objectives is set by reason. All are set by the passions the desiderative and aversive impulses aroused in us by what our cognitive faculties apprehend. It does not follow from this alone that ethical motivation reduces to mere desire and aversion, based on the pleasure and pain different courses of action might afford. There might yet be a specifically ethical passion, or it might be that independently based moral injunctions have in themselves a special capacity to provoke ordinary desire and aversion. Nevertheless, instrumentalism is often associated with the view that pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, are the sole objects of value and disvalue, and hence the only possible motivators of conduct. Hence, it is claimed, moral injunctions must be grounded in these motives, and practical reason is of interest only as subordinated to inclination. The alternative to instrumentalism is the view championed by Kant, that practical reason is an autonomous source of normative principles, capable of motivating behavior independently of ordinary desire and aversion. On this view it is the passions that lack intrinsic moral import, and the function of practical reason is to limit their motivational role by formulating normative principles binding for all rational agents and founded in the operation of practical reason itself. Theories of this kind usually view moral principles as grounded in consistency, and an impartial respect for the autonomy of all rational agents. To be morally acceptable, principles of conduct must be universalizable, so that all rational agents could behave in the same way without their conduct either destroying itself or being inconsistently motivated. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these views. Instrumentalism offers a simpler account of both the function of practical reason and the sources of human motivation. But it introduces a strong subjective element by giving primacy to desire, thereby posing a problem of how moral principles can be universally binding. The Kantian approach offers more promise here, since it makes universalizability essential to any type of behavior being moral. But it is more complex, and the claim that the deliverances of practical reason carry intrinsic motivational force is open to challenge.

practical reasoning, the inferential process by which considerations for or against envisioned courses of action are brought to bear on the formation and execution of intention. The content of a piece of practical reasoning is a practical argument. Practical arguments can be complex, but they are often summarized in syllogistic form. Important issues concerning practical reasoning include how it relates to theoretical reasoning, whether it is a causal process, and how it can be evaluated. Theories of practical reasoning tend to divide into two basic categories. On one sort of view, the intrinsic features of practical reasoning exhibit little or no difference from those of theoretical reasoning. What makes practical reasoning practical is its subject matter and motivation. Hence the following could be a bona fide practical syllogism: Exercise would be good for me. Jogging is exercise. Therefore, jogging would be good for me. This argument has practical subject matter, and if made with a view toward intention formation it would be practical in motivation also. But it consists entirely of propositions, which are appropriate contents for belief-states. In principle, therefore, an agent could accept its conclusion without intending or even desiring to jog. Intention formation requires a further step. But if the content of an intention cannot be a proposition, that step could not count in itself as practical reasoning unless such reasoning can employ the contents of strictly practical mental states. Hence many philosophers call for practical syllogisms such as: Would that I exercise. Jogging is exercise. Therefore, I shall go jogging. Here the first premise is optative and understood to represent the content of a desire, and the conclusion is the content of a decision or act of intention formation. These contents are not true or false, and so are not propositions. Theories that restrict the contents of practical reasoning to propositions have the advantage that they allow such reasoning to be evaluated in terms of familiar logical principles. Those that permit the inclusion of optative content entail a need for more complex modes of evaluation. However, they bring more of the process of intention formation under the aegis of reason; also, they can be extended to cover the execution of intentions, in terms of syllogisms that terminate in volition. Both accounts must deal with cases of self-deception, in which the considerations an agent cites to justify a decision are not those from which it sprang, and cases of akrasia, where the agent views one course of action as superior, yet carries out another. Because mental content is always abstract, it cannot in itself be a nomic cause of behavior. But the states and events to which it belongs desires, beliefs, etc. can count as causes, and are so treated in deterministic explanations of action. Opponents of determinism reject this step, and seek to explain action solely through the teleological or justifying force carried by mental content. Practical syllogisms often summarize very complex thought processes, in which multiple options are considered, each with its own positive and negative aspects. Some philosophers hold that when successfully concluded, this process issues in a judgment of what action would be best all things considered i.e., in light of all relevant considerations. Practical reasoning can be evaluated in numerous ways. Some concern the reasoning process itself: whether it is timely and duly considers the relevant alternatives, as well as whether it is well structured logically. Other concerns have to do with the products of practical reasoning. Decisions may be deemed irrational if they result in incompatible intentions, or conflict with the agent’s beliefs regarding what is possible. They may also be criticized if they conflict with the agent’s best interests. Finally, an agent’s intentions can fail to accord with standards of morality. The relationship among these ways of evaluating intentions is important to the foundations of ethics.

practition, Castaneda’s term for the characteristic content of practical thinking. Each practition represents an action as something to be done, say, as intended, commanded, recommended, etc., and not as an accomplishment or prediction. Thus, unlike propositions, practitions are not truth-valued, but they can be components of valid arguments and so possess values akin to truth; e.g., the command ‘James, extinguish your cigar!’ seems legitimate given that James is smoking a cigar in a crowded bus. Acknowledging practitions is directly relevant to many other fields.

praedicamenta singular: praedicamentum, in medieval philosophy, the ten Aristotelian categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, where, when, position i.e., orientation e.g., “upright”, having, action, and passivity. These were the ten most general of all genera. All of them except substance were regarded as accidental. It was disputed whether this tenfold classification was intended as a linguistic division among categorematic terms or as an ontological division among extralinguistic realities. Some authors held that the division was primarily linguistic, and that extralinguistic realities were divided according to some but not all the praedicamenta. Most authors held that everything in any way real belonged to one praedicamentum or another, although some made an exception for God. But authors who believed in complexe significabile usually regarded them as not belonging to any praedicamentum.

pragmatic contradiction, a contradiction that is generated by pragmatic rather than logical implication. A logically implies B if it is impossible for B to be false if A is true, whereas A pragmatically implies B if in most but not necessarily all contexts, saying ‘A’ can reasonably be taken as indicating that B is true. Thus, if I say, “It’s raining,” what I say does not logically imply that I believe that it is raining, since it is possible for it to be raining without my believing it is. Nor does my saying that it is raining logically imply that I believe that it is, since it is possible for me to say this without believing it. But my saying this does pragmatically imply that I believe that it is raining, since normally my saying this can reasonably be taken to indicate that I believe it. Accordingly, if I were to say, “It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining,” the result would be a pragmatic contradiction. The first part “It’s raining” does not logically imply the negation of the second part “I don’t believe that it’s raining” but my saying the first part does pragmatically imply the negation of the second part.

pragmatism, a philosophy that stresses the relation of theory to praxis and takes the continuity of experience and nature as revealed through the outcome of directed action as the starting point for reflection. Experience is the ongoing transaction of organism and environment, i.e., both subject and object are constituted in the process. When intelligently ordered, initial conditions are deliberately transformed according to ends-inview, i.e., intentionally, into a subsequent state of affairs thought to be more desirable. Knowledge is therefore guided by interests or values. Since the reality of objects cannot be known prior to experience, truth claims can be justified only as the fulfillment of conditions that are experimentally determined, i.e., the outcome of inquiry. As a philosophic movement, pragmatism was first formulated by Peirce in the early 1870s in the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts; it was announced as a distinctive position in James’s 8 address to the Philosophical Union at the of California at Berkeley, and further elaborated according to the Chicago School, especially by Dewey, Mead, and Jane Addams 18605. Emphasis on the reciprocity of theory and praxis, knowledge and action, facts and values, follows from its postDarwinian understanding of human experience, including cognition, as a developmental, historically contingent, process. C. I. Lewis’s pragmatic a priori and Quine’s rejection of the analytic synthetic distinction develop these insights further. Knowledge is instrumental a tool for organizing experience satisfactorily. Concepts are habits of belief or rules of action. Truth cannot be determined solely by epistemological criteria because the adequacy of these criteria cannot be determined apart from the goals sought and values instantiated. Values, which arise in historically specific cultural situations, are intelligently appropriated only to the extent that they satisfactorily resolve problems and are judged worth retaining. According to pragmatic theories of truth, truths are beliefs that are confirmed in the course of experience and are therefore fallible, subject to further revision. True beliefs for Peirce represent real objects as successively confirmed until they converge on a final determination; for James, leadings that are worthwhile; and according to Dewey’s theory of inquiry, the transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinate one that leads to warranted assertions. Pragmatic ethics is naturalistic, pluralistic, developmental, and experimental. It reflects on the motivations influencing ethical systems, examines the individual developmental process wherein an individual’s values are gradually distinguished from those of society, situates moral judgments within problematic situations irreducibly individual and social, and proposes as ultimate criteria for decision making the value for life as growth, determined by all those affected by the actual or projected outcomes. The original interdisciplinary development of pragmatism continues in its influence on the humanities. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., member of the Metaphysical Club, later justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, developed a pragmatic theory of law. Peirce’s Principle of Pragmatism, by which meaning resides in conceivable practical effects, and his triadic theory of signs developed into the field of semiotics. James’s Principles of Psychology 0 not only established experimental psychology in North America, but shifted philosophical attention away from abstract analyses of rationality to the continuity of the biological and the mental. The reflex arc theory was reconstructed into an interactive loop of perception, feeling, thinking, and behavior, and joined with the selective interest of consciousness to become the basis of radical empiricism. Mead’s theory of the emergence of self and mind in social acts and Dewey’s analyses of the individual and society influenced the human sciences. Dewey’s theory of education as community-oriented, based on the psychological developmental stages of growth, and directed toward full participation in a democratic society, was the philosophical basis of progressive education.

praxis from Grecian prasso, ‘doing’, ‘acting’, in Aristotle, the sphere of thought and action that comprises the ethical and political life of man, contrasted with the theoretical designs of logic and epistemology theoria. It was thus that ‘praxis’ acquired its general definition of ‘practice’ through a contrastive comparison with ‘theory’. Throughout the history of Western philosophy the concept of praxis found a place in a variety of philosophical vocabularies. Marx and the neoMarxists linked the concept with a production paradigm in the interests of historical explanation. Within such a scheme of things the activities constituting the relations of production and exchange are seen as the dominant features of the socioeconomic history of humankind. Significations of ‘praxis’ are also discernible in the root meaning of pragma deed, affair, which informed the development of pragmatism. In more recent times the notion of praxis has played a prominent role in the formation of the school of critical theory, in which the performatives of praxis are seen to be more directly associated with the entwined phenomena of discourse, communication, and social practices. The central philosophical issues addressed in the current literature on praxis have to do with the theorypractice relationship and the problems associated with a value-free science. The general thrust is that of undermining or subverting the traditional bifurcation of theory and practice via a recognition of praxis-oriented endeavors that antedate both theory construction and the construal of practice as a mere application of theory. Both the project of “pure theory,” which makes claims for a value-neutral standpoint, and the purely instrumentalist understanding of practice, as itself shorn of discernment and insight, are jettisoned. The consequent philosophical task becomes that of understanding human thought and action against the backdrop of the everyday communicative endeavors, habits, and skills, and social practices that make up our inheritance in the world.

Praxis school, a school of philosophy originating in Zagreb and Belgrade which, from 4 to 4, published the international edition of the leading postwar Marxist journal Praxis. During the same period, it organized the Korcula Summer School, which attracted scholars from around the Western world. In a reduced form the school continues each spring with the Social Philosophy Course in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The founders of praxis philosophy include Gajo Petrovic Zagreb, Milan Kangrga Zagreb, and Mihailo Markovic Belgrade. Another wellknown member of the group is Svetozar Stojanovic Belgrade, and a second-generation leader is Gvozden Flego Zagreb. The Praxis school emphasized the writings of the young Marx while subjecting dogmatic Marxism to one of its strongest criticisms. Distinguishing between Marx’s and Engels’s writings and emphasizing alienation and a dynamic concept of the human being, it contributed to a greater understanding of the interrelationship between the individual and society. Through its insistence on Marx’s call for a “ruthless critique,” the school stressed open inquiry and freedom of speech in both East and West. Quite possibly the most important and original philosopher of the group, and certainly Croatia’s leading twentieth-century philosopher, was Gajo Petrovic 793. He called for 1 understanding philosophy as a radical critique of all existing things, and 2 understanding human beings as beings of praxis and creativity. This later led to a view of human beings as revolutionary by nature. At present he is probably best remembered for his Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century and Philosophie und Revolution. Milan Kangrga b.3 also emphasizes human creativity while insisting that one should understand human beings as producers who humanize nature. An ethical problematic of humanity can pragmatism, ethical Praxis school 731 731 be realized through a variety of disciplines that include aesthetics, philosophical anthropolgy, theory of knowledge, ontology, and social thought. Mihailo Markovic b.3, a member of the Belgrade Eight, is best known for his theory of meaning, which leads him to a theory of socialist humanism. His most widely read work in the West is From Affluence to Praxis: Philosophy and Social Criticism.

Pre-analytic, considered but naive; commonsensical; not tainted by prior explicit theorizing; said of judgments and, derivatively, of beliefs or intuitions underlying such judgments. Preanalytic judgments are often used to test philosophical theses. All things considered, we prefer theories that accord with preanalytic judgments to those that do not, although most theorists exhibit a willingness to revise preanalytic assessments in light of subsequent inquiry. Thus, a preanalytic judgment might be thought to constitute a starting point for the philosophical consideration of a given topic. Is justice giving every man his due? It may seem so, preanalytically. Attention to concrete examples, however, may lead us to a different view. It is doubtful, even in such cases, that we altogether abandon preanalytic judgments. Rather, we endeavor to reconcile apparently competing judgments, making adjustments in a way that optimizes overall coherence.

Principle of economy of rational effort -- cheapest-cost avoider, in the economic analysis of law, the party in a dispute that could have prevented the dispute, or minimized the losses arising from it, with the lowest loss to itself. The term encompasses several types of behavior. As the lowest-cost accident avoider, it is the party that could have prevented the accident at the lowest cost. As the lowest-cost insurer, it is the party that could been have insured against the losses arising from the dispute. This could be the party that could have purchased insurance at the lowest cost or self-insured, or the party best able to appraise the expected losses and the probability of the occurrence. As the lowest-cost briber, it is the party least subject to transaction costs. This party is the one best able to correct any legal errors in the assignment of the entitlement by purchasing the entitlement from the other party. As the lowest-cost information gatherer, it is the party best able to make an informed judgment as to the likely benefits and costs of an action. Principle of economy of rational effort: Coase theorem, a non-formal insight by R. Coase: 1: assuming that there are no transaction costs involved in exchanging rights for money, then no matter how rights are initially distributed, rational agents will buy and sell them so as to maximize individual returns. In jurisprudence this proposition has been the basis for a claim about how rights should be distributed even when as is usual transaction costs are high: the law should confer rights on those who would purchase them were they for sale on markets without transaction costs; e.g., the right to an indivisible, unsharable resource should be conferred on the agent willing to pay the highest price for it.

principium. Grice. Principle of conversational helpfulness. “I call it ‘principle,’ echoing Boethius.”Mention should also he made of Boethius’ conception, that there are certain principles, sentences which have no demonstration — probatio — which he calls principales propositiones or probationis principia. Here is the fragment from his Commentary on Topics treating of principles; El iliac quidem (propositiones) quarum nulla probatio est, maximae ac principales vocantur, quod his illas necesse est approbari, quae ut demonstrari valeant, non recusant/ est auteni maxima proposiiio ut liaec « si de aequalibus aequalia demas, quae derelinquitur aequalia sunt », ita enim hoc per se notion est, ut aliud notius quo approbari valeat esse non possit; quae proposi- tiones cum (idem sui natura propria gerant, non solum alieno ad (idem non egent argumento, oerum ceteris quoque probationis sclent esse principium; igitur per se notae propositiones, quibus nihil est notius, indemonstrabiles ac maxime et principales vocantur (“Indeed those sentences that have no demonstration are called maximum or principal [sentences], because they are not rejected since they are necessary to those that have to be demonstrated and which are valid for making a demonstration ; but a maximum sentence such as « if from equal [quantifies], equal [quantities] are taken, what is left are equal [quantities]*, is self- evident, and there is nothing which can be better known self-evidently valid, and self- demonstrating, therefore they are sentences containing their certitude in their very nature and not only do they need no additional argument to demonstrate their certitude, but are also the principles of demonstration of the other [sentences]; so they are, self-evident sen- tences, nothing being better known than they are, and are called undemonstrable or maxi- mum and principal”). Boethius’ idea coincides with Aristotle’s; deduction must start from somewhere, we must begin with something unproved. The Stagirite, how- ever, gave an explanation of the existence of principles and the possibility of their being grasjied by the active intellect, whereas with Boethius princi- ples appear as severed from the sentences demonstrated in a more formal manner: there are two kinds of sentences: some which are demonstrable and others which need no demonstration

praedicabile: As in qualia being the plural of quale and universalia being the plural of universale, predicabilia is Boethius’s plural for the ‘predicabile’ -- something Grice knew by heart from giving seminars at Oxfrod on Aristotle’s categories with Austin and Strawson. He found the topic boring enough to give the seminar ALONE!

prædicatum: vide Is there a praedicatum in Blackburn’s one-off predicament. He draws a skull and communicates that there is danger. The drawsing of the skull is not syntactically structured. So it is difficult to isolate the ‘praedicatum.’ That’s why Grice leaves matters of the praedicatum’ to reductive analyses at a second stage of his programme, where one wants to apply, metabolically, ‘communicate’ to what an emissum does. The emissum of the form, The S is P, predicates P of S. Vide subjectification, and subjectum. Of especial interest to Grice and Strawson. Lewis and Short have “praedīco,” which they render as “to say or mention before or beforehand, to premise.” Grice as a modista is interested in parts of speech: nomen (onoma) versus verbum (rhema) being the classical, since Plato. The mediaeval modistae like Alcuin adapted Aristotle, and Grice follows suit. Of particular relevance are the ‘syncategoremata,’ since Grice was obsessed with particles, and we cannot say that ‘and’ is a predicate! This relates to the ‘categorema.’ Liddell and Scott have “κατηγόρ-ημα,” which they render as “accusation, charge,” Gorg.Pal.22; but in philosophy, as “predicate,” as per Arist.Int.20b32, Metaph.1053b19, etc.; -- “οὐκ εὔοδον τὸ ἁπλοῖν ἐστι κ.” Epicur.Fr.18. – and as “head of predicables,” in Arist.Metaph.1028a33,Ph.201a1, Zeno Stoic.1.25, etc.; περὶ κατηγορημάτων Sphaer.ib.140. The term syncategorema comes from a passage of Priscian in his Institutiones grammatice II , 15. “coniunctae plenam faciunt orationem, alias autem partes, κατηγορήματα, hoc est consignificantia, appellabant.” A distinction is made between two types of word classes ("partes orationis," singular, "pars orationis") distinguished by philosophers since Plato, viz. nouns (nomen, onoma) and verbs (verbum, rhema) on the one hand, and a 'syncategorema or consignificantium. A consignificantium, just as the unary functor "non," and any of the three dyadic functors, "et," "vel" (or "aut") and "si," does not have a definitive meaning on its own -- cf. praepositio, cited by Grice, -- "the meaning of 'to,' the meaning of 'of,'" -- rather, they acquire meaning in combination or when con-joined to one or more categorema. It is one thing to say that we employ a certain part of speech when certain conditions are fulfilled and quite another to claim that the role in the language of that part of speech is to say, even in an extended sense, that those conditions are fulfilled. In Logic, the verb 'kategoreo' is 'predicate of a person or thing,' “τί τινος” Arist.Cat.3a19,al., Epicur.Fr.250; κυρίως, καταχρηστικῶς κ., Phld.Po.5.15; “ἐναντίως ὑπὲρ τῶν αὐτῶν” Id.Oec.p.60 J.: —more freq. in Pass., to be predicated of . . , τινος Arist.Cat.2a21, APr. 26b9, al.; “κατά τινος” Id.Cat.2a37; “κατὰ παντὸς ἢ μηδενός” Id.APr.24a15: less freq. “ἐπί τινος” Id.Metaph.998b16, 999a15; so later “ἐφ᾽ ἑνὸς οἴονται θεοῦ ἑκάτερον τῶν ὀνομάτων -εῖσθαι” D.H.2.48; “περί τινος” Arist. Top.140b37; “τὸ κοινῇ -ούμενον ἐπὶ πᾶσιν” Id.SE179a8: abs., τὸ κατηγορούμενον the predicate, opp. τὸ ὑποκείμενον (the subject), Id.Cat.1b11, cf.Metaph.1043a6, al.; κατηγορεῖν καὶ -εῖσθαι to be subject and predicate, Id.APr.47b1. BANC.

prejudices: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice, by H. P. Grice! PGRICE had been in the works for a while. Knowing this, Grice is able to start his auto-biography, or memoir, to which he later adds a specific reply to this or that objection by the editors. The reply is divided in neat sections. After a preamble displaying his gratitude for the volume in his honour, Grice turns to his prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice. The third section is a reply to the editorss overview of his work. This reply itself is itself subdivided into questions of meaning and rationality, and questions of Met. , philosophical psychology, and value. As the latter is repr. in “Conception” it is possible to cite this sub-section from the Reply as a separate piece. Grice originally entitles his essay in a brilliant manner, echoing the style of an English non-conformist, almost: Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice. With his Richards, a nice Welsh surNames, Grice is punning on the first Names of both Grandy and Warner. Grice is especially concerned with what Richards see as an ontological commitment on Grices part to the abstract, yet poorly individuated entity of a proposition. Grice also deals with the alleged insufficiency in his conceptual analysis of reasoning. He brings for good measure a point about a potential regressus ad infinitum in his account of a chain of intentions involved in meaning that p and communicating that p. Even if one of the drafts is titled festschrift, not by himself, this is not strictly a festschrift in that Grices Names is hidden behind the acronym: PGRICE. Notably on the philosophy of perception. Also in “Conception,” especially that tricky third lecture on a metaphysical foundation for objective value. Grice is supposed to reply to the individual contributors, who include Strawson, but does not. I cancelled the implicaturum! However, we may identify in his oeuvre points of contacts of his own views with the philosophers who contributed, notably Strawson. Most of this material is reproduced verbatim, indeed, as the second part of his Reply to Richards, and it is a philosophical memoir of which Grice is rightly proud. The life and opinions are, almost in a joke on Witters, distinctly separated. Under Life, Grice convers his conservative, irreverent rationalism making his early initial appearance at Harborne under the influence of his non-conformist father, and fermented at his tutorials with Hardie at Corpus, and his associations with Austins play group on Saturday mornings, and some of whose members he lists alphabetically: Austin, Gardiner, Grice, Hampshire, Hare, Hart, Nowell-Smith, Paul, Pears, Strawson, Thomson, Urmson, and Warnock. Also, his joint philosophising with Austin, Pears, Strawson, Thomson, and Warnock. Under Opinions, Grice expands mainly on ordinary-language philosophy and his Bunyanesque way to the City of Eternal Truth. Met. , Philosophical Psychology, and Value, in “Conception,” is thus part of his Prejudices and predilections. The philosophers Grice quotes are many and varied, such as Bosanquet and Kneale, and from the other place, Keynes. Grice spends some delightful time criticising the critics of ordinary-language philosophy such as Bergmann (who needs an English futilitarian?) and Gellner. He also quotes from Jespersen, who was "not a philosopher but wrote a philosophy of grammar!" And Grice includes a reminiscence of the bombshells brought from Vienna by the enfant terrible of Oxford philosophy Freddie Ayer, after being sent to the Continent by Ryle. He recalls an air marshal at a dinner with Strawson at Magdalen relishing on Cook Wilsons adage, What we know we know. And more besides! After reminiscing for Clarendon, Grice will go on to reminisce for Harvard University Press in the closing section of the Retrospective epilogue. Refs.: The main source is “Reply to Richards,” and references to Oxonianism, and linguistic botanising, BANC.

prelatum -- anaphora: a device of reference or cross-reference in which a term called an anaphor, typically a pronoun, has its semantic properties determined by a term or noun phrase called the anaphor’s antecedent that occurs earlier. Sometimes the antecedent is a proper name or other independently referring expression, as in ‘Jill went up the hill and then she came down again’. In such cases, the anaphor refers to the same object as its antecedent. In other cases, the anaphor seems to function as a variable bound by an antecedent quantifier, as in ‘If any miner bought a donkey, he is penniless’. But anaphora is puzzling because not every example falls neatly into one of these two groups. Thus, in ‘John owns some sheep and Harry vaccinates them’ an example due to Gareth Evans the anaphor is arguably not bound by its antecedent ‘some sheep’. And in ‘Every miner who owns a donkey beats it’ a famous type of case discovered by Geach, the anaphor is arguably neither bound by ‘a donkey’ nor a uniquely referring expression.

predicables, also praedicabilia, sometimes called the quinque voces five words, in medieval philosophy, genus, species, difference, proprium, and accident, the five main ways general predicates can be predicated. The list comes from Porphyry’s Isagoge. It was debated whether it applies to linguistic predicates only or also to extralinguistic universals. Things that have accidents can exist without them; other predicables belong necessarily to whatever has them. The Aristotelian/Porphyrian notion of “inseparable accident” blurs this picture. Genus and species are natural kinds; other predicables are not. A natural kind that is not a narrowest natural kind is a genus; one that is not a broadest natural kind is a species. Some genera are also species. A proprium is not a species, but is coextensive with one. A difference belongs necessarily to whatever has it, but is neither a natural kind nor coextensive with one.

Pre-existence, existence of the individual soul or psyche prior to its current embodiment, when the soul or psyche is taken to be separable and capable of existing independently from its embodiment. The current embodiment is then often described as a reincarnation of the soul. Plato’s Socrates refers to such a doctrine several times in the dialogues, notably in the myth of Er in Book X of the Republic. The doctrine is distinguished from two other teachings about the soul: creationism, which holds that the individual human soul is directly created by God, and traducianism, which held that just as body begets body in biological generation, so the soul of the new human being is begotten by the parental soul. In Hinduism, the cycle of reincarnations represents the period of estrangement and trial for the soul or Atman before it achieves release moksha.

prescriptivism, the theory that evaluative judgments necessarily have prescriptive meaning. Associated with noncognitivism and moral antirealism, prescriptivism holds that moral language is such that, if you say that you think one ought to do a certain kind of act, and yet you are not committed to doing that kind of act in the relevant circumstances, then you either spoke insincerely or are using the word ‘ought’ in a less than full-blooded sense. Prescriptivism owes its stature to Hare. One of his innovations is the distinction between “secondarily evaluative” and “primarily evaluative” words. The prescriptive meaning of secondarily evaluative words, such as ‘soft-hearted’ or ‘chaste’, may vary significantly while their descriptive meanings stay relatively constant. Hare argues the reverse for the primarily evaluative words ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘ought’, and ‘must’. For example, some people assign to ‘wrong’ the descriptive meaning ‘forbidden by God’, others assign it the descriptive meaning ‘causes social conflict’, and others give it different descriptive meanings; but since all use ‘wrong’ with the same prescriptive meaning, they are using the same concept. In part to show how moral judgments can be prescriptive and yet have the same logical relations as indicative sentences, Hare distinguished between phrastics and neustics. The phrastic, or content, can be the same in indicative and prescriptive sentences; e.g., ‘Sam’s leaving’ is the phrastic not only of the indicative ‘Sam will leave’ but also of the prescription ‘Sam ought to leave’. Hare’s Language of Morals 2 specified that the neustic indicates mood, i.e., whether the sentence is indicative, imperative, interrogative, etc. However, in an article in Mind 9 and in Sorting Out Ethics 7, he used ‘neustic’ to refer to the sign of subscription, and ‘tropic’ to refer to the sign of mood. Prescriptivity is especially important if moral judgments are universalizable. For then we can employ golden rulestyle moral reasoning.

pre-Socratics: cf. pre-Griceians. the early Grecian philosophers who were not influenced by Socrates. Generally they lived before Socrates, but some are contemporary with him or even younger. The classification though not the term goes back to Aristotle, who saw Socrates’ humanism and emphasis on ethical issues as a watershed in the history of philosophy. Aristotle rightly noted that philosophers prior to Socrates had stressed natural philosophy and cosmology rather than ethics. He credited them with discovering material principles and moving causes of natural events, but he criticized them for failing to stress structural elements of things formal causes and values or purposes final causes. Unfortunately, no writing of any pre-Socratic survives in more than a fragmentary form, and evidence of their views is thus often indirect, based on reports or criticisms of later writers. In order to reconstruct pre-Socratic thought, scholars have sought to collect testimonies of ancient sources and to identify quotations from the preSocratics in those sources. As modern research has revealed flaws in the interpretations of ancient witnesses, it has become a principle of exegesis to base reconstructions of their views on the actual words of the pre-Socratics themselves wherever possible. Because of the fragmentary and derivative nature of our evidence, even basic principles of a philosopher’s system sometimes remain controversial; nevertheless, we can say that thanks to modern methods of historiography, there are many points we understand better than ancient witnesses who are our secondary sources. Our best ancient secondary source is Aristotle, who lived soon after the pre-Socratics and had access to most of their writings. He interprets his predecessors from the standpoint of his own theory; but any historian must interpret philosophers in light of some theoretical background. Since we have extensive writings of Aristotle, we understand his system and can filter out his own prejudices. His colleague Theophrastus was the first professional historian of philosophy. Adopting Aristotle’s general framework, he systematically discussed pre-Socratic theories. Unfortunately his work itself is lost, but many fragments and summaries of parts of it remain. Indeed, virtually all ancient witnesses writing after Theophrastus depend on him for their general understanding of the early philosophers, sometimes by way of digests of his work. When biography became an important genre in later antiquity, biographers collected facts, anecdotes, slanders, chronologies often based on crude a priori assumptions, lists of book titles, and successions of school directors, which provide potentially valuable information. By reconstructing ancient theories, we can trace the broad outlines of pre-Socratic development with some confidence. The first philosophers were the Milesians, philosophers of Miletus on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, who in the sixth century B.C. broke away from mythological modes of explanation by accounting for all phenomena, even apparent prodigies of nature, by means of simple physical hypotheses. Aristotle saw the Milesians as material monists, positing a physical substrate of water, or the apeiron, or air; but their material source was probably not a continuing substance that underlies all changes as Aristotle thought, but rather an original stuff that was transformed into different stuffs. Pythagoras migrated from Ionia to southern Italy, founding a school of Pythagoreans who believed that souls transmigrated and that number was the basis of all reality. Because Pythagoras and his early followers did not publish anything, it is difficult to trace their development and influence in detail. Back in Ionia, Heraclitus criticized Milesian principles because he saw that if substances changed into one another, the process of transformation was more important than the substances that appeared in the cycle of changes. He thus chose the unstable substance fire as his material principle and stressed the unity of opposites. Parmenides and the Eleatic School criticized the notion of notbeing that theories of physical transformations seemed to presuppose. One cannot even conceive of or talk of not-being; hence any conception that presupposes not-being must be ruled out. But the basic notions of coming-to-be, differentiation, and indeed change in general presuppose not-being, and thus must be rejected. Eleatic analysis leads to the further conclusion, implicit in Parmenides, explicit in Melissus, that there is only one substance, what-is. Since this substance does not come into being or change in any way, nor does it have any internal differentiations, the world is just a single changeless, homogeneous individual. Parmenides’ argument seems to undermine the foundations of natural philosophy. After Parmenides philosophers who wished to continue natural philosophy felt compelled to grant that coming-to-be and internal differentiation of a given substance were impossible. But in order to accommodate natural processes, they posited a plurality of unchanging, homogeneous elements the four elements of Empedocles, the elemental stuffs of Anaxagoras, the atoms of Democritus that by arrangement and rearrangement could produce the cosmos and the things in it. There is no real coming-to-be and perishing in the world since the ultimate substances are everlasting; but some limited kind of change such as chemical combination or mixture or locomotion could account for changing phenomena in the world of experience. Thus the “pluralists” incorporated Eleatic principles into their systems while rejecting the more radical implications of the Eleatic critique. Pre-Socratic philosophers developed more complex systems as a response to theoretical criticisms. They focused on cosmology and natural philosophy in general, championing reason and nature against mythological traditions. Yet the pre-Socratics have been criticized both for being too narrowly scientific in interest and for not being scientific experimental enough. While there is some justice in both criticisms, their interests showed breadth as well as narrowness, and they at least made significant conceptual progress in providing a framework for scientific and philosophical ideas. While they never developed sophisticated theories of ethics, logic, epistemology, or metaphysics, nor invented experimental methods of confirmation, they did introduce the concepts that ultimately became fundamental in modern theories of cosmic, biological, and cultural evolution, as well as in atomism, genetics, and social contract theory. Because the Socratic revolution turned philosophy in different directions, the pre-Socratic line died out. But the first philosophers supplied much inspiration for the sophisticated fourthcentury systems of Plato and Aristotle as well as the basic principles of the great Hellenistic schools, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism.

presupposition, 1 a relation between sentences or statements, related to but distinct from entailment and assertion; 2 what a speaker takes to be understood in making an assertion. The first notion is semantic, the second pragmatic. The semantic notion was introduced by Strawson in his attack on Russell’s theory of descriptions, and perhaps anticipated by Frege. Strawson argued that ‘The present king of France is bald’ does not entail ‘There is a present king of France’ as Russell held, but instead presupposes it. Semantic presupposition can be defined thus: a sentence or statement S presupposes a sentence or statement SH provided S entails SH and the negation of S also entails SH . SH is a condition of the truth or falsity of S. Thus, since ‘There is a present king of France’ is false, ‘The present king of France is bald’ is argued to be neither true nor false. So construed, presupposition is defined in terms of, but is distinct from, entailment. It is also distinct from assertion, since it is viewed as a precondition of the truth or falsity of what is asserted. The pragmatic conception does not appeal to truth conditions, but instead contrasts what a speaker presupposes and what that speaker asserts in making an utterance. Thus, someone who utters ‘The present king of France is bald’ presupposes believes and believes that the audience believes that there is a present king of France, and asserts that this king is bald. So conceived, presuppositions are beliefs that the speaker takes for granted; if these beliefs are false, the utterance will be inappropriate in some way, but it does not follow that the sentence uttered lacks a truth-value. These two notions of presupposition are logically independent. On the semantic characterization, presupposition is a relation between sentences or statements requiring that there be truth-value gaps. On the pragmatic characterization, it is speakers rather than sentences or statements that have presuppositions; no truth-value gaps are required. Many philosophers and linguists have argued for treating what have been taken to be cases of semantic presupposition, including the one discussed above, as pragmatic phenomena. Some have denied that semantic presuppositions exist. If not, intuitions about presupposition do not support the claims that natural languages have truth-value gaps and that we need a three-valued logic to represent the semantics of natural language adequately. Presupposition is also distinct from implicaturum. If someone reports that he has just torn his coat and you say, “There’s a tailor shop around the corner,” you conversationally implicate that the shop is open. This is not a semantic presupposition because if it is false that the shop is open, there is no inclination to say that your assertion was neither true nor false. It is not a pragmatic presupposition because it is not something you believe the hearer believes.

pretheoretical, independent of theory. More specifically, a proposition is pretheoretical, according to some philosophers, if and only if it does not depend for its plausibility or implausibility on theoretical considerations or considerations of theoretical analysis. The term ‘preanalytic’ is often used synonymously with ‘pretheoretical’, but the former is more properly paired with analysis rather than with theory. Some philosophers characterize pretheoretical propositions as “intuitively” plausible or implausible. Such propositions, they hold, can regulate philosophical theorizing as follows: in general, an adequate philosophical theory should not conflict with intuitively plausible propositions by implying intuitively implausible propositions, and should imply intuitively plausible propositions. Some philosophers grant that theoretical considerations can override “intuitions” in the sense of intuitively plausible propositions when overall theoretical coherence or reflective equilibrium is thereby enhanced.

prescriptum: prescriptivism. According to Grice’s prescriptive meta-ethics, by uttering ‘p,’ the emissor may intend his recipient to entertain a desiderative state of content ‘p.’ In which case, the emissor is ‘prescribing’ a course of conduct. As opposed to the ‘descriptum,’ which just depicts a ‘state’ of affairs that the emissor wants to inform his recipient about. Surely there are for Grice at least two different modes, the buletic, which tends towards the prescriptive, and the doxastic, which is mostly ‘descriptive.’ One has to be careful because Grice thinks that what a philosopher like Strawson does with ‘descriptive’ expression (like ‘true,’ ‘know’ and ‘good’) and talk of pseudo-descriptive. What is that gives the buletic a ‘prescritive’ or deontic ring to it? This is Kant’s question. Grice kept a copy of Foots on morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives. “So Somervillian Oxonian it hurts!”. Grice took virtue ethics more seriously than the early Hare. Hare will end up a virtue ethicist, since he changed from a meta-ethicist to a moralist embracing a hedonistic version of eudaemonist utilitarianism. Grice was more Aristotelianly conservative! Unlike Hares and Grices meta-ethical sensitivities (as members of the Oxonian school of ordinary-language philosophy), Foot suggests a different approach to ethics. Grice admired Foots ability to make the right conceptual distinction. Foot is following a very Oxonian tradition best represented by the work of Warnock. Of course, Grice was over-familiar with the virtue vs. vice distinction, since Hardie had instilled it on him at Corpus! For Grice, virtue and vice (and the mesotes), display an interesting logical grammar, though. Grice would say that rationality is a virtue; fallacious reasoning is a vice. Some things Grice takes more of a moral standpoint about. To cheat is neither irrational nor unreasonble: just plain repulsive. As such, it would be a vice ‒ mind not getting caught in its grip! Grice is concerned with vice in his account of akrasia or incontinentia. If agent A KNOWS that doing x is virtuous, yet decides to do ~x, which is vicious, A is being akratic. For Grice, akratic behaviour applies both in the buletic or boulomaic realm and in the doxastic realm. And it is part of the philosopher’s job to elucidate the conceptual intricacies attached to it. 1. prima-facie (p⊃!q) V probably (p⊃q). 2. prima-facie ((A and B) ⊃!p) V probably ( (A and B) ⊃p). 3. prima-facie ((A and B and C) ⊃!p) V probably ( (A and B and C,) ⊃p). 4. prima-facie ((all things before P V!p) V probably ((all things before P) ⊃ p). 5. prima-facie ((all things are considered ⊃ !p) V probably (all things are considered, ⊃ p). 6. !q V .q 7. Acc. Reasoning P wills that !q V Acc. Reasoning P that judges q. Refs.: The main sources under ‘meta-ethics,’ above, BANC.

Price, Richard 172391, Welsh Dissenting minister, actuary, and moral philosopher. His main work, A Review of the Principal Question in Morals 1758, is a defense of rationalism in ethics. He argued that the understanding immediately perceives simple, objective, moral qualities of actions. The resulting intuitive knowledge of moral truths is accompanied by feelings of approval and disapproval responsible for moral motivation. He also wrote influential papers on life expectancy, public finance, and annuities; communicated to the Royal Society the paper by his deceased friend Thomas Bayes containing Bayes’s theorem; and defended the and revolutions. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is a response to one of Price’s sermons.

Prichard: h. a. – H. P. Grice called himself a neo-Prichardian, but then “I used to be a neo-Stoutian before that!” -- English philosopher and founder of the Oxford school of intuitionism. An Oxford fellow and professor, he published Kant’s Theory of Knowledge 9 and numerous essays, collected in Moral Obligation 9, 8 and in Knowledge and Perception 0. Prichard was a realist in his theory of knowledge, following Cook Wilson. He held that through direct perception in concrete cases we obtain knowledge of universals and of necessary connections between them, and he elaborated a theory about our knowledge of material objects. In “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” 2 he argued powerfully that it is wrong to think that a general theory of obligation is possible. No single principle captures the various reasons why obligatory acts are obligatory. Only by direct perception in particular cases can we see what we ought to do. With this essay Prichard founded the Oxford school of intuitionism, carried on by, among others, Ross.

Priestley, J.: British philosopher. In 1774 he prepared oxygen by heating mercuric oxide. Although he continued to favor the phlogiston hypothesis, his work did much to discredit that idea. He discovered many gases, including ammonia, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrochloric acid. While studying the layer of carbon dioxide over a brewing vat, he conceived the idea of dissolving it under pressure. The resulting “soda water” was famous throughout Europe. His Essay on Government 1768 influenced Jefferson’s ideas in the Declaration of Independence. The essay also contributed to the utilitarianism of Bentham, supplying the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Priestley modified the associationism of Locke, Hume, and Hartley, holding that a sharp distinction must be drawn between the results of association in forming natural propensities and its effects on the development of moral ideas. On the basis of this distinction, he argued, against Hume, that differences in individual moral sentiments are results of education, through the association of ideas, a view anticipated by Helvétius. Priestley served as minister to anti-Establishment congregations. His unpopular stress on individual freedom resulted in his move to Pennsylvania, where he spent his last years.

prime mover, the original source and cause of motion change in the universe an idea that was developed by Aristotle and became important in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic thought about God. According to Aristotle, something that is in motion a process of change is moving from a state of potentiality to a state of actuality. For example, water that is being heated is potentially hot and in the process of becoming actually hot. If a cause of change must itself actually be in the state that it is bringing about, then nothing can produce motion in itself; whatever is in motion is being moved by another. For otherwise something would be both potentially and actually in the same state. Thus, the water that is potentially hot can become hot only by being changed by something else the fire that is actually hot. The prime mover, the original cause of motion, must itself, therefore, not be in motion; it is an unmoved mover. Aquinas and other theologians viewed God as the prime mover, the ultimate cause of all motion. Indeed, for these theologians the argument to establish the existence of a first mover, itself unmoved, was a principal argument used in their efforts to prove the existence of God on the basis of reason. Many modern thinkers question the argument for a first mover on the ground that it does not seem to be logically impossible that the motion of one thing be caused by a second thing whose motion in turn is caused by a third thing, and so on without end. Defenders of the argument claim that it presupposes a distinction between two different causal series, one temporal and one simultaneous, and argue that the objection succeeds only against a temporal causal series.

PRIMA PHILOSOPHIA -- first philosophy, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the study of being qua being, including the study of theology as understood by him, since the divine is being par excellence. Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy was concerned chiefly with the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of matter and of the mind.

Prince Maurice’s parrot: The ascription of ‘that’-clause in the report of a communicatum by a pirot of stage n-1 may be a problem by a priot in stage n. Do we want to say that the parrot communicates that he finds Prince Maurice an idiot? While some may not be correct that Griciean principles can be explained on practical, utilitarian grounds, Grice’s main motivation is indeed to capture the ‘rational’ capacity. Since I think I may be confident, that, whoever should see a creature of his own shape or make, though it had no more reason all its life than a cat or a parrot, would call him still a man; or whoever should hear a cat or a parrot discourse, reason, and philosophize, would call or think it nothing but a cat or a parrot; and say, the one was a dull irrational man, and the other a very intelligent rational parrot. A relation we have in an author of great note, is sufficient to countenance the supposition of a rational parrot. His words are: "I had a mind to know, from Prince Maurice's own mouth, the account of a common, but much credited story, that I had heard so often from many others, of an old parrot he had in Brazil, during his government there, that spoke, and asked, and answered common questions, like a reasonable creature: so that those of his train there generally concluded it to be witchery or possession; and one of his chaplains, who lived long afterwards in Holland, would never from that time endure a parrot, but said they all had a devil in them. I had heard many particulars of this story, and as severed by people hard to be discredited, which made me ask Prince Maurice what there was of it. He said, with his usual plainness and dryness in talk, there was something true, but a great deal false of what had been reported. I desired to know of him what there was of the first. He told me short and coldly, that he had heard of such an old parrot when he had been at Brazil; and though he believed nothing of it, and it was a good way off, yet he had so much curiosity as to send for it: that it was a very great and a very old one; and when it came first into the room where the prince was, with a great many Dutchmen about him, it said presently, What a company of white men are here! They asked it, what it thought that man was, pointing to the prince. It answered, Some General or other. When they brought it close to him, he asked it, D'ou venez-vous? It answered, De Marinnan. The Prince, A qui estes-vous? The Parrot, A un Portugais. The Prince, Que fais-tu la? Parrot, Je garde les poulles. The Prince laughed, and said, Vous gardez les poulles? The Parrot answered, Oui, moi; et je scai bien faire; and made the chuck four or five times that people use to make to chickens when they call them. I set down the words of this worthy dialogue in French, just as Prince Maurice said them to me. I asked him in what language the parrot spoke, and he said in Brazilian. I asked whether he understood Brazilian; he said No, but he had taken care to have two interpreters by him, the one a Dutchman that spoke Brazilian, and the other a Brazilian that spoke Dutch; that he asked them separately and privately, and both of them agreed in telling him just the same thing that the parrot had said. I could not but tell this odd story, because it is so much out of the way, and from the first hand, and what may pass for a good one; for I dare say this Prince at least believed himself in all he told me, having ever passed for a very honest and pious man: I leave it to naturalists to reason, and to other men to believe, as they please upon it; however, it is not, perhaps, amiss to relieve or enliven a busy scene sometimes with such digressions, whether to the purpose or no." I have taken care that the reader should have the story at large in the author's own words, because he seems to me not to have thought it incredible; for it cannot be imagined that so able a man as he, who had sufficiency enough to warrant all the testimonies he gives of himself, should take so much pains, in a place where it had nothing to do, to pin so close, not only on a man whom he mentions as his friend, but on a Prince in whom he acknowledges very great honesty and piety, a story which, if he himself thought incredible, he could not but also think ridiculous. The Prince, it is plain, who vouches this story, and our author, who relates it from him, both of them call this talker a parrot: and I ask any one else who thinks such a story fit to be told, whether, if this parrot, and all of its kind, had always talked, as we have a prince's word for it this one did,- whether, I say, they would not have passed for a race of rational animals; but yet, whether, for all that, they would have been allowed to be men, and not parrots? For I presume it is not the idea of a thinking or rational being alone that makes the idea of a man in most people's sense: but of a body, so and so shaped, joined to it: and if that be the idea of a man, the same successive body not shifted all at once, must, as well as the same immaterial spirit, go to the making of the same man.

principle of economy of rational effort: (principium oeconomiae effortis rationalis). Cf. his metaphor of the hamburger. Grice knew that ‘economy’ is vague. It relates to the ‘open house.’ But is a crucial concept. It is not the principle of parsimony of rational effort. It is not the principle of ‘minimisaation’ of rational effort. It is the principle of the ‘economy’ of rational effort. ‘Economy’ is already a value-oriented word, since it is a branch of politics and meta-ethics. oecŏnŏmĭcus , a, um, adj., = οἰκονομικός. I. Of or relating to domestic economy; subst.: oecŏnŏmĭcus , i, m., a work of Xenophon on domestic economy. in eo libro, qui Oeconomicus inscribitur, Cic. Off. 2, 24, 87; Gell. 15, 5, 8.— II. Of or belonging to a proper (oratorical) division or arrangement; orderly, methodical: “oeconomica totius causae dispositio,” Quint. 7, 10, 11. οἰκονομ-ικός , ή, όν, A.practised in the management of a household or family, opp. πολιτικός, Pl.Alc.1.133e, Phdr.248d, X.Oec.1.3, Arist.Pol.1252a8, etc. : Sup., [κτημάτων] τὸ βέλτιστον καὶ-ώτατον, of man, Phld.Oec.p.30 J. : hence, thrifty, frugal, economical, X.Mem.4.2.39, Phylarch.65 J. (Comp.) : ὁ οἰ. title of treatise on the duties of domestic life, by Xenophon ; and τὰ οἰ. title of treatise on public finance, ascribed to Aristotle, cf. X.Cyr.8.1.14 : ἡ -κή (sc. τέχνη) domestic economy, husbandry, Pl.Plt.259c, X.Mem. 3.4.11, etc. ; οἰ. ἀρχή defined as ἡ τέκνων ἀρχὴ καὶ γυναικὸς καὶ τῆς οἰκίας πάσης, Arist.Pol.1278b38 ; applied to patriarchal rule, ib.1285b32. Adv.“-κῶς” Ph.2.426, Plu.2.1126a ; also in literary sense, in a well ordered manner, Sch.Th.1.63. Grice’s conversational maximin. Blackburn draws a skull to communicate that there is danger. The skull complete with the rest of the body will not do. So abiding by this principle has nothing to do with an arbitrary convention. Vide principle of least conversational effort. Principle of conversational least effort. No undue effort (candour), no unnecessary trouble (self-love) if doing A involves too much conversational effort, never worry: you will be DEEMED to have made the effort. Invoked by Grice in “Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.” When Grice qualifies this as ‘rational’ effort, what other efforts are there? Note that the lexeme ‘effort’ does NOT feature in the formulation of the principle itself. Grice confesses to be strongly inclined to assent to the principle of economy of rational conversational effort or the principle of economy of conversational effort, or the principle of economy of conversational expenditure, or the principle of minimisation of rational expenditure, or the principle of minimization of conversational expenditure, or the principle of minimisation of rational cost, or the conversational maximin. The principle of least cost. The principle of economy of rational expenditure states that, where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcome, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, involves an expenditure of time and energy, if there is a NON-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcome as the ratiocinative procedure, provided the stakes are not too high, it is rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination. Grice thinks this principle would meet with genitorial approval, in which case the genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise. This applies to the charge of overcomplexity and ‘psychological irreality’ of the reasoning involved in the production and design of the maximally efficient conversational move and the reasoning involved in the recognition of the implicaturum by the addressee. In “Epilogue” he goes by yet another motto, Do not multiply rationalities beyond necessity: The principle of conversational rationality, as he calls it in the Epilogue, is a sub-principle of a principle of rationality simpiciter, not applying to a pursuit related to ‘communication,’ as he puts it.

principium individuationis, the cause or basis of individuality in individuals; what makes something individual as opposed to universal, e.g., what makes the cat Minina individual and thus different from the universal, cat. Questions regarding the principle of individuation were first raised explicitly in the early Middle Ages. Classical authors largely ignored individuation; their ontological focus was on the problem of universals. The key texts that originated the discussion of the principle of individuation are found in Boethius. Between Boethius and 1150, individuation was always discussed in the context of more pressing issues, particularly the problem of universals. After 1150, individuation slowly emerged as a focus of attention, so that by the end of the thirteenth century it had become an independent subject of discussion, especially in Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Most early modern philosophers conceived the problem of individuation epistemically rather than metaphysically; they focused on the discernibility of individuals rather than the cause of individuation, as in Descartes. With few exceptions, such as Karl Popper, the twentieth century has followed this epistemic approach e. g. P. F. Strawson.

principle of bivalence, the principle that any significant statement is either true or false. It is often confused with the principle of excluded middle. Letting ‘Tp’ stand for ‘p is true’ and ‘Tp’ for ‘p is false’ and otherwise using standard logical notation, bivalence is ‘Tp 7 T-p’ and excluded middle is ‘T p 7 -p’. That they are different principles is shown by the fact that in probability theory, where ‘Tp’ can be expressed as ‘Prp % 1’, bivalence ‘Pr p % 1 7 Pr ~p % 1’ is not true for all values of p e.g. it is not true where ‘p’ stands for ‘given a fair toss of a fair die, the result will be a six’ a statement with a probability of 1 /6, where -p has a probability of 5 /6 but excluded middle ‘Prp 7 -p % 1’ is true for all definite values of p, including the probability case just given. If we allow that some significant statements have no truth-value or probability and distinguish external negation ‘Tp’ from internal negation ‘T-p’, we can distinguish bivalence and excluded middle from the principle of non-contradiction, namely, ‘-Tp • T-p’, which is equivalent to ‘-Tp 7 -T-p’. Standard truth-functional logic sees no difference between ‘p’ and ‘Tp’, or ‘-Tp’ and ‘T-p’, and thus is unable to distinguish the three principles. Some philosophers of logic deny there is such a difference.

principle of contradiction, also called principle of non-contradiction, the principle that a statement and its negation cannot both be true. It can be distinguished from the principle of bivalence, and given certain controversial assumptions, from the principle of excluded middle; but in truth-functional logic all three are regarded as equivalent. Outside of formal logic the principle of non-contradiction is best expressed as Aristotle expresses it: “Nothing can both be and not be at the same time in the same respect.”

principle of double effect, the view that there is a morally relevant difference between those consequences of our actions we intend and those we do not intend but do still foresee. According to the principle, if increased literacy means a higher suicide rate, those who work for education are not guilty of driving people to kill themselves. A physician may give a patient painkillers foreseeing that they will shorten his life, even though the use of outright poisons is forbidden and the physician does not intend to shorten the patient’s life. An army attacking a legitimate military target may accept as inevitable, without intending to bring about, the deaths of a number of civilians. Traditional moral theologians affirmed the existence of exceptionless prohibitions such as that against taking an innocent human life, while using the principle of double effect to resolve hard cases and avoid moral blind alleys. They held that one may produce a forbidden effect, provided 1 one’s action also had a good effect, 2 one did not seek the bad effect as an end or as a means, 3 one did not produce the good effect through the bad effect, and 4 the good effect was important enough to outweigh the bad one. Some contemporary philosophers and Roman Catholic theologians hold that a modified version of the principle of double effect is the sole justification of deadly deeds, even when the person killed is not innocent. They drop any restriction on the causal sequence, so that e.g. it is legitimate to cut off the head of an unborn child to save the mother’s life. But they oppose capital punishment on the ground that those who inflict it require the death of the convict as part of their plan. They also play down the fourth requirement, on the ground that the weighing of incommensurable goods it requires is impossible. Consequentialists deny the principle of double effect, as do those for whom the crucial distinction is between what we cause by our actions and what just happens. In the most plausible view, the principle does not presuppose exceptionless moral prohibitions, only something stronger than prima facie duties. It is easier to justify an oblique evasion of a moral requirement than a direct violation, even if direct violations are sometimes permissible. So understood, the principle is a guide to prudence rather than a substitute for it.

principle of excluded middle, the principle that the disjunction of any significant statement with its negation is always true; e.g., ‘Either there is a tree over 500 feet tall or it is not the case that there is such a tree’. The principle is often confused with the principle of bivalence.

principle of indifference, a rule for assigning a probability to an event based on “parity of reasons.” According to the principle, when the “weight of reasons” favoring one event is equal to the “weight of reasons” favoring another, the two events should be assigned the same probability. When there are n mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive events, and there is no reason to favor one over another, then we should be “indifferent” and the n events should each be assigned probability 1/n the events are equiprobable, according to the principle. This principle is usually associated with the names Bernoulli Ars Conjectandi, 1713 and Laplace Théorie analytique des probabilités, 1812, and was so called by J. M. Keynes A Treatise on Probability, 1. The principle gives probability both a subjective “degree of belief” and a logical “partial logical entailment” interpretation. One rationale for the principle says that in ignorance, when no reasons favor one event over another, we should assign equal probabilities. It has been countered that any assignment of probabilities at all is a claim to some knowledge. Also, several seemingly natural applications of the principle, involving non-linearly related variables, have led to some mathematical contradictions, known as Bertrand’s paradox, and pointed out by Keynes.

principle of insufficient reason, the principle that if there is no sufficient reason or explanation for something’s being the case, then it will not be the case. Since the rise of modern probability theory, many have identified the principle of insufficient reason with the principle of indifference a rule for assigning a probability to an event based on “parity of reasons”. The two principles are closely related, but it is illuminating historically and logically to view the principle of insufficient reason as the general principle stated above which is related to the principle of sufficient reason and to view the principle of indifference as a special case of the principle of insufficient reason applying to probabilities. As Mach noted, the principle of insufficient reason, thus conceived, was used by Archimedes to argue that a lever with equal weights at equal distances from a central fulcrum would not move, since if there is no sufficient reason why it should move one way or the other, it would not move one way or the other. Philosophers from Anaximander to Leibniz used the same principle to argue for various metaphysical theses. The principle of indifference can be seen to be a special case of this principle of insufficient reason applying to probabilities, if one reads the principle of indifference as follows: when there are N mutually exclusive and exhaustive events and there is no sufficient reason to believe that any one of them is more probable than any other, then no one of them is more probable than any other they are equiprobable. The idea of “parity of reasons” associated with the principle of indifference is, in such manner, related to the idea that there is no sufficient reason for favoring one outcome over another. This is significant because the principle of insufficient reason is logically equivalent to the more familiar principle of sufficient reason if something is [the case], then there is a sufficient reason for its being [the case] which means that the principle of indifference is a logical consequence of the principle of sufficient reason. If this is so, we can understand why so many were inclined to believe the principle of indifference was an a priori truth about probabilities, since it was an application to probabilities of that most fundamental of all alleged a priori principles of reasoning, the principle of sufficient reason. Nor should it surprise us that the alleged a priori truth of the principle of indifference was as controversial in probability theory as was the alleged a priori truth of the principle of sufficient reason in philosophy generally.

principle of plenitude, the principle that every genuine possibility is realized or actualized. This principle of the “fullness of being” was named by A. O. Lovejoy, who showed that it was commonly assumed throughout the history of Western science and philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus who associated it with inexhaustible divine productivity, through Augustine and other medieval philosophers, to the modern rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz and the Enlightenment. Lovejoy connected plenitude to the great chain of being, the idea that the universe is a hierarchy of beings in which every possible form is actualized. In the eighteenth century, the principle was “temporalized”: every possible form of creature would be realized not necessarily at all times but at some stage “in the fullness of time.” A clue about the significance of plenitude lies in its connection to the principle of sufficient reason everything has a sufficient reason [cause or explanation] for being or not being. Plenitude says that if there is no sufficient reason for something’s not being i.e., if it is genuinely possible, then it exists which is logically equivalent to the negative version of sufficient reason: if something does not exist, then there is a sufficient reason for its not being.

principle of verifiability, a claim about what meaningfulness is: at its simplest, a sentence is meaningful provided there is a method for verifying it. Therefore, if a sentence has no such method, i.e., if it does not have associated with it a way of telling whether it is conclusively true or conclusively false, then it is meaningless. The purpose for which this verificationist principle was originally introduced was to demarcate sentences that are “apt to make a significant statement of fact” from “nonsensical” or “pseudo-” sentences. It is part of the emotive theory of content, e.g., that moral discourse is not literally, cognitively meaningful, and therefore, not factual. And, with the verifiability principle, the central European logical positivists of the 0s hoped to strip “metaphysical discourse” of its pretensions of factuality. For them, whether there is a reality external to the mind, as the realists claim, or whether all reality is made up of “ideas” or “appearances,” as idealists claim, is a “meaningless pseudo-problem.” The verifiability principle proved impossible to frame in a form that did not admit all metaphysical sentences as meaningful. Further, it casts doubt on its own status. How was it to be verified? So, e.g., in the first edition of Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer proposed that a sentence is verifiable, and consequently meaningful, if some observation sentence can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises, without being deducible from those other premises alone. It follows that any metaphysical sentence M is meaningful since ‘if M, then O’ always is an appropriate premise, where O is an observation sentence. In the preface to the second edition, Ayer offered a more sophisticated account: M is directly verifiable provided it is an observation sentence or it entails, in conjunction with certain observation sentences, some observation sentence that does not follow from them alone. And M is indirectly verifiable provided it entails, in conjunction with certain other premises, some directly verifiable sentence that does not follow from those other premises alone and these additional premises are either analytic or directly verifiable or are independently indirectly verifiable. The new verifiability principle is then that all and only sentences directly or indirectly verifiable are “literally meaningful.” Unfortunately, Ayer’s emendation admits every nonanalytic sentence. Let M be any metaphysical sentence and O1 and O2 any pair of observation sentences logically independent of each other. Consider sentence A: ‘either O1 or not-M and not-O2’. Conjoined with O2, A entails O1. But O2 alone does not entail O1. So A is directly verifiable. Therefore, since M conjoined with A entails O1, which is not entailed by A alone, M is indirectly verifiable. Various repairs have been attempted; none has succeeded.

prisoner’s dilemma, a problem in game theory, and more broadly the theory of rational choice, that takes its name from a familiar sort of pleabargaining situation: Two prisoners Robin and Carol are interrogated separately and offered the same deal: If one of them confesses “defects” and the other does not, the defector will be given immunity from prosecution and the other will get a stiff prison sentence. If both confess, both will get moderate prison terms. If both remain silent cooperate with each other, both will get light prison terms for a lesser offense. There are thus four possible outcomes: 1 Robin confesses and gets immunity, while Carol is silent and gets a stiff sentence. 2 Both are silent and get light sentences. 3 Both confess and get moderate sentences. 4 Robin is silent and gets a stiff sentence, while Carol confesses and gets immunity. Assume that for Robin, 1 would be the best outcome, followed by 2, 3, and 4, in that order. Assume that for Carol, the best outcome is 4, followed by 2, 3, and 1. Each prisoner then reasons as follows: “My confederate will either confess or remain silent. If she confesses, I must do likewise, in order to avoid the ‘sucker’s payoff’ immunity for her, a stiff sentence for me. If she remains silent, then I must confess in order to get immunity the best outcome for me. Thus, no matter what my confederate does, I must confess.” Under those conditions, both will confess, effectively preventing each other from achieving anything better than the option they both rank as only third-best, even though they agree that option 2 is second-best. This illustrative story attributed to A. W. Tucker must not be allowed to obscure the fact that many sorts of social interactions have the same structure. In general, whenever any two parties must make simultaneous or independent choices over a range of options that has the ordinal payoff structure described in the plea bargaining story, they are in a prisoner’s dilemma. Diplomats, negotiators, buyers, and sellers regularly find themselves in such situations. They are called iterated prisoner’s dilemmas if the same parties repeatedly face the same choices with each other. Moreover, there are analogous problems of cooperation and conflict at the level of manyperson interactions: so-called n-person prisoner’s diemmas or free rider problems. The provision of public goods provides an example. Suppose there is a public good, such as clean air, national defense, or public radio, which we all want. Suppose that is can be provided only by collective action, at some cost to each of the contributors, but that we do not have to have a contribution from everyone in order to get it. Assume that we all prefer having the good to not having it, and that the best outcome for each of us would be to have it without cost to ourselves. So each of us reasons as follows: “Other people will either contribute enough to produce the good by themselves, or they will not. If they do, then I can have it cost-free the best option for me and thus I should not contribute. But if others do not contribute enough to produce the good by themselves, and if the probability is very low that my costly contribution would make the difference between success and failure, once again I should not contribute.” Obviously, if we all reason in this way, we will not get the public good we want. Such problems of collective action have been noticed by philosophers since Plato. Their current nomenclature, rigorous game-theoretic formulation, empirical study, and systematic philosophical development, however, has occurred since 0.

private language argument, an argument designed to show that there cannot be a language that only one person can speak a language that is essentially private, that no one else can in principle understand. In addition to its intrinsic interest, the private language argument is relevant to discussions of linguistic rules and linguistic meaning, behaviorism, solipsism, and phenomenalism. The argument is closely associated with Vitters’s Philosophical Investigations 8. The exact structure of the argument is controversial; this account should be regarded as a standard one, but not beyond dispute. The argument begins with the supposition that a person assigns signs to sensations, where these are taken to be private to the person who has them, and attempts to show that this supposition cannot be sustained because no standards for the correct or incorrect application of the same sign to a recurrence of the same sensation are possible. Thus Vitters supposes that he undertakes to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation; he associates it with the sign ‘S’, and marks ‘S’ on a calendar every day he has that sensation. Vitters finds the nature of the association of the sign and sensation obscure, on the ground that ‘S’ cannot be given an ordinary definition this would make its meaning publicly accessible or even an ostensive definition. He further argues that there is no difference between correct and incorrect entries of ‘S’ on subsequent days. The initial sensation with which the sign ‘S’ was associated is no longer present, and so it cannot be compared with a subsequent sensation taken to be of the same kind. He could at best claim to remember the nature of the initial sensation, and judge that it is of the same kind as today’s. But since the memory cannot confirm its own accuracy, there is no possible test of whether he remembers the initial association of sign and sensation right today. Consequently there is no criterion for the correct reapplication of the sign ‘S’. Thus we cannot make sense of the notion of correctly reapplying ‘S’, and cannot make sense of the notion of a private language. The argument described appears to question only the claim that one could have terms for private mental occurrences, and may not seem to impugn a broader notion of a private language whose expressions are not restricted to signs for sensations. Advocates of Vitters’s argument would generalize it and claim that the focus on sensations simply highlights the absence of a distinction between correct and incorrect reapplications of words. A language with terms for publicly accessible objects would, if private to its user, still be claimed to lack criteria for the correct reapplication of such terms. This broader notion of a private language would thus be argued to be equally incoherent.

privation: H. P. Grice, “Negation and privation,” a lack of something that it is natural or good to possess. The term is closely associated with the idea that evil is itself only a lack of good, privatio boni. In traditional theistic religions everything other than God is created by God out of nothing, creation ex nihilo. Since, being perfect, God would create only what is good, the entire original creation and every creature from the most complex to the simplest are created entirely good. The original creation contains no evil whatever. What then is evil and how does it enter the world? The idea that evil is a privation of good does not mean, e.g., that a rock has some degree of evil because it lacks such good qualities as consciousness and courage. A thing has some degree of evil only if it lacks some good that is 741 privileged access privileged access 742 proper for that thing to possess. In the original creation each created thing possessed the goods proper to the sort of thing it was. According to Augustine, evil enters the world when creatures with free will abandon the good above themselves for some lower, inferior good. Human beings, e.g., become evil to the extent that they freely turn from the highest good God to their own private goods, becoming proud, selfish, and wicked, thus deserving the further evils of pain and punishment. One of the problems for this explanation of the origin of evil is to account for why an entirely good creature would use its freedom to turn from the highest good to a lesser good.

privileged access: H. P. Grice, “Privileged access and incorrigibility,” special first-person awareness of the contents of one’s own mind. Since Descartes, many philosophers have held that persons are aware of the occurrent states of their own minds in a way distinct from both their mode of awareness of physical objects and their mode of awareness of the mental states of others. Cartesians view such apprehension as privileged in several ways. First, it is held to be immediate, both causally and epistemically. While knowledge of physical objects and their properties is acquired via spatially intermediate causes, knowledge of one’s own mental states involves no such causal chains. And while beliefs about physical properties are justified by appeal to ways objects appear in sense experience, beliefs about the properties of one’s own mental states are not justified by appeal to properties of a different sort. I justify my belief that the paper on which I write is white by pointing out that it appears white in apparently normal light. By contrast, my belief that white appears in my visual experience seems to be self-justifying. Second, Cartesians hold that first-person apprehension of occurrent mental contents is epistemically privileged in being absolutely certain. Absolute certainty includes infallibility, incorrigibility, and indubitability. That a judgment is infallible means that it cannot be mistaken; its being believed entails its being true even though judgments regarding occurrent mental contents are not necessary truths. That it is incorrigible means that it cannot be overridden or corrected by others or by the subject himself at a later time. That it is indubitable means that a subject can never have grounds for doubting it. Philosophers sometimes claim also that a subject is omniscient with regard to her own occurrent mental states: if a property appears within her experience, then she knows this. Subjects’ privileged access to the immediate contents of their own minds can be held to be necessary or contingent. Regarding corrigibility, for example, proponents of the stronger view hold that first-person reports of occurrent mental states could never be overridden by conflicting evidence, such as conflicting readings of brain states presumed to be correlated with the mental states in question. They point out that knowledge of such correlations would itself depend on first-person reports of mental states. If a reading of my brain indicates that I am in pain, and I sincerely claim not to be, then the law linking brain states of that type with pains must be mistaken. Proponents of the weaker view hold that, while persons are currently the best authorities as to the occurrent contents of their own minds, evidence such as conflicting readings of brain states could eventually override such authority, despite the dependence of the evidence on earlier firstperson reports. Weaker views on privileged access may also deny infallibility on more general grounds. In judging anything, including an occurrent mental state, to have a particular property P, it seems that I must remember which property P is, and memory appears to be always fallible. Even if such judgments are always fallible, however, they may be more immediately justified than other sorts of judgments. Hence there may still be privileged access, but of a weaker sort. In the twentieth century, Ryle attacked the idea of privileged access by analyzing introspection, awareness of what one is thinking or doing, in terms of behavioral dispositions, e.g. dispositions to give memory reports of one’s mental states when asked to do so. But while behaviorist or functional analyses of some states of mind may be plausible, for instance analyses of cognitive states such as beliefs, accounts in these terms of occurrent states such as sensations or images are far less plausible. A more influential attack on stronger versions of privileged access was mounted by Wilfrid Sellars. According to him, we must be trained to report non-inferentially on properties of our sense experience by first learning to respond with whole systems of concepts to public, physical objects. Before I can learn to report a red sense impression, I must learn the system of color concepts and the logical relations among them by learning to respond to colored objects. Hence, knowledge of my own mental states cannot be the firm basis from which I progress to other knowledge. Even if this order of concept acquisition is determined necessarily, it still may be that persons’ access to their own mental states is privileged in some of the ways indicated, once the requisite concepts have been acquired. Beliefs about one’s own occurrent states of mind may still be more immediately justified than beliefs about physical properties, for example.

pro attitude, a favorable disposition toward an object or state of affairs. Although some philosophers equate pro attitudes with desires, the expression is more often intended to cover a wide range of conative states of mind including wants, feelings, wishes, values, and principles. My regarding a certain course of action open to me as morally required and my regarding it as a source of selfish satisfaction equally qualify as pro attitudes toward the object of that action. It is widely held that intentional action, or, more generally, acting for reasons, is necessarily based, in part, on one or more pro attitudes. If I go to the store in order to buy some turnips, then, in addition to my regarding my store-going as conducive to turnip buying, I must have some pro attitude toward turnip buying.

Probability -- doomsday argument, an argument examined by Grice -- an argument associated chiefly with the mathematician Brandon Carter and the philosopher John Leslie purporting to show, by appeal to Bayes’s theorem and Bayes’s rule, that whatever antecedent probability we may have assigned to the hypothesis that human life will end relatively soon is magnified, perhaps greatly, upon our learning or noticing that we are among the first few score thousands of millions of human beings to exist.Leslie’s The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction 6. The argument is based on an allegedly close analogy between the question of the probability of imminent human extinction given our ordinal location in the temporal swath of humanity and the fact that the reader’s name being among the first few drawn randomly from an urn may greatly enhance for the reader the probability that the urn contains fairly few names rather than very many. probability, a numerical value that can attach to items of various kinds e.g., propositions, events, and kinds of events that is a measure of the degree to which they may or should be expected or the degree to which they have “their own disposition,” i.e., independently of our psychological expectations to be true, to occur, or to be exemplified depending on the kind of item the value attaches to. There are both multiple interpretations of probability and two main kinds of theories of probability: abstract formal calculi and interpretations of the calculi. An abstract formal calculus axiomatically characterizes formal properties of probability functions, where the arguments of the function are often thought of as sets, or as elements of a Boolean algebra. In application, the nature of the arguments of a probability function, as well as the meaning of probability, are given by interpretations of probability. The most famous axiomatization is Kolmogorov’s Foundations of the Theory of Probability, 3. The three axioms for probability functions Pr are: 1 PrX M 0 for all X; 2 PrX % 1 if X is necessary e.g., a tautology if a proposition, a necessary event if an event, and a “universal set” if a set; and 3 PrX 7 Y % PrX ! PrY where ‘7’ can mean, e.g., logical disjunction, or set-theoretical union if X and Y are mutually exclusive X & Y is a contradiction if they are propositions, they can’t both happen if they are events, and their set-theoretical intersection is empty if they are sets. Axiom 3 is called finite additivity, which is sometimes generalized to countable additivity, involving infinite disjunctions of propositions, or infinite unions of sets. Conditional probability, PrX/Y the probability of X “given” or “conditional on” Y, is defined as the quotient PrX & Y/PrY. An item X is said to be positively or negatively statistically or probabilistically correlated with an item Y according to whether PrX/Y is greater than or less than PrX/-Y where -Y is the negation of a proposition Y, or the non-occurrence of an event Y, or the set-theoretical complement of a set Y; in the case of equality, X is said to be statistically or probabilistically independent of Y. All three of these probabilistic relations are symmetric, and sometimes the term ‘probabilistic relevance’ is used instead of ‘correlation’. From the axioms, familiar theorems can be proved: e.g., 4 Pr-X % 1 PrX; 5 PrX 7 Y % PrX ! PrY PrX & Y for all X and Y; and 6 a simple version of Bayes’s theorem PrX/Y % PrY/XPrX/PrY. Thus, an abstract formal calculus of probability allows for calculation of the probabilities of some items from the probabilities of others. The main interpretations of probability include the classical, relative frequency, propensity, logical, and subjective interpretations. According to the classical interpretation, the probability of an event, e.g. of heads on a coin toss, is equal to the ratio of the number of “equipossibilities” or equiprobable events favorable to the event in question to the total number of relevant equipossibilities. On the relative frequency interpretation, developed by Venn The Logic of Chance, 1866 and Reichenbach The Theory of Probability, probability attaches to sets of events within a “reference class.” Where W is the reference class, and n is the number of events in W, and m is the number of events in or of kind X, within W, then the probability of X, relative to W, is m/n. For various conceptual and technical reasons, this kind of “actual finite relative frequency” interpretation has been refined into various infinite and hypothetical infinite relative frequency accounts, where probability is defined in terms of limits of series of relative frequencies in finite nested populations of increasing sizes, sometimes involving hypothetical infinite extensions of an actual population. The reasons for these developments involve, e.g.: the artificial restriction, for finite populations, of probabilities to values of the form i/n, where n is the size of the reference class; the possibility of “mere coincidence” in the actual world, where these may not reflect the true physical dispositions involved in the relevant events; and the fact that probability is often thought to attach to possibilities involving single events, while probabilities on the relative frequency account attach to sets of events this is the “problem of the single case,” also called the “problem of the reference class”. These problems also have inspired “propensity” accounts of probability, according to which probability is a more or less primitive idea that measures the physical propensity or disposition of a given kind of physical situation to yield an outcome of a given type, or to yield a “long-run” relative frequency of an outcome of a given type. A theorem of probability proved by Jacob Bernoulli Ars Conjectandi, 1713 and sometimes called Bernoulli’s theorem or the weak law of large numbers, and also known as the first limit theorem, is important for appreciating the frequency interpretation. The theorem states, roughly, that in the long run, frequency settles down to probability. For example, suppose the probability of a certain coin’s landing heads on any given toss is 0.5, and let e be any number greater than 0. Then the theorem implies that as the number of tosses grows without bound, the probability approaches 1 that the frequency of heads will be within e of 0.5. More generally, let p be the probability of an outcome O on a trial of an experiment, and assume that this probability remains constant as the experiment is repeated. After n trials, there will be a frequency, f n, of trials yielding outcome O. The theorem says that for any numbers d and e greater than 0, there is an n such that the probability P that _pf n_ ‹ e is within d of 1 P 1d. Bernoulli also showed how to calculate such n for given values of d, e, and p. It is important to notice that the theorem concerns probabilities, and not certainty, for a long-run frequency. Notice also the assumption that the probability p of O remains constant as the experiment is repeated, so that the outcomes on trials are probabilistically independent of earlier outcomes. The kinds of interpretations of probability just described are sometimes called “objective” or “statistical” or “empirical” since the value of a probability, on these accounts, depends on what actually happens, or on what actual given physical situations are disposed to produce as opposed to depending only on logical relations between the relevant events or propositions, or on what we should rationally expect to happen or what we should rationally believe. In contrast to these accounts, there are the “logical” and the “subjective” interpretations of probability. Carnap “The Two Concepts of Probability,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5 has marked this kind of distinction by calling the second concept probability1 and the first probability2. According to the logical interpretation, associated with Carnap Logical Foundations of Probability, 0; and Continuum of Inductive Methods, 2, the probability of a proposition X given a proposition Y is the “degree to which Y logically entails X.” Carnap developed an ingenious and elaborate set of systems of logical probability, including, e.g., separate systems depending on the degree to which one happens to be, logically and rationally, sensitive to new information in the reevaluation of probabilities. There is, of course, a connection between the ideas of logical probability, rationality, belief, and belief revision. It is natural to explicate the “logical-probabilistic” idea of the probability of X given Y as the degree to which a rational person would believe X having come to learn Y taking account of background knowledge. Here, the idea of belief suggests a subjective sometimes called epistemic or partial belief or degree of belief interpretation of probability; and the idea of probability revision suggests the concept of induction: both the logical and the subjective interpretations of probability have been called “inductive probability” a formal apparatus to characterize rational learning from experience. The subjective interpretation of probability, according to which the probability of a proposition is a measure of one’s degree of belief in it, was developed by, e.g., Ramsey “Truth and Probability,” in his Foundations of Mathematics and Other Essays, 6; Definetti “Foresight: Its Logical Laws, Its Subjective Sources,” 7, translated by H. Kyburg, Jr., in H. E. Smokler, Studies in Subjective Probability, 4; and Savage The Foundations of Statistics, 4. Of course, subjective probability varies from person to person. Also, in order for this to be an interpretation of probability, so that the relevant axioms are satisfied, not all persons can count only rational, or “coherent” persons should count. Some theorists have drawn a connection between rationality and probabilistic degrees of belief in terms of dispositions to set coherent betting odds those that do not allow a “Dutch book” an arrangement that forces the agent to lose come what may, while others have described the connection in more general decision-theoretic terms.

problem of induction. First stated by Hume, this problem concerns the logical basis of inferences from observed matters of fact to unobserved matters of fact. Although discussion often focuses upon predictions of future events e.g., a solar eclipse, the question applies also to inferences to past facts e.g., the extinction of dinosaurs and to present occurrences beyond the range of direct observation e.g., the motions of planets during daylight hours. Long before Hume the ancient Skeptics had recognized that such inferences cannot be made with certainty; they realized there can be no demonstrative deductive inference, say, from the past and present to the future. Hume, however, posed a more profound difficulty: Are we justified in placing any degree of confidence in the conclusions of such inferences? His question is whether there is any type of non-demonstrative or inductive inference in which we can be justified in placing any confidence at all. According to Hume, our inferences from the observed to the unobserved are based on regularities found in nature. We believe, e.g., that the earth, sun, and moon move in regular patterns according to Newtonian mechanics, and on that basis astronomers predict solar and lunar eclipses. Hume notes, however, that all of our evidence for such uniformities consists of past and present experience; in applying these uniformities to the future behavior of these bodies we are making an inference from the observed to the unobserved. This point holds in general. Whenever we make inferences from the observed to the unobserved we rely on the uniformity of nature. The basis for our belief that nature is reasonably uniform is our experience of such uniformity in the past. If we infer that nature will continue to be uniform in the future, we are making an inference from the observed to the unobserved precisely the kind of inference for which we are seeking a justification. We are thus caught up in a circular argument. Since, as Hume emphasized, much of our reasoning from the observed to the unobserved is based on causal relations, he analyzed causality to ascertain whether it could furnish a necessary connection between distinct events that could serve as a basis for such inferences. His conclusion was negative. We cannot establish any such connection a priori, for it is impossible to deduce the nature of an effect from its cause e.g., we cannot deduce from the appearance of falling snow that it will cause a sensation of cold rather than heat. Likewise, we cannot deduce the nature of a cause from its effect e.g., looking at a diamond, we cannot deduce that it was produced by great heat and pressure. All such knowledge is based on past experience. If we infer that future snow will feel cold or that future diamonds will be produced by great heat and pressure, we are again making inferences from the observed to the unobserved. Furthermore, if we carefully observe cases in which we believe a causeeffect relation holds, we cannot perceive any necessary connection between cause and effect, or any power in the cause that brings about the effect. We observe only that an event of one type e.g., drinking water occurs prior to and contiguously with an event of another type quenching thirst. Moreover, we notice that events of the two types have exhibited a constant conjunction; i.e., whenever an event of the first type has occurred in the past it has been followed by one of the second type. We cannot discover any necessary connection or causal power a posteriori; we can only establish priority, contiguity, and constant conjunction up to the present. If we infer that this constant conjunction will persist in future cases, we are making another inference from observed to unobserved cases. To use causality as a basis for justifying inference from the observed to the unobserved would again invovle a circular argument. Hume concludes skeptically that there can be no rational or logical justification of inferences from the observed to the unobserved i.e., inductive or non-demonstrative inference. Such inferences are based on custom and habit. Nature has endowed us with a proclivity to extrapolate from past cases to future cases of a similar kind. Having observed that events of one type have been regularly followed by events of another type, we experience, upon encountering a case of the first type, a psychological expectation that one of the second type will follow. Such an expectation does not constitute a rational justification. Although Hume posed his problem in terms of homely examples, the issues he raises go to the heart of even the most sophisticated empirical sciences, for all of them involve inference from observed phenomena to unobserved facts. Although complex theories are often employed, Hume’s problem still applies. Its force is by no means confined to induction by simple enumeration. Philosophers have responded to the problem of induction in many different ways. Kant invoked synthetic a priori principles. Many twentieth-century philosophers have treated it as a pseudo-problem, based on linguistic confusion, that requires dissolution rather than solution. Carnap maintained that inductive intuition is indispensable. Reichenbach offered a pragmatic vindication. Goodman has recommended replacing Hume’s “old riddle” with a new riddle of induction that he has posed. Popper, taking Hume’s skeptical arguments as conclusive, advocates deductivism. He argues that induction is unjustifiable and dispensable. None of the many suggestions is widely accepted as correct.

problem of the criterion, a problem of epistemology, arising in the attempt both to formulate the criteria and to determine the extent of knowledge. Skeptical and non-skeptical philosophers disagree as to what, or how much, we know. Do we have knowledge of the external world, other minds, the past, and the future? Any answer depends on what the correct criteria of knowledge are. The problem is generated by the seeming plausibility of the following two propositions: 1 In order to recognize instances, and thus to determine the extent, of knowledge, we must know the criteria for it. 2 In order to know the criteria for knowledge i.e., to distinguish between correct and incorrect criteria, we must already be able to recognize its instances. According to an argument of ancient Grecian Skepticism, we can know neither the extent nor the criteria of knowledge because 1 and 2 are both true. There are, however, three further possibilities. First, it might be that 2 is true but 1 false: we can recognize instances of knowledge even if we do not know the criteria of knowledge. Second, it might be that 1 is true but 2 false: we can identify the criteria of knowledge without prior recognition of its instances. Finally, it might be that both 1 and 2 are false. We can know the extent of knowledge without knowing criteria, and vice versa. Chisholm, who has devoted particular attention to this problem, calls the first of these options particularism, and the second methodism. Hume, a skeptic about the extent of empirical knowledge, was a methodist. Reid and Moore were particularists; they rejected Hume’s skepticism on the ground that it turns obvious cases of knowledge into cases of ignorance. Chisholm advocates particularism because he believes that, unless one knows to begin with what ought to count as an instance of knowledge, any choice of a criterion is ungrounded and thus arbitrary. Methodists turn this argument around: they reject as dogmatic any identification of instances of knowledge not based on a criterion.

problem of the speckled hen: a problem propounded by Ryle as an objection to Ayer’s analysis of perception in terms of sense-data. It is implied by this analysis that, if I see a speckled hen in a good light and so on, I do so by means of apprehending a speckled sense-datum. The analysis implies further that the sense-datum actually has just the number of speckles that I seem to see as I look at the hen, and that it is immediately evident to me just how many speckles this is. Thus, if I seem to see many speckles as I look at the hen, the sense-datum I apprehend must actually contain many speckles, and it must be immediately evident to me how many it does contain. Now suppose it seems to me that I see more than 100 speckles. Then the datum I am apprehending must contain more than 100 speckles. Perhaps it contains 132 of them. The analysis would then imply, absurdly, that it must be immediately evident to me that the number of speckles is exactly 132. One way to avoid this implication would be to deny that a sense-datum of mine could contain exactly 132 speckles or any other large, determinate number of them precisely on the ground that it could never seem to me that I was seeing exactly that many speckles. A possible drawback of this approach is that it involves committing oneself to the claim, which some philosophers have found problem of the criterion problem of the speckled hen 747 747 self-contradictory, that a sense-datum may contain many speckles even if there is no large number n such that it contains n speckles.

prolatum – participle for ‘proferre,’ to utter. A much better choice than Austin’s pig-latin “utteratum”! Grice prefferd Latinate when going serious. While the verb is ‘profero – the participle corresponds to the ‘implicaturum’: what the emissor profers. profer (v.)c. 1300, "to utter, express," from Old French proferer (13c.) "utter, present verbally, pronounce," from Latin proferre "to bring forth, produce," figuratively "make known, publish, quote, utter." Sense confused with proffer. Related: Profered; profering.

process-product ambiguity, an ambiguity that occurs when a noun can refer either to a process or activity or to the product of that process or activity. E.g., ‘The definition was difficult’ could mean either that the activity of defining was a difficult one to perform, or that the definiens the form of words proposed as equivalent to the term being defined that the definer produced was difficult to understand. Again, ‘The writing absorbed her attention’ leaves it unclear whether it was the activity of writing or a product of that activity that she found engrossing. Philosophically significant terms that might be held to exhibit processproduct ambiguity include: ‘analysis’, ‘explanation’, ‘inference’, ‘thought’. P.Mac. process theology, any theology strongly influenced by the theistic metaphysics of Whitehead or Hartshorne; more generally, any theology that takes process or change as basic characteristics of all actual beings, including God. Those versions most influenced by Whitehead and Hartshorne share a core of convictions that constitute the most distinctive theses of process theology: God is constantly growing, though certain abstract features of God e.g., being loving remain constant; God is related to every other actual being and is affected by what happens to it; every actual being has some self-determination, and God’s power is reconceived as the power to lure attempt to persuade each actual being to be what God wishes it to be. These theses represent significant differences from ideas of God common in the tradition of Western theism, according to which God is unchanging, is not really related to creatures because God is not affected by what happens to them, and has the power to do whatever it is logically possible for God to do omnipotence. Process theologians also disagree with the idea that God knows the future in all its details, holding that God knows only those details of the future that are causally necessitated by past events. They claim these are only certain abstract features of a small class of events in the near future and of an even smaller class in the more distant future. Because of their understanding of divine power and their affirmation of creaturely self-determination, they claim that they provide a more adequate theodicy. Their critics claim that their idea of God’s power, if correct, would render God unworthy of worship; some also make this claim about their idea of God’s knowledge, preferring a more traditional idea of omniscience. Although Whitehead and Hartshorne were both philosophers rather than theologians, process theology has been more influential among theologians. It is a major current in contemporary Protestant theology and has attracted the attention of some Roman Catholic theologians as well. It also has influenced some biblical scholars who are attempting to develop a distinctive process hermeneutics.

production theory, the economic theory dealing with the conversion of factors of production into consumer goods. In capitalistic theories that assume ideal markets, firms produce goods from three kinds of factors: capital, labor, and raw materials. Production is subject to the constraint that profit the difference between revenues and costs be maximized. The firm is thereby faced with the following decisions: how much to produce, what price to charge for the product, what proportions to combine the three kinds of factors in, and what price to pay for the factors. In markets close to perfect competition, the firm will have little control over prices so the decision problem tends to reduce to the amounts of factors to use. The range of feasible factor combinations depends on the technologies available to firms. Interesting complications arise if not all firms have access to the same technologies, or if not all firms make accurate responses concerning technological changes. Also, if the scale of production affects the feasible technologies, the firms’ decision process must be subtle. In each of these cases, imperfect competition will result. Marxian economists think that the concepts used in this kind of production theory have a normative component. In reality, a large firm’s capital tends to be owned by a rather small, privileged class of non-laborers and labor is treated as a commodity like any other factor. This might lead to the perception that profit results primarily from capital and, therefore, belongs to its owners. Marxians contend that labor is primarily responsible for profit and, consequently, that labor is entitled to more than the market wage.

professional ethics, a term designating one or more of 1 the justified moral values that should govern the work of professionals; 2 the moral values that actually do guide groups of professionals, whether those values are identified as a principles in codes of ethics promulgated by professional societies or b actual beliefs and conduct of professionals; and 3 the study of professional ethics in the preceding senses, either i normative philosophical inquiries into the values desirable for professionals to embrace, or ii descriptive scientific studies of the actual beliefs and conduct of groups of professionals. Professional values include principles of obligation and rights, as well as virtues and personal moral ideals such as those manifested in the lives of Jane Addams, Albert Schweitzer, and Thurgood Marshall. Professions are defined by advanced expertise, social organizations, society-granted monopolies over services, and especially by shared commitments to promote a distinctive public good such as health medicine, justice law, or learning education. These shared commitments imply special duties to make services available, maintain confidentiality, secure informed consent for services, and be loyal to clients, employers, and others with whom one has fiduciary relationships. Both theoretical and practical issues surround these duties. The central theoretical issue is to understand how the justified moral values governing professionals are linked to wider values, such as human rights. Most practical dilemmas concern how to balance conflicting duties. For example, what should attorneys do when confidentiality requires keeping information secret that might save the life of an innocent third party? Other practical issues are problems of vagueness and uncertainty surrounding how to apply duties in particular contexts. For example, does respect for patients’ autonomy forbid, permit, or require a physician to assist a terminally ill patient desiring suicide? Equally important is how to resolve conflicts of interest in which self-seeking places moral values at risk.

proof by recursion, also called proof by mathematical induction, a method for conclusively demonstrating the truth of universal propositions about the natural numbers. The system of natural numbers is construed as an infinite sequence of elements beginning with the number 1 and such that each subsequent element is the immediate successor of the preceding element. The immediate successor of a number is the sum of that number with 1. In order to apply this method to show that every number has a certain chosen property it is necessary to demonstrate two subsidiary propositions often called respectively the basis step and the inductive step. The basis step is that the number 1 has the chosen property; the inductive step is that the successor of any number having the chosen property is also a number having the chosen property in other words, for every number n, if n has the chosen property then the successor of n also has the chosen property. The inductive step is itself a universal proposition that may have been proved by recursion. The most commonly used example of a theorem proved by recursion is the remarkable fact, known before the time of Plato, that the sum of the first n odd numbers is the square of n. This proposition, mentioned prominently by Leibniz as requiring and having demonstrative proof, is expressed in universal form as follows: for every number n, the sum of the first n odd numbers is n2. 1 % 12, 1 ! 3 % 22, 1 ! 3 ! 5 % 32, and so on. Rigorous formulation of a proof by recursion often uses as a premise the proposition called, since the time of De Morgan, the principle of mathematical induction: every property belonging to 1 and belonging to the successor of every number to which it belongs is a property that belongs without exception to every number. Peano took the principle of mathematical induction as an axiom in his 9 axiomatization of arithmetic or the theory of natural numbers. The first acceptable formulation of this principle is attributed to Pascal.

proof theory, a branch of mathematical logic founded by David Hilbert in the 0s to pursue Hilbert’s Program. The foundational problems underlying that program had been formulated around the turn of the century, e.g., in Hilbert’s famous address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris 0. They were closely connected with investigations on the foundations of analysis carried out by Cantor and Dedekind; but they were also related to their conflict with Kronecker on the nature of mathematics and to the difficulties of a completely unrestricted notion of set or multiplicity. At that time, the central issue for Hilbert was the consistency of sets in Cantor’s sense. He suggested that the existence of consistent sets multiplicities, e.g., that of real numbers, could be secured by proving the consistency of a suitable, characterizing axiomatic system; but there were only the vaguest indications on how to do that. In a radical departure from standard practice and his earlier hints, Hilbert proposed four years later a novel way of attacking the consistency problem for theories in Über die Grundlagen der Logik und der Arithmetik 4. This approach would require, first, a strict formalization of logic together with mathematics, then consideration of the finite syntactic configurations constituting the joint formalism as mathematical objects, and showing by mathematical arguments that contradictory formulas cannot be derived. Though Hilbert lectured on issues concerning the foundations of mathematics during the subsequent years, the technical development and philosophical clarification of proof theory and its aims began only around 0. That involved, first of all, a detailed description of logical calculi and the careful development of parts of mathematics in suitable systems. A record of the former is found in Hilbert and Ackermann, Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik 8; and of the latter in Supplement IV of Hilbert and Bernays, Grundlagen der Mathematik II 9. This presupposes the clear distinction between metamathematics and mathematics introduced by Hilbert. For the purposes of the consistency program metamathematics was now taken to be a very weak part of arithmetic, so-called finitist mathematics, believed to correspond to the part of mathematics that was accepted by constructivists like Kronecker and Brouwer. Additional metamathematical issues concerned the completeness and decidability of theories. The crucial technical tool for the pursuit of the consistency problem was Hilbert’s e-calculus. The metamathematical problems attracted the collaboration of young and quite brilliant mathematicians with philosophical interests; among them were Paul Bernays, Wilhelm Ackermann, John von Neumann, Jacques Herbrand, Gerhard Gentzen, and Kurt Schütte. The results obtained in the 0s were disappointing when measured against the hopes and ambitions: Ackermann, von Neumann, and Herbrand established essentially the consistency of arithmetic with a very restricted principle of induction. That limits of finitist considerations for consistency proofs had been reached became clear in 1 through Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Also, special cases of the decision problem for predicate logic Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem had been solved; its general solvability was made rather implausible by some of Gödel’s results in his 1 paper. The actual proof of unsolvability had to wait until 6 for a conceptual clarification of ‘mechanical procedure’ or ‘algorithm’; that was achieved through the work of Church and Turing. The further development of proof theory is roughly characterized by two complementary tendencies: 1 the extension of the metamathematical frame relative to which “constructive” consistency proofs can be obtained, and 2 the refined formalization of parts of mathematics in theories much weaker than set theory or even full second-order arithmetic. The former tendency started with the work of Gödel and Gentzen in 3 establishing the consistency of full classical arithmetic relative to intuitionistic arithmetic; it led in the 0s and 0s to consistency proofs of strong subsystems of secondorder arithmetic relative to intuitionistic theories of constructive ordinals. The latter tendency reaches back to Weyl’s book Das Kontinuum 8 and culminated in the 0s by showing that the classical results of mathematical analysis can be formally obtained in conservative extensions of first-order arithmetic. For the metamathematical work Gentzen’s introduction of sequent calculi and the use of transfinite induction along constructive ordinals turned out to be very important, as well as Gödel’s primitive recursive functionals of finite type. The methods and results of proof theory are playing, not surprisingly, a significant role in computer science. Work in proof theory has been motivated by issues in the foundations of mathematics, with the explicit goal of achieving epistemological reductions of strong theories for mathematical practice like set theory or second-order arithmetic to weak, philosophically distinguished theories like primitive recursive arithmetic. As the formalization of mathematics in strong theories is crucial for the metamathematical approach, and as the programmatic goal can be seen as a way of circumventing the philosophical issues surrounding strong theories, e.g., the nature of infinite sets in the case of set theory, Hilbert’s philosophical position is often equated with formalism in the sense of Frege in his Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie 306 and also of Brouwer’s inaugural address Intuitionism and Formalism 2. Though such a view is not completely unsupported by some of Hilbert’s polemical remarks during the 0s, on balance, his philosophical views developed into a sophisticated instrumentalism, if that label is taken in Ernest Nagel’s judicious sense The Structure of Science, 1. Hilbert’s is an instrumentalism emphasizing the contentual motivation of mathematical theories; that is clearly expressed in the first chapter of Hilbert and Bernays’s Grundlagen der Mathematik I 4. A sustained philosophical analysis of proof-theoretic research in the context of broader issues in the philosophy of mathematics was provided by Bernays; his penetrating essays stretch over five decades and have been collected in Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der Mathematik 6.

propensity, an irregular or non-necessitating causal disposition of an object or system to produce some result or effect. Propensities are usually conceived as essentially probabilistic in nature. A die may be said to have a propensity of “strength” or magnitude 1 /6 to turn up a 3 if thrown from a dice box, of strength 1 /3 to turn up, say, a 3 or 4, etc. But propensity talk is arguably appropriate only when determinism fails. Strength is often taken to vary from 0 to 1. Popper regarded the propensity notion as a new physical or metaphysical hypothesis, akin to that of forces. Like Peirce, he deployed it to interpret probability claims about single cases: e.g., the probability of this radium atom’s decaying in 1,600 years is 1 /2. On relative frequency interpretations, probability claims are about properties of large classes such as relative frequencies of outcomes in them, rather than about single cases. But single-case claims appear to be common in quantum theory. Popper advocated a propensity interpretation of quantum theory. Propensities also feature in theories of indeterministic or probabilistic causation. Competing theories about propensities attribute them variously to complex systems such as chance or experimental set-ups or arrangements a coin and tossing device, to entities within such set-ups the coin itself, and to particular trials of such set-ups. Long-run theories construe propensities as dispositions to give rise to certain relative frequencies of, or probability distributions over, outcomes in long runs of trials, which are sometimes said to “manifest” or “display” the propensities. Here a propensity’s strength is identical to some such frequency. By contrast, single-case theories construe propensities as dispositions of singular trials to bring about particular outcomes. Their existence, not their strength, is displayed by such an outcome. Here frequencies provide evidence about propensity strength. But the two can always differ; they converge with a limiting probability of 1 in an appropriate long run.

property, roughly, an attribute, characteristic, feature, trait, or aspect. propensity property 751 751 Intensionality. There are two salient ways of talking about properties. First, as predicables or instantiables. For example, the property red is predicable of red objects; they are instances of it. Properties are said to be intensional entities in the sense that distinct properties can be truly predicated of i.e., have as instances exactly the same things: the property of being a creature with a kidney & the property of being a creature with a heart, though these two sets have the same members. Properties thus differ from sets collections, classes; for the latter satisfy a principle of extensionality: they are identical if they have the same elements. The second salient way of talking about properties is by means of property abstracts such as ‘the property of being F’. Such linguistic expressions are said to be intensional in the following semantical vs. ontological sense: ‘the property of being F’ and ‘the property of being G’ can denote different properties even though the predicates ‘F’ and ‘G’ are true of exactly the same things. The standard explanation Frege, Russell, Carnap, et al. is that ‘the property of being F’ denotes the property that the predicate ‘F’ expresses. Since predicates ‘F’ and ‘G’ can be true of the same things without being synonyms, the property abstracts ‘being F’ and ‘being G’ can denote different properties. Identity criteria. Some philosophers believe that properties are identical if they necessarily have the same instances. Other philosophers hold that this criterion of identity holds only for a special subclass of properties those that are purely qualitative and that the properties for which this criterion does not hold are all “complex” e.g., relational, disjunctive, conditional, or negative properties. On this theory, complex properties are identical if they have the same form and their purely qualitative constituents are identical. Ontological status. Because properties are a kind of universal, each of the standard views on the ontological status of universals has been applied to properties as a special case. Nominalism: only particulars and perhaps collections of particulars exist; therefore, either properties do not exist or they are reducible following Carnap et al. to collections of particulars including perhaps particulars that are not actual but only possible. Conceptualism: properties exist but are dependent on the mind. Realism: properties exist independently of the mind. Realism has two main versions. In rebus realism: a property exists only if it has instances. Ante rem realism: a property can exist even if it has no instances. For example, the property of being a man weighing over ton has no instances; however, it is plausible to hold that this property does exist. After all, this property seems to be what is expressed by the predicate ‘is a man weighing over a ton’. Essence and accident. The properties that a given entity has divide into two disjoint classes: those that are essential to the entity and those that are accidental to it. A property is essential to an entity if, necessarily, the entity cannot exist without being an instance of the property. A property is accidental to an individual if it is possible for the individual to exist without being an instance of the property. Being a number is an essential property of nine; being the number of the planets is an accidental property of nine. Some philosophers believe that all properties are either essential by nature or accidental by nature. A property is essential by nature if it can be an essential property of some entity and, necessarily, it is an essential property of each entity that is an instance of it. The property of being self-identical is thus essential by nature. However, it is controversial whether every property that is essential to something must be essential by nature. The following is a candidate counterexample. If this automobile backfires loudly on a given occasion, loudness would seem to be an essential property of the associated bang. That particular bang could not exist without being loud. If the automobile had backfired softly, that particular bang would not have existed; an altogether distinct bang a soft bang would have existed. By contrast, if a man is loud, loudness is only an accidental property of him; he could exist without being loud. Loudness thus appears to be a counterexample: although it is an essential property of certain particulars, it is not essential by nature. It might be replied echoing Aristotle that a loud bang and a loud man instantiate loudness in different ways and, more generally, that properties can be predicated instantiated in different ways. If so, then one should be specific about which kind of predication instantiation is intended in the definition of ‘essential by nature’ and ‘accidental by nature’. When this is done, the counterexamples might well disappear. If there are indeed different ways of being predicated instantiated, most of the foregoing remarks about intensionality, identity criteria, and the ontological status of properties should be refined accordingly.

propositio universalis: cf. substitutional account of universal quantification, referred to by Grice for his treatment of what he calls a Ryleian agitation caused by his feeling Byzantine. Vide inverted A. A proposition (protasis), then, is a sentence affirming or denying something of something; and this is either universal or particular or indefinite. By universal I mean a statement that something belongs to all or none of something; by particular that it belongs to some or not to some or not to all; by indefinite that it does or does not belong, without any mark of being universal or particular, e.g. ‘contraries are subjects of the same science’, or ‘pleasure is not good’. (Prior Analytics I, 1, 24a16–21.)

propositional complexum: In logic, the first proposition of a syllogism (class.): “propositio est, per quem locus is breviter exponitur, ex quo vis omnis oportet emanet ratiocinationis,” Cic. Inv. 1, 37, 67; 1, 34, 35; Auct. Her. 2, 18, 28.— B. Transf. 1. A principal subject, theme (class.), Cic. de Or. 3, 53; Sen. Ben. 6, 7, 1; Quint. 5, 14, 1.— 2. Still more generally, a proposition of any kind (post-Aug.), Quint. 7, 1, 47, § 9; Gell. 2, 7, 21.—Do not expect Grice to use the phrase ‘propositional content,’ as Hare does so freely. Grices proposes a propositional complexum, rather, which frees him from a commitment to a higher-order calculus and the abstract entity of a feature or a proposition. Grice regards a proposition as an extensional family of propositional complexa (Paul saw Peter; Peter was seen by Paul). The topic of a propositional complex Grice regards as Oxonian in nature. Peacocke struggles with the same type of problems, in his essays on content. Only a perception-based account of content in terms of qualia gets the philosopher out of the vicious circle of appealing to a linguistic entity to clarify a psychological entity. One way to discharge the burden of giving an account of a proposition involves focusing on a range of utterances, the formulation of which features no connective or quantifier. Each expresses a propositional complexum which consists of a sequence simplex-1 and simplex-2, whose elements would be a set and an ordered sequence of this or that individuum which may be a member of the set. The propositional complexum ‘Fido is shaggy’ consists of a sequence of the set of shaggy individua and the singleton consisting of the individuum Fido. ‘Smith loves Fido’ is a propositional complexum, i. e., a sequence whose first element is the class “love” correlated to a two-place predicate) and a the ordered pair of the singletons Smith and Fido. We define alethic satisfactoriness. A propositional complexum is alethically satisfactory just in case the sequence is a member of the set. A “proposition” (prosthesis) simpliciter is defined as a family of propositional complexa. Family unity may vary in accordance with context.

proposition, an abstract object said to be that to which a person is related by a belief, desire, or other psychological attitude, typically expressed in language containing a psychological verb ‘think’, ‘deny’, ‘doubt’, etc. followed by a thatclause. The psychological states in question are called propositional attitudes. When I believe that snow is white I stand in the relation of believing to the proposition that snow is white. When I hope that the protons will not decay, hope relates me to the proposition that the protons will not decay. A proposition can be a common object for various attitudes of various agents: that the protons will not decay can be the object of my belief, my hope, and your fear. A sentence expressing an attitude is also taken to express the associated proposition. Because ‘The protons will not decay’ identifies my hope, it identifies the proposition to which my hope relates me. Thus the proposition can be the shared meaning of this sentence and all its synonyms, in English or elsewhere e.g., ‘die Protonen werden nicht zerfallen’. This, in sum, is the traditional doctrine of propositions. Although it seems indispensable in some form for theorizing about thought and language, difficulties abound. Some critics regard propositions as excess baggage in any account of meaning. But unless this is an expression of nominalism, it is confused. Any systematic theory of meaning, plus an apparatus of sets or properties will let us construct proposition-like objects. The proposition a sentence S expresses might, e.g., be identified with a certain set of features that determines S’s meaning. Other sentences with these same features would then express the same proposition. A natural way to associate propositions with sentences is to let the features in question be semantically significant features of the words from which sentences are built. Propositions then acquire the logical structures of sentences: they are atomic, conditional, existential, etc. But combining the view of propositions as meanings with the traditional idea of propositions as bearers of truthvalues brings trouble. It is assumed that two sentences that express the same proposition have the same truth-value indeed, that sentences have their truth-values in virtue of the propositions they express. Yet if propositions are also meanings, this principle fails for sentences with indexical elements: although ‘I am pale’ has a single meaning, two utterances of it can differ in truth-value. In response, one may suggest that the proposition a sentence S expresses depends both on the linguistic meaning of S and on the referents of S’s indexical elements. But this reveals that proposition is a quite technical concept and one that is not motivated simply by a need to talk about meanings. Related questions arise for propositions as the objects of propositional attitudes. My belief that I am pale may be true, yours that you are pale false. So our beliefs should take distinct propositional objects. Yet we would each use the same sentence, ‘I am pale’, to express our belief. Intuitively, your belief and mine also play similar cognitive roles. We may each choose the sun exposure, clothing, etc., that we take to be appropriate to a fair complexion. So our attitudes seem in an important sense to be the same an identity that the assignment of distinct propositional objects hides. Apparently, the characterization of beliefs e.g. as being propositional attitudes is at best one component of a more refined, largely unknown account. Quite apart from complications about indexicality, propositions inherit standard difficulties about meaning. Consider the beliefs that Hesperus is a planet and that Phosphorus is a planet. It seems that someone might have one but not the other, thus that they are attitudes toward distinct propositions. This difference apparently reflects the difference in meaning between the sentences ‘Hesperus is a planet’ and ‘Phosphorus is a planet’. The principle would be that non-synonymous sentences express distinct propositions. But it is unclear what makes for a difference in meaning. Since the sentences agree in logico-grammatical structure and in the referents of their terms, their specific meanings must depend on some more subtle feature that has resisted definition. Hence our concept of proposition is also only partly defined. Even the idea that the sentences here express the same proposition is not easily refuted. What such difficulties show is not that the concept of proposition is invalid but that it belongs to a still rudimentary descriptive scheme. It is too thoroughly enmeshed with the concepts of meaning and belief to be of use in solving their attendant problems. This observation is what tends, through a confusion, to give rise to skepticism about propositions. One may, e.g., reasonably posit structured abstract entities propositions that represent the features on which the truth-values of sentences depend. Then there is a good sense in which a sentence is true in virtue of the proposition it expresses. But how does the use of words in a certain context associate them with a particular proposition? Lacking an answer, we still cannot explain why a given sentence is true. Similarly, one cannot explain belief as the acceptance of a proposition, since only a substantive theory of thought would reveal how the mind “accepts” a proposition and what it does to accept one proposition rather than another. So a satisfactory doctrine of propositions remains elusive.

propositional function, an operation that, when applied to something as argument or to more than one thing in a given order as arguments, yields a truth-value as the value of that function for that argument or those arguments. This usage presupposes that truth-values are objects. A function may be singulary, binary, ternary, etc. A singulary propositional function is applicable to one thing and yields, when so applied, a truth-value. For example, being a prime number, when applied to the number 2, yields truth; negation, when applied to truth, yields falsehood. A binary propositional function is applicable to two things in a certain order and yields, when so applied, a truth-value. For example, being north of when applied to New York and Boston in that order yields falsehood. Material implication when applied to falsehood and truth in that order yields truth. The term ‘propositional function’ has a second use, to refer to an operation that, when applied to something as argument or to more than one thing in a given order as arguments, yields a proposition as the value of the function for that argument or those arguments. For example, being a prime number when applied to 2 yields the proposition that 2 is a prime number. Being north of, when applied to New York and Boston in that order, yields the proposition that New York is north of Boston. This usage presupposes that propositions are objects. In a third use, ‘propositional function’ designates a sentence with free occurrences of variables. Thus, ‘x is a prime number’, ‘It is not the case that p’, ‘x is north of y’ and ‘if p then q’ are propositional functions in this sense. C.S. propositional justification.

The Grice Club

jls.rbjones.com

The Grice Club

The Grice Club

Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

Search This Blog

Monday, June 22, 2020

IMPLICATVRA, in 12 volumes; vol. X

No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers

Blog Archive

Contributors

The Grice Club

jls.rbjones.com

The Grice Club

The Grice Club

Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

Search This Blog

Monday, June 22, 2020

IMPLICATVRA, in 12 volumes; vol. X

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe To The Grice Club

Followers

Blog Archive

Contributors