IMPLICATVRA, in 12 volumes; vol. VIII

James-Lange theory, the theory, put forward by James and independently by Lange, an anatomist, that an emotion is the felt awareness of bodily reactions to something perceived or thought (James) or just the bodily reactions themselves (Lange). According to the more influential version (James, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind, 1884), “our natural way of thinking” mistakenly supposes that the perception or thought causes the emotion, e.g., fear or anger, which in turn causes the bodily reactions, e.g., rapid heartbeat, weeping, trembling, grimacing, and actions such as running and striking. In reality, however, the fear or anger consists in the bodily sensations caused by these reactions. In support of this theory, James proposed a thought experiment: Imagine feeling some “strong” emotion, one with a pronounced “wave of bodily disturbance,” and then subtract in imagination the felt awareness of this disturbance. All that remains, James found, is “a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception,” a cognition lacking in emotional coloration. Consequently, it is our bodily feelings that emotionalize consciousness, imbuing our perceptions and thoughts with emotional qualities and endowing each type of emotion, such as fear, anger, and joy, with its special feeling quality. But this does not warrant James’s radical conclusion that emotions or emotional states are effects rather than causes of bodily reactions. That conclusion requires the further assumption, which James shared with many of his contemporaries, that the various emotions are nothing but particular feeling qualities. Historically, the James-Lange theory led to further inquiries into the physiological and cognitive causes of emotional feelings and helped transform the psychology of emotions from a descriptive study relying on introspection to a broader naturalistic inquiry.

Jansenism, a set of doctrines advanced by philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterized by a predestinarianism that emphasized Adam’s fall (“il pecato originale di Adamo”) irresistible efficacious grace (“grice”), limited atonement, election, and reprobation. Addressing the issue of free will and grace left open by the Council of Trent, Cornelius Jansen crystallized the seventeenth-century Augustinian revival, producing a compilation of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian teachings (Augustinus). Propagated by Saint Cyran and Antoine Arnauld (On Frequent Communion, 1643), adopted by the nuns of Port-Royal, and defended against Jesuit attacks by Pascal (Provincial Letters, 1656–57), Jansenism pervaded Roman Catholicism from Utrecht to Rome for over 150 years. Condemned by Pope Innocent X (Cum Occasione, 1653) and crushed by Louis XIV and the French clergy (the 1661 formulary), it survived outside France and rearmed for a counteroffensive. Pasquier Quesnel’s (1634–1719) “second Jansenism,” condemned by Pope Clement XI (Unigenitus, 1713), was less Augustinian, more rigorist, and advocated Presbyterianism and Gallicanism.

jaspers: philosopher, one of the main representatives of the existentialist movement (although he rejected ‘existentialism’ as a distortion of the philosophy of existence). Jaspers studied law and medicine at Heidelberg, Munich, Berlin, and Göttingen. He concluded his studies with an M.D. (Homesickness and Crime) from Heidelberg. From 1908 until 1915 he worked as a voluntary assistant in the psychiatric clinic, and published his first major work (Allgemeine Psychopathologie, 1913; General Psychopathology, 1965). After his habilitation in psychology (1913) Jaspers lectured as Privatdocent. In 1919 he published Psychologie der Weltanschauung (“Psychology of Worldviews”). Two years later he became professor in philosophy. Because of his personal convictions and marriage with Gertrud Mayer (who was Jewish) the Nazi government took away his professorship in 1937 and suppressed all publications. He and his wife were saved from deportation because the American army liberated Heidelberg a few days before the fixed date of April 14, 1945. In 1948 he accepted a professorship from the University of Basel. As a student, Jaspers felt a strong aversion to academic philosophy. However, as he gained insights in the fields of psychiatry and psychology, he realized that both the study of human beings and the meaning of scientific research pointed to questions and problems that demanded their own thoughts and reflections. Jaspers gave a systematic account of them in his three-volume Philosophie (1931; with postscript, 1956; Philosophy, 1969–71), and in the 1,100 pages of Von der Wahrheit (On Truth, 1947). In the first volume (“Philosophical World-orientation”) he discusses the place and meaning of philosophy with regard to the human situation in general and scientific disciplines in particular. In the second (“Clarification of Existence”), he contrasts the compelling modes of objective (scientific) knowledge with the possible (and in essence non-objective) awareness of being in self-relation, communication, and historicity, both as being oneself presents itself in freedom, necessity, and transcendence, and as existence encounters its unconditionality in limit situations (of death, suffering, struggle, guilt) and the polar intertwining of subjectivity and objectivity. In the third volume (“Metaphysics”) he concentrates on the meaning of transcendence as it becomes translucent in appealing ciphers (of nature, history, consciousness, art, etc.) to possible existence under and against the impact of stranding. His Von der Wahrheit is the first volume of a projected work on philosophical logic (cf. Nachlaß zur philosophischen Logik, ed. H. Saner and M. Hänggi, 1991) in which he develops the more formal aspects of his philosophy as “periechontology” (ontology of the encompassing, des Umgreifenden, with its modes of being there, consciousness, mind, existence, world, transcendence, reason) and clarification of origins. In both works Jaspers focuses on “existential philosophy” as “that kind of thinking through which man tries to become himself both as thinking makes use of all real knowledge and as it transcends this knowledge. This thinking does not recognize objects, but clarifies and enacts at once the being of the one who thinks in this way” (Philosophische Autobiographie, 1953). In his search for authentic existence in connection with the elaboration of “philosophical faith” in reason and truth, Jaspers had to achieve a thorough understanding of philosophical, political, and religious history as well as an adequate assessment of the present situation. His aim became a world philosophy as a possible contribution to universal peace out of the spirit of free and limitless communication, unrestricted open-mindedness, and unrelenting truthfulness. Besides a comprehensive history of philosophy (Die groben Philosophen I, 1957; II and III, 1981; The Great Philosophers, 2 vols., 1962, 1966) and numerous monographs (on Cusanus, Descartes, Leonardo da Vinci, Schelling, Nietzsche, Strindberg, van Gogh, Weber) he wrote on subjects such as the university (Die Idee der Universität, 1946; The Idea of the University, 1959), the spiritual situation of the age (Die geistige Situation der Zeit, 1931; Man in the Modern Age, 1933), the meaning of history (Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, 1949; The Origin and Goal of History, in which he developed the idea of an “axial period”), the guilt question (Die Schuldfrage, 1946; The Question of German Guilt, 1947), the atomic bomb (Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen, 1958; The Future of Mankind, 1961), German politics (Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? 1966; The Future of Germany, 1967). He also wrote on theology and religious issues (Die Frage der Entymythologisierung. Eine Diskussion mit Rudolf Bultmann, 1954; Myth and Christianity, 1958; Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, 1962; Philosophical Faith and Revelation, 1967).

jevons: w. s., philosopher of science. In economics, he clarified the idea of value, arguing that it is a function of utility. Later theorists imitated his use of the calculus and other mathematical tools to reach theoretical results. His approach anticipated the idea of marginal utility, a notion basic in modern economics. Jevons regarded J. S. Mill’s logic as inadequate, preferring the new symbolic logic of Boole. One permanent contribution was his introduction of the concept of inclusive ‘or’, with ‘or’ meaning ‘either or, or both’. To aid in teaching the new logic of classes and propositions, Jevons invented his “logical piano.” In opposition to the confidence in induction of Mill and Whewell, both of whom thought, for different reasons, that induction can arrive at exact and necessary truths, Jevons argued that science yields only approximations, and that any perfect fit between theory and observation must be grounds for suspicion that we are wrong, not for confidence that we are right. Jevons introduced probability theory to show how rival hypotheses are evaluated. He was a subjectivist, holding that probability is a measure of what a perfectly rational person would believe given the available evidence. H. P. Grice: “Jevons’s Aristotle.”

da Floris: Italian philosopher, the founder the order of Ciscercian order of San Giovanni in Fiore (vide, Grice, “St. John’s and the Cistercians”). He devoted the rest of his life to meditation and the recording of his prophetic visions. In his major works Liber concordiae Novi ac Veteri Testamenti (“Book of the Concordances between the New and the Old Testament,” 1519), Expositio in Apocalypsim (1527), and Psalterium decem chordarum (1527), Joachim illustrates the deep meaning of history as he perceived it in his visions. History develops in coexisting patterns of twos and threes. The two testaments represent history as divided in two phases ending in the First and Second Advent, respectively. History progresses also through stages corresponding to the Holy Trinity. The age of the Father is that of the law; the age of the Son is that of grace, ending approximately in 1260; the age of the Spirit will produce a spiritualized church. Some monastic orders like the Franciscans and Dominicans saw themselves as already belonging to this final era of spirituality and interpreted Joachim’s prophecies as suggesting the overthrow of the contemporary ecclesiastical institutions. Some of his views were condemned by the Lateran Council in 1215.  

philoponus: Grecian philosopher and theologian, who worked in Alexandria (“philoponus,” ‘workaholic’, just a nickname). A Christian from birth, he was a pupil of the Platonist Ammonius, and is the first Christian Aristotelian. As such, he challenged Aristotle on many points where he conflicted with Christian doctrine, e.g. the eternity of the world, the need for an infinite force, the definition of place, the impossibility of a vacuum, and the necessity for a fifth element to be the substance of the heavens. Johannes composed commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Meteorologics, and On the Soul; and a treatise Against Proclus: On the Eternity of the World. There is dispute as to whether the commentaries exhibit a change of mind (away from orthodox Aristotelianism) on these questions.

Damascenus Chrysorrhoas: Greican theologian and Eastern church doctor. Born of a well-to-do family in Damascus, he was educated in Greek. He attained a high position in government but resigned under the antiChristian Caliph Abdul Malek and became a monk about 700, living outside Jerusalem. He left extensive writings, most little more than compilations of older texts. The Iconoclastic Synod of 754 condemned his arguments in support of the veneration of images in the three Discourses against the Iconoclasts (726–30), but his orthodoxy was confirmed in 787 at the Second Council of Nicaea. His Sources of Knowledge consists of a Dialectic, a history of heresies, and an exposition of orthodoxy. Considered a saint from the end of the eighth century, he was much respected in the East and was regarded as an important witness to Eastern Orthodox thought by the West in the Middle Ages.

Poinsot: philosopher, studied at Louvain, entered the Dominican order (1610), and taught at Piacenza. His most important works are the Cursus philosophicus, a work on logic and natural philosophy; and the Cursus theologicus (“Course of Theology,” 1637–44), a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. John considered himself a Thomist, but he modified Aquinas’s views in important ways. The “Ars Logica,” the first part of the Cursus philosophicus, is the source of much subsequent Catholic teaching in logic. It is divided into two parts: the first deals with formal logic and presents a comprehensive theory of terms, propositions, and reasoning; the second discusses topics in material logic, such as predicables, categories, and demonstration. An important contribution in the first is a comprehensive theory of signs that has attracted considerable attention in the twentieth century among such philosophers as Maritain, Yves Simon, John Wild, and others. An important contribution in the second part is the division of knowledge according to physical, mathematical, and metaphysical degrees, which was later adopted by Maritain. John dealt with metaphysical problems in the second part of the Cursus philosophicus and in the Cursus theologicus. His views are modifications of Aquinas’s. For example, Aquinas held that the principle of individuation is matter designated by quantity; John interpreted this as matter radically determined by dimensions, where the dimensions are indeterminate. In contrast to other major figures of the Spanish Scholasticism of the times, John did not write much in political and legal theory. He considered ethics and political philosophy to be speculative rather than practical sciences, and adopted a form of probabilism. Moreover, when in doubt about a course of action, one may simply adopt any pertinent view proposed by a prudent moralist.

salisbury: Grice: “One should not confuse Salisbury with Salisbury.” English philosopher, tutored by Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers in Paris. It is possible that during this time he also studied grammar, rhetoric, and part of the quadrivium with Conches at Chartres. After 1147 he was for a time a member of the Roman Curia, secretary to Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, and friend of Thomas Becket. For his role in Becket’s canonization, Louis VII of France rewarded him with the bishopric of Chartres. Salisbury is a dedicated student of philosophy. In his letters, biographies of Anselm and Becket, and Memoirs of the Papal Court, Salisbury provides, in perhaps the best medieval imitation of classical Latin style, an account of some of the most important ideas, events, and personalities of his time. Neither these works nor his Polycraticus and “Metalogicon,” for which he is most celebrated, are systematic philosophical treatises. The “Polycraticus” is, however, considered one of the first medieval treatises to take up political theory in any extended way. Salisbury maintains that if a ruler does not legislate in accordance with natural moral law, legitimate resistance to him can include his assassination. In the “Metalogicon,” on the other hand, Salisbury discusses, in a humanist spirit, the benefits for a civilized world of philosophical training based on Aristotle’s logic. He also presents current views on the nature of the universale and, not surprisingly, endorses an Aristotelian view of them as neither extramental entities nor mere expressum, but a conceptus that nevertheless has a basis in reality insofar as they are the result of the mind’s abstracting from extramental entities what those entities have in common.

johnson: Grice, “Not to be confused with Dr. Johnson – this one was as a philosopher should just be, an MA, like me!” -- w. e., very English philosopher who lectured on psychology and logic at Cambridge University. His Logic was published in three parts: Part I (1921); Part II, Demonstrative Inference: Deductive and Inductive (1922); and Part III, The Logical Foundations of Science (1924). He did not complete Part IV on probability, but in 1932 Mind published three of its intended chapters. Johnson’s other philosophical publications, all in Mind, were not abundant. The discussion note “On Feeling as Indifference” (1888) deals with problems of classification. “The Logical Calculus” (three parts, 1892) anticipates the “Cambridge” style of logic while continuing the tradition of Jevons and Venn; the same is true of treatments of formal logic in Logic. “Analysis of Thinking” (two parts, 1918) advances an adverbial theory of experience. Johnson’s philosophic influence at Cambridge exceeded the influence of these publications, as one can see from the references to him by John Neville Keynes in Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic and by his son John Maynard Keynes in A Treatise on Probability. Logic contains original and distinctive treatments of induction, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. Johnson’s theory of inference proposes a treatment of implication that is an alternative to the view of Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica. He coined the term ‘ostensive definition’ and introduced the distinction between determinates and determinables.

jung: founder of analytical psychology, a form of psychoanalysis that differs from Freud’s chiefly by an emphasis on the collective character of the unconscious and on archetypes as its privileged contents. Jung, like Freud, was deeply influenced by philosophy in his early years. Before his immersion in psychiatry, he wrote several essays of explicitly philosophical purport. Kant was doubtless the philosopher who mattered most to Jung, for whom archetypes were conceived as a priori structures of the human psyche. Plato and Neoplatonists, Schopenhauer and especially Nietzsche (to whose Zarathustra he devoted a seminar of several years’ duration) were also of critical importance. Oddly, Jung was a close reader of James (in German translation, of course), and his Psychological Types (1921) – in addition to an extended discussion of nominalism versus realism – contains a detailed treatment of Jamesian typologies of the self. Jung considered the self to be an amalgamation of an “ectopsyche” – consisting of four functions (intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking) that surround an ego construed not as a singular entity but as a “complex” of ideas and emotions – and an “endosphere” (i.e., consciousness turned inward in memory, affect, etc.). The personal unconscious, which preoccupied Freud, underlies the endosphere and its “invasions,” but it is in turn grounded in the collective unconscious shared by all humankind. The collective unconscious was induced by Jung from his analysis of dream symbols and psychopathological symptoms. It is an inherited archive of archaic-mythic forms and figures that appear repeatedly in the most diverse cultures and historical epochs. Such forms and figures – also called archetypes – are considered “primordial images” preceding the “ideas” that articulate rational thought. As a consequence, the self, rather than being autonomous, is embedded in a prepersonal and prehistoric background from which there is no effective escape. However, through prolonged psychotherapeutically guided “individuation,” a slow assimilation of the collective unconscious into daily living can occur, leading to an enriched and expanded sense of experience and selfhood.

Hart, Grice’s favourite prudens, iurisprudens: jurisprudence, the science or “knowledge” of law; thus, in its widest usage, the study of the legal doctrines, rules, and principles of any legal system, especially that which is valid at Oxford. More commonly, however, ‘prudens,’ or ‘iurisprudens’ designates the study not of the actual laws of particular legal systems, but of the general concepts and principles that underlie a legal system or that are common to every such system (general jurisprudence). Jurisprudence in this usage, sometimes also called the philosophy of law – but Grice preferred, “philosophical jurisprudence”) may be further subdivided according to the major focus of a particular study. Examples include Roman and English historical jurisprudence (a study of the development of legal principles over time, often emphasizing the origin of law in custom or tradition rather than in enacted rules), sociological jurisprudence (an examination of the relationship between legal rules and the behavior of individuals, groups, or institutions), functional jurisprudence (an inquiry into the relationship between legal norms and underlying social interests or needs), and analytical jurisprudence (an investigation into the connections among legal concepts). Within analytical jurisprudence the most substantial body of thought focuses on the meaning of the concept of law itself (legal theory) and the relationship between that concept and the concept of the moral. Legal positivism, the view that there is no necessary connection between legal (a legal right) and the moral (a moral right), opposes the natural law view that no sharp distinction between these concepts can be drawn. Legal positivism is sometimes thought to be a consequence of positivism’s insistence that legal validity is determined ultimately by reference to certain basic social facts: “the command of the sovereign” (Austin – “the other Austin, the benevolent one!” -- Grice), the Grundnorm (Kelsen), or “the rule of re-cognition” (Hart). These different positivist characterizations of the basic, law-determining FACT yield different claims about the normative character of law, with classical positivists (e.g., John Austin) insisting that legal systems are essentially coercive, whereas modern positivists (e.g., Hans Kelsen) maintain that they are normative. Disputes within legal theory often generate or arise out of disputes about theories of adjudication, or how a judge does or should decide a case. Mechanical jurisprudence, or formalism, the theory that all cases can be decided solely by analyzing a legal concept, is thought by many to have characterized judicial decisions and legal reasoning in the nineteenth century; that theory became an easy target in the twentieth century for various forms of legal ‘realism,’ the view (which Grice found pretentious) that law is better determined by observing what a court and a citizen actually does than by analyzing stated legal rules and concepts. Recent developments in the natural law tradition also focus on the process of adjudication and the normative claim that accompany the judicial declaration of legal rights and obligations. These normative claim, the natural law theorist argues, show a legal right is a species of a political right or a moral right. In consequence, one must either revise prevailing theories of adjudication and abandon the social-fact theory of law (New-World Dworkin), or explore the connection between legal theory and the classical question of political theory. Under what condition does a legal obligation, even if determined by an inter-subjetctive fact, create a genuine political obligation (e.g., the meta-obligation to obey the law)? Other jurisprudential notions that overlap topics in political theory include rule of law, legal moralism, and civil disobedience. The disputes within legal theory about the connection between law and morality should not be confused with discussions of “natural law” within moral theory. In Grice’s meta-ethics, so-called “natural law” denotes a particular view about the objective status of a moral norm that has produced a considerable literature, extending from ancient Grecian and Roman thought, through medieval theological writings, to contemporary Oxonian ethical thought. Though the claim that one cannot sharply separate law and morality is often made as part of a general natural law moral theory, the referents of ‘natural law’ in legal and moral theory do not share any obvious logical relationship. A moral theorist may conclude that there is NO necessary connection between law and morality, thus endorsing a positivist view of law, while consistently advocating a natural law view of morality itself. Conversely, as Grice notes, a natural law legal theorist, in accepting the view that there IS a connection (or priority) between law and morality (a moral right being evaluational prior than a legal right, even if not epistemically prior), might nonetheless endorse a substantive moral theory different from that implied by a natural law moral theory. Refs.: G. P. Baker, “Meaning and defeasibility,” in Festschrift for H. L. A. Hart,  G. P. Baker, “Alternative mind styles,” in Festschrift for H. P. Grice, H. L. A. Hart, “Grice” in “The nightmare,” H. P. Grice, “Moral right and legal right: three types of conceptual priority.”

jury nullification, a jury’s ability, or the exercise of that ability, to acquit a criminal defendant despite finding facts that leave no reasonable doubt about violation of a criminal statute. This ability is not a right, but an artifact of criminal procedure. In the common law, the jury has sole authority to determine the facts, and the judge to determine the law. The jury’s findings of fact cannot be reviewed. The term ‘nullification’ suggests that jury nullification is opposed to the rule of law. This thought would be sound only if an extreme legal positivism were true – that the law is nothing but the written law and the written law covers every possible fact situation. Jury nullification is better conceived as a form of equity, a rectification of the inherent limits of written law. In nullifying, juries make law. To make jury nullification a right, then, raises problems of democratic legitimacy, such as whether a small, randomly chosen group of citizens has authority to make law.

de jure: Or titular, as opposed to ‘de facto.’ Each getting what he is due. Formal justice is the impartial and consistent application of a Kantian principle, whether or not the principle itself is just. Substantive justice is closely associated with rights, i.e., with what individuals can legitimately demand of one another or what they can legitimately demand of their government (e.g., with respect to the protection of liberty or the promotion of equality). Retributive justice concerns when and why punishment is justified. Debate continues over whether punishment is justified as retribution for past wrongdoing or because it deters future wrongdoing. Those who stress retribution as the justification for punishment usually believe human beings have libertarian free will, while those who stress deterrence usually accept determinism. At least since Aristotle, justice has commonly been identified both with obeying law and with treating everyone with fairness. But if law is, and justice is not, entirely a matter of convention, then justice cannot be identified with obeying law. The literature on legal positivism and natural law theory contains much debate about jury nullification justice 456 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 456 whether there are moral limits on what conventions could count as law. Corrective justice concerns the fairness of demands for civil damages. Commutative justice concerns the fairness of wages, prices, and exchanges. Distributive justice concerns the fairness of the distribution of resources. Commutative justice and distributive justice are related, since people’s wages influence how much resources they have. But the distinction is important because it may be just to pay A more than B (because A is more productive than B) but just that B is left with more after-tax resources (because B has more children to feed than A does). In modern philosophy, however, the debate about just wages and prices has been overshadowed by the larger question of what constitutes a just distribution of resources. Some (e.g., Marx) have advocated distributing resources in accordance with needs. Others have advocated their distribution in whatever way maximizes utility in the long run. Others have argued that the fair distribution is one that, in some sense, is to everyone’s advantage. Still others have maintained that a just distribution is whatever results from the free market. Some theorists combine these and other approaches.

iustificatum: “Late Latin; apparently neither the Grecians nor Cicero saw the need for it!”– Grice. justification, a concept of broad scope that spans epistemology and ethics and has as special cases the concepts of apt belief and right action. The concept has, however, highly varied application. Many things, of many different sorts, can be justified. Prominent among them are beliefs and actions. To say that X is justified is to say something positive about X. Other things being equal, it is better that X be justified than otherwise. However, not all good entities are justified. The storm’s abating may be good since it spares some lives, but it is not thereby justified. What we can view as justified or unjustified is what we can relate appropriately to someone’s faculties or choice. (Believers might hence view the storm’s abating as justified after all, if they were inclined to judge divine providence.) Just as in epistemology we need to distinguish justification from truth, since either of these might apply to a belief in the absence of the other, so in ethics we must distinguish justification from utility: an action might be optimific but not justified, and justified but not optimific. What is distinctive of justification is then the implied evaluation of an agent (thus the connection, however remote, with faculties of choice). To say that a belief is (epistemically) justified (apt) or to say that an action is (ethically) justified (“right” – in one sense) is to make or imply a judgment on the subject and how he or she has arrived at that action or belief. Often a much narrower concept of justification is used, one according to which X is justified only if X has been or at least can be justified through adducing reasons. Such adducing of reasons can be viewed as the giving of an argument of any of several sorts: e.g., conclusive, prima facie, inductive, or deductive. A conclusive justification or argument adduces conclusive reasons for the possible (object of) action or belief that figures in the conclusion. In turn, such reasons are conclusive if and only if they raise the status of the conclusion action or belief so high that the subject concerned would be well advised to conclude deliberation or inquiry. A prima facie justification or argument adduces a prima facie reason R (or more than one) in favor of the possible (object of) action or belief O that figures in the conclusion. In turn, R is a prima facie reason for O if and only if R specifies an advantage or positive consideration in favor of O, one that puts O in a better light than otherwise. Even if R is a prima facie reason for O, however, R can be outweighed, overridden, or defeated by contrary considerations RH. Thus my returning a knife that I promised to return to its rightful owner has in its favor the prima facie reason that it is my legal obligation and the fulfillment of a promise, but if the owner has gone raving mad, then there may be reasons against returning the knife that override, outweigh, or defeat. (And there may also be reasons that defeat a positive prima facie reason without amounting to reasons for the opposite course. Thus it may emerge that the promise to return the knife was extracted under duress.) A (valid) deductive argument for a certain conclusion C is a sequence of thoughts or statements whose last member is C (not necessarily last temporally, but last in the sequence) and each member of which is either an assumption or premise of the argument or is based on earlier members of the sequence in accordance with a sound principle of necessary inference, such as simplification: from (P & Q) to P; or addition: from P to (P or Q); or modus ponens: from P and (P only if Q) to Q. Whereas the premises of a deductive argument necessarily entail the conclusion, which cannot possibly fail to be true when the justice as fairness justification 457 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 457 premises are all true, the premises of an inductive argument do not thus entail its conclusion but offer considerations that only make the conclusion in some sense more probable than it would be otherwise. From the premises that it rains and that if it rains the streets are wet, one may deductively derive the conclusion that the streets are wet. However, the premise that I have tried to start my car on many, many winter mornings during the two years since I bought it and that it has always started, right up to and including yesterday, does not deductively imply that it will start when I try today. Here the conclusion does not follow deductively. Though here the reason provided by the premise is only an inductive reason for believing the conclusion, and indeed a prima facie and defeasible reason, nevertheless it might well be in our sense a conclusive reason. For it might enable us rightfully to conclude inquiry and/or deliberation and proceed to (action or, in this case) belief, while turning our attention to other matters (such as driving to our destination).

Fides: -- justification by faith, the characteristic doctrine of the Protestant Reformation that sinful human beings can be justified before God through faith in Jesus Christ. ‘Being justified’ is understood in forensic terms: before the court of divine justice humans are not considered guilty because of their sins, but rather are declared by God to be holy and righteous in virtue of the righteousness of Christ, which God counts on their behalf. Justification is received by faith, which is not merely belief in Christian doctrine but includes a sincere and heartfelt trust and commitment to God in Christ for one’s salvation. Such faith, if genuine, leads to the reception of the transforming influences of God’s grace and to a life of love, obedience, and service to God. These consequences of faith, however, are considered under the heading of sanctification rather than justification. The rival Roman Catholic doctrine of justification – often mislabeled by Protestants as “justification by works” – understands key terms differently. ‘Being just’ is understood not primarily in forensic terms but rather as a comprehensive state of being rightly related to God, including the forgiveness of sins, the reception of divine grace, and inner transformation. Justification is a work of God initially accomplished at baptism; among the human “predispositions” for justification are faith (understood as believing the truths God has revealed), awareness of one’s sinfulness, hope in God’s mercy, and a resolve to do what God requires. Salvation is a gift of God that is not deserved by human beings, but the measure of grace bestowed depends to some extent on the sincere efforts of the sinner who is seeking salvation. The Protestant and Catholic doctrines are not fully consistent with each other, but neither are they the polar opposites they are often made to appear by the caricatures each side offers of the other.

Jus ad bellum, jus in bello: a set of conditions justifying the resort to war (jus ad bellum) and prescribing how war may permissibly be conducted (jus in bello). The theory is a Western approach to the moral assessment of war that grew out of the Christian tradition beginning with Augustine, later taking both religious and secular (including legalist) forms. Proposed conditions for a just war vary in both number and interpretation. Accounts of jus ad bellum typically require: (1) just cause: an actual or imminent wrong against the state, usually a violation of rights, but sometimes provided by the need to protect innocents, defend human rights, or safeguard the way of life of one’s own or other peoples; (2) competent authority: limiting the undertaking of war to a state’s legitimate rulers; (3) right intention: aiming only at peace and the ends of the just cause (and not war’s attendant suffering, death, and destruction); (4) proportionality: ensuring that anticipated good not be outweighed by bad; (5) last resort: exhausting peaceful alternatives before going to war; and (6) probability of success: a reasonable prospect that war will succeed. Jus in bellorequires: (7) proportionality: ensuring that the means used in war befit the ends of the just cause and that their resultant good and bad, when individuated, be proportionate in the sense of (4); and (8) discrimination: prohibiting the killing of noncombatants and/or innocents. Sometimes conditions (4), (5), and (6) are included in (1). The conditions are usually considered individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a fully just war. But sometimes strength of just cause is taken to offset some lack of proportion in means, and sometimes absence of right intention is taken to render a war evil though not necessarily unjust. Most just war theorists take jus ad bellum to warrant only defensive wars. But some follow earlier literature and allow for just offensive wars. Early theorists deal primarily with jus ad bellum, later writers with both jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Recent writers stress jus in bello, with particular attention to deterrence: the attempt, by instilling fear of retaliation, to induce an adversary to refrain from attack. Some believe that even though large-scale use of nuclear weapons would violate requirements of proportionality and discrimination, the threatened use of such weapons can maintain peace, and hence justify a system of nuclear deterrence.

kabala

ariskant: “Today I’ll lecture on Aristkant, or rather his second part,” – Grice. Kant (which Grice spelt ‘cant,’ seeing that it was Scots) Immanuel, preeminent Scots philosopher whose distinctive concern was to vindicate the authority of reason. He believed that by a critical examination of its own powers, reason can distinguish unjustifiable traditional metaphysical claims from the principles that are required by our theoretical need to determine ourselves within spatiotemporal experience and by our practical need to legislate consistently with all other rational wills. Because these principles are necessary and discoverable, they defeat empiricism and skepticism, and because they are disclosed as simply the conditions of orienting ourselves coherently within experience, they contrast with traditional rationalism and dogmatism. Kant was born and raised in the eastern Prussian university town of Königsberg (today Kaliningrad), where, except for a short period during which he worked as a tutor in the nearby countryside, he spent his life as student and teacher. He was trained by Pietists and followers of Leibniz and Wolff, but he was also heavily influenced by Newton and Rousseau. In the 1750s his theoretical philosophy began attempting to show how metaphysics must accommodate as certain the fundamental principles underlying modern science; in the 1760s his 460 K 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 460 practical philosophy began attempting to show (in unpublished form) how our moral life must be based on a rational and universally accessible self-legislation analogous to Rousseau’s political principles. The breakthrough to his own distinctive philosophy came in the 1770s, when he insisted on treating epistemology as first philosophy. After arguing in his Inaugural Dissertation (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World) both that our spatiotemporal knowledge applies only to appearances and that we can still make legitimate metaphysical claims about “intelligible” or non-spatiotemporal features of reality (e.g., that there is one world of substances interconnected by the action of God), there followed a “silent decade” of preparation for his major work, the epoch-making Critique of Pure Reason (first or “A” edition, 1781; second or “B” edition, with many revisions, 1787; Kant’s initial reaction to objections to the first edition dominate his short review, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, 1783; the full title of which means ‘preliminary investigations for any future metaphysics that will be able to present itself as a science’, i.e., as a body of certain truths). This work resulted in his mature doctrine of transcendental idealism, namely, that all our theoretical knowledge is restricted to the systematization of what are mere spatiotemporal appearances. This position is also called formal or Critical idealism, because it criticizes theories and claims beyond the realm of experience, while it also insists that although the form of experience is ideal, or relative to us, this is not to deny the reality of something independent of this form. Kant’s earlier works are usually called pre-Critical not just because they precede his Critique but also because they do not include a full commitment to this idealism. Kant supplemented his “first Critique” (often cited just as “the” Critique) with several equally influential works in practical philosophy – Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason (the “second Critique,” 1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (consisting of “Doctrine of Justice” and “Doctrine of Virtue,” 1797). Kant’s philosophy culminated in arguments advancing a purely moral foundation for traditional theological claims (the existence of God, immortality, and a transcendent reward or penalty proportionate to our goodness), and thus was characterized as “denying knowledge in order to make room for faith.” To be more precise, Kant’s Critical project was to restrict theoretical knowledge in such a way as to make it possible for practical knowledge to reveal how pure rational faith has an absolute claim on us. This position was reiterated in the Critique of Judgment (the “third Critique,” 1790), which also extended Kant’s philosophy to aesthetics and scientific methodology by arguing for a priori but limited principles in each of these domains. Kant was followed by radical idealists (Fichte, Schelling), but he regarded himself as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, and in numerous shorter works he elaborated his belief that everything must submit to the “test of criticism,” that human reason must face the responsibility of determining the sources, extent, and bounds of its own principles. The Critique concerns pure reason because Kant believes all these determinations can be made a priori, i.e., such that their justification does not depend on any particular course of experience (‘pure’ and ‘a priori’ are thus usually interchangeable). For Kant ‘pure reason’ often signifies just pure theoretical reason, which determines the realm of nature and of what is, but Kant also believes there is pure practical reason (or Wille), which determines a priori and independently of sensibility the realm of freedom and of what ought to be. Practical reason in general is defined as that which determines rules for the faculty of desire and will, as opposed to the faculties of cognition and of feeling. On Kant’s mature view, however, the practical realm is necessarily understood in relation to moral considerations, and these in turn in terms of laws taken to have an unconditional imperative force whose validity requires presuming that they are addressed to a being with absolute freedom, the faculty to choose (Willkür) to will or not to will to act for their sake. Kant also argues that no evidence of human freedom is forthcoming from empirical knowledge of the self as part of spatiotemporal nature, and that the belief in our freedom, and thus the moral laws that presuppose it, would have to be given up if we thought that our reality is determined by the laws of spatiotemporal appearances alone. Hence, to maintain the crucial practical component of his philosophy it was necessary for Kant first to employ his theoretical philosophy to show that it is at least possible that the spatiotemporal realm does not exhaust reality, so that there can be a non-empirical and free side to the self. Therefore Kant’s first Critique is a theoretical foundation for his entire system, which is devoted to establishing not just (i) what the most general necessary principles for the spatio-temporal domain are – a project that has been called his “metaphysics of experience” – but also (ii) that this domain cannot without contradiction define ultimate reality (hence his transcendental idealism). The first of these claims involves Kant’s primary use of the term ‘transcendental’, namely in the context of what he calls a transcendental deduction, which is an argument or “exposition” that establishes a necessary role for an a priori principle in our experience. As Kant explains, while mathematical principles are a priori and are necessary for experience, the mathematical proof of these principles is not itself transcendental; what is transcendental is rather the philosophical argument that these principles necessarily apply in experience. While in this way some transcendental arguments may presume propositions from an established science (e.g., geometry), others can begin with more modest assumptions – typically the proposition that there is experience or empirical knowledge at all – and then move on from there to uncover a priori principles that appear required for specific features of that knowledge. Kant begins by connecting metaphysics with the problem of synthetic a priori judgment. As necessary, metaphysical claims must have an a priori status, for we cannot determine that they are necessary by mere a posteriori means. As objective rather than merely formal, metaphysical judgments (unlike those of logic) are also said to be synthetic. This synthetic a priori character is claimed by Kant to be mysterious and yet shared by a large number of propositions that were undisputed in his time. The mystery is how a proposition can be known as necessary and yet be objective or “ampliative” or not merely “analytic.” For Kant an analytic proposition is one whose predicate is “contained in the subject.” He does not mean this “containment” relation to be understood psychologically, for he stresses that we can be psychologically and even epistemically bound to affirm non-analytic propositions. The containment is rather determined simply by what is contained in the concepts of the subject term and the predicate term. However, Kant also denies that we have ready real definitions for empirical or a priori concepts, so it is unclear how one determines what is really contained in a subject or predicate term. He seems to rely on intuitive procedures for saying when it is that one necessarily connects a subject and predicate without relying on a hidden conceptual relation. Thus he proposes that mathematical constructions, and not mere conceptual elucidations, are what warrant necessary judgments about triangles. In calling such judgments ampliative, Kant does not mean that they merely add to what we may have explicitly seen or implicitly known about the subject, for he also grants that complex analytic judgments may be quite informative, and thus “new” in a psychological or epistemic sense. While Kant stresses that non-analytic or synthetic judgments rest on “intuition” (Anschauung), this is not part of their definition. If a proposition could be known through its concepts alone, it must be analytic, but if it is not knowable in this way it follows only that we need something other than concepts. Kant presumed that this something must be intuition, but others have suggested other possibilities, such as postulation. Intuition is a technical notion of Kant, meant for those representations that have an immediate relation to their object. Human intuitions are also all sensible (or sensuous) or passive, and have a singular rather than general object, but these are less basic features of intuition, since Kant stresses the possibility of (nonhuman) non-sensible or “intellectual” intuition, and he implies that singularity of reference can be achieved by non-intuitive means (e.g., in the definition of God). The immediacy of intuition is crucial because it is what sets them off from concepts, which are essentially representations of representations, i.e., rules expressing what is common to a set of representations. Kant claims that mathematics, and metaphysical expositions of our notions of space and time, can reveal several evident synthetic a priori propositions, e.g., that there is one infinite space. In asking what could underlie the belief that propositions like this are certain, Kant came to his Copernican revolution. This consists in considering not how our representations may necessarily conform to objects as such, but rather how objects may necessarily conform to our representations. On a “pre-Copernican” view, objects are considered just by themselves, i.e., as “things-in-themselves” (Dinge an sich) totally apart from any intrinsic cognitive relation to our representations, and thus it is mysterious how we could ever determine them a priori. If we begin, however, with our own faculties of representation we might find something in them that determines how objects must be – at least when considered just as phenomena (singular: phenomenon), i.e., as objects of experience rather than as noumena (singular: noumenon), i.e., things-inthemselves specified negatively as unknown and beyond our experience, or positively as knowable in some absolute non-sensible way – which Kant insists is theoretically impossible for sensible beings like us. For example, Kant claims that when we consider our faculty for receiving impressions, or sensibility, we can find not only contingent contents but also two necessary forms or “pure forms of intuition”: space, which structures all outer representations given us, and time, which structures all inner representations. These forms can explain how the synthetic a priori propositions of mathematics will apply with certainty to all the objects of our experience. That is, if we suppose that in intuiting these propositions we are gaining a priori insight into the forms of our representation that must govern all that can come to our sensible awareness, it becomes understandable that all objects in our experience will have to conform with these propositions. Kant presented his transcendental idealism as preferable to all the alternative explanations that he knew for the possibility of mathematical knowledge and the metaphysical status of space and time. Unlike empiricism, it allowed necessary claims in this domain; unlike rationalism, it freed the development of this knowledge from the procedures of mere conceptual analysis; and unlike the Newtonians it did all this without giving space and time a mysterious status as an absolute thing or predicate of God. With proper qualifications, Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental ideality of space and time can be understood as a radicalization of the modern idea of primary and secondary qualities. Just as others had contended that sensible color and sound qualities, e.g., can be intersubjectively valid and even objectively based while existing only as relative to our sensibility and not as ascribable to objects in themselves, so Kant proposed that the same should be said of spatiotemporal predicates. Kant’s doctrine, however, is distinctive in that it is not an empirical hypothesis that leaves accessible to us other theoretical and non-ideal predicates for explaining particular experiences. It is rather a metaphysical thesis that enriches empirical explanations with an a priori framework, but begs off any explanation for that framework itself other than the statement that it lies in the “constitution” of human sensibility as such. This “Copernican” hypothesis is not a clear proof that spatiotemporal features could not apply to objects apart from our forms of intuition, but more support for this stronger claim is given in Kant’s discussion of the “antinomies” of rational cosmology. An antinomy is a conflict between two a priori arguments arising from reason when, in its distinctive work as a higher logical faculty connecting strings of judgments, it posits a real unconditioned item at the origin of various hypothetical syllogisms. There are antinomies of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, and they each proceed by pairs of dogmatic arguments which suppose that since one kind of unconditioned item cannot be found, e.g., an absolutely first event, another kind must be posited, e.g., a complete infinite series of past events. For most of the other antinomies, Kant indicates that contradiction can be avoided by allowing endless series in experience (e.g., of chains of causality, of series of dependent beings), series that are compatible with – but apparently do not require – unconditioned items (uncaused causes, necessary beings) outside experience. For the antinomy of quantity, however, he argues that the only solution is to drop the common dogmatic assumption that the set of spatiotemporal objects constitutes a determinate whole, either absolutely finite or infinite. He takes this to show that spatiotemporality must be transcendentally ideal, only an indeterminate feature of our experience and not a characteristic of things-in-themselves. Even when structured by the pure forms of space and time, sensible representations do not yield knowledge until they are grasped in concepts and these concepts are combined in a judgment. Otherwise, we are left with mere impressions, scattered in an unintelligible “multiplicity” or manifold; in Kant’s words, “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Judgment requires both concepts and intuitions; it is not just any relation of concepts, but a bringing together of them in a particular way, an “objective” unity, so that one concept is predicated of another – e.g., “all bodies are divisible” – and the latter “applies to certain appearances that present themselves to us,” i.e., are intuited. Because any judgment involves a unity of thought that can be prefixed by the phrase ‘I think’, Kant speaks of all representations, to the extent that they can be judged by us, as subject to a necessary unity of apperception. This term originally signified self-consciousness in contrast to direct consciousness or perception, but Kant uses it primarily to contrast with ‘inner sense’, the precognitive manifold of temporal representations as they are merely given in the mind. Kant also contrasts the empirical ego, i.e., the self as it is known contingently in experience, with the transcendental ego, i.e., the self thought of as the subject of structures of intuiting and thinking that are necessary throughout experience. The fundamental need for concepts and judgments suggests that our “constitution” may require not just intuitive but also conceptual forms, i.e., “pure concepts of the understanding,” or “categories.” The proof that our experience does require such forms comes in the “deduction of the objective validity of the pure concepts of the understanding,” also called the transcendental deduction of the categories, or just the deduction. This most notorious of all Kantian arguments appears to be in one way harder and in one way easier than the transcendental argument for pure intuitions. Those intuitions were held to be necessary for our experience because as structures of our sensibility nothing could even be imagined to be given to us without them. Yet, as Kant notes, it might seem that once representations are given in this way we can still imagine that they need not then be combined in terms of such pure concepts as causality. On the other hand, Kant proposed that a list of putative categories could be derived from a list of the necessary forms of the logical table of judgments, and since these forms would be required for any finite understanding, whatever its mode of sensibility is like, it can seem that the validity of pure concepts is even more inescapable than that of pure intuitions. That there is nonetheless a special difficulty in the transcendental argument for the categories becomes evident as soon as one considers the specifics of Kant’s list. The logical table of judgments is an a priori collection of all possible judgment forms organized under four headings, with three subforms each: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive), and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodictic). This list does not map exactly onto any one of the logic textbooks of Kant’s day, but it has many similarities with them; thus problematic judgments are simply those that express logical possibility, and apodictic ones are those that express logical necessity. The table serves Kant as a clue to the “metaphysical deduction” of the categories, which claims to show that there is an origin for these concepts that is genuinely a priori, and, on the premise that the table is proper, that the derived concepts can be claimed to be fundamental and complete. But by itself the list does not show exactly what categories follow from, i.e., are necessarily used with, the various forms of judgment, let alone what their specific meaning is for our mode of experience. Above all, even when it is argued that each experience and every judgment requires at least one of the four general forms, and that the use of any form of judgment does involve a matching pure concept (listed in the table of categories: reality, negation, limitation; unity, plurality, totality; inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community; possibility – impossibility, existence –non-existence, and necessity–contingency) applying to the objects judged about, this does not show that the complex relational forms and their corresponding categories of causality and community are necessary unless it is shown that these specific forms of judgment are each necessary for our experience. Precisely because this is initially not evident, it can appear, as Kant himself noted, that the validity of controversial categories such as causality cannot be established as easily as that of the forms of intuition. Moreover, Kant does not even try to prove the objectivity of the traditional modal categories but treats the principles that use them as mere definitions relative to experience. Thus a problematic judgment, i.e., one in which “affirmation or negation is taken as merely possible,” is used when something is said to be possible in the sense that it “agrees with the formal conditions of experience, i.e., with the conditions of intuition and of concepts.” A clue for rescuing the relational categories is given near the end of the Transcendental Deduction (B version), where Kant notes that the a priori all-inclusiveness and unity of space and time that is claimed in the treatment of sensibility must, like all cognitive unity, ultimately have a foundation in judgment. Kant expands on this point by devoting a key section called the analogies of experience to arguing that the possibility of our judging objects to be determined in an objective position in the unity of time (and, indirectly, space) requires three a priori principles (each called an “Analogy”) that employ precisely the relational categories that seemed especially questionable. Since these categories are established as needed just for the determination of time and space, which themselves have already been argued to be transcendentally ideal, Kant can conclude that for us even a priori claims using pure concepts of the understanding provide what are only transcendentally ideal claims. Thus we cannot make determinate theoretical claims about categories such as substance, cause, and community in an absolute sense that goes beyond our experience, but we can establish principles for their spatiotemporal specifications, called schemata, namely, the three Analogies: “in all change of appearance substance is permanent,” “all alterations take place in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect,” and “all substances, insofar as they can be perceived to coexist in space, are in thoroughgoing reciprocity.” Kant initially calls these regulative principles of experience, since they are required for organizing all objects of our empirical knowledge within a unity, and, unlike the constitutive principles for the categories of quantity and quality (namely: “all intuitions [for us] are extensive magnitudes,” and “in all appearances the real that is an object of sensation has intensive magnitude, that is, a degree”), they do not characterize any individual item by itself but rather only by its real relation to other objects of experience. Nonetheless, in comparison to mere heuristic or methodological principles (e.g., seek simple or teleological explanations), these Analogies are held by Kant to be objectively necessary for experience, and for this reason can also be called constitutive in a broader sense. The remainder of the Critique exposes the “original” or “transcendental” ideas of pure reason that pretend to be constitutive or theoretically warranted but involve unconditional components that wholly transcend the realm of experience. These include not just the antinomic cosmological ideas noted above (of these Kant stresses the idea of transcendental freedom, i.e., of uncaused causing), but also the rational psychological ideas of the soul as an immortal substance and the rational theological idea of God as a necessary and perfect being. Just as the pure concepts of the understanding have an origin in the necessary forms of judgments, these ideas are said to originate in the various syllogistic forms of reason: the idea of a soul-substance is the correlate of an unconditioned first term of a categorical syllogism (i.e., a subject that can never be the predicate of something else), and the idea of God is the correlate of the complete sum of possible predicates that underlies the unconditioned first term of the disjunctive syllogism used to give a complete determination of a thing’s properties. Despite the a priori origin of these notions, Kant claims we cannot theoretically establish their validity, even though they do have regulative value in organizing our notion of a human or divine spiritual substance. Thus, even if, as Kant argues, traditional proofs of immortality, and the teleological, cosmological, and ontological arguments for God’s existence, are invalid, the notions they involve can be affirmed as long as there is, as he believes, a sufficient non-theoretical, i.e., moral argument for them. When interpreted on the basis of such an argument, they are transformed into ideas of practical reason, ideas that, like perfect virtue, may not be verified or realized in sensible experience, but have a rational warrant in pure practical considerations. Although Kant’s pure practical philosophy culminates in religious hope, it is primarily a doctrine of obligation. Moral value is determined ultimately by the nature of the intention of the agent, which in turn is determined by the nature of what Kant calls the general maxim or subjective principle underlying a person’s action. One follows a hypothetical imperative when one’s maxim does not presume an unconditional end, a goal (like the fulfillment of duty) that one should have irrespective of all sensible desires, but rather a “material end” dependent on contingent inclinations (e.g., the directive “get this food,” in order to feel happy). In contrast, a categorical imperative is a directive saying what ought to be done from the perspective of pure reason alone; it is categorical because what this perspective commands is not contingent on sensible circumstances and it always carries overriding value. The general formula of the categorical imperative is to act only according to those maxims that can be consistently willed as a universal law – something said to be impossible for maxims aimed merely at material ends. In accepting this imperative, we are doubly self-determined, for we are not only determining our action freely, as Kant believes humans do in all exercises of the faculty of choice; we are also accepting a principle whose content is determined by that which is absolutely essential to us as agents, namely our pure practical reason. We thus are following our own law and so have autonomy when we accept the categorical imperative; otherwise we fall into heteronomy, or the (free) acceptance of principles whose content is determined independently of the essential nature of our own ultimate being, which is rational. Given the metaphysics of his transcendental idealism, Kant can say that the categorical imperative reveals a supersensible power of freedom in us such that we must regard ourselves as part of an intelligible world, i.e., a domain determined ultimately not by natural laws but rather by laws of reason. As such a rational being, an agent is an end in itself, i.e., something whose value is not dependent on external material ends, which are contingent and valued only as means to the end of happiness – which is itself only a conditional value (since the satisfaction of an evil will would be improper). Kant regards accepting the categorical imperative as tantamount to respecting rational nature as an end in itself, and to willing as if we were legislating a kingdom of ends. This is to will that the world become a “systematic Kant, Immanuel Kant, Immanuel 465 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 465 union of different rational beings through common laws,” i.e., laws that respect and fulfill the freedom of all rational beings. Although there is only one fundamental principle of morality, there are still different types of specific duties. One basic distinction is between strict duty and imperfect duty. Duties of justice, of respecting in action the rights of others, or the duty not to violate the dignity of persons as rational agents, are strict because they allow no exception for one’s inclination. A perfect duty is one that requires a specific action (e.g. keeping a promise), whereas an imperfect duty, such as the duty to perfect oneself or to help others, cannot be completely discharged or demanded by right by someone else, and so one has considerable latitude in deciding when and how it is to be respected. A meritorious duty involves going beyond what is strictly demanded and thereby generating an obligation in others, as when one is extraordinarily helpful to others and “merits” their gratitude.

kennyism: “His surname means ‘white,’ as in penguin, kennedy.” – Grice. Cited by Grice in his British Academy lecture – Grice was pleased that Kenny translated Vitters’s “Philosophical Grammar” – “He turned it into more of a philosophical thing than I would have thought one could!”

kepler: philosopher, born in Weil der Stadt, near Stuttgart. He studied astronomy with Michael Maestlin at the University of Tübingen, and then began the regular course of theological studies that prepared him to become a Lutheran pastor. Shortly before completing these studies he accepted the post of mathematician at Graz. “Mathematics” was still construed as including astronomy and astrology. There he published the Mysterium cosmographicum (1596), the first mjaor astronomical work to utilize the Copernican system since Copernicus’s own De revolutionibus half a century before. The Copernican shift of the sun to the center allowed Kepler to propose an explanation for the spacing of the planets (the Creator inscribed the successive planetary orbits in the five regular polyhedra) and for their motions (a sun-centered driving force diminishing with disKao Tzu Kepler, Johannes 466 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 466 tance from the sun). In this way, he could claim to have overcome the traditional prohibition against the mathematical astronomer’s claiming reality for the motion he postulates. Ability to explain had always been the mark of the philosopher. Kepler, a staunch Lutheran, was forced to leave Catholic Graz as bitter religious and political disputes engulfed much of northern Europe. He took refuge in the imperial capital, Prague, where Tycho Brahe, the greatest observational astronomer of the day, had established an observatory. Tycho asked Kepler to compose a defense of Tycho’s astronomy against a critic, Nicolaus Ursus, who had charged that it was “mere hypothesis.” The resulting Apologia (1600) remained unpublished; it contains a perceptive analysis of the nature of astronomical hypothesis. Merely saving the phenomena, Kepler argues, is in general not sufficient to separate two mathematical systems like those of Ptolemy and Copernicus. Other more properly explanatory “physical” criteria will be needed. Kepler was allowed to begin work on the orbit of Mars, using the mass of data Tycho had accumulated. But shortly afterward, Tycho died suddenly (1601). Kepler succeeded to Tycho’s post as Imperial Mathematician; more important, he was entrusted with Tycho’s precious data. Years of labor led to the publication of the Astronomia nova (1609), which announced the discovery of the elliptical orbit of Mars. One distinctive feature of Kepler’s long quest for the true shape of the orbit was his emphasis on finding a possible physical evaluation for any planetary motion he postulated before concluding that it was the true motion. Making the sun’s force magnetic allowed him to suppose that its effect on the earth would vary as the earth’s magnetic axis altered its orientation to the sun, thus perhaps explaining the varying distances and speeds of the earth in its elliptical orbit. The full title of his book makes his ambition clear: A New Astronomy Based on Causes, or A Physics of the Sky. Trouble in Prague once more forced Kepler to move. He eventually found a place in Linz (1612), where he continued his exploration of cosmic harmonies, drawing on theology and philosophy as well as on music and mathematics. The “Harmonia mundi” was his favorite among his books: “It can wait a century for a reader, as God himself has waited six thousand years for a witness.” The discovery of what later became known as his third law, relating the periodic times of any two planets as the ratio of the 3 /2 power of their mean distances, served to confirm his long-standing conviction that the universe is fashioned according to ideal harmonic relationships. In the Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae (1612), he continued his search for causes “either natural or archetypal,” not only for the planetary motions, but for such details as the size of the sun and the densities of the planets. He was more convinced than ever that a physics of the heavens had to rest upon its ability to explain (and not just to predict) the peculiarities of the planetary and lunar motions. What prevented him from moving even further than he did toward a new physics was that he had not grasped what later came to be called the principle of inertia. Thus he was compelled to postulate not only an attractive force between planet and sun but also a second force to urge the planet onward. It was Newton who showed that the second force is unnecessary, and who finally constructed the “physics of the sky” that had been Kepler’s ambition. But he could not have done it without Kepler’s notion of a quantifiable force operating between planet and sun, an unorthodox notion shaped in the first place by an imagination steeped in Neoplatonic metaphysics and the theology of the Holy Spirit.

Keynes, j. Neville – “the father of the better known Keynes, but the more interesting of the pair.” – Grice. Keynes, j. k., philosopher, author of “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” and “A Treatise on Probability,” cited by Grice for the importance of the ontological status of properties. Keynes was also active in English Oxbridge philosophical life, being well acquainted with such philosophers as G. E. Moore and F. P. Ramsey. In the philosophy of probability, Keynes pioneers the treatment of the proposition as the bearers of a probability assignment. Unlike classical subjectivists, Keynes treats probability as objective evidential relations among at least two proposition in ‘if’ connection. These relations are to be directly epistemically accessible to an intuitive ‘faculty.’ An idiosyncratic feature of Keynes’s system is that different probability assignments cannot always be compared (ordered as equal, less than, or greater than one another). Keynesianism permanently affected philosophy. Keynes’s philosophy has a number of important dimensions. While Keynes’s theorizing is in the capitalistic tradition, he rejects Sctos Smith’s notion of an invisible hand that would optimize the performance of an economy without any intentional direction by an individual or by the government. This involved rejection of the economic policy of “laissez-faire,” according to which government intervention in the economy’s operation is useless, or worse. Keynes argues that the natural force could deflect an economy from a course of optimal growth and keep it permanently out of equilibrium. Keynes proposes a number of mechanisms for adjusting its performance. Keynes advocates programs of government taxation and spending, not primarily as a means of providing public goods, but as a means of increasing prosperity. The philosopher is thereby provided with another means for justifying the existence of a strong government. One of the important ways that Keynes’s philosophy still directs much theorizing is its deep division between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Keynes argues, in effect, that micro-oeconomic analysis with its emphasis on ideal individual rationality and perfect intersubjective game-theoretical two-player competition is inadequate as a tool for understanding a macrophenomenon such as interest, and money. Keynes tries to show how human psychological foibles and market frictions require a qualitatively different kind of analysis at the macro level. Much theorizing is concerned with understanding the connections between micro- and macrophenomena and micro- and macroeconomics in an attempt to dissolve or blur the division. This issue is a philosophically important instance of a potential theoretical reduction. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Keynes’s ontology in the “Treatise on Probability,” H. P. Grice, “Credibility and Probability.”

kierkegaard: “Literally, churchyard, fancy that!” – Grice. Philosopher born to a well-to-do family, he consumed his inheritance while writing a large corpus of essays in a remarkably short time. His life was marked by an intense relationship with a devout but melancholy father, from whom he inherited his own bent to melancholy, with which he constantly struggled. A decisive event was his broken engagement from Regina Olsen, which precipitated the beginning of his authorship; his first essays are partly an attempt to explain, in a covert and symbolic way, the reasons why he felt he could not marry. Later Kierkegaard was involved in a controversy in which he was mercilessly attacked by a popular satirical periodical; this experience deepened his understanding of the significance of suffering and the necessity for an authentic individual to stand alone if necessary against “the crowd.” This caused him to abandon his plans to take a pastorate, a post for which his education had prepared him. At the end of his life, he waged a lonely, public campaign in the popular press and in a magazine he founded himself, against the Danish state church. He collapsed on the street with the final issue of this magazine, The Instant, ready for the printer, and was carried to a hospital. He died a few weeks later, affirming a strong Christian faith, but refusing to take communion from the hands of a priest of the official church. Though some writers have questioned whether Kierkegaard’s writings admit of a unified interpretation, Kierkegaard himself sees his oeuvre as serving Christianity; he saw himself as a “missionary” whose task was to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom.” However, much of this literature does not address Christianity directly, but rather concerns itself with an analysis of human existence. Kierkegaard see this as necessary, because Christianity is first and foremost a way of existing. He saw much of the confusion about Christian faith as rooted in confusion about the nature of existence. Hence to clear up the former, the latter must be carefully analyzed. The great misfortune of “Christendom” and “the present age” is that people “have forgotten what it means ‘to exist,’” and Kierkegaard sees himself as a modern Socrates sent to “remind” others of what they know but have forgotten. It is not surprising that the analyses of human existence he provides have been of great interest to many philosophers. Kierkegaard frequently uses the verb ‘to exist’ (at existere) idiosyncratically, to refer to human existence. In this sense God is said NOT to exist, even though God has eternal reality. Kierkegaard describes human existence as an unfinished process, in which “the individual” (a key concept in his thought) must take responsibility for achieving an identity as a self through a free choice. Such a choice is described as a leap, to highlight Kierkegaard’s view that intellectual reflection alone can never motivate action. A decision to end the process of reflection is necessary and such a decision must be generated by a passion. The passions that shape a person’s self are referred to by Kierkegaard as the individual’s “inwardness” or “subjectivity.” The most significant passion, love or faith, does not merely happen; they must be cultivated and formed. The process by which the individual becomes a self is described by Kierkegaard as ideally moving through three stages, termed the “stages on life’s way.” Since human development occurs by freedom and not automatically, however, the individual can become fixated in any of these stages. Thus the stages also confront each other as rival views of life, or “spheres of existence.” The three stages or spheres are the “aesthetic,” (or sensual), the ethical, and the religious. A distinctive feature of Kierkegaard’s philosophy is that these three lifeviews are represented by pseudonymous “characters” who actually “author” some of the oeuvre; this leads to interpretive difficulties, since it is not always clear what to attribute to Kierkegaard himself and what to the pseudonymous character. Fortunately, he also wrote many devotional and religious works under his own name, where this problem does not arise. The “aesthetic” life is described by Kierkegaard as lived for and in “the moment.” It is a life governed by “immediacy,” or the satisfaction of one’s immediate desire, though it is capable of a kind of development in which one learns to enjoy life reflectively. What the aesthetic person lacks is a commitment (except to sensation itself) which is the key to the ethical life, a life that attempts to achieve a unified self through commitment to ideals with enduring validity, rather than simply sensual appeal. The religious life emerges from the ethical life when the individual realizes both the transcendent character of the true ideals and also how far short of realizing those ideals the person is. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript two forms of the religious life are distinguished: a “natural” religiosity (religiousness “A”) in which the person attempts to relate to the divine and resolve the problem of guilt, relying solely on one’s natural “immanent” idea of the divine; and Christianity (religiousness “B”), in which God becomes incarnate as a human being in order to establish a relation with humans. Christianity can be accepted only through the “leap of faith.” It is a religion not of “immanence” but of “transcendence,” since it is based on a revelation. This revelation cannot be rationally demonstrated, since the incarnation is a paradox that transcends human reason. Reason can, however, when the passion of faith is present, come to understand the appropriateness of recognizing its own limits and accepting the paradoxical incarnation of God in the form of Jesus Christ. The true Christian is not merely an admirer of Jesus, but one who believes by becoming a follower. The irreducibility of the religious life to the ethical life is illustrated for Kierkegaard in the biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac to obey the command of God. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard (through his pseudonym “de Silentio”) analyzes this act of Abraham’s as involving a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Abraham’s act cannot be understood merely in ethical terms as a conflict of duties in which one rationally comprehensible duty is superseded by a higher one. Rather, Abraham seems to be willing to “suspend” the ethical as a whole in favor of a higher religious duty. Thus, if one admires Abraham as “the father of faith,” one admires a quality that cannot be reduced to simply moral virtue. Some (like J. L. Mackie) have read this as a claim that religious faith may require immoral behavior; others (like P. F. Strawson) argue that what is relativized by the teleological suspension of the ethical is not an eternally valid set of moral requirements, but rather ethical obligations as these are embedded in human social institutions. Thus, in arguing that “the ethical” is not the highest element in existence, Kierkegaard leaves open the possibility that our social institutions, and the ethical ideals that they embody, do not deserve our absolute and unqualified allegiance, an idea with important political implications. In accord with his claim that existence cannot be reduced to intellectual thought, Kierkegaard devotes much attention to emotions and passions. Anxiety is particularly important, since it reflects human freedom. Anxiety involves a “sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy”; it is the psychological state that precedes the basic human fall into sin, but it does not explain this “leap,” since no final explanation of a free choice can be given. Such negative emotions as despair and guilt are also important for Kierkegaard; they reveal the emptiness of the aesthetic and the ultimately unsatisfactory character of the ethical, driving individuals on toward the religious life. Irony and humor are also seen as important “boundary zones” for the stages of existence. The person who has discovered his or her own “eternal validity” can look ironically at the relative values that capture most people, who live their lives aesthetically. Similarly, the “existential humorist” who has seen the incongruities that necessarily pervade our ethical human projects is on the border of the religious life. Kierkegaard also analyzes the passions of faith Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 469 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 469 and love. Faith is ultimately understood as a “willing to be oneself” that is made possible by a transparent, trusting relationship to the “power that created the self.” Kierkegaard distinguishes various forms of love, stressing that Christian love must be understood as neighbor love, a love that is combined and is not rooted in any natural relationship to the self, such as friendship or kinship, but ultimately is grounded in the fact that all humans share a relationship to their creator. Kierkegaard is well known for his critique of Hegel’s absolute idealism. Hegel’s claim to have written “the system” is ridiculed for its pretensions of finality. From the Dane’s perspective, though reality may be a system for God, it cannot be so for any existing thinker, since both reality and the thinker are incomplete and system implies completeness. Hegelians are also criticized for pretending to have found a presuppositionless or absolute starting point; for Kierkegaard, philosophy begins not with doubt but with wonder. Reflection is potentially infinite; the doubt that leads to skepticism cannot be ended by thought alone but only by a resolution of the will. Kierkegaard also defends traditional Aristotelian logic and the principle of non-contradiction against the Hegelian introduction of “movement” into logic. Kierkegaard is particularly disturbed by the Hegelian tendency to see God as immanent in society; he thought it important to understand God as “wholly other,” the “absolutely different” who can never be exhaustively embodied in human achievement or institutions. To stand before God one must stand as an individual, in “fear and trembling,” conscious that this may require a break with the given social order. Kierkegaard is often characterized as the father of existentialism. There are reasons for this; he does indeed philosophize existentially, and he undoubtedly exercised a deep influence on many twentieth-century existentialists such as Sartre and Camus. But the characterization is anachronistic, since existentialism as a movement is a twentieth-century phenomenon, and the differences between Kierkegaard and those existentialists are also profound. If existentialism is defined as the denial that there is such a thing as a human essence or nature, it is unlikely that Kierkegaard is an existentialist. More recently, the Dane has also been seen as a precursor of postmodernism. His rejection of classical foundationalist epistemologies and employment of elusive literary techniques such as his pseudonyms again make such associations somewhat plausible. However, despite his rejection of the system and criticism of human claims to finality and certitude, Kierkegaard does not appear to espouse any form of relativism or have much sympathy for “anti-realism.” He has the kind of passion for clarity and delight in making sharp distinctions that are usually associated with contemporary “analytic” philosophy. In the end he must be seen as his own person, a unique Christian presence with sensibilities that are in many ways Greek and premodern rather than postmodern. He has been joyfully embraced and fervently criticized by thinkers of all stripes. He remains “the individual” he wrote about, and to whom he dedicated many of his works.

kilvington: Oriel, Oxford. Yorks. Grice, “The English Place Name Society told me.” “I tried to teach Sophismata at Oxford, but my tutees complained that Chillington’s Latin chilled them!” – Grice. English philosopher. He was a scholar associated with the household of Richard de Bury and an early member of “The Oxford Calculators,” as Grice calls them, important in the early development of physics. Kilvington’s “Sophismata” is the only work of his studied extensively to date. It is an investigation of puzzles regarding ceasing, doubting, the liar, change, velocity and acceleration, motive power, beginning and ceasing, the continuum, infinity, knowing and doubting, and the liar and related paradoxes. Kilvington’s “Sophismata” is peculiar insofar as all these are treated in a conceptual way, in contrast to the more artificial “calculations” used by Bradwardine, Heytesbury, and other Oxford Calculators to handle this or that problem. Kilvington also wrote a commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and questions on Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption, Physics, and Nicomachean Ethics. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Chillington chills: “Sophismata” – on beginning and ceasing and knowing and doubting – implicatura.”

kilwardby of rufina: English philosopher, he taught at Paris, joins the Dominicans and teaches at Oxford. He becomes archbishop of Canterbury and condemns thirty propositions, among them Aquinas’s position that there is a single substantial form in a human being. Kilwardby resigns his archbishopric and is appointed to the bishopric of Santa Rufina, Italy, where he dies. Kilwardby writes extensively and had considerable medieval influence, especially in philosophy of language; but it is now unusually difficult to determine which works are authentically his. “De Ortu Scientiarum advances a sophisticated account of how a name is imposed and a detailed account of the nature and role of conceptual analysis. In metaphysics Kilwardby of Rufina insisted that things are individual and that universality arises from operations of the soul. He writes extensively on happiness and was concerned to show that some happiness is possible in this life. In psychology he argued that freedom of decision is a disposition arising from the cooperation of the intellect and the will.

cognitum: KK-thesis: the thesis that knowing entails knowing that one knows, symbolized in propositional epistemic logic as Kp > KKp, where ‘K’ stands for knowing. According to the KK-thesis, proposed by Grice in “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre,” the (propositional) logic of knowledge resembles the modal system S4. The KK-thesis was introduced into epistemological discussion by Hintikka in Knowledge and Belief. He calls the KKthesis a “virtual implication,” a conditional whose negation is “indefensible.” A tacit or an explicit acceptance of the thesis has been part of many philosophers’ views about knowledge since Plato and Aristotle. If the thesis is formalized as Kap P KaKap, where ‘Ka’ is read as ‘a knows that’, it holds only if the person a knows that he is referred to by ‘a’; this qualification is automatically satisfied for the first-person case. The validity of the thesis seems sensitive to variations in the sense of ‘know’; it has sometimes been thought to characterize a strong concept of knowledge, e.g., knowledge based on (factually) conclusive reasons, or active as opposed to implicit knowledge. If knowledge is regarded as true belief based on conclusive evidence, the KKthesis entails that a person knows that p only if his evidence for p is also sufficient to justify the claim that he knows that p; the epistemic claim should not require additional evidence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre,” in “The Conception of Value.”

Shaftesbury: “One of my favourite rationalist philosophers” – Grice.

Kleist: philosopher whose oeuvre is based on the antinomy of reason and sentiment, one as impotent as the other, and reflects the Aufklärung crisis at the turn of the century. He resigned from the Prussian army. Following a reading of Kant, he lost faith in a “life’s plan” as inspired by Leibniz’s, Wolff’s, and Shaftesbury’s rationalism. Kleist looks for salvation in Rousseau but concluded that sentiment revealed itself just as untrustworthy as reason as soon as man left the state of original grace (“or grice, his spelling is doubtful” – Grice) and realized himself to be neither a puppet nor a god (see Essay on the Puppet Theater, 1810). The Schroffenstein Family repeats the Shakespearian theme of two young people who love each other but belong to warring families. One already finds in it the major elements of Kleist’s universe: the incapacity of the individual to master his fate, the theme of the tragic error, and the importance of the juridical. In 1803, Kleist returned to philosophy and literature and realized in Amphitryon (1806) the impossibility of the individual knowing himself and the world and acting deliberately in it. The divine order that is the norm of tragic art collapses, and with it, the principle of identity. Kleistian characters, “modern” individuals, illustrate this normative chaos. The Broken Jug (a comedy) shows Kleist’s interest in law. In his two parallel plays, Penthesilea and The Young Catherine of Heilbronn, Kleist presents an alternative: either “the marvelous order of the world” and the theodicy that carries Catherine’s fate, or the sublime and apocryphal mission of the Christlike individual who must redeem the corrupt order. Before his suicide, Kleist looked toward the renaissance of the German nation for a historical way out of this metaphysical conflict.

knowledge by acquaintance: knowledge of objects by means of direct awareness of them. The notion of knowledge by acquaintance is primarily associated with Russell (The Problems of Philosophy). Russell first distinguishes knowledge of truths from knowledge of things. He then distinguishes two kinds of knowledge of things: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Ordinary speech suggests that we are acquainted with the people and the physical objects in our immediate environments. On Russell’s view, however, our contact with these things is indirect, being mediated by our mental representations of them. He holds that the only things we know by acquaintance are the content of our minds, abstract universals, and, perhaps, ourselves. Russell says that knowledge by description is indirect knowledge of objects, our knowledge being mediated by other objects and truths. He suggests that we know external objects, such as tables and other people, only by description (e.g., the cause of my present experience). Russell’s discussion of this topic is quite puzzling. The considerations that lead him to say that we lack acquaintance with external objects also lead him to say that, strictly speaking, we lack knowledge of such things. This seems to amount to the claim that what he has called “knowledge by description” is not, strictly speaking, a kind of knowledge at all. Russell also holds that every proposition that a person understands must be composed entirely of elements with which the person is acquainted. This leads him to propose analyses of familiar propositions in terms of mental objects with which we are acquainted.

de re/de sensu:, knowledge de re, with respect to some object, that it has a particular property, or knowledge, of a group of objects, that they stand in some relation. Knowledge de re is typically contrasted with knowledge de dicto, which is knowledge of facts or propositions. If persons A and B know that a winner has been declared in an election, but only B knows which candidate has won, then both have de dicto knowledge that someone has won, but only B has de re knowledge about some candidate that she is the winner. Person B can knowingly attribute the property of being the winner to one of the candidates. It is generally held that to have de re knowledge about an object one must at least be in some sense familiar with or causally connected to the object. A related concept is knowledge de se. This is self-knowledge, of the sort expressed by ‘I am —— ’. Knowledge de se is not simply de re knowledge about oneself. A person might see a group of people in a mirror and notice that one of the people has a red spot on his nose. He then has de dicto knowledge that someone in the group has a red spot on his nose. On most accounts, he also has de re knowledge with respect to that individual that he has a spot. But if he has failed to recognize that he himself is the one with the spot, then he lacks de se knowledge. He doesn’t know (or believe) what he would express by saying “I have a red spot.” So, according to this view, knowledge de se is not merely knowledge de re about oneself.

köhler: philosophical psychologist who, with Wertheimer and Koffka, founded Gestalt psychologie. Köhler makestwo distinctive contributions to Gestalt doctrine, one empirical, one theoretical. The empirical contribution was his study of animal thinking, performed on Tenerife (The Mentality of Apes). The then dominant theory of problem solving was E. L. Thorndike’s associationist trial-and-error learning theory, maintaining that animals attack problems by trying out a series of behaviors, one of which is gradually “stamped in” by success. Köhler argues that trial-and-error behavior occurred only when, as in Thorndike’s experiments, part of the problem situation was hidden. He arranged more open puzzles, such as getting bananas hanging from a ceiling, requiring the ape to get a (visible) box to stand on. His apes showed insight – suddenly arriving at the correct solution. Although he demonstrated the existence of insight, its nature remains elusive, and trial-and-error learning remains the focus of research. Köhler’s theoretical contribution was the concept of isomorphism, Gestalt psychology’s theory of psychological representation. He held an identity theory of mind and body, and isomorphism claims that a topological mapping exists between the behavioral field in which an organism is acting (cf. Lewin) and fields of electrical currents in the brain (not the “mind”). Such currents have not been discovered. Important works by Köhler include Gestalt Psychology, The Place of Value in a World of Facts, Dynamics in Psychology, and Selected Papers (ed. M. Henle).

Kotarbigski: philosopher, cofounder, with Lukasiewicz and Lesniewski, of the Warsaw Centre of Logical Research. His broad philosophical interests and humanistic concerns, probity, scholarship, and clarity in argument, consequent persuasiveness, and steadfast championship of human rights made him heir to their common mentor Kasimir Twardowski, father of modern Polish philosophy. In philosophical, historical, and methodological works like his influential Elements of Theory of Knowledge, Formal Logic, and Scientific Methodology (1929; mistitled Gnosiology in English translation), he popularized the more technical contributions of his colleagues, and carried on Twardowski’s objectivist and “anti-irrationalist” critical tradition, insisting on accuracy and clarity, holding that philosophy has no distinctive method beyond the logical and analytical methods of the empirical and deductive sciences. As a free-thinking liberal humanist socialist, resolved to be “a true compass, not a weathervane,” he defended autonomous ethics against authoritarianism, left or right. His lifelong concern with community and social practice led him to develop praxiology as a theory of efficacious action. Following Lesniewsi’s “refutation” of Twardowski’s Platonism, Kotarbigski insisted on translating abstractions into more concrete terms. The principal tenets of his “reist, radical realist, and imitationist” rejection of Platonism, phenomenalism, and introspectionism are (1) pansomatism or ontological reism as modernized monistic materialism: whatever is anything at all (even a soul) is a body – i.e., a concrete individual object, resistant and spatiotemporally extended, enduring at least a while; (2) consequent radical realism: no object is a “property,” “relation,” “event,” “fact,” or “abstract entity” of any other kind, nor “sense-datum,” “phenomenon,” or essentially “private mental act” or “fact” accessible only to “introspection”; (3) concretism or semantic reism and imitationism as a concomitant “nominalist” program – thus, abstract terms that, hypostatized, might appear to name “abstract entities” are pseudo-names or onomatoids to be eliminated by philosophical analysis and elucidatory paraphrase. Hypostatizations that might appear to imply existence of such Platonic universals are translatable into equivalent generalizations characterizing only bodies. Psychological propositions are likewise reducible, ultimately to the basic form: Individual So-and-so experiences thus; Such-and-such is so. Only as thus reduced can such potentially misleading expressions be rightly understood and judged true or false.

krause: philosopher representative of a tendency to develop Kant’s views in the direction of pantheism and mysticism. Educated at Jena, he came under the influence of Fichte and Schelling. Taking his philosophical starting point as Fichte’s analysis of self-consciousness, and adopting as his project a “spiritualized” systematic elaboration of the philosophy of Spinoza (somewhat like the young Schelling), he arrived at a position that he called panentheism. According to this, although nature and human consciousness are part of God or Absolute Being, the Absolute is neither exhausted in nor identical with them. To some extent, he anticipated Hegel in invoking an “end of history” in which the finite realm of human affairs would reunite with the infinite essence in a universal moral and “spiritual” order.

Kripke: philosopher cited by H. P. Grice, he formulated a semantics for modal logic (the logic of necessity and possibility) based on Leibniz’s notion of a possible world, and, using the apparatus, proved completeness for a variety of systems. Possible world semantics (due in part also to Carnap and others) has proved to be pretty fruitful.. Kripke’s Princeton lectures, Naming and Necessity are a watershed. The work primarily concerns proper names of individuals (e.g., ‘H. P. Grice is called ‘H. P. Grice’’) and, by extension, terms for natural kinds (‘Oxonian’) and similar expressions. Kripke uses his thesis that any such term is a “rigid designator,”– i.e., designates the same thing with respect to every possible world in which that thing exists (and does not designate anything else with respect to worlds in which it does not exist) – to argue, contrary to the received Fregeian view, that the designation of a proper name is not semantically secured by means of a description that gives the sense of the name. On the contrary, the description associated with a particular use of a name will frequently designate something else entirely. Kripke derives putative examples of necessary a posteriori truths, as well as contingent a priori truths. In addition, he defends essentialism – the doctrine that some properties of things are properties that those things could not fail to have (except by not existing) – and uses it, together with his account of natural-kind terms, to argue against the identification of mental entities with their physical manifestations (e.g., sensations with specific neural events). In a sequel, “A Puzzle about Belief,” Kripke addresses the problem of substitution failure in sentential contexts attributing belief or other propositional attitudes. Kripke’s interpretation of the later Wittgenstein as a semantic skeptic has also had a profound impact (Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language). His semantic theory of truth (“Outline of a Theory of Truth”) has sparked renewed interest in the liar paradox (‘This statement is false’) and related paradoxes, and in the development of non-classical languages containing their own truth predicates as possible models for ordinary language. He is also known for his work in intuitionism and on his theory of transfinite recursion on admissible ordinals. Kripke, McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, frequently lectures on numerous further significant results in philosophy. A Kripke semantics, a type of formal semantics for languages with operators A and B for necessity and possibility (‘possible worlds semantics’ and ‘relational semantics’ are sometimes used for the same notion); also, a similar semantics for intuitionistic logic. In a basic version a framefor a sentential language with A and B is a pair (W, R) where W is a non-empty set (the “possible worlds”) and R is a binary relation on W – the relation of “relative possibility” or “accessibility.” A model on the frame (W, R) is a triple (W, R, V), where V is a function (the “valuation function”) that assigns truth-values to sentence letters at worlds. If w 1 W then a sentence AA is true at world w in the model (W, R, V) if A is true at all worlds v 1 W for which wRv. Informally, AA is true at world w if A is true at all the worlds that would be possible if w were actual. This is a generalization of the doctrine commonly attributed to Leibniz that necessity is truth in all possible worlds. A is valid in the model (W, R, V) if it is true at all worlds w 1 W in that model. It is valid in the frame (W, R) if it is valid in all models on that frame. It is valid if it is valid in all frames. In predicate logic versions, a frame may include another component D, that assigns a non-empty set Dw of objects (the existents at w) to each possible world w. Terms and quantifiers may be treated either as objectual (denoting and ranging over individuals) or conceptual (denoting and ranging over functions from possible worlds to individuals) and either as actualist or possibilist(denoting and ranging over either existents or possible existents). On some of these treatments there may arise further choices about whether and how truth-values should be assigned to sentences that assert relations among non-existents. The development of Kripke semantics marks a watershed in the modern study of modal systems. A number of axiomatizations for necessity and possibility were proposed and investigated. Carnap showed that for the simplest of these systems, C. I. Lewis’s S5, AA can be interpreted as saying that A is true in all “state descriptions.” Answering even the most basic questions about the other systems, however, required effort and ingenuity. Stig Kanger, Richard Montague, Kripke, and Hintikka each formulated interpretations for such systems that generalized Carnap’s semantics by using something like the accessibility relation described above. Kripke’s semantics was more natural than the others in that accessibility was taken to be a relation among mathematically primitive “possible worlds,” and, in a series of papers, Kripke demonstrated that versions of it provide characteristic interpretations for a number of modal systems. For these reasons Kripke’s formulation has become standard. Relational semantics provided simple solutions to some older problems about the distinctness and relative strength of the various systems. It also opened new areas of investigation, facilitating general results (establishing decidability and other properties for infinite classes of modal systems), incompleteness results (exhibiting systems not determined by any class of frames), and correspondence results (showing that the frames verifying certain modal formulas were exactly the frames meeting certain conditions on R). It suggested parallel interpretations for notions whose patterns of inference were known to be similar to that of necessity and possibility, including obligation and permission, epistemic necessity and possibility, provability and consistency, and, more recently, the notion of a computation’s inevitably or possibly terminating in a particular state. It inspired similar semantics for nonclassical conditionals and the more general neighborhood or functional variety of possible worlds semantics. The philosophical utility of Kripke semantics is more difficult to assess. Since the accessibility relation is often explained in terms of the modal operators, it is difficult to maintain that the semantics provides an explicit analysis of the modalities it interprets. Furthermore, questions about which version of the semantics is correct (particularly for quantified modal systems) are themselves tied to substantive questions about the nature of things and worlds. The semantics does impose important constraints on the meaning of modalities, and it provides a means for many philosophical questions to be posed more clearly and starkly.

Kristeva: The centerpiece of Kristeva’s semiotic theory has two correlative moments: a focus on the speaking subject as embodying unconscious motivations (and not simply the conscious intentionality of a Husserlian transcendental ego) and an articulation of the signifying phenomenon as a dynamic, productive process (not a static sign-system). Kristeva’s most systematic philosophical work, La Révolution du langage poétique brings her semiotics to mature expression through an effective integration of psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), elements of linguistic models (from Roman Jakobson to Chomskyan generative grammar) and semiology (from Saussure to Peirce and Louis Hjelmslev), and a literary approach to text (influenced by Bakhtin). Together the symbolic and the semiotic, two dialectical and irreconcilable modalities of meaning, constitute the signifying process. The symbolic designates the systematic rules governing denotative and propositional speech, while the semiotic isolates an archaic layer of meaning that is neither representational nor based on relations among signs. The concept of the chora combines the semiotic, translinguistic layer of meaning (genotext) with a psychoanalytic, drive-based model of unconscious sound production, dream logic, and fantasy life that defy full symbolic articulation. Drawing on Plato’s non-unified notion of the maternal receptacle (Timaeus), the chora constitutes the space where subjectivity is generated. Drives become “ordered” in rhythmic patterns during the pre-Oedipal phase before the infant achieves reflexive capacity, develops spatial intuition and time consciousness, and posits itself as an enunciating subject. Ordered, but not according to symbolic laws, semiotic functions arise when the infant forms associations between its vocal gesticulations and sensorimotor development, and patterns these associations after the mother’s corporeal modulations. The semiotic chora, while partly repressed in identity formation, links the subject’s preverbal yet functional affective life to signification. All literary forms – epic narrative, metalanguage, contemplation or theoria and text-practice – combine two different registers of meaning, phenotext and genotext. Yet they do so in different ways and none encompasses both registers in totality. The phenotext refers to language in its function “to communicate” and can be analyzed in terms of syntax and semantics. Though not itself linguistic, the genotext reveals itself in the way that “phonematic” and “melodic devices” and “syntactic and logical” features establish “semantic” fields. The genotext isolates the specific mode in which a text sublimates drives; it denotes the “process” by which a literary form generates a particular type of subjectivity. Poetic language is unique in that it largely reveals the genotext. This linkage between semiotic processes, genotext, and poetic language fulfills the early linguistic project (1967–73) and engenders a novel post-Hegelian social theory. Synthesizing semiotics and the destructive death drive’s attack against stasis artfully restores permanence to Hegelian negativity. Poetic mimesis, because it transgresses grammatical rules while sustaining signification, reactivates the irreducible negativity and heterogeneity of drive processes. So effectuating anamnesis, poetry reveals the subject’s constitution within language and, by holding open rather than normalizing its repressed desire, promotes critical analysis of symbolic and institutionalized values. Later works like Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980), Etrangers à nous-mêmes (1989), Histoires d’amour, and Les Nouvelles maladies de l’âme shift away from collective political agency to a localized, culturally therapeutic focus. Examining xenophobic social formations, abjection and societal violence, romantic love, grief, women’s melancholic poison in patriarchy, and a crisis of moral values in the postmetaphysical age, they harbor forceful implications for ethics and social theory.

Kropotkin: philosopher, best remembered for his anarchism and his defense of mutual aid as a factor of evolution. Traveling extensively in Siberia on scientific expeditions (1862–67), he was stimulated by Darwin’s newly published theory of evolution and sought, in the Siberian landscape, confirmation of Darwin’s Malthusian principle of the struggle for survival. Instead Kropotkin found that underpopulation was the rule, that climate was the main obstacle to survival, and that mutual aid was a far more common phenomenon than Darwin recognized. He soon generalized these findings to social theory, opposing social Darwinism, and also began to espouse anarchist theory.

Kuhn: Grice: “I would hardly look for inspiration in ‘philosophical minor revolutions’ in Kuhn, who wasn’t really a philosopher – MA physics, PhD philosophy of science” -- philosopher, studied at Harvard, where he received degrees in physics and a doctorate in the history of science. He then taught history of science or philosophy of science at Harvard (1951–56), Berkeley (1956–64), Princeton (1964–79), and M.I.T. (1979–91). Kuhn traced his shift from physics to the history and philosophy of science to a moment in 1947 when he was Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich Kuhn, Thomas S(amuel) 478 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 478 asked to teach some science to humanities majors. Searching for a case study to illuminate the development of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle’s Physics and was astonished at how “simply wrong” it was. After a while, Kuhn came to “think like an Aristotelian physicist” and to realize that Aristotle’s basic concepts were totally unlike Newton’s, and that, understood on its own terms, Aristotle’s Physics was not bad Newtonian mechanics. This new perspective resulted in The Copernican Revolution (1957), a study of the transformation of the Aristotelian geocentric image of the world to the modern heliocentric one. Pondering the structure of these changes, Kuhn produced his immensely influential second book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He argued that scientific thought is defined by “paradigms,” variously describing these as disciplinary matrixes or exemplars, i.e., conceptual world-views consisting of beliefs, values, and techniques shared by members of a given community, or an element in that constellation: concrete achievements used as models for research. According to Kuhn, scientists accept a prevailing paradigm in “normal science” and attempt to articulate it by refining its theories and laws, solving various puzzles, and establishing more accurate measurements of constants. Eventually, however, their efforts may generate anomalies; these emerge only with difficulty, against a background of expectations provided by the paradigm. The accumulation of anomalies triggers a crisis that is sometimes resolved by a revolution that replaces the old paradigm with a new one. One need only look to the displacement of Aristotelian physics and geocentric astronomy by Newtonian mechanics and heliocentrism for instances of such paradigm shifts. In this way, Kuhn challenged the traditional conception of scientific progress as gradual, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. He elaborated upon these themes and extended his historical inquiries in his later works, The Essential Tension (1977) and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978). H. P. Grice, “A minor revolution in philosophy.”

Labriola: born in Genova, Liguria, Italia, philosopher who studied Hegel and corresponded with Engels for years (Lettere a Engels, 1949). Labriola’s essays on Marxism appeared first in French in the collection Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire. Another influential work, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia collects ten letters to Georges Sorel on Marxism. Labriola did not intend to develop an original Marxist theory but only to give an accurate exposition of Marx’s thought. He believed that socialism would inevitably ensue from the inner contradictions of capitalist society and defended Marx’s views as objective scientific truths. He criticized revisionism and defended the need to maintain the orthodoxy of Marxist thought. His views and works were publicized by two of his students, Sorel in France and Croce in Italy. Gramsci brought new attention to Labriola as an example of pure and independent Marxism.

labours: the twelve labours of Grice. They are twelve. The first is Extensionalism. The second is Nominalism. The third is Positivism. The fourth is Naturalism. The fifth is Mechanism. The sixth is Phenomenalism. The seventh is Reductionism. The eighth is physicalism. The ninth is materialism. The tenth is Empiricism. The eleventh is Scepticism, and the twelfth is functionalism. “As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positivism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physicalism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey.”“The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.” “There are many persons, for example, who view Naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting Nominalism.”“And it is not easy to see how anyone could couple support for Phenomenalism with support for Physicalism.”“After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age, I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.“But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?” “The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelve-fold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies.” “To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which seeks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertised philosophical commodity, such as abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth.”“In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character; in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.”“In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of ‘desert landscapes.’”“But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate.”“We are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape.”“We are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer.”“To change the image somewhat, what bothers me about whatI am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.”“I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these betes noires seem to possess.”“Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission.”“They limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.”“They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation.”“Some prima-facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away.”“And they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs.”“My own instincts operate in a reverse direction from this.”“I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.”“I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.”“This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic.”“But all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack.”“I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism.’”“The best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which I should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject.”“My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that 'Because it is red' is no more informative as an answer to the question 'Why is a pillar-box called ‘red’?' than would be 'Because he is Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called "Grice"?', and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory.”“The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, butdistinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs.”“As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system.”“Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject.”“On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist view-point, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set.”“But if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be.”“This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.”“I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks.” H. P. Grice, “Grice’s seven labours.”

Lacan: he developed and transformed Freudian theory and practice on the basis of the structuralist semiotics originated by Saussure. According to Lacan, the unconscious is not a congeries of biological instincts and drives, but rather a system of signifiers. Lacan construes, e.g., the fundamental Freudian processes of condensation and displacement as instances of metaphor and metonymy. Lacan proposea a Freudianism in which any traces of the substantial Cartesian self are replaced by a system of this or that symbolic function. Contrary to standard views, the ego is an imaginary projection, not our access to the real (which, for Lacan, is the unattainable and inexpressible limit of language). In accord with his theoretical position, Lacan develops a new form of psychoanalytic practice that tries to avoid rather than achieve the “transference” whereby the analysand identifies with the ego of the analyst. Lacan’s writings (e.g., Écrits and the numerous volumes of his Séminaires) are of legendary difficulty, offering idiosyncratic networks of allusion, word play, and paradox, which Grice finds rich and stimulating and Strawson irresponsibly obscure. Beyond psychoanalysis, Lacan has been particularly influential on literary theorists and on poststructuralist philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze.

Laffitte: positivist philosopher, a disciple of Comte and founder of the Revue Occidentale. Laffitte spread positivism by adopting Comte’s format of “popular” courses. He faithfully acknowledged Comte’s objective method and religion of humanity. Laffitte wrote Great Types of Humanity. In Positive Ethics, he distinguishes between theoretical and practical ethics. His Lectures on First Philosophy sets forth a metaphysics, or a body of general and abstract laws, that attempts to complete positivism, to resolve the conflict between the subjective and the objective, and to avert materialism.

La Forge: philosopher, a member of the Cartesian school. La Forge seems to have become passionately interested in Descartes’s philosophy and grew to become one of its most visible and energetic advocates. La Forge (together with Gérard van Gutschoven) illustrated an edition of Descartes’s L’homme and provided an extensive commentary; both illustrations and commentary were often reprinted with the text. His main work, though, is the Traité de l’esprit de l’homme: though not a commentary on Descartes, it is “in accordance with the principles of René Descartes,” according to its subtitle. It attempts to continue Descartes’s program in L’homme, left incomplete at his death, by discussing the mind and its union with the body. In many ways La Forge’s work is quite orthodox; he carefully follows Descartes’s opinions on the nature of body, the nature of soul, etc., as they appear in the extant writings to which he had access. But with others in the Cartesian school, La Forge’s work contributed to the establishment of the doctrine of occasionalism as Cartesian orthodoxy, a doctrine not explicitly found in Descartes’s writings.

Future and general duty: I think it is clear that whatever I imply, suggest, mean, etc., is distinct from what I explicitly convey. I wish to introduce, as terms of art, one verb "implicate" and two related nouns, "implicature" (cf. "implying") and "implicatum" (cf. "what is implied").  The point of my maneuvre is to free you from having to choose (a) between this or that member of the family of verbs (imply, etc.) for which the verb "implicate" is to do general duty. (b) between this or that member of the family of nouns (the implying, etc.) for which the noun "implicature" is to do general duty.(c) between this or that member of the the family of nouns or nominal consstructions ('what is implied,' etc.) for which 'implicatum' is to do general duty. I will add: implicaturum – implicatura. "Implicaturum" (sing.) becomes, of course, "implicatura." So, strictly, while the verb to use do do general duty is 'implicate,' the NOUN is 'implicaturum' (plural: implicatura). I think it is clear that whatever I imply or keep implicit (suggest, mean, etc.)is distinct from what I explicitly convey, or make explicit. I wish to introduce, as a term of art the Latinate verb 'implicate,' from the Latin 'implicare' -- with its derivative, 'implicaturum.' The point of my maneuvre is for my tutee's delight: he won't have to choose between this or that member of the family of verbs ('suggest,' 'mean') for which the Latinate verb 'implicate' (from 'implicaare' with its derivative form, 'implicaturum,') is to do general duty. If we compare it with ‘amare’: Grice: “As Cicero knows, there is a world of difference between ‘amatum’ and ‘amaturum’ – so with ‘implicatum’ and ‘implicaturum’!” – IMPLICATURUM: about to imply, about to be under obligation to imply, about to be obliged to imply. Refs. H. P. Grice, “Implicaturum.”

lambda implicaturum -- Church: a., philosopher, known in pure logic for his discovery and application of the Church lambda operator, one of the central ideas of the Church lambda calculus, and for his rigorous formalizations of the theory of types, a higher-order underlying logic originally formulated in a flawed form by Whitehead and Russell. The lambda operator enables direct, unambiguous, symbolic representation of a range of philosophically and mathematically important expressions previously representable only ambiguously or after elaborate paraphrasing. In philosophy, Church advocated rigorous analytic methods based on symbolic logic. His philosophy was characterized by his own version of logicism, the view that mathematics is reducible to logic, and by his unhesitating acceptance of higherorder logics. Higher-order logics, including second-order, are ontologically rich systems that involve quantification of higher-order variables, variables that range over properties, relations, and so on. Higher-order logics were routinely used in foundational work by Frege, Peano, Hilbert, Gödel, Tarski, and others until around World War II, when they suddenly lost favor. In regard to both his logicism and his acceptance of higher-order logics, Church countered trends, increasingly dominant in the third quarter of the twentieth century, against reduction of mathematics to logic and against the so-called “ontological excesses” of higher-order logic. In the 0s, although admired for his high standards of rigor and for his achievements, Church was regarded as conservative or perhaps even reactionary. Opinions have softened in recent years. On the computational and epistemological sides of logic Church made two major contributions. He was the first to articulate the now widely accepted principle known as Church’s thesis, that every effectively calculable arithmetic function is recursive. At first highly controversial, this principle connects intuitive, epistemic, extrinsic, and operational aspects of arithmetic with its formal, ontic, intrinsic, and abstract aspects. Church’s thesis sets a purely arithmetic outer limit on what is computationally achievable. Church’s further work on Hilbert’s “decision problem” led to the discovery and proof of Church’s theorem  basically that there is no computational procedure for determining, of a finite-premised first-order argument, whether it is valid or invalid. This result contrasts sharply with the previously known result that the computational truth-table method suffices to determine the validity of a finite-premised truthfunctional argument. Church’s thesis at once highlights the vast difference between propositional logic and first-order logic and sets an outer limit on what is achievable by “automated reasoning.” Church’s mathematical and philosophical writings are influenced by Frege, especially by Frege’s semantic distinction between sense and reference, his emphasis on purely syntactical treatment of proof, and his doctrine that sentences denote are names of their truth-values. lambda-calculus, also l-calculus, a theory of mathematical functions that is (a) “logic-free,” i.e. contains no logical constants (formula-connectives or quantifier-expressions), and (b) equational, i.e. ‘%’ is its sole predicate (though its metatheory refers to relations of reducibility between terms). There are two species, untyped and typed, each with various subspecies. Termhood is always inductively defined (as is being a type-expression, if the calculus is typed). A definition of being a term will contain at least these clauses: take infinitely many variables (of each type if the calculus is typed) to be terms; for any terms t and s (of appropriate type if the calculus is typed), (ts) is a term (of type determined by that of t and s if the calculus is typed); for any term t and a variable u (perhaps meeting certain conditions), (lut) is a term (“of” type determined by that of t and u if the calculus is typed). (ts) is an application-term; (lut) is a l-term, the labstraction of t, and its l-prefix binds all free occurrences of u in t. Relative to any assignment a of values (of appropriate type if the calculus is typed) to its free variables, each term denotes a unique entity. Given a term (ts), t denotes a function and (ts) denotes the output of that function when it is applied to the denotatum of s, all relative to a. (lut) denotes relative to a that function which when applied to any entity x (of appropriate type if the calculus is typed) outputs the denotatum of t relative to the variant of a obtained by assigning u to the given x. Alonzo Church introduced the untyped l-calculus around 1932 as the basis for a foundation for mathematics that took all mathematical objects to be functions. It characterizes a universe of functions, each with that universe as its domain and each yielding values in that universe. It turned out to be almost a notational variant of combinatory logic, first presented by Moses Schonfinkel (1920, written up and published by Behmann in 1924). Church presented the simplest typed l calculus in 1940. Such a calculus characterizes a domain of objects and functions, each “of” a unique type, so that the type of any given function determines two further types, one being the type of all and only those entities in the domain of that function, the other being the type of all those entities output by that function. In 1972 Jean-Yves Girard presented the first second-order (or polymorphic) typed l-calculus. It uses additional type-expressions themselves constructed by second-order l-abstraction, and also more complicated terms constructed by labstracting with respect to certain type-variables, and by applying such terms to type-expressions. The study of l-calculi has deepened our understanding of constructivity in mathematics. They are of interest in proof theory, in category theory, and in computer science.

Lambert: German natural philosopher, logician, mathematician, and astronomer. Born in Mulhouse (Alsace), he was an autodidact who became a prominent member of the Munich Academy (1759) and the Berlin Academy (1764). He made significant discoveries in physics and mathematics. His most important philosophical works were Neues Organon, or Thoughts on the Investigation and Induction of Truth and the Distinction Between Error and Appearances,” 1764) and Anlage zur Architectonic, or Theory of the Simple and Primary Elements in Philosophical and Mathematical Knowledge.” Lambert attempted to revise metaphysics. Arguing against both German rationalism and British empiricism, he opted for a form of phenomenalism similar to that of Kant and Tetens. Like his two contemporaries, he believed that the mind contains a number of basic concepts and principles that make knowledge possible. The philosopher’s task is twofold: first, these fundamental concepts and principles have to be analyzed; second, the truths of science have to be derived from them. In his own attempt at accomplishing this, Lambert tended more toward Leibniz than Locke.

mettrie, Julien Offroy de la: philosopher who was his generation’s most notorious materialist, atheist, and hedonist. Raised in Brittany, he was trained at Leiden by Hermann Boerhaave, an iatromechanist, whose works he translated into French. As a Lockean sensationalist who read Gassendi and followed the Swiss physiologist Haller, La Mettrie took nature to be life’s dynamic and ultimate principle. He published Natural History of the Soul, which attacked Cartesian dualism and dispensed with God. Drawing from Descartes’s animal-machine, his masterpiece, Man the Machine(1747), argued that the organization of matter alone explains man’s physical and intellectual faculties. Assimilating psychology to mechanistic physiology, La Mettrie integrates man into nature and proposed a materialistic monism. An Epicurean and a libertine, he denies any religious or rational morality in Anti-Seneca and instead accommodated human behavior to natural laws. Anticipating Sade’s nihilism, his Art of Enjoying Pleasures and Metaphysical Venus eulogized physical passions. Helvétius, d’Holbach, Marx, Plekhanov, and Lenin all acknowledged a debt to his belief that “to write as a philosopher is to teach materialism.”

Lange, philosopher, born at Wald near Solingen, he became a university instructor at Bonn, professor of inductive logic at Zürich in 1870, and professor at Marburg in 1873, establishing neo-Kantian studies there. He published three books in 1865: Die Arbeiterfrage (The Problem of the Worker), Die Grundlegung der mathematischen Psychologie (The Foundation of Mathematical Psychology), and J. S. Mills Ansichten über die sociale Frage und die angebliche Umwälzung der Socialwissenschaftlichen durch Carey (J. S. Mill’s Views of the Social Question and Carey’s Supposed Social-Scientific Revolution). Lange’s most important work, however, Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism), was published in 1866. An expanded second edition in two volumes appeared in 1873–75 and in three later editions. The History of Materialism is a rich, detailed study not only of the development of materialism but of then-recent work in physical theory, biological theory, and political economy; it includes a commentary on Kant’s analysis of knowledge. Lange adopts a restricted positivistic approach to scientific interpretations of man and the natural world and a conventionalism in regard to scientific theory, and also encourages the projection of aesthetic interpretations of “the All” from “the standpoint of the ideal.” Rejecting reductive materialism, Lange argues that a strict analysis of materialism leads to ineliminable idealist theoretical issues, and he adopts a form of materio-idealism. In his Geschichte are anticipations of instrumental fictionalism, pragmatism, conventionalism, and psychological egoism. Following the skepticism of the scientists he discusses, Lange adopts an agnosticism about the ultimate constituents of actuality and a radical phenomenalism. His major work was much admired by Russell and significantly influenced the thought of Nietzsche. History of Materialism predicted coming sociopolitical “earthquakes” because of the rise of science, the decline of religion, and the increasing tensions of “the social problem.” Die Arbeiterfrage explores the impact of industrialization and technology on the “social problem” and predicts a coming social “struggle for survival” in terms already recognizable as Social Darwinism. Both theoretically and practically, Lange was a champion of workers and favored a form of democratic socialism. His study of J. S. Mill and the economist Henry Carey was a valuable contribution to social science and political economic theory.

Peyrère, Isaac La: a Calvinist of probable Marrano extraction and a Catholic convert whose messianic and anthropological work (Men Before Adam, 1656) scandalized Jews, Catholics, and Protestants alike. Anticipating both ecumenism and Zionism, The Recall of the Jews (1643) claims that, together, converted Jews and Christians will usher in universal redemption. A threefold “salvation history” undergirds La Peyrère’s “Marrano theology”: (1) election of the Jews; (2) their rejection and the election of the Christians; (3) the recall of the Jews.

laplace: he produced the definitive formulation of the classical theory of probability. He taught at various schools in Paris, including the École Militaire; one of his students was Napoleon, to whom he dedicated his work on probability. According to Laplace, probabilities arise from our ignorance. The world is deterministic, so the probability of a possible event depends on our limited information about it rather than on the causal forces that determine whether it shall occur. Our chief means of calculating probabilities is the principle of insufficient reason, or the principle of indifference. It says that if there is no reason to believe that one of n mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive possible cases will obtain rather than some other, so that the cases are equally possible, then the probability of each case is 1/n. In addition, the probability of a possible event equivalent to a disjunction of cases is the number of cases favorable to the event divided by the total number of cases. For instance, the probability that the top card of a well-shuffled deck is a diamond is 13/52.Laplace’s chief work on probability is Théorie analytique des probabilités(Analytic Theory of Probabilities, 1812).

law -- H. P. Grice was obsessed with ‘laws’ to introduce ‘psychological concepts.’ covering law model, the view of scientific explanation as a deductive argument which contains non-vacuously at least one universal law among its premises. The names of this view include ‘Hempel’s model’, ‘Hempel-Oppenheim HO model’, ‘Popper-Hempel model’, ‘deductivenomological D-N model’, and the ‘subsumption theory’ of explanation. The term ‘covering law model of explanation’ was proposed by William Dray. The theory of scientific explanation was first developed by Aristotle. He suggested that science proceeds from mere knowing that to deeper knowing why by giving understanding of different things by the four types of causes. Answers to why-questions are given by scientific syllogisms, i.e., by deductive arguments with premises that are necessarily true and causes of their consequences. Typical examples are the “subsumptive” arguments that can be expressed by the Barbara syllogism: All ravens are black. Jack is a raven. Therefore, Jack is black. Plants containing chlorophyll are green. Grass contains chlorophyll. Therefore, grass is green. In modern logical notation, An explanatory argument was later called in Grecian synthesis, in Latin compositio or demonstratio propter quid. After the seventeenth century, the terms ‘explication’ and ‘explanation’ became commonly used. The nineteenth-century empiricists accepted Hume’s criticism of Aristotelian essences and necessities: a law of nature is an extensional statement that expresses a uniformity, i.e., a constant conjunction between properties ‘All swans are white’ or types of events ‘Lightning is always followed by thunder’. Still, they accepted the subsumption theory of explanation: “An individual fact is said to be explained by pointing out its cause, that is, by stating the law or laws of causation, of which its production is an instance,” and “a law or uniformity in nature is said to be explained when another law or laws are pointed out, of which that law itself is but a case, and from which it could be deduced” J. S. Mill. A general model of probabilistic explanation, with deductive explanation as a specific case, was given by Peirce in 3. A modern formulation of the subsumption theory was given by Hempel and Paul Oppenheim in 8 by the following schema of D-N explanation: Explanandum E is here a sentence that describes a known particular event or fact singular explanation or uniformity explanation of laws. Explanation is an argument that answers an explanation-seeking why-question ‘Why E?’ by showing that E is nomically expectable on the basis of general laws r M 1 and antecedent conditions. The relation between the explanans and the explanandum is logical deduction. Explanation is distinguished from other kinds of scientific systematization prediction, postdiction that share its logical characteristics  a view often called the symmetry thesis regarding explanation and prediction  by the presupposition that the phenomenon E is already known. This also separates explanations from reason-seeking arguments that answer questions of the form ‘What reasons are there for believing that E?’ Hempel and Oppenheim required that the explanans have empirical content, i.e., be testable by experiment or observation, and it must be true. If the strong condition of truth is dropped, we speak of potential explanation. Dispositional explanations, for non-probabilistic dispositions, can be formulated in the D-N model. For example, let Hx % ‘x is hit by hammer’, Bx % ‘x breaks’, and Dx % ‘x is fragile’. Then the explanation why a piece of glass was broken may refer to its fragility and its being hit: It is easy to find examples of HO explanations that are not satisfactory: self-explanations ‘Grass is green, because grass is green’, explanations with too weak premises ‘John died, because he had a heart attack or his plane crashed’, and explanations with irrelevant information ‘This stuff dissolves in water, because it is sugar produced in Finland’. Attempts at finding necessary and sufficient conditions in syntactic and semantic terms for acceptable explanations have not led to any agreement. The HO model also needs the additional Aristotelian condition that causal explanation is directed from causes to effects. This is shown by Sylvain Bromberger’s flagpole example: the length of a flagpole explains the length of its shadow, but not vice versa. Michael Scriven has argued against Hempel that eaplanations of particular events should be given by singular causal statements ‘E because C’. However, a regularity theory Humean or stronger than Humean of causality implies that the truth of such a singular causal statement presupposes a universal law of the form ‘Events of type C are universally followed by events of type E’. The HO version of the covering law model can be generalized in several directions. The explanans may contain probabilistic or statistical laws. The explanans-explanandum relation may be inductive in this case the explanation itself is inductive. This gives us four types of explanations: deductive-universal i.e., D-N, deductiveprobabilistic, inductive-universal, and inductiveprobabilistic I-P. Hempel’s 2 model for I-P explanation contains a probabilistic covering law PG/F % r, where r is the statistical probability of G given F, and r in brackets is the inductive probability of the explanandum given the explanans: The explanation-seeking question may be weakened from ‘Why necessarily E?’ to ‘How possibly E?’. In a corrective explanation, the explanatory answer points out that the explanandum sentence E is not strictly true. This is the case in approximate explanation e.g., Newton’s theory entails a corrected form of Galileo’s and Kepler’s laws. 

Law-like generalisation, also called nomological (or nomic), a generalization that, unlike an accidental generalization, possesses nomic necessity or counterfactual force. Compare (1) ‘All specimens of gold have a melting point of 1,063o C’ with (2) ‘All the rocks in my garden are sedimentary’. (2) may be true, but its generality is restricted to rocks in my garden. Its truth is accidental; it does not state what must be the case. (1) is true without restriction. If we write (1) as the conditional ‘For any x and for any time t, if x is a specimen of gold subjected to a temperature of 1,063o C, then x will melt’, we see that the generalization states what must be the case. (1) supports the hypothetical counterfactual assertion ‘For any specimen of gold x and for any time t, if x were subjected to a temperature of 1,063o C, then x would melt’, which means that we accept (1) as nomically necessary: it remains true even if no further specimens of gold are subjected to the required temperature. This is not true of (2), for we know that at some future time an igneous rock might appear in my garden. Statements like (2) are not lawlike; they do not possess the unrestricted necessity we require of lawlike statements. Ernest Nagel has claimed that a nomological statement must satisfy two other conditions: it must deductively entail or be deductively entailed by other laws, and its scope of prediction must exceed the known evidence for it.

law of thought: a law by which or in accordance with which valid thought proceeds, or that justify valid inference, or to which all valid deduction is reducible. Laws of thought are rules that apply without exception to any subject matter of thought, etc.; sometimes they are said to be the object of logic. The term, rarely used in exactly the same sense by different authors, has long been associated with three equally ambiguous expressions: the law of identity (ID), the law of contradiction (or non-contradiction; NC), and the law of excluded middle (EM). Sometimes these three expressions are taken as propositions of formal ontology having the widest possible subject matter, propositions that apply to entities per se: (ID) every thing is (i.e., is identical to) itself; (NC) no thing having a given quality also has the negative of that quality (e.g., no even number is non-even); (EM) every thing either has a given quality or has the negative of that quality (e.g., every number is either even or non-even). Equally common in older works is use of these expressions for principles of metalogic about propositions: (ID) every proposition implies itself; (NC) no proposition is both true and false; (EM) every proposition is either true or false. Beginning in the middle to late 1800s these expressions have been used to denote propositions of Boolean Algebra about classes: (ID) every class includes itself; (NC) every class is such that its intersection (“product”) with its own complement is the null class; (EM) every class is such that its union (“sum”) with its own complement is the universal class. More recently the last two of the three expressions have been used in connection with the classical propositional logic and with the socalled protothetic or quantified propositional logic; in both cases the law of non-contradiction involves the negation of the conjunction (‘and’) of something with its own negation and the law of excluded middle involves the disjunction (‘or’) of something with its own negation. In the case of propositional logic the “something” is a schematic letter serving as a place-holder, whereas in the case of protothetic logic the “something” is a genuine variable. The expressions ‘law of non-contradiction’ and ‘law of excluded middle’ are also used for semantic principles of model theory concerning sentences and interpretations: (NC) under no interpretation is a given sentence both true and false; (EM) under any interpretation, a given sentence is either true or false. The expressions mentioned above all have been used in many other ways. Many other propositions have also been mentioned as laws of thought, including the dictum de omni et nullo attributed to Aristotle, the substitutivity of identicals (or equals) attributed to Euclid, the socalled identity of indiscernibles attributed to Leibniz, and other “logical truths.” The expression “law of thought” gains added prominence through its use by Boole to denote theorems of his “algebra of logic”; in fact, he named his second logic book An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Modern logicians, in almost unanimous disagreement with Boole, take this expression to be a misnomer; none of the above propositions classed under ‘laws of thought’ are explicitly about thought per se, a mental phenomenon studied by psychology, nor do they involve explicit reference to a thinker or knower as would be the case in pragmatics or in epistemology. The distinction between psychology (as a study of mental phenomena) and semantics (as a study of valid inference) is widely accepted.

Lebensphilosophie, German term, translated as ‘philosophy of life’, that became current in a variety of popular and philosophical inflections during the second half of the nineteenth century. Such philosophers as Dilthey and Eucken frequently applied it to a general philosophical approach or attitude that distinguished itself, on the one hand, from the construction of comprehensive systems by Hegel and his followers and, on the other, from the tendency of empiricism and early positivism to reduce human experience to epistemological questions about sensations or impressions. Rather, a Lebensphilosophie should begin from a recognition of the variety and complexity of concrete and already meaningful human experience as it is “lived”; it should acknowledge that all human beings, including the philosopher, are always immersed in historical processes and forms of organization; and it should seek to understand, describe, and sometimes even alter these and their various patterns of interrelation without abstraction or reduction. Such “philosophies of life” as those of Dilthey and Eucken provided much of the philosophical background for the conception of the social sciences as interpretive rather than explanatory disciplines. They also anticipated some central ideas of phenomenology, in particular the notion of the Life-World in Husserl, and certain closely related themes in Heidegger’s version of existentialism.

legal moralism, the view (defended in this century by, e.g., Lord Patrick Devlin) that law may properly be used to enforce morality, including notably “sexual morality.” Contemporary critics of the view (e.g., Hart) expand on the argument of Mill that law should only be used to prevent harm to others.

legal positivism, a theory about the nature of law, commonly thought to be characterized by two major tenets: (1) that there is no necessary connection between law and morality; and (2) that legal validity is determined ultimately by reference to certain basic social facts, e.g., the command of the sovereign (John Austin), the Grundnorm (Hans Kelsen), or the rule of recognition (Hart). These different descriptions of the basic law-determining facts lead to different claims about the normative character of law, with classical positivists (e.g., John Austin) insisting that law is essentially coercive, and modern positivists (e.g., Hans Kelsen) maintaining that it is normative. The traditional opponent of the legal positivist is the natural law theorist, who holds that no sharp distinction can be drawn between law and morality, thus challenging positivism’s first tenet. Whether that tenet follows from positivism’s second tenet is a question of current interest and leads inevitably to the classical question of political theory: Under what conditions might legal obligations, even if determined by social facts, create genuine political obligations (e.g., the obligation to obey the law)?

legal realism, a theory in philosophy of law or jurisprudence broadly characterized by the claim that the nature of law is better understood by observing what courts and citizens actually do than by analyzing stated legal rules and legal concepts. The theory is also associated with the thoughts that legal rules are disguised predictions of what courts will do, and that only the actual decisions of courts constitute law. There are two important traditions of legal realism, in Scandinavia and in the United States. Both began in the early part of the century, and both focus on the reality (hence the name ‘legal realism’) of the actual legal system, rather than on law’s official image of itself. The Scandinavian tradition is more theoretical and presents its views as philosophical accounts of the normativity of law based on skeptical methodology – the normative force of law consists in nothing but the feelings of citizens or officials or both about or their beliefs in that normative force. The older, U.S. tradition is more empirical or sociological or instrumentalist, focusing on how legislation is actually enacted, how rules are actually applied, how courts’ decisions are actually taken, and so forth. U.S. legal realism in its contemporary form is known as critical legal studies. Its argumentation is both empirical (law as experienced to be and as being oppressive by gender) and theoretical (law as essentially indeterminate, or interpretative – properties that prime law for its role in political manipulation).

Leibniz: German rationalist philosopher who made seminal contributions in geology, linguistics, historiography, mathematics, and physics, as well as philosophy. He was born in Leipzig and died in Hanover. Trained in the law, he earned a living as a councilor, diplomat, librarian, and historian, primarily in the court of Hanover. His contributions in mathematics, physics, and philosophy were known and appreciated among his educated contemporaries in virtue of his publication in Europe’s leading scholarly journals and his vast correspondence with intellectuals in a variety of fields. He was best known in his lifetime for his contributions to mathematics, especially to the development of the calculus, where a debate raged over whether Newton or Leibniz should be credited with priority for its discovery. Current scholarly opinion seems to have settled on this: each discovered the basic foundations of the calculus independently; Newton’s discovery preceded that of Leibniz; Leibniz’s publication of the basic theory of the calculus preceded that of Newton. Leibniz’s contributions to philosophy were known to his contemporaries through articles published in learned journals, correspondence, and one book published in his lifetime, the Theodicy (1710). He wrote a book-length study of Locke’s philosophy, New Essays on Human Understanding, but decided not to publish it when he learned of Locke’s death. Examination of Leibniz’s papers after his own death revealed that what he published during his lifetime was but the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps the most complete formulation of Leibniz’s mature metaphysics occurs in his correspondence (1698–1706) with Burcher De Volder, a professor of philosophy at the University of Leyden. Leibniz therein formulated his basic ontological thesis: Considering matters accurately, it must be said that there is nothing in things except simple substances, and, in them, nothing but perception and appetite. Moreover, matter and motion are not so much substances or things as they are the phenomena of percipient beings, the reality of which is located in the harmony of each percipient with itself (with respect to different times) and with other percipients. In this passage Leibniz asserts that the basic individuals of an acceptable ontology are all monads, i.e., immaterial entities lacking spatial parts, whose basic properties are a function of their perceptions and appetites. He held that each monad perceives all the other monads with varying degrees of clarity, except for God, who perceives all monads with utter clarity. Leibniz’s main theses concerning causality among the created monads are these: God creates, conserves, and concurs in the actions of each created monad. Each state of a created monad is a causal consequence of its preceding state, except for its state at creation and any of its states due to miraculous divine causality. Intrasubstantial causality is the rule with respect to created monads, which are precluded from intersubstantial causality, a mode of operation of which God alone is capable. Leibniz was aware that elements of this monadology may seem counterintuitive, that, e.g., there appear to be extended entities composed of parts, existing in space and time, causally interacting with each other. In the second sentence of the quoted passage Leibniz set out some of the ingredients of his theory of the preestablished harmony, one point of which is to save those appearances that are sufficiently well-founded to deserve saving. In the case of material objects, Leibniz formulated a version of phenomenalism, based on harmony among the perceptions of the monads. In the case of apparent intersubstantial causal relations among created monads, Leibniz proposed an analysis according to which the underlying reality is an increase in the clarity of relevant perceptions of the apparent causal agent, combined with a corresponding decrease in the clarity of the relevant perceptions of the apparent patient. Leibniz treated material objects and intersubstantial causal relations among created entities as well-founded phenomena. By contrast, he treated space and time as ideal entities. Leibniz’s mature metaphysics includes a threefold classification of entities that must be accorded some degree of reality: ideal entities, well-founded phenomena, and actual existents, i.e., the monads with their perceptions and appetites. In the passage quoted above Leibniz set out to distinguish the actual entities, the monads, from material entities, which he regarded as well-founded phenomena. In the following passage from another letter to De Volder he formulated the distinction between actual and ideal entities: In actual entities there is nothing but discrete quantity, namely, the multitude of monads, i.e., simple substances. . . . But continuous quantity is something ideal, which pertains to possibles, and to actuals, insofar as they are possible. Indeed, a continuum involves indeterminate parts, whereas, by contrast, there is nothing indefinite in actual entities, in which every division that can be made, is made. Actual things are composed in the manner that a number is composed of unities, ideal things are composed in the manner that a number is composed of fractions. The parts are actual in the real whole, but not in the ideal. By confusing ideal things with real substances when we seek actual parts in the order of possibles and indeterminate parts in the aggregate of actual things, we entangle ourselves in the labyrinth of the continuum and in inexplicable contradictions. The labyrinth of the continuum was one of two labyrinths that, according to Leibniz, vex the philosophical mind. His views about the proper course to take in unraveling the labyrinth of the continuum are one source of his monadology. Ultimately, he concluded that whatever may be infinitely divided without reaching indivisible entities is not something that belongs in the basic ontological category. His investigations of the nature of individuation and identity over time provided premises from which he concluded that only indivisible entities are ultimately real, and that an individual persists over time only if its subsequent states are causal consequences of its preceding states. In refining the metaphysical insights that yielded the monadology, Leibniz formulated and defended various important metaphysical theses, e.g.: the identity of indiscernibles – that individual substances differ with respect to their intrinsic, non-relational properties; and the doctrine of minute perceptions – that each created substance has some perceptions of which it lacks awareness. In the process of providing what he took to be an acceptable account of well-founded phenomena, Leibniz formulated various theses counter to the then prevailing Cartesian orthodoxy, concerning the nature of material objects. In particular, Leibniz argued that a correct application of Galileo’s discoveries concerning acceleration of freely falling bodies of the phenomena of impact indicates that force is not to be identified with quantity of motion, i.e., mass times velocity, as Descartes held, but is to be measured by mass times the square of the velocity. Moreover, Leibniz argued that it is force, measured as mass times the square of the velocity, that is conserved in nature, not quantity of motion. From these results Leibniz drew some important metaphysical conclusions. He argued that force, unlike quantity of motion, cannot be reduced to a conjunction of modifications of extension. But force is a central property of material objects. Hence, he concluded that Descartes was mistaken in attempting to reduce matter to extension and its modifications. Leibniz concluded that each material substance must have a substantial form that accounts for its active force. These conclusions have to do with entities that Leibniz viewed as phenomenal. He drew analogous conclusions concerning the entities he regarded as ultimately real, i.e., the monads. Thus, although Leibniz held that each monad is absolutely simple, i.e., without parts, he also held that the matter–form distinction has an application to each created monad. In a letter to De Volder he wrote: Therefore, I distinguish (1) the primitive entelechy or soul, (2) primary matter, i.e., primitive passive power, (3) monads completed from these two, (4) mass, i.e., second matter . . . in which innumerable subordinate monads come together, (5) the animal, i.e., corporeal substance, which a dominating monad makes into one machine. The second labyrinth vexing the philosophical mind, according to Leibniz, is the labyrinth of freedom. It is fair to say that for Leibniz the labyrinth of freedom is fundamentally a matter of how it is possible that some states of affairs obtain contingently, i.e., how it is possible that some propositions are true that might have been false. There are two distinct sources of the problem of contingency in Leibniz’s philosophy, one theological, and the other metaphysical. Each source may be grasped by considering an argument that appears to have premises to which Leibniz was predisposed and the conclusion that every state of affairs that obtains, obtains necessarily, and hence that there are no contingent propositions. The metaphysical argument is centered on some of Leibniz’s theses about the nature of truth. He held that the truth-value of all propositions is settled once truth-values have been assigned to the elementary propositions, i.e., those expressed by sentences in subject-predicate form. And he held that a sentence in subject-predicate form expresses a true proposition if and only if the concept of its predicate is included in the concept of its subject. But this makes it sound as if Leibniz were committed to the view that an elementary proposition is true if and only if it is conceptually true, from which it seems to follow that an elementary proposition is true if and only if it is necessarily true. Leibniz’s views concerning the relation of the truthvalue of non-elementary propositions to the truth-value of elementary propositions, then, seem to entail that there are no contingent propositions. He rejected this conclusion in virtue of rejecting the thesis that if an elementary proposition is conceptually true then it is necessarily true. The materials for his rejection of this thesis are located in theses connected with his program for a universal science (scientia universalis). This program had two parts: a universal notation (characteristica universalis), whose purpose was to provide a method for recording scientific facts as perspicuous as algebraic notation, and a formal system of reasoning (calculus ratiocinator) for reasoning about the facts recorded. Supporting Leibniz’s belief in the possibility and utility of the characteristica universalis and the calculus ratiocinator is his thesis that all concepts arise from simple primitive concepts via concept conjunction and concept complementation. In virtue of this thesis, he held that all concepts may be analyzed into their simple, primitive components, with this proviso: in some cases there is no finite analysis of a concept into its primitive components; but there is an analysis that converges on the primitive components without ever reaching them. This is the doctrine of infinite analysis, which Leibniz applied to ward off the threat to contingency apparently posed by his account of truth. He held that an elementary proposition is necessarily true if and only if there is a finite analysis that reveals that its predicate concept is included in its subject concept. By contrast, an elementary proposition is contingently true if and only if there is no such finite analysis, but there is an analysis of its predicate concept that converges on a component of its subject concept. The theological argument may be put this way. There would be no world were God not to choose to create a world. As with every choice, as, indeed, with every state of affairs that obtains, there must be a sufficient reason for that choice, for the obtaining of that state of affairs – this is what the principle of sufficient reason amounts to, according to Leibniz. The reason for God’s choice of a world to create must be located in God’s power and his moral character. But God is allpowerful and morally perfect, both of which attributes he has of necessity. Hence, of necessity, God chose to create the best possible world. Whatever possible world is the best possible world, is so of necessity. Hence, whatever possible world is actual, is so of necessity. A possible world is defined with respect to the states of affairs that obtain in it. Hence, whatever states of affairs obtain, do so of necessity. Therefore, there are no contingent propositions. Leibniz’s options here were limited. He was committed to the thesis that the principle of sufficient reason, when applied to God’s choice of a world to create, given God’s attributes, yields the conclusion that this is the best possible world – a fundamental component of his solution to the problem of evil. He considered two ways of avoiding the conclusion of the argument noted above. The first consists in claiming that although God is metaphysically perfect of necessity, i.e., has every simple, positive perfection of necessity, and although God is morally perfect, nonetheless he is not morally perfect of necessity, but rather by choice. The second consists in denying that whatever possible world is the best, is so of necessity, relying on the idea that the claim that a given possible world is the best involves a comparison with infinitely many other possible worlds, and hence, if true, is only contingently true. Once again the doctrine of infinite analysis served as the centerpiece of Leibniz’s efforts to establish that, contrary to appearances, his views do not lead to necessitarianism, i.e., to the thesis that there is no genuine contingency. Much of Leibniz’s work in philosophical theology had as a central motivation an effort to formulate a sound philosophical and theological basis for various church reunion projects – especially reunion between Lutherans and Calvinists on the Protestant side, and ultimately, reunion between Protestants and Catholics. He thought that most of the classical arguments for the existence of God, if formulated with care, i.e., in the way in which Leibniz formulated them, succeeded in proving what they set out to prove. For example, Leibniz thought that Descartes’s version of the ontological argument established the existence of a perfect being, with one crucial proviso: that an absolutely perfect being is possible. Leibniz believed that none of his predecessors had established this premise, so he set out to do so. The basic idea of his purported proof is this. A perfection is a simple, positive property. Hence, there can be no demonstration that there is a formal inconsistency in asserting that various collections of them are instantiated by the same being. But if there is no such demonstration, then it is possible that something has them all. Hence, a perfect being is possible. Leibniz did not consider in detail many of the fundamental epistemological issues that so moved Descartes and the British empiricists. Nonetheless, Leibniz made significant contributions to the theory of knowledge. His account of our knowledge of contingent truths is much like what we would expect of an empiricist’s epistemology. He claimed that our knowledge of particular contingent truths has its basis in sense perception. He argued that simple enumerative induction cannot account for all our knowledge of universal contingent truths; it must be supplemented by what he called the a priori conjectural method, a precursor of the hypothetico-deductive method. He made contributions to developing a formal theory of probability, which he regarded as essential for an adequate account of our knowledge of contingent truths. Leibniz’s rationalism is evident in his account of our a priori knowledge, which for him amounted to our knowledge of necessary truths. Leibniz thought that Locke’s empiricism did not provide an acceptable account of a priori knowledge, because it attempted to locate all the materials of justification as deriving from sensory experience, thus overlooking what Leibniz took to be the primary source of our a priori knowledge, i.e., what is innate in the mind. He summarized his debate with Locke on these matters thus: Our differences are on matters of some importance. It is a matter of knowing if the soul in itself is entirely empty like a writing tablet on which nothing has as yet been written (tabula rasa), . . . and if everything inscribed there comes solely from the senses and experience, or if the soul contains originally the sources of various concepts and doctrines that external objects merely reveal on occasion. The idea that some concepts and doctrines are innate in the mind is central not only to Leibniz’s theory of knowledge, but also to his metaphysics, because he held that the most basic metaphysical concepts, e.g., the concepts of the self, substance, and causation, are innate. Leibniz utilized the ideas behind the characteristica universalis in order to formulate a system of formal logic that is a genuine alternative to Aristotelian syllogistic logic and to contemporary quantification theory. Assuming that propositions are, in some fashion, composed of concepts and that all composite concepts are, in some fashion, composed of primitive simple concepts, Leibniz formulated a logic based on the idea of assigning numbers to concepts according to certain rules. The entire program turns on his concept containment account of truth previously mentioned. In connection with the metatheory of this logic Leibniz formulated the principle: “eadem sunt quorum unum alteri substitui potest salva veritate” (“Those things are the same of which one may be substituted for the other preserving truth-value”). The proper interpretation of this principle turns in part on exactly what “things” he had in mind. It is likely that he intended to formulate a criterion of concept identity. Hence, it is likely that this principle is distinct from the identity of indiscernibles, previously mentioned, and also from what has come to be called Leibniz’s law, i.e., the thesis that if x and y are the same individual then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. The account outlined above concentrates on Leibniz’s mature views in metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. The evolution of his thought in these areas is worthy of close study, which cannot be brought to a definitive state until all of his philosophical work has been published in the edition of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin.

lekton (Grecian, ‘what can be said’), a Stoic term sometimes translated as ‘the meaning of an utterance’. A lekton differs from an utterance in being what the utterance (or its emisor) signifies: A lekton is said to be what the Grecian grasps and the non-Grecian does not when Gricese is spoken. Moreover, a lekton is incorporeal, which for the Stoics means it does not, strictly speaking, exist, but only “sub-sists,” and so cannot act or be acted upon. A lekton constitutes the content of a state of Grice’s soul:. A lekton is what we assent to and endeavor toward and they “correspond” to the presentations given to rational animals. The Stoics acknowledged a lekton for a predicate as well as for a sentence (including questions, oaths, and imperatives). An axioma or a propositions is a lekton that can be assented to and may be true or false (although being essentially tensed, its truth-value may change). The Stoics’ theory of reference suggests that they also acknowledged singular propositions, which “perish” when the referent ceases to exist. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Benson Mates and the stoics.”

lenin: a Marxist philosopher, principal creator of Soviet dialectical materialism. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, he attacked his contemporaries who sought to interpret Marx’s philosophy in the spirit of the phenomenalistic positivism of Avenarius and Mach. Rejecting their position as idealist, Lenin argues that matter is not a construct from sensations but an objective reality independent of consciousness; because a sensation directly copies this reality, objective truth is possible. The dialectical dimension of Lenin’s outlook is best elaborated in his posthumous Philosophical Notebooks (written 1914–16), a collection of reading notes and fragments in which he gives close attention to the Hegelian dialectic and displays warm sympathy toward it, though he argues that the dialectic should be interpreted materialistically rather than idealistically. Some of Lenin’s most original theorizing, presented in Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) and State and Revolution (1918), is devoted to analyzing the connection between monopoly capitalism and imperialism and to describing the coming violent replacement of bourgeois rule by, first, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and, later, stateless communism. Lenin regarded all philosophy as a partisan weapon in the class struggle, and he wielded his own philosophy polemically in the interests of Communist revolution. As a result of the victory of the Bolsheviks in November 1917, Lenin’s ideas were enshrined as the cornerstone of Soviet intellectual culture and were considered above criticism until the advent of glasnost.

lequier: philosopher, educated in Paris. He influenced Renouvier, who regarded Lequier as his “master in philosophy.” Through Renouvier, he came to the attention of James, who called Lequier a “philosopher of genius.” Central to Lequier’s philosophy is the idea of freedom understood as the power to “create,” or add novelty to the world. Such freedom involves an element of arbitrariness and is incompatible with determinism. Anticipating James, Lequier argued that determinism, consistently affirmed, leads to skepticism about truth and values. Though a devout Roman Catholic, his theological views were unorthodox for his time. God cannot know future free actions until they occur and therefore cannot be wholly immutable and eternal. Lequier’s views anticipate in striking ways some views of James, Bergson, Alexander, and Peirce, and the process philosophies and process theologies of Whitehead and Hartshorne.

leroux: philosopher reputed to have introduced “socialism” in France – “the word, not the doctrine!” – Grice). He claimed to be the first to use solidarité (conversational solidarity) as a sociological concept (in his memoirs, La Grève de Samarez. The son of a Parisian café owner, Leroux centered his life work on journalism, both as a printer (patenting an advanced procedure for typesetting) and as founder of a number of significant serial publications. The Encyclopédie Nouvelle, which he launched with Jean Reynaud is conceived and written in the spirit of Diderot’s magnum opus. It aspired to be the platform for republican and democratic thought during the July Monarchy. The reformer’s influence on contemporaries such as Hugo, Belinsky, J. Michelet, and Heine was considerable. Leroux fervently believed in Progress, unlimited and divinely inspired. This doctrine he took to be eighteenth-century France’s particular contribution to the Enlightenment. Progress must make its way between twin perils: the “follies of illuminism” or “foolish spiritualism” and the “abject orgies of materialism.” Accordingly, Leroux blamed Condillac for having “drawn up the code of materialism” by excluding an innate Subject from his sensationalism (“Condillac,” Encyclopédie Nouvelle). Cousin’s eclecticism, state doctrine under the July Monarchy and synonym for immobility (“Philosophy requires no further development; it is complete as is,” Leroux wrote sarcastically in 1838, echoing Cousin), was a constant target of his polemics. Having abandoned traditional Christian beliefs, Leroux viewed immortality as an infinite succession of rebirths on earth, our sense of personal identity being preserved throughout by Platonic “reminiscences” (De l’Humanité).

lesniewski: philosopher-logician, co-founder, with Lukasiewicz and Kotarbigski, of the Warsaw Center of Logical Research. He perfected the logical reconstruction of classical mathematics by Frege, Schröder, Whitehead, and Russell in his synthesis of mathematical with modernized Aristotelian logic. A pioneer in scientific semantics whose insights inspired Tarski, Les’niewski distinguished genuine antinomies of belief, in theories intended as true mathematical sciences, from mere formal inconsistencies in uninterpreted calculi. Like Frege an acute critic of formalism, he sought to perfect one comprehensive, logically true instrument of scientific investigation. Demonstrably consistent, relative to classical elementary logic, and distinguished by its philosophical motivation and logical economy, his system integrates his central achievements. Other contributions include his ideographic notation, his method of natural deduction from suppositions and his demonstrations of inconsistency of other systems, even Frege’s revised foundations of arithmetic. Fundamental were (1) his 1913 refutation of Twardowski’s Platonistic theory of abstraction, which motivated his “constructive nominalism”; and (2) his deep analyses of Russell’s paradox, which led him to distinguish distributive from collective predication and (as generalized to subsume Grelling and Nelson’s paradox of self-reference) logical from semantic paradoxes, and so (years before Ramsey and Gödel) to differentiate, not just the correlatives object language and metalanguage, but any such correlative linguistic stages, and thus to relativize semantic concepts to successive hierarchical strata in metalinguistic stratification. His system of logic and foundations of mathematics comprise a hierarchy of three axiomatic deductive theories: protothetic, ontology, and mereology. Each can be variously based on just one axiom introducing a single undefined term. His prototheses are basic to any further theory. Ontology, applying them, complements protothetic to form his logic. Les’niewski’s ontology develops his logic of predication, beginning (e.g.) with singular predication characterizing the individual so-and-so as being one (of the one or more) such-and-such, without needing classabstraction operators, dispensable here as in Russell’s “no-class theory of classes.” But this, his logic of nouns, nominal or predicational functions, etc., synthesizing formulations by Aristotle, Leibniz, Boole, Schröder, and Whitehead, also represents a universal theory of being and beings, beginning with related individuals and their characteristics, kinds, or classes distributively understood to include individuals as singletons or “one-member classes.” Les’niewski’s directives of definition and logical grammar for his systems of protothetic and ontology provide for the unbounded hierarchies of “open,” functional expressions. Systematic conventions of contextual determinacy, exploiting dependence of meaning on context, permit unequivocal use of the same forms of expression to bring out systematic analogies between homonyms as analogues in Aristotle’s and Russell’s sense, systematically ambiguous, differing in semantic category and hence significance. Simple distinctions of semantic category within the object language of the system itself, together with the metalinguistic stratification to relativize semantic concepts, prevent logical and semantic paradoxes as effectively as Russell’s ramified theory of types. Lesniewski’s system of logic, though expressively rich enough to permit Platonist interpretation in terms of universals, is yet “metaphysically neutral” in being free from ontic commitments. It neither postulates, presupposes, nor implies existence of either individuals or abstractions, but relies instead on equivalences without existential import that merely introduce and explicate new terms. In his “nominalist” construction of the endless Platonic ladder of abstraction, logical principles can be elevated step by step, from any level to the next, by definitions making abstractions eliminable, translatable by definition into generalizations characterizing related individuals. In this sense it is “constructively nominalist,” as a developing language always open to introduction of new terms and categories, without appeal to “convenient fictions.” Les’niewski’s system, completely designed by 1922, was logically and chronologically in advance of Russell’s 1925 revision of Principia Mathematica to accommodate Ramsey’s simplification of Russell’s theory of types. Yet Les’niewski’s premature death, the ensuing disruption of war, which destroyed his manuscripts and dispersed survivors such as Sobocigski and Lejewski, and the relative inaccessibility of publications delayed by Les’niewski’s own perfectionism have retarded understanding of his work.

Lessing: philosopher whose oeuvre aimed to replace the so-called possession of truth by a search for truth through public debate. The son of a Protestant minister, he studied theology but gave it up to take part in the literary debate between Gottsched and the Swiss Bodmer and Breitinger, which dealt with French classicism (Boileau) and English influences (Shakespeare for theater and Milton for poetry). His literary criticism (Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend), his own dramatic works, and his theological-philosophical reflections were united in his conception of a practical Aufklärung, which opposed all philosophical or religious dogmatism. Lessing’s creation and direction of the National German Theater of Hamburg (1767–70) helped to form a sense of German national identity. In 1750 Lessing published Thoughts on the Moravian Brothers, which contrasted religion as lived by this pietist community with the ecclesiastical institution. In 1753–54 he wrote a series of “rehabilitations” (Rettugen) to show that the opposition between dogmas and heresies, between “truth” and “error,” was incompatible with living religious thought. This position had the seeds of a historical conception of religion that Lessing developed during his last years. In 1754 he again attempted a deductive formulation, inspired by Spinoza, of the fundamental truths of Christianity. Lessing rejected this rationalism, as substituting a dogma of reason for one of religion. To provoke public debate on the issue, be published H. S. Reimarus’s Fragments of an Anonymous Author (1774–78), which the Protestant hierarchy considered atheistic. The relativism and soft deism to which his arguments seemed to lead were transformed in his Education of Mankind (1780) into a historical theory of truth. In Lessing’s view, all religions have an equal dignity, for none possesses “the” truth; they represent only ethical and practical moments in the history of mankind. Revelation is assimilated into an education of mankind and God is compared to a teacher who reveals to man only what he is able to assimilate. This secularization of the history of salvation, in which God becomes immanent in the world, is called pantheism (“the quarrel of pantheism”). For Lessing, Judaism and Christianity are the preliminary stages of a third gospel, the “Gospel of Reason.” The Masonic Dialogues (1778) introduced this historical and practical conception of truth as a progress from “thinking by oneself” to dialogue (“thinking aloud with a friend”). In the literary domain Lessing broke with the culture of the baroque: against the giants and martyrs of baroque tragedy, he offered the tragedy of the bourgeois, with whom any spectator must be able to identify. After a poor first play in 1755 – Miss Sara Sampson – which only reflected the sentimentalism of the time, Lessing produced a model of the genre with Emilia Galotti (1781). The Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767– 68) was supposed to be influenced by Aristotle, but its union of fear and pity was greatly influenced by Moses Mendelssohn’s theory of “mixed sensations.” Lessing’s entire aesthetics was based not on permanent ontological, religious, or moral rules, but on the spectator’s interest. In Laokoon (1766) he associated this aesthetics of reception with one of artistic production, i.e., a reflection on the means through which poetry and the plastic arts create this interest: the plastic arts by natural signs and poetry through the arbitrary signs that overcome their artificiality through the imitation not of nature but of action. Much like Winckelmann’s aesthetics, which influenced German classicism for a considerable time, Lessing’s aesthetics opposed the baroque, but for a theory of ideal beauty inspired by Plato it substituted a foundation of the beautiful in the agreement between producer and receptor.

Leucippus: Grecian pre-Socratic philosopher credited with founding atomism, expounded in a work titled The Great World-system. Positing the existence of atoms and the void, he answered Eleatic arguments against change by allowing change of place. The arrangements and rearrangements of groups of atoms could account for macroscopic changes in the world, and indeed for the world itself. Little else is known of Leucippus. It is difficult to distinguish his contributions from those of his prolific follower Democritus.

Levinas: philosopher. Educated as an orthodox Jew and a Russian citizen, he studied philosophy at Strasbourg and Freiburg, introduced the work of Husserl and Heidegger in France, taught philosophy at Paris, spent years in a German labor camp and was a professor at the universities of Poitiers, Nanterre, and the Sorbonne. To the impersonal totality of being reduced to “the same” by the Western tradition (including Hegel’s and Husserl’s idealism and Heidegger’s ontology), Levinas opposes the irreducible otherness of the human other, death, time, God, etc. In Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (1961), he shows how the other’s facing and speaking urge philosophy to transcend the horizons of comprehension, while Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974) concentrates on the self of “me” as one-for-the-other. Appealing to Plato’s form of the Good and Descartes’s idea of the infinite, Levinas describes the asymmetrical relation between the other’s “highness” or “infinity” and me, whose self-enjoyment is thus interrupted by a basic imperative: Do not kill me, but help me to live! The fact of the other’s existence immediately reveals the basic “ought” of ethics; it awakens me to a responsibility that I have never been able to choose or to refuse. My radical “passivity,” thus revealed, shows the anachronic character of human temporality. It also refers to the immemorial past of “Him” whose “illeity” is still otherwise other than the human other: God, or the Good itself, who is neither an object nor a you. Religion and ethics coincide because the only way to meet with God is to practice one’s responsibility for the human other, who is “in the trace of God.” Comprehensive thematization and systematic objectification, though always in danger of reducing all otherness, have their own relative and subordinate truth, especially with regard to the economic and political conditions of universal justice toward all individuals whom I cannot encounter personally. With and through the other I meet all humans. In this experience lies the origin of equality and human rights. Similarly, theoretical thematization has a positive role if it remains aware of its ancillary or angelic role with regard to concern for the other. What is said in philosophy betrays the saying by which it is communicated. It must therefore be unsaid in a return to the saying. More than desire for theoretical wisdom, philosophy is the wisdom of love.

Lewin: German philosophical psychologist, perhaps the most influential of the Gestalt psychologists. Believing traditional psychology was stuck in an “Aristotelian” class-logic stage of theorizing, Lewin proposed advancing to a “Galilean” stage of field theory. His central field concept was the “life space, containing the person and his psychological environment.” Primarily concerned with motivation (or goal-oriented behaviour), he explained locomotion as caused by life-space objects’ valences, psychological vectors of force acting on people as physical vectors of force act on physical objects. A thing with positive valence exert attractive force; A thing with negative valence exert repulsive force; an ambivalent thing exerts both. To attain theoretical rigor, Lewin borrows from mathematical topology, mapping life spaces as diagrams. One represented the motivational conflict involved in choosing between pizza and hamburger: Life spaces frequently contain psychological barriers (e.g., no money) blocking movement toward or away from a valenced object. Lewin also created the important field of group dynamics in 1939, carrying out innovative studies on children and adults, focusing on group cohesion and effects of leadership style. His main works are A Dynamic Theory of Personality (1935), Principles of Topological Psychology (1936), and Field Theory in Social Science (1951). H. P. Grice, “Lewin and aspects of reason.”

Lewis: philosopher who advocated a version of pragmatism and empiricism, but was nonetheless strongly influenced by Kant. Lewis was born in Massachusetts, New England (his ancestors were from Lincolnshire), educated at Harvard, and taught at the University of California and Harvard. He wrote in logic (A Survey of Symbolic Logic; Symbolic Logic, coauthored with C. H. Langford), in epistemology (Mind and the World Order; An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation), and in ethical theory (The Ground and Nature of the Right, 1965; Our Social Inheritance, 1957). General views. Use of the senses involves “presentations” of sense experiences that signalize external objects. Reflection upon the relations of sense experiences to psychological “intensions” permits our thoughts to refer to aspects of objective reality. Consequently, we can experience those non-presented objective conditions. Intensions, which include the mind’s categories, are meanings in one ordinary sense, and concepts in a philosophical sense. When judging counts as knowing, it has the future-oriented function and sole value of guiding action in pursuit of what one evaluates as good. Intensions do not fundamentally depend upon being formulated in those linguistic phrases that may express them and thereby acquire meaning. Pace Kant, our categories are replaceable when pragmatically unsuccessful, and are sometimes invented, although typically socially instilled. Kant also failed to realize that any a priori knowledge concerns only what is expressed by an “analytic truth,” i.e., what is knowable with certainty via reflection upon intensions and permits reference to the necessary inclusion (and exclusion) relations between objective properties. Such inclusion/exclusion relationships are “entailments” expressible by a use of “if” different from material implication. The degree of justification of an empirical judgment about objective reality (e.g., that there is a doorknob before one) and of any beliefs in consequences that are probable given the judgment, approximates to certainty when the judgment stands in a relationship of “congruence” to a collection of justified judgments (e.g., a collection including the judgments that one remembers seeing a doorknob a moment before, and that one has not just turned around). Lewis’s empiricism involves one type of phenomenalism. Although he treats external conditions as metaphysically distinct from passages of sense experience, he maintains that the process of learning about the former does not involve more than learning about the latter. Accordingly, he speaks of the “sense meaning” of an intension, referring to an objective condition. It concerns what one intends to count as a process that verifies that the particular intension applies to the objective world. Sense meanings of a statement may be conceived as additional “entailments” of it, and are expressible by conjunctions of an infinite number of statements each of which is “the general form of a specific terminating judgment” (as defined below). Lewis wants his treatment of sense meaning to rule out Berkeley’s view that objects exist only when perceived. Verification of an objective judgment, as Kant realized, is largely specified by a non-social process expressed by a rule to act in imaginable ways in response to imaginable present sense experiences (e.g. seeing a doorknob) and thereupon to have imaginable future sense experiences (e.g. feeling a doorknob). Actual instances of such passages of sense experience raise the probability of an objective judgment, whose verification is always partial. Apprehensions of sense experiences are judgments that are not reached by basing them on grounds in a way that might conceivably produce errors. Such apprehensions are “certain.” The latter term may be employed by Lewis in more than one sense, but here it at least implies that the judgment is rationally credible and in the above sense not capable of being in error. So such an apprehension is “datal,” i.e., rationally employed in judging other matters, and “immediate,” i.e., formed noninferentially in response to a presentation. These presentations make up “the (sensory) given.” Sense experience is what remains after everything that is less than certain in one’s experience of an objective condition is set aside. Lewis thought some version of the epistemic regress argument to be correct, and defended the Cartesian view that without something certain as a foundation no judgment has any degree of justification. Technical terminology. Presentation: something involved in experience, e.g. a visual impression, in virtue of which one possesses a non-inferential judgment that it is involved. The given: those presentations that have the content that they do independently of one’s intending or deciding that they have it. Terminating: decisively and completely verifiable or falsifiable in principle. (E.g., where S affirms a present sense experience, A affirms an experience of seeming to initiate an action, and E affirms a future instance of sense experience, the judgment ‘S and if A then E’ is terminating.) The general form of the terminating judgment that S and if A then E: the conditional that if S then (in all probability) E, if A. (An actual judgment expressed by this conditional is based on remembering passages of sense experience of type S/A/E and is justified thanks to the principle of induction and the principle that seeming to remember an event makes the judgment that the event occurred justified at least to some degree. These statements concern a connection that holds independently of whether anyone is thinking and underlies the rationality of relying to any degree upon what is not part of one’s self.) Congruence: the relationship among statements in a collection when the following conditional is true: If each had some degree of justification independently of the remaining ones, then each would be made more justified by the conjoint truth of the remaining ones. (When the antecedent of this conditional is true, and a statement in the collection is such that it is highly improbable that the remaining ones all be true unless it is true, then it is made very highly justified.) Pragmatic a priori: those judgments that are not based on the use of the senses but on employing a set of intensions, and yet are susceptible of being reasonably set aside because of a shift to a different set of intensions whose employment is pragmatically more useful (roughly, more useful for the attainment of what has intrinsic value). Valuation: the appraising of something as having value or being morally right. (What has some value that is not due to its consequences is what has intrinsic value, e.g., enjoyable experiences of self-realization in living rationally. Other evaluations of what is good are empirical judgments concerning what may be involved in actions leading to what is intrinsically good. Rational reflection permits awareness of various moral principles.)

Lewis: very Irish literary critic, novelist, and Christian apologist, whom Grice would occasionally see at the Bird and Baby. (“I don’t like him” – Grice). Born in Belfast, Lewis took three first-class degrees at Oxford, became a tutor at Magdalen, and assumed the chair of medieval and Renaissance studies at Cambridge. While his tremendous output includes important works on medieval literature and literary criticism, he is best known for his fiction and Christian apologetics. Lewis combined a poetic sense and appreciation of argument that allowed him to communicate complex philosophical and theological material to lay audiences. His popular writings in the philosophy of religion range over a variety of topics, including the nature and existence of God (Mere Christianity, 1952), miracles (Miracles, 1947), hell (The Great Divorce, 1945), and the problem of evil (The Problem of Pain, 1940). His own conversion to Christianity as an adult is chronicled in his autobiography (Surprised by Joy, 1955). In defending theism Lewis employed arguments from natural theology (most notably versions of the moral and teleological arguments) and arguments from religious experience. Also of philosophical interest is his defense of moral absolutism in The Abolition of Man.

Lewis: philosopher influential in many areas. Lewis received the B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore and the Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard when Grice was giving the William James lectures on the implicaturum He has been a member of the philosophy department at U.C.L.A. and Princeton . In philosophy of mind, Lewis is known principally for “An Argument for the Identity Theory” (1966), “Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications” (1972), and “Mad Pain and Martian Pain” (1980). He argues for the functionalist thesis that mental states are defined by their typical causal roles, and the materialist thesis that the causal roles definitive of mental states are occupied by physical states. Lewis develops the view that theoretical definitions in general are functionally defined, applying the formal concept of a Ramsey sentence. And he suggests that the platitudes of commonsense or folk psychology constitute the theory implicitly defining psychological concepts. In philosophy of language and linguistics, Lewis is known principally for Convention (1969), “General Semantics” (1970), and “Languages and Language” (1975). His theory of convention had its source in the theory of games of pure coordination developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. Roughly, conventions are arbitrary solutions to coordination problems that perpetuate themselves once a precedent is set because they serve a common interest. Lewis requires it to be common knowledge that people prefer to conform to a conventional regularity given that others do. He treats linguistic meanings as compositional intensions. The basic intensions for lexical constituents are functions assigning extensions to indices, which include contextual factors and a possible world. An analytic sentence is one true at every index. Languages are functions from sentences to meanings, and the language of a population is the one in which they have a convention of truthfulness and trust. In metaphysics and modal logic, Lewis is known principally for “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic” (1968) and On the Plurality of Worlds (1986). Based on its theoretical benefits, Lewis argues for modal realism: other possible worlds and the objects in them are just as real as the actual world and its inhabitants. Lewis develops a non-standard form of modal logic in which objects exist in at most one possible world, and for which the necessity of identity fails. Properties are identified with the set of objects that have them in any possible world, and propositions as the set of worlds in which they are true. He also develops a finergrained concept of structured properties and propositions. In philosophical logic and philosophy of science, Lewis is best known for Counterfactuals (1973), “Causation” (1973), and “Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities” (1976). He developed a formal semantics for counterfactual conditionals that matches their truth conditions and logic much more adequately than the previously available material or strict conditional analyses. Roughly, a counterfactual is true if its consequent is true in every possible world in which its antecedent is true that is as similar overall to the actual world as the truth of the antecedent will allow. Lewis then defended an analysis of causation in terms of counterfactuals: c caused e if e would not have occurred if c had not occurred or if there is a chain of events leading from e to c each member of which is counterfactually dependent on the next. He presents a reductio ad absurdum argument to show that conditional probabilities could not be identified with the probabilities of any sort of conditional. Lewis has also written on visual experience, events, holes, parts of classes, time travel, survival and identity, subjective and objective probability, desire as belief, attitudes de se, deontic logic, decision theory, the prisoner’s dilemma and the Newcomb problem, utilitarianism, dispositional theories of value, nuclear deterrence, punishment, and academic ethics. H. P. Grice, “Lewis at Harvard.”

lexical ordering, also called lexicographic ordering, a method, given a finite ordered set of symbols, such as the letters of the alphabet, of ordering all finite sequences of those symbols. All finite sequences of letters, e.g., can be ordered as follows: first list all single letters in alphabetical order; then list all pairs of letters in the order aa, ab, . . . az; ba . . . bz; . . . ; za . . . zz. Here pairs are first grouped and alphabetized according to the first letter of the pair, and then within these groups are alphabetized according to the second letter of the pair. All sequences of three letters, four letters, etc., are then listed in order by an analogous process. In this way every sequence of n letters, for any n, is listed. Lexical ordering differs from alphabetical ordering, although it makes use of it, because all sequences with n letters come before any sequence with n ! 1 letters; thus, zzt will come before aaab. One use of lexical ordering is to show that the set of all finite sequences of symbols, and thus the set of all words, is at most denumerably infinite.

Liber vitae -- Arbitrium – liber vitae -- book of life, expression found in Hebrew and Christian scriptures signifying a record kept by the Lord of those destined for eternal happiness Exodus 32:32; Psalms 68; Malachi 3:16; Daniel 12:1; Philippians 4:3; Revelation 3:5, 17:8, 20:12, 21:27. Medieval philosophers often referred to the book of life when discussing issues of predestination, divine omniscience, foreknowledge, and free will. Figures like Augustine and Aquinas asked whether it represented God’s unerring foreknowledge or predestination, or whether some names could be added or deleted from it. The term is used by some contemporary philosophers to mean a record of all the events in a person’s life. 

liberalism – alla Locke – “meaning liberalism” – “Every man has the liberty to make his words for any idea he pleases.” “every Man has so inviolable a Liberty, to make Words stand for what Ideas he pleases.” Bennett on Locke: An utterer has all the freedom he has to make any of his expressions for any idea he pleases. Constant, Benjamin – Grice was a sort of a liberal – at least he was familiar with “pinko Oxford” --  in full, Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, defender of liberalism and passionate analyst of  and European politics. He welcomed the  Revolution but not the Reign of Terror, the violence of which he avoided by accepting a lowly diplomatic post in Braunschweig 1787 94. In 1795 he returned to Paris with Madame de Staël and intervened in parliamentary debates. His pamphlets opposed both extremes, the Jacobin and the Bonapartist. Impressed by Rousseau’s Social Contract, he came to fear that like Napoleon’s dictatorship, the “general will” could threaten civil rights. He had first welcomed Napoleon, but turned against his autocracy. He favored parliamentary democracy, separation of church and state, and a bill of rights. The high point of his political career came with membership in the Tribunat 180002, a consultative chamber appointed by the Senate. His centrist position is evident in the Principes de politique 180610. Had not republican terror been as destructive as the Empire? In chapters 1617, Constant opposes the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns. He assumes that the Grecian world was given to war, and therefore strengthened “political liberty” that favors the state over the individual the liberty of the ancients. Fundamentally optimistic, he believed that war was a thing of the past, and that the modern world needs to protect “civil liberty,” i.e. the liberty of the individual the liberty of the moderns. The great merit of Constant’s comparison is the analysis of historical forces, the theory that governments must support current needs and do not depend on deterministic factors such as the size of the state, its form of government, geography, climate, and race. Here he contradicts Montesquieu. The opposition between ancient and modern liberty expresses a radical liberalism that did not seem to fit  politics. However, it was the beginning of the liberal tradition, contrasting political liberty in the service of the state with the civil liberty of the citizen cf. Mill’s On Liberty, 1859, and Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty, 8. Principes remained in manuscript until 1861; the scholarly editions of Étienne Hofmann 0 are far more recent. Hofmann calls Principes the essential text between Montesquieu and Tocqueville. It was tr. into English as Constant, Political Writings ed. Biancamaria Fontana, 8 and 7. Forced into retirement by Napoleon, Constant wrote his literary masterpieces, Adolphe and the diaries. He completed the Principes, then turned to De la religion 6 vols., which he considered his supreme achievement.  liberalism, a political philosophy first formulated during the Enlightenment in response to the growth of modern nation-states, which centralize governmental functions and claim sole authority to exercise coercive power within their boundaries. One of its central theses has long been that a government’s claim to this authority is justified only if the government can show those who live under it that it secures their liberty. A central thesis of contemporary liberalism is that government must be neutral in debates about the good human life. John Locke, one of the founders of liberalism, tried to show that constitutional monarchy secures liberty by arguing that free and equal persons in a state of nature, concerned to protect their freedom and property, would agree with one another to live under such a regime. Classical liberalism, which attaches great value to economic liberty, traces its ancestry to Locke’s argument that government must safeguard property. Locke’s use of an agreement or social contract laid the basis for the form of liberalism championed by Rousseau and most deeply indebted to Kant. According to Kant, the sort of liberty that should be most highly valued is autonomy. Agents enjoy autonomy, Kant said, when they live according to laws they would give to themselves. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) set the main themes of the chapter of liberal thought now being written. Rawls asked what principles of justice citizens would agree to in a contract situation he called “the original position.” He argued that they would agree to principles guaranteeing adequate basic liberties and fair equality of opportunity, and requiring that economic inequalities benefit the least advantaged. A government that respects these principles secures the autonomy of its citizens by operating in accord with principles citizens would give themselves in the original position. Because of the conditions of the original position, citizens would not choose principles based on a controversial conception of the good life. Neutrality among such conceptions is therefore built into the foundations of Rawls’s theory. Some critics argue that liberalism’s emphasis on autonomy and neutrality leaves it unable to account for the values of tradition, community, or political participation, and unable to limit individual liberty when limits are needed. Others argue that autonomy is not the notion of freedom needed to explain why common forms of oppression like sexism are wrong. Still others argue that liberalism’s focus on Western democracies leaves it unable to address the most pressing problems of contemporary politics. Recent work in liberal theory has therefore asked whether liberalism can accommodate the political demands of religious and ethnic communities, ground an adequate conception of democracy, capture feminist critiques of extant power structures, or guide nation-building in the face of secessionist, nationalist, and fundamentalist claims. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Impenetrability: Humpty-Dumpty’s meaning-liberalism,” H. P. Grice, “Davidson and Humpty Dumpty’s glory.”

liberum arbitrium, Latin expression meaning ‘free judgment’, often used to refer to medieval doctrines of free choice or free will. It appears in the title of Augustine’s seminal work De libero arbitrio voluntatis (usually translated ‘On the Free Choice of the Will’) and in many other medieval writings (e.g., Aquinas, in Summa theologiae I, asks “whether man has free choice [liberum arbitrium]”). For medieval thinkers, a judgment (arbitrium) “of the will” was a conclusion of practical reasoning – “I will do this” (hence, a choice or decision) – in contrast to a judgment “of the intellect” (“This is the case”), which concludes theoretical reasoning.

delimitatum: limiting case, an individual or subclass of a given background class that is maximally remote from “typical” or “paradigm” members of the class with respect to some ordering that is not always explicitly mentioned. The number zero is a limiting case of cardinal number. A triangle is a limiting case of polygon. A square is a limiting case of rectangle when rectangles are ordered by the ratio of length to width. Certainty is a limiting case of belief when beliefs are ordered according to “strength of subjective conviction.” Knowledge is a limiting case of belief when beliefs are ordered according “adequacy of objective grounds.” A limiting case is necessarily a case (member) of the background class; in contrast a li-ch’i limiting case 504 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 504 borderline case need not be a case and a degenerate case may clearly fail to be a case at all.

linguistic botany: Ryle preferred to call himself a ‘geographer,’ or cartographer – cf. Grice on conceptual latitude and conceptual longitude. But then there are plants. Pretentious Austin, mocking continental philosophy called this ‘linguistic phenomenology,’ meaning literally, the ‘language phenomena’ out there. Feeling Byzanthine. Possibly the only occasion when Grice engaged in systematic botany. Like Hare, he would just rather ramble around. It was said of Hare that he was ‘of a different world.’ In the West Country, he would go with his mother to identify wild flowers, and they identied “more than a hundred.” Austin is not clear about ‘botanising.’ Grice helps. Grice was a meta-linguistic botanist. His point was to criticise ordinary-language philosophers criticising philosophers. Say: Plato and Ayer say that episteme is a kind of doxa. The contemporary, if dated, ordinary-language philosopher detects a nuance, and embarks risking collision with the conversational facts or data: rushes ahead to exploit the nuance without clarifying it, with wrong dicta like: What I known to be the case I dont believe to be the case. Surely, a cancellable implicaturum generated by the rational principle of conversational helpfulness is all there is to the nuance. Grice knew that unlike the ordinary-language philosopher, he was not providing a taxonomy or description, but a theoretical explanation. To not all philosophers analysis fits them to a T. It did to Grice. It did not even fit Strawson. Grice had a natural talent for analysis. He could not see philosophy as other than conceptual analysis. “No more, no less.” Obviously, there is an evaluative side to the claim that the province of philosophy is to be identified with conceptual analysis. Listen to a theoretical physicist, and hell keep talking about concepts, and even analysing them! The man in the street may not! So Grice finds himself fighting with at least three enemies: the man in the street (and trying to reconcile with him:  What I do is to help you), the scientists (My conceptual analysis is meta-conceptual), and synthetic philosophers who disagree with Grice that analysis plays a key role in philosophical methodology. Grice sees this as an update to his post-war Oxford philosophy. But we have to remember that back when he read that paper, post-war Oxford philosophy, was just around the corner and very fashionable. By the time he composed the piece on conceptual analysis as overlapping with the province of philosophy, he was aware that, in The New World, anaytic had become, thanks to Quine, a bit of an abusive term, and that Grices natural talent for linguistic botanising (at which post-war Oxford philosophy excelled) was not something he could trust to encounter outside Oxford, and his Play Group! Since his Negation and Personal identity Grice is concerned with reductive analysis. How many angels can dance on a needles point? A needless point? This is Grices update to his Post-war Oxford philosophy. More generally concerned with the province of philosophy in general and conceptual analysis beyond ordinary language. It can become pretty technical. Note the Roman overtone of province. Grice is implicating that the other province is perhaps science, even folk science, and the claims and ta legomena of the man in the street. He also likes to play with the idea that a conceptual enquiry need not be philosophical. Witness the very opening to Logic and conversation, Prolegomena. Surely not all inquiries need be philosophical. In fact, a claim to infame of Grice at the Play Group is having once raised the infamous, most subtle, question: what is it that makes a conceptual enquiry philosophically interesting or important? As a result, Austin and his kindergarten spend three weeks analysing the distinct inappropriate implicatura of adverbial collocations of intensifiers like highly depressed, versus very depressed, or very red, but not highly red, to no avail. Actually the logical form of very is pretty complicated, and Grice seems to minimise the point. Grices moralising implicaturum, by retelling the story, is that he has since realised (as he hoped Austin knew) that there is no way he or any philosopher can dictate to any other philosopher, or himself, what is it that makes a conceptual enquiry philosophically interesting or important. Whether it is fun is all that matters. Refs.: The main references are meta-philosophical, i. e. Grice talking about linguistic botany, rather than practicing it. “Reply to Richards,” and the references under “Oxonianism” below are helpful. For actual practice, under ‘rationality.’ There is a specific essay on linguistic botanising, too. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.

linguistic relativity, the thesis that at least some distinctions found in one language are found in no other language (a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, by Benjamin Lee Whorf, of New England, from the river Wharf, in Yorkshire – he died in Hartford, Conn., New England); more generally, the thesis that different languages utilize different representational systems that are at least in some degree informationally incommensurable and hence non-equivalent. The differences arise from the arbitrary features of languages resulting in each language encoding lexically or grammatically some distinctions not found in other languages. The thesis of linguistic determinism holds that the ways people perceive or think about the world, especially with respect to their classificatory systems, are causally determined or influenced by their linguistic systems or by the structures common to all human languages. Specifically, implicit or explicit linguistic categorization determines or influences aspects of nonlinguistic categorization, memory, perception, or cognition in general. Its strongest form (probably a straw-man position) holds that linguistically unencoded concepts are unthinkable. Weaker forms hold that concepts that are linguistically encoded are more accessible to thought and easier to remember than those that are not. This thesis is independent of that of linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism plus linguistic relativity as defined here implies the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

literary theory, a reasoned account of the nature of the literary artifact, its causes, effects, and distinguishing features. So understood, literary theory is part of the systematic study of literature covered by the term ‘criticism’, which also includes interpretation of literary works, philology, literary history, and the evaluation of particular works or bodies of work. Because it attempts to provide the conceptual foundations for practical criticism, literary theory has also been called “critical theory.” However, since the latter term has been appropriated by neo-Marxists affiliated with the Frankfurt School to designate their own kind of social critique, ‘literary theory’ is less open to misunderstanding. Because of its concern with the ways in which literary productions differ from other verbal artifacts and from other works of art, literary theory overlaps extensively with philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and the other human sciences. The first ex professo theory of literature in the West, for centuries taken as normative, was Aristotle’s Poetics. On Aristotle’s view, poetry is a verbal imitation of the forms of human life and action in language made vivid by metaphor. It stimulates its audience to reflect on the human condition, enriches their understanding, and thereby occasions the pleasure that comes from the exercise of the cognitive faculty. The first real paradigm shift in literary theory was introduced by the Romantics of the nineteenth century. The Biographia Literaria of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recounting the author’s conversion from Humean empiricism to a form of German idealism, defines poetry not as a representation of objective structures, but as the imaginative self-expression of the creative subject. Its emphasis is not on the poem as a source of pleasure but on poetry as a heightened form of spiritual activity. The standard work on the transition from classical (imitation) theory to Romantic (expression) theory is M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. In the present century theory has assumed a place of prominence in literary studies. In the first half of the century the works of I. A. Richards – from his early positivist account of linear order poetry in books like Science and Poetry to his later idealist views in books like The Philosophy of Rhetoric – sponsored the practice of the American New Critics. The most influential theorist of the period is Northrop Frye, whose formalist manifesto, Anatomy of Criticism, proposed to make criticism the “science of literature.” The introduction of Continental thought to the English-speaking critical establishment in the 1960s and after spawned a bewildering variety of competing theories of literature: e.g., Russian formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, Marxism, Freudianism, feminism, and even the anti-theoretical movement called the “new pragmatism.” The best summary account of these developments is Frank Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism (1980). Given the present near-chaos in criticism, the future of literary theory is unpredictable. But the chaos itself offers ample opportunities for philosophical analysis and calls for the kind of conceptual discrimination such analysis can offer. Conversely, the study of literary theory can provide philosophers with a better understanding of the textuality of philosophy and of the ways in which philosophical content is determined by the literary form of philosophical texts.

lit. hum. (philos.): While Grice would take tutees under different curricula, he preferred Lit. Hum. So how much philosophy did this include. Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Mill. And that was mainly it. We are referring to the ‘philosophy’ component. Ayer used to say that he would rather have been a judge. But at Oxford of that generation, having a Lit. Hum. perfectly qualified you as a philosopher. And people like Ayer, who would rather be a juddge, end up being a philosopher after going through the Lit. Hum. Grice himself comes as a “Midlands scholarship boy” straight from Clifton on a classics scholarship, and being from the Midlands, straight to Corpus. The fact that he got on so well with Hardie helped. The fact that his interim at Merton worked was good. The fact that the thing at Rossall did NOT work was good. The fact that he becamse a fellow at St. John’s OBVIOUSLY helped. The fact that he had Strawson as a tutee ALSO helped helped. H. P. Grice, Literae Humaniores (Philosophy), Oxon.

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

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

Constant – in system G -- a symbol, such as the connectives -, 8, /, or S or the quantifiers D or E of elementary quantification theory, that represents logical form. The contrast here is with expressions such as terms, predicates, and function symbols, which are supposed to represent the “content” of a sentence or proposition. Beyond this, there is little consensus on how to understand logical constancy. It is sometimes said, e.g., that a symbol is a logical constant if its interpretation is fixed across admissible valuations, though there is disagreement over exactly how to construe this “fixity” constraint. This account seems to make logical form a mere artifact of one’s choice of a model theory. More generally, it has been questioned whether there are any objective grounds for classifying some expressions as logical and others not, or whether such a distinction is (wholly or in part) conventional. Other philosophers have suggested that logical constancy is less a semantic notion than an epistemic one: roughly, that a is a logical constant if the semantic behavior of certain other expressions together with the semantic contribution of a determine a priori (or in some other epistemically privileged fashion) the extensions of complex expressions in which a occurs. There is also considerable debate over whether particular symbols, such as the identity sign, modal operators, and quantifiers other than D and E, are, or should be treated as, logical constants.

Grice’s “logical construction” – a phrase he borrowed from Broad via Russell -- something built by logical operations from certain elements. Suppose that any sentence, S, containing terms apparently referring to objects of type F can be paraphrased without any essential loss of content into some (possibly much more complicated) sentence, Sp, containing only terms referring to objects of type G (distinct from F): in this case, objects of type F may be said to be logical constructions out of objects of type G. The notion originates with Russell’s concept of an “incomplete symbol,” which he introduced in connection with his theory of descriptions. According to Russell, a definite description – i.e., a descriptive phrase, such as ‘the present king of France’, apparently picking out a unique object – cannot be taken at face value as a genuinely referential term. One reason for this is that the existence of the objects seemingly referred to by such phrases can be meaningfully denied. We can say, “The present king of France does not exist,” and it is hard to see how this could be if ‘the present king of France’, to be meaningful, has to refer to the present king of France. One solution, advocated by Meinong, is to claim that the referents required by what ordinary grammar suggests are singular terms must have some kind of “being,” even though this need not amount to actual existence; but this solution offended Russell’s “robust sense of reality.” According to Peano, Whitehead and Russell, then, ‘The F is G’ is to be understood as equivalent to (something like) ‘One and only one thing Fs and that thing is G’. (The phrase ‘one and only one’ can itself be paraphrased away in terms of quantifiers and identity.) The crucial feature of this analysis is that it does not define the problematic phrases by providing synonyms: rather, it provides a rule, which Russell called “a definition in use,” for paraphrasing whole sentences in which they occur into whole sentences in which they do not. This is why definite descriptions are “incomplete symbols”: we do not specify objects that are their meanings; we lay down a rule that explains the meaning of whole sentences in which they occur. Thus definite descriptions disappear under analysis, and with them the shadowy occupants of Meinong’s realm of being. Russell thought that the kind of analysis represented by the theory of descriptions gives the clue to the proper method for philosophy: solve metaphysical and epistemological problems by reducing ontological commitments. The task of philosophy is to substitute, wherever possible, logical constructions for inferred entities. Thus in the philosophy of mathematics, Russell attempted to eliminate numbers, as a distinct category of objects, by showing how mathematical statements can be translated into (what he took to be) purely logical statements. But what really gave Russell’s program its bite was his thought that we can refer only to objects with which we are directly acquainted. This committed him to holding that all terms apparently referring to objects that cannot be regarded as objects of acquaintance should be given contextual definitions along the lines of the theory of descriptions: i.e., to treating everything beyond the scope of acquaintance as a logical construction (or a “logical fiction”). Most notably, Russell regarded physical objects as logical constructions out of sense-data, taking this to resolve the skeptical problem about our knowledge of the external world. The project of showing how physical objects can be treated as logical constructions out of sense-data was a major concern of analytical philosophers in the interwar period, Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, standing as perhaps its major monument. However, the project was not a success. Even Carnap’s construction involves a system of space-time coordinates that is not analyzed in sense-datum terms and today few, if any, philosophers believe that such ambitious projects can be carried through..

informatum -- forma: “To inform was originally to mould, to shape,” and so quite different from Grecian ‘eidos.’ But the ‘forma-materia’ distinction stuck. Whhat is obtained from a proposition, a set of propositions, or an argument by abstracting from the matter of its content terms or by regarding the content terms as mere place-holders or blanks in a form. In what Grice (after Bergmann) calls an ideal (versus an ordinary) language the form of a proposition, a set of propositions, or an argument is determined by the ‘matter’ of the sentence, the set of sentences, or the argument-text expressing it. Two sentences, sets of sentences, or argument-texts are said to have the same form, in this way, if a uniform one-toone substitution of content words transforms the one exactly into the other. ‘Abe properly respects every agent who respects himself’ may be regarded as having the same form as the sentence ‘Ben generously assists every patient who assists himself’. Substitutions used to determine sameness of form (isomorphism) cannot involve change of form words such as ‘every’, ‘no’, ‘some’, ‘is’, etc., and they must be category-preserving, i.e., they must put a proper name for a proper name, an adverb for an adverb, a transitive verb for a transitive verb, and so on. Two sentences having the same grammatical form have exactly the same form words distributed in exactly the same pattern; and although they of course need not, and usually do not, have the same content words, they do have logical dependence logical form exactly the same number of content words. The most distinctive feature of form words, which are also called syncategorematic terms or logical terms, is their topic neutrality; the form words in a sentence are entirely independent of and are in no way indicative of its content or topic. Modern formal languages used in formal axiomatizations of mathematical sciences are often taken as examples of logically perfect languages. Pioneering work on logically perfect languages was done by George Boole, Frege, Giuseppe Peano, Russell, and Church. According to the principle of form, an argument is valid or invalid in virtue of form. More explicitly, every two arguments in the same form are both valid or both invalid. Thus, every argument in the same form as a valid argument is valid and every argument in the same form as an invalid argument is invalid. The argument form that a given argument fits (or has) is not determined solely by the logical forms of its constituent propositions; the arrangement of those propositions is critical because the process of interchanging a premise with the conclusion of a valid argument can result in an invalid argument. The principle of logical form, from which formal logic gets its name, is commonly used in establishing invalidity of arguments and consistency of sets of propositions. In order to show that a given argument is invalid it is sufficient to exhibit another argument as being in the same logical form and as having all true premises and a false conclusion. In order to show that a given set of propositions is consistent it is sufficient to exhibit another set of propositions as being in the same logical form and as being composed exclusively of true propositions. The history of these methods traces back through non-Cantorian set theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and medieval logicians (especially Anselm) to Aristotle. These methods must be used with extreme caution in an ordinary languages that fails to be logically perfect as a result of ellipsis, amphiboly, ambiguity, etc. E.g. ‘This is a male dog’ implies ‘This is a dog.’ But ‘This is a brass monkey’ does not strictly imply – but implicate -- ‘This is a monkey’, as would be required in a what Bergmann calls an ideal (or perfect, rather than ordinary or imperfect) language. Likewise, of two propositions commonly expressed by the ambiguous sentence ‘Ann and Ben are married’ one does and one does not imply (but at most ‘implicate’) the proposition that Ann is married to Ben. (cf. We are married, but not to each other – a New-World ditty.). Grice, Quine and other philosophers – not Strawson! -- are careful to distinguish, in effect, the unique form of a proposition from this or that ‘schematic’ form it may display. The proposition (A) ‘If Abe is Ben, if Ben is wise Abe is wise’ has exactly one form, which it shares with ‘If Carl is Dan, if Dan is kind Carl is kind’, whereas it has all of the following schematic forms: ‘If P, if Q then R;’ ‘If P, Q;’ and ‘P.’ The principle of form for propositions is that every two propositions in the same form are both tautological (logically necessary) or both non-tautological. Thus, although the propositions above are tautological, there are non-tautological propositions that fit this or that the schematic form just mentioned. Failure to distinguish form proper from ‘schematic form’ has led to fallacies. According to the principle of logical form quoted above every argument in the same logical form as an invalid argument is invalid, but it is not the case that every argument sharing a schematic form with an invalid argument is invalid. Contrary to what would be fallaciously thought, the conclusion ‘Abe is Ben’ is logically implied by the following two propositions taken together, ‘If Abe is Ben, Ben is Abe’ and ‘Ben is Abe’, even though the argument shares a schematic form with invalid arguments “committing” the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Refs.: Grice, “Leibniz on ‘lingua perfecta.’”

indicatum --  indicator: an expression that provides some help in identifying the conclusion of an argument or the premises offered in support of a conclusion. Common premise indicators include ‘for’, ‘because’, and ‘since’. Common conclusion indicators include ‘so’, ‘it follows that’, ‘hence’, ‘thus’, and ‘therefore’. Since Tom sat in the back of the room, he could not hear the performance clearly. Therefore, he could not write a proper review. ’Since’ makes clear that Tom’s seat location is offered as a reason to explain his inability to hear the performance. ‘Therefore’ indicates that the proposition that Tom could not write a proper review is the conclusion of the argument.

Notatum: symbol or communication device designed to achieve unambiguous formulation of principles and inferences in deductive logic. A notation involves some regimentation of words, word order, etc., of language. Some schematization was attempted even in ancient times by Aristotle, the Megarians, the Stoics, Boethius, and the medievals. But Leibniz’s vision of a universal logical language began to be realized only in the past 150 years. The notation is not yet standardized, but the following varieties of logical operators in propositional and predicate calculus may be noted. Given that ‘p’, ‘q’, ‘r’, etc., are propositional variables, or propositions, we find, in the contexts of their application, the following variety of operators (called truth-functional connectives). Negation: ‘-p’, ‘Ýp’, ‘p - ’, ‘p’ ’. Conjunction: ‘p • q’, ‘p & q’, ‘p 8 q’. Weak or inclusive disjunction: ‘p 7 q’. Strong or exclusive disjunction: ‘p V q’, ‘p ! q’, ‘p W q’. Material conditional (sometimes called material implication): ‘p / q’, ‘p P q’. Material biconditional (sometimes called material equivalence): ‘p S q’, ‘p Q q’. And, given that ‘x’, ‘y’, ‘z’, etc., are individual variables and ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, etc., are predicate letters, we find in the predicate calculus two quantifiers, a universal and an existential quantifier: Universal quantification: ‘(x)Fx’, ‘(Ex)Fx’, ‘8xFx’. Existential quantification: ‘(Ex)Fx’, ‘(Dx)Fx’, ‘7xFx’. The formation principle in all the schemata involving dyadic or binary operators (connectives) is that the logical operator is placed between the propositional variables (or propositional constants) connected by it. But there exists a notation, the so-called Polish notation, based on the formation rule stipulating that all operators, and not only negation and quantifiers, be placed in front of the schemata over which they are ranging. The following representations are the result of application of that rule: Negation: ‘Np’. Conjunction: ‘Kpq’. Weak or inclusive disjunction: ‘Apq’. Strong or exclusive disjunction: ‘Jpq’. Conditional: ‘Cpq’. Biconditional: ‘Epq’. Sheffer stroke: ‘Dpq’. Universal quantification: ‘PxFx’. Existential quantifications: ‘9xFx’. Remembering that ‘K’, ‘A’, ‘J’, ‘C’, ‘E’, and ‘D’ are dyadic functors, we expect them to be followed by two propositional signs, each of which may itself be simple or compound, but no parentheses are needed to prevent ambiguity. Moreover, this notation makes it very perspicuous as to what kind of proposition a given compound proposition is: all we need to do is to look at the leftmost operator. To illustrate, ‘p7 (q & r) is a disjunction of ‘p’ with the conjunction ‘Kqr’, i.e., ‘ApKqr’, while ‘(p 7 q) & r’ is a conjunction of a disjunction ‘Apq’ with ‘r’, i.e., ‘KApqr’. ‘- p P q’ is written as ‘CNpq’, i.e., ‘if Np, then q’, while negation of the whole conditional, ‘-(p P q)’, becomes ‘NCpq’. A logical thesis such as ‘((p & q) P r) P ((s P p) P (s & q) P r))’ is written concisely as ‘CCKpqrCCspCKsqr’. The general proposition ‘(Ex) (Fx P Gx)’ is written as ‘PxCFxGx’, while a truth-function of quantified propositions ‘(Ex)Fx P (Dy)Gy’ is written as ‘CPxFx9yGy’. An equivalence such as ‘(Ex) Fx Q - (Dx) - Fx’ becomes ‘EPxFxN9xNFx’, etc. Dot notation is way of using dots to construct well-formed formulas that is more thrifty with punctuation marks than the use of parentheses with their progressive strengths of scope. But dot notation is less thrifty than the parenthesis-free Polish notation, which secures well-formed expressions entirely on the basis of the order of logical operators relative to truth-functional compounds. Various dot notations have been devised. The convention most commonly adopted is that punctuation dots always operate away from the connective symbol that they flank. It is best to explain dot punctuation by examples: (1) ‘p 7 (q - r)’ becomes ‘p 7 .q P - r’; (2) ‘(p 7 q) P - r’ becomes ‘p 7 q. P - r’; (3) ‘(p P (q Q r)) 7 (p 7 r)’ becomes ‘p P. q Q r: 7. p 7r’; (4) ‘(- pQq)•(rPs)’ becomes ‘-p Q q . r Q s’. logically perfect language logical notation 513 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 513 Note that here the dot is used as conjunction dot and is not flanked by punctuation dots, although in some contexts additional punctuation dots may have to be added, e.g., ‘p.((q . r) P s), which is rewritten as ‘p : q.r. P s’. The scope of a group of n dots extends to the group of n or more dots. (5) ‘- p Q (q.(r P s))’ becomes ‘- p. Q : q.r P s’; (6)‘- pQ((q . r) Ps)’ becomes ‘~p. Q: q.r.Ps’; (7) ‘(- p Q (q . r)) P s’ becomes ‘- p Q. q.r: P s’. The notation for modal propositions made popular by C. I. Lewis consisted of the use of ‘B’ to express the idea of possibility, in terms of which other alethic modal notions were defined. Thus, starting with ‘B p’ for ‘It is possiblethat p’ we get ‘- B p’ for ‘It is not possible that p’ (i.e., ‘It is impossible that p’), ‘- B - p’ for ‘It is not possible that not p’ (i.e., ‘It is necessary that p’), and ‘B - p’ for ‘It is possible that not p’ (i.e., ‘It is contingent that p’ in the sense of ‘It is not necessary that p’, i.e., ‘It is possible that not p’). Given this primitive or undefined notion of possibility, Lewis proceeded to introduce the notion of strict implication, represented by ‘ ’ and defined as follows: ‘p q .% . - B (p. -q)’. More recent tradition finds it convenient to use ‘A’, either as a defined or as a primitive symbol of necessity. In the parenthesis-free Polish notation the letter ‘M’ is usually added as the sign of possibility and sometimes the letter ‘L’ is used as the sign of necessity. No inconvenience results from adopting these letters, as long as they do not coincide with any of the existing truthfunctional operators ‘N’, ‘K’, ‘A’, ‘J’, ‘C’, ‘E’, ‘D’. Thus we can express symbolically the sentences ‘If p is necessary, then p is possible’ as ‘CNMNpMp’ or as ‘CLpMp’; ‘It is necessary that whatever is F is G’ as ‘NMNPxCFxGx’ or as ‘LPxCFxGx’; and ‘Whatever is F is necessarily G’ as ‘PxCFxNMNGx’ or as PxCFxLGx; etc.

logical positivism, also called positivism, a philosophical movement inspired by empiricism and verificationism. While there are still philosophers who would identify themselves with some of the logical positivists’ theses, many of the central docrines of the theory have come under considerable attack in the last half of this century. In some ways logical positivism can be seen as a natural outgrowth of radical or British empiricism and logical atomism. The driving force of positivism may well have been adherence to the verifiability criterion for the meaningfulness of cognitive statements. Acceptance of this principle led positivists to reject as problematic many assertions of religion, morality, and the kind of philosophy they described as metaphysics. The verifiability criterion of meaning. The radical empiricists took genuine ideas to be composed of simple ideas traceable to elements in experience. If this is true and if thoughts about the empirical world are “made up” out of ideas, it would seem to follow that all genuine thoughts about the world must have as constituents thoughts that denote items of experience. While not all positivists tied meaning so clearly to the sort of experiences the empiricists had in mind, they were convinced that a genuine contingent assertion about the world must be verifiable through experience or observation. Questions immediately arose concerning the relevant sense of ‘verify’. Extreme versions of the theory interpret verification in terms of experiences or observations that entail the truth of the proposition in question. Thus for my assertion that there is a table before me to be meaningful, it must be in principle possible for me to accumulate evidence or justification that would guarantee the existence of the table, which would make it impossible for the table not to exist. Even this statement of the view is ambiguous, however, for the impossibility of error could be interpreted as logical or conceptual, or something much weaker, say, causal. Either way, extreme verificationism seems vulnerable to objections. Universal statements, such as ‘All metal expands when heated’, are meaningful, but it is doubtful that any observations could ever conclusively verify them. One might modify the criterion to include as meaningful only statements that can be either conclusively confirmed or conclusively disconfirmed. It is doubtful, however, that even ordinary statements about the physical world satisfy the extreme positivist insistence that they admit of conclusive verification or falsification. If the evidence we have for believing what we do about the physical world consists of knowledge of fleeting and subjective sensation, the possibility of hallucination or deception by a malevolent, powerful being seems to preclude the possibility of any finite sequence of sensations conclusively establishing the existence or absence of a physical object. Faced with these difficulties, at least some positivists retreated to a more modest form of verificationism which insisted only that if a proposition is to be meaningful it must be possible to find evidence or justification that bears on the likelihood of the proposition’s being true. It is, of course, much more difficult to find counterexamples to this weaker form of verificationism, but by the same token it is more difficult to see how the principle will do the work the positivists hoped it would do of weeding out allegedly problematic assertions. Necessary truth. Another central tenet of logical positivism is that all meaningful statements fall into two categories: necessary truths that are analytic and knowable a priori, and contingent truths that are synthetic and knowable only a posteriori. If a meaningful statement is not a contingent, empirical statement verifiable through experience, then it is either a formal tautology or is analytic, i.e., reducible to a formal tautology through substitution of synonymous expressions. According to the positivist, tautologies and analytic truths that do not describe the world are made true (if true) or false (if false) by some fact about the rules of language. ‘P or not-P’ is made true by rules we have for the use of the connectives ‘or’ and ‘not’ and for the assignments of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’. Again there are notorious problems for logical positivism. It is difficult to reduce the following apparently necessary truths to formal tautologies through the substitution of synonymous expressions: (1) Everything that is blue (all over) is not red (all over). (2) All equilateral triangles are equiangular triangles. (3) No proposition is both true and false. Ironically, the positivists had a great deal of trouble categorizing the very theses that defined their view, such as the claims about meaningfulness and verifiability and the claims about the analytic–synthetic distinction. Reductionism. Most of the logical positivists were committed to a foundationalist epistemology according to which all justified belief rests ultimately on beliefs that are non-inferentially justified. These non-inferentially justified beliefs were sometimes described as basic, and the truths known in such manner were often referred to as self-evident, or as protocol statements. Partly because the positivists disagreed as to how to understand the notion of a basic belief or a protocol statement, and even disagreed as to what would be good examples, positivism was by no means a monolithic movement. Still, the verifiability criterion of meaning, together with certain beliefs about where the foundations of justification lie and beliefs about what constitutes legitimate reasoning, drove many positivists to embrace extreme forms of reductionism. Briefly, most of them implicitly recognized only deduction and (reluctantly) induction as legitimate modes of reasoning. Given such a view, difficult epistemological gaps arise between available evidence and the commonsense conclusions we want to reach about the world around us. The problem was particularly acute for empiricists who recognized as genuine empirical foundations only propositions describing perceptions or subjective sensations. Such philosophers faced an enormous difficulty explaining how what we know about sensations could confirm for us assertions about an objective physical world. Clearly we cannot deduce any truths about the physical world from what we know about sensations (remember the possibility of hallucination). Nor does it seem that we could inductively establish sensation as evidence for the existence of the physical world when all we have to rely on ultimately is our awareness of sensations. Faced with the possibility that all of our commonplace assertions about the physical world might fail the verifiability test for meaningfulness, many of the positivists took the bold step of arguing that statements about the physical world could really be viewed as reducible to (equivalent in meaning to) very complicated statements about sensations. Phenomenalists, as these philosophers were called, thought that asserting that a given table exists is equivalent in meaning to a complex assertion about what sensations or sequences of sensations a subject would have were he to have certain other sensations. The gap between sensation and the physical world is just one of the epistemic gaps threatening the meaningfulness of commonplace assertions about the world. If all we know about the mental states of others is inferred from their physical behavior, we must still explain how such inference is justified. Thus logical positivists who took protocol statements to include ordinary assertions about the physical world were comfortable reducing talk about the mental states of others to talk about their behavior; this is logical behaviorism. Even some of those positivists who thought empirical propositions had to be reduced ultimately to talk about sensations were prepared to translate talk about the mental states of others into talk about their behavior, which, ironically, would in turn get translated right back into talk about sensation. Many of the positivists were primarily concerned with the hypotheses of theoretical physics, which seemed to go far beyond anything that could be observed. In the context of philosophy of science, some positivists seemed to take as unproblematic ordinary statements about the macrophysical world but were still determined either to reduce theoretical statements in science to complex statements about the observable world, or to view theoretical entities as a kind of convenient fiction, description of which lacks any literal truth-value. The limits of a positivist’s willingness to embrace reductionism are tested, however, when he comes to grips with knowledge of the past. It seems that propositions describing memory experiences (if such “experiences” really exist) do not entail any truths about the past, nor does it seem possible to establish memory inductively as a reliable indicator of the past. (How could one establish the past correlations without relying on memory?) The truly hard-core reductionists actually toyed with the possibility of reducing talk about the past to talk about the present and future, but it is perhaps an understatement to suggest that at this point the plausibility of the reductionist program was severely strained.

logical product, a conjunction of propositions or predicates. The term ‘product’ derives from an analogy that conjunction bears to arithmetic multiplication, and that appears very explicitly in an algebraic logic such as a Boolean algebra. In the same way, ‘logical sum’ usually means the disjunction of propositions or predicates, and the term ‘sum’ derives from an analogy that disjunction bears with arithmetic addition. In the logical literature of the nineteenth century, e.g. in the works of Peirce, ‘logical product’ and ‘logical sum’ often refer to the relative product and relative sum, respectively. In the work of George Boole, ‘logical sum’ indicates an operation that corresponds not to disjunction but rather to the exclusive ‘or’. The use of ‘logical sum’ in its contemporary sense was introduced by John Venn and then adopted and promulgated by Peirce. ‘Relative product’ was introduced by Augustus De Morgan and also adopted and promulgated by Peirce.

Subjectum – The subjectum-praedicatum distinction -- in Aristotelian and traditional (and what Grice calls NEO-traditionalism of Strawson) logic, the common noun, or sometimes the intension or the extension of the common noun, that follows the initial quantifier word (‘every’, ‘some’, ‘no’, etc.) of a sentence, as opposed to the material subject, which is the entire noun phrase including the quantifier and the noun, and in some usages, any modifiers that may apply. The material subject of ‘Every number exceeding zero is positive’ is ‘every number’, or in some usages, ‘every number exceeding zero’, whereas the conceptual or formal subject is ‘number’, or the intension or the extension of ‘number’. Similar distinctions are made between the logical predicate and the grammatical predicate: in the above example, ‘is positive’ is the material predicate, whereas the formal predicate is the adjective ‘positive’, or sometimes the property of being positive or even the extension of ‘positive’. In standard first-order predicate calculus with identity, the formal subject of a sentence under a given interpretation is the entire universe of discourse of the interpretation.

Grice on syntactics, semantics, and pramatics – syntactics -- description of the forms of the expressions of a language in virtue of which the expressions stand in logical relations to one another. Implicit in the idea of logical syntax is the assumption that all – or at least most – logical relations hold in virtue of form: e.g., that ‘If snow is white, then snow has color’ and ‘Snow is white’ jointly entail ‘Snow has color’ in virtue of their respective forms, ‘If P, then Q’, ‘P’, and ‘Q’. The form assigned to an expression in logical syntax is its logical form. Logical form may not be immediately apparent from the surface form of an expression. Both (1) ‘Every individual is physical’ and (2) ‘Some individual is physical’ apparently share the subjectpredicate form. But this surface form is not the form in virtue of which these sentences (or the propositions they might be said to express) stand in logical relations to other sentences (or propositions), for if it were, (1) and (2) would have the same logical relations to all sentences (or propositions), but they do not; (1) and (3) ‘Aristotle is an individual’ jointly entail (4) ‘Aristotle is physical’, whereas (2) and (3) do not jointly entail (4). So (1) and (2) differ in logical form. The contemporary logical syntax, devised largely by Frege, assigns very different logical forms to (1) and (2), namely: ‘For every x, if x is an individual, then x is physical’ and ‘For some x, x is an individual and x is physical’, respectively. Another example: (5) ‘The satellite of the moon has water’ seems to entail ‘There is at least one thing that orbits the moon’ and ‘There is no more than one thing that orbits the moon’. In view of this, Russell assigned to (5) the logical form ‘For some x, x orbits the moon, and for every y, if y orbits the moon, then y is identical with x, and for every y, if y orbits the moon, then y has water’. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Peirce, Mead, and Morris on the semiotic triad – and why we don’t study them at Oxford.”

logicism, the thesis that mathematics, or at least some significant portion thereof, is part of logic. Modifying Carnap’s suggestion (in “The Logicist Foundation for Mathematics,” first published in Erkenntnis), this thesis is the conjunction of two theses: expressibility logicism: mathematical propositions are (or are alternative expressions of) purely logical propositions; and derivational logicism: the axioms and theorems of mathematics can be derived from pure logic. Here is a motivating example from the arithmetic of the natural numbers. Let the cardinality-quantifiers be those expressible in the form ‘there are exactly . . . many xs such that’, which we abbreviate ¢(. . . x),Ü with ‘. . .’ replaced by an Arabic numeral. These quantifiers are expressible with the resources of first-order logic with identity; e.g. ‘(2x)Px’ is equivalent to ‘DxDy(x&y & Ez[Pz S (z%x 7 z%y)])’, the latter involving no numerals or other specifically mathematical vocabulary. Now 2 ! 3 % 5 is surely a mathematical truth. We might take it to express the following: if we take two things and then another three things we have five things, which is a validity of second-order logic involving no mathematical vocabulary: EXEY ([(2x) Xx & (3x)Yx & ÝDx(Xx & Yx)] / (5x) (Xx 7 Yx)). Furthermore, this is provable in any formalized fragment of second-order logic that includes all of first-order logic with identity and secondorder ‘E’-introduction. But what counts as logic? As a derivation? As a derivation from pure logic? Such unclarities keep alive the issue of whether some version or modification of logicism is true. The “classical” presentations of logicism were Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik and Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. Frege took logic to be a formalized fragment of secondorder logic supplemented by an operator forming singular terms from “incomplete” expressions, such a term standing for an extension of the “incomplete” expression standing for a concept of level 1 (i.e. type 1). Axiom 5 of Grundgesetze served as a comprehension-axiom implying the existence of extensions for arbitrary Fregean concepts of level 1. In his famous letter of 1901 Russell showed that axiom to be inconsistent, thus derailing Frege’s original program. Russell and Whitehead took logic to be a formalized fragment of a ramified full finite-order (i.e. type w) logic, with higher-order variables ranging over appropriate propositional functions. The Principia and their other writings left the latter notion somewhat obscure. As a defense of expressibility logicism, Principia had this peculiarity: it postulated typical ambiguity where naive mathematics seemed unambiguous; e.g., each type had its own system of natural numbers two types up. As a defense of derivational logicism, Principia was flawed by virtue of its reliance on three axioms, a version of the Axiom of Choice, and the axioms of Reducibility and Infinity, whose truth was controversial. Reducibility could be avoided by eliminating the ramification of the logic (as suggested by Ramsey). But even then, even the arithmetic of the natural numbers required use of Infinity, which in effect asserted that there are infinitely many individuals (i.e., entities of type 0). Though Infinity was “purely logical,” i.e., contained only logical expressions, in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (p. 141) Russell admits that it “cannot be asserted by logic to be true.” Russell then (pp. 194–95) forgets this: “If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer is arbitrary.” The answer, “Section 120, in which Infinity is first assumed!,” is not arbitrary. In Principia Whitehead and Russell jocularly say of Infinity that they “prefer to keep it as a hypothesis.” Perhaps then they did not really take logicism to assert the above identity, but rather a correspondence: to each sentence f of mathematics there corresponds a conditional sentence of logic whose antecedent is the Axiom of Infinity and whose consequent is a purely logical reformulation of f. In spite of the problems with the “classical” versions of logicism, if we count so-called higherorder (at least second-order) logic as logic, and if we reformulate the thesis to read ‘Each area of mathematics is, or is part of, a logic’, logicism remains alive and well.

logistic system, a formal language together with a set of axioms and rules of inference, or what many today would call a “logic.” The original idea behind the notion of a logistic system was that the language, axioms, rules, and attendant concepts of proof and theorem were to be specified in a mathematically precise fashion, thus enabling one to make the study of deductive reasoning an exact science. One was to begin with an effective specification of the primitive symbols of the language and of which (finite) sequences of symbols were to count as sentences or wellformed formulas. Next, certain sentences were to be singled out effectively as axioms. The rules of inference were also to be given in such a manner that there would be an effective procedure for telling which rules are rules of the system and what inferences they license. A proof was then defined as any finite sequence of sentences, each of which is either an axiom or follows from some earlier line(s) by one of the rules, with a theorem being the last line of a proof. With the subsequent development of logic, the requirement of effectiveness has sometimes been dropped, as has the requirement that sentences and proofs be finite in length.

Logos (plural: logoi) (Grecian, ‘word’, ‘speech’, ‘reason’), term with the following main philosophical senses. (1) Rule, principle, law. E.g., in Stoicism the logos is the divine order and in Neoplatonism the intelligible regulating forces displayed in the sensible world. The term came thus to refer, in Christianity, to the Word of God, to the instantiation of his agency in creation, and, in the New Testament, to the person of Christ. (2) Proposition, account, explanation, thesis, argument. E.g., Aristotle presents a logos from first principles. (3) Reason, reasoning, the rational faculty, abstract theory (as opposed to experience), discursive reasoning (as opposed to intuition). E.g., Plato’s Republic uses the term to refer to the intellectual part of the soul. (4) Measure, relation, proportion, ratio. E.g., Aristotle speaks of the logoi of the musical scales. (5) Value, worth. E.g., Heraclitus speaks of the man whose logos is greater than that of others.

Longinus (late first century A.D.), Greek literary critic, author of a treatise On the Sublime (Peri hypsous). The work is ascribed to “Dionysius or Longinus” in the manuscript and is now tentatively dated to the end of the first century A.D. The author argues for five sources of sublimity in literature: (a) grandeur of thought and (b) deep emotion, both products of the writer’s “nature”; (c) figures of speech, (d) nobility and originality in word use, and (e) rhythm and euphony in diction, products of technical artistry. The passage on emotion is missing from the text. The treatise, with Aristotelian but enthusiastic spirit, throws light on the emotional effect of many great passages of Greek literature; noteworthy are its comments on Homer (ch. 9). Its nostalgic plea for an almost romantic independence and greatness of character and imagination in the poet and orator in an age of dictatorial government and somnolent peace is unique and memorable.

lottery paradox, a paradox involving two plausible assumptions about justification which yield the conclusion that a fully rational thinker may justifiably believe a pair of contradictory propositions. The unattractiveness of this conclusion has led philosophers to deny one or the other of the assumptions in question. The paradox, which is due to Henry Kyburg, is generated as follows. Suppose I am contemplating a fair lottery involving n tickets (for some suitably large n), and I justifiably believe that exactly one ticket will win. Assume that if the probability of p, relative to one’s evidence, meets some given high threshold less than 1, then one has justification for believing that p (and not merely justification for believing that p is highly probable). This is sometimes called a rule of detachment for inductive hypotheses. Then supposing that the number n of tickets is large enough, the rule implies that I have justification for believing (T1) that the first ticket will lose (since the probability of T1 (% (n † 1)/n) will exceed the given high threshold if n is large enough). By similar reasoning, I will also have justification for believing (T2) that the second ticket will lose, and similarly for each remaining ticket. Assume that if one has justification for believing that p and justification for believing that q, then one has justification for believing that p and q. This is a consequence of what is sometimes called “deductive closure for justification,” according to which one has justification for believing the deductive consequences of what one justifiably believes. Closure, then, implies that I have justification for believing that T1 and T2 and . . . Tn. But this conjunctive proposition is equivalent to the proposition that no ticket will win, and we began with the assumption that I have justification for believing that exactly one ticket will win.

Lotze, philosopher and influential representative of post-Hegelian German metaphysics. Lotze was born in Bautzen and studied medicine, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Leipzig, where he became instructor, first in medicine and later in philosophy. His early views, expressed in his Metaphysik and Logik, were influenced by C. H. Weisse, a former student of Hegel’s. He succeeded Herbart as professor of philosophy at Göttingen. His best-known work, Mikrocosmus. “Logik” and “Metaphysik” were published as two parts of his “System der Philosophie. While Lotze shared the metaphysical and systematic appetites of his German idealist predecessors, he rejected their intellectualism, favoring an emphasis on the primacy of feeling; believed that metaphysics must fully respect the methods, results, and “mechanistic” assumptions of the empirical sciences; and saw philosophy as the never completed attempt to raise and resolve questions arising from the inevitable pluralism of methods and interests involved in science, ethics, and the arts. A strong personalism is manifested in his assertion that feeling discloses to us a relation to a personal deity and its teleological workings in nature. His most enduring influences can be traced, in America, through Royce, B. P. Bowne, and James, and, in England, through Bosanquet and Bradley.

Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, the result that for any set of sentences of standard predicate logic, if there is any interpretation in which they are all true, there there is also an interpretation whose domain consists of natural numbers and in which they are all true. Leopold Löwenheim proved in 1915 that for finite sets of sentences of standard predicate logic, if there is any interpretation in which they are true, there is also an interpretation that makes them true and where the domain is a subset of the domain of the first interpretation, and the new domain can be mapped one-to-one onto a set of natural numbers. Löwenheim’s proof contained some gaps and made essential but implicit use of the axiom of choice, a principle of set theory whose truth was, and is, a matter of debate. In fact, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem is equivalent to the axiom of choice. Thoralf Skolem, in 1920, gave a more detailed proof that made explicit the appeal to the axiom of choice and that extended the scope of the theorem to include infinite sets of sentences. In 1922 he gave an essentially different proof that did not depend on the axiom of choice and in which the domain consisted of natural numbers rather than being of the same size as a set of natural numbers. In most contemporary texts, Skolem’s result is proved by methods later devised by Gödel, Herbrand, or Henkin for proving other results. If the language does not include an identity predicate, then Skolem’s result is that the second domain consists of the entire set of natural numbers; if the language includes an identity predicate, then the second domain may be a proper subset of the natural numbers. (v. van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic). The original results were of interest because they showed that in many cases unexpected interpretations with smaller infinite domains than those of the initially given interpretation could be constructed. It was later shown – and this is the Upward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem – that interpretations with larger domains could also be constructed that rendered true the same set of sentences. Hence the theorem as stated initially is sometimes referred to as the Downward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. The theorem was surprising because it was believed that certain sets of axioms characterized domains, such as the continuum of real numbers, that were larger than the set of natural numbers. This surprise is called Skolem’s paradox, but it is to be emphasized that this is a philosophical puzzle rather than a formal contradiction. Two main lines of response to the paradox developed early. The realist, who believes that the continuum exists independently of our knowledge or description of it, takes the theorem to show either that the full truth about the structure of the continuum is ineffable or at least that means other than standard first-order predicate logic are required. The constructivist, who believes that the continuum is in some sense our creation, takes the theorem to show that size comparisons among infinite sets is not an absolute matter, but relative to the particular descriptions given. Both positions have received various more sophisticated formulations that differ in details, but they remain the two main lines of development.

Lucretius: Roman poet, author of “De rerum natura,” an epic poem in six books. Lucretius’s emphasis, as an orthodox Epicurean, is on the role of even the most technical aspects of physics and philosophy in helping to attain emotional peace and dismiss the terrors of popular religion. Each book studies some aspect of the school’s theories, while purporting to offer elementary instruction to its addressee, Memmius. Each begins with an ornamental proem and ends with a passage of heightened emotional impact; the argumentation is adorned with illustrations from personal observation, frequently of the contemporary Roman and Italian scene. Book 1 demonstrates that nothing exists but an infinity of atoms moving in an infinity of void. Opening with a proem on the love of Venus and Mars (an allegory of the Roman peace), it ends with an image of Epicurus as conqueror, throwing the javelin of war outside the finite universe of the geocentric astronomers. Book 2 proves the mortality of all finite worlds; Book 3, after proving the mortality of the human soul, ends with a hymn on the theme that there is nothing to feel or fear in death. The discussion of sensation and thought in Book 4 leads to a diatribe against the torments of sexual desire. The shape and contents of the visible world are discussed in Book 5, which ends with an account of the origins of civilization. Book 6, about the forces that govern meteorological, seismic, and related phenomena, ends with a frightening picture of the plague of 429 B.C. at Athens. The unexpectedly gloomy end suggests the poem is incomplete (also the absence of two great Epicurean themes, friendship and the gods).

Lukács: philosopher best known for his History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923). In 1918 he joined the Communist Party and for much of the remainder of his career had a controversial relationship with it. For several months in 1919 he was People’s Commissar for Education in Béla Kun’s government, until he fled to Vienna and later moved to Berlin. In 1933 he fled Hitler and moved to Moscow, remaining there until the end of World War II, when he returned to Budapest as a university professor. In 1956 he was Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy’s short-lived government. This led to a brief exile in Rumania. In his later years he returned to teaching in Budapest and was much celebrated by the Hungarian government. His Collected Works are forthcoming in both German and Hungarian. He is equally celebrated for his literary criticism and his reconstruction of the young Marx’s thought. For convenience his work is often divided into three periods: the pre-Marxist, the Stalinist, and the post-Stalinist. What unifies these periods and remains constant in his work are the problems of dialectics and the concept of totality. He stressed the Marxist claim of the possibility of a dialectical unity of subject and object. This was to be obtained through the proletariat’s realization of itself and the concomitant destruction of economic alienation in society, with the understanding that truth was a still-to-be-realized totality. (In the post–World War II period this theme was taken up by the Yugoslavian praxis theorists.) The young neo-Kantian Lukács presented an aesthetics stressing the subjectivity of human experience and the emptiness of social experience. This led several French philosophers to claim that he was the first major existentialist of the twentieth century; he strongly denied it. Later he asserted that realism is the only correct way to understand literary criticism, arguing that since humanity is at the core of any social discussion, form depends on content and the content of politics is central to all historical social interpretations of literature. Historically Lukács’s greatest claim to fame within Marxist circles came from his realization that Marx’s materialist theory of history and the resultant domination of the economic could be fully understood only if it allowed for both necessity and species freedom. In History and Class Consciousness he stressed Marx’s debt to Hegelian dialectics years before the discovery of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Lukács stresses his Hegelian Marxism as the correct orthodox version over and against the established Engels-inspired Soviet version of a dialectics of nature. His claim to be returning to Marx’s methodology emphasizes the primacy of the concept of totality. It is through Marx’s use of the dialectic that capitalist society can be seen as essentially reified and the proletariat viewed as the true subject of history and the only possible salvation of humanity. All truth is to be seen in relation to the proletariat’s historical mission. Marx’s materialist conception of history itself must be examined in light of proletarian knowledge. Truth is no longer given but must be understood in terms of relative moments in the process of the unfolding of the real union of theory and praxis: the totality of social relations. This union is not to be realized as some statistical understanding, but rather grasped through proletarian consciousness and directed party action in which subject and object are one. (Karl Mannheim included a modified version of this theory of social-historical relativism in his work on the sociology of knowledge.) In Europe and America this led to Western Marxism. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it led to condemnation. If both the known and the knower are moments of the same thing, then there is a two-directional dialectical relationship, and Marxism cannot be understood from Engels’s one-way movement of the dialectic of nature. The Communist attack on Lukács was so extreme that he felt it necessary to write an apologetic essay on Lenin’s established views. In The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics (1938), Lukács modified his views but still stressed the dialectical commonality of Hegel and Marx. In Lukács’s last years he unsuccessfully tried to develop a comprehensive ethical theory. The positive result was over two thousand pages of a preliminary study on social ontology.

Lukasiewicz: philosopher and logician, the most renowned member of the Warsaw School. The work for which he is best known is the discovery of many-valued logics, but he also invented bracket-free Polish notation; obtained original consistency, completeness, independence, and axiom-shortening results for sentential calculi; rescued Stoic logic from the misinterpretation and incomprehension of earlier historians and restored it to its rightful place as the first formulation of the theory of deduction; and finally incorporated Aristotle’s syllogisms, both assertoric and modal, into a deductive system in his work Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic. Reflection on Aristotle’s discussion of future contingency in On Interpretation led Lukasiewicz in 1918 to posit a third truth-value, possible, in addition to true and false, and to construct a formal three-valued logic. Where in his notation Cpq denotes ‘if p then q’, Np ‘not p’, Apq ‘either p or q’, and Kpq ‘both p and q’, the system is defined by the following matrices (½ is the third truthvalue): Apq is defined as CCpqq, and Kpq as NANpNq. The system was axiomatized by Wajsberg in 1931. Lukasiewicz’s motivation in constructing a formal system of three-valued logic was to break the grip of the idea of universal determinism on the imagination of philosophers and scientists. For him, there was causal determinism (shortly to be undermined by quantum theory), but there was also logical determinism, which in accordance with the principle of bivalence decreed that the statement that J.L. would be in Warsaw at noon on December 21 next year was either true or false now, and indeed had been either true or false for all time. In three-valued logic this statement would take the value ½, thus avoiding any apparent threat to free will posed by the law of bivalence.

Lull, Raymond, also spelled Raymond Lully, Ramon Llull, mystic and missionary. A polemicist against Islam, a social novelist, and a constructor of schemes for international unification, Lull is best known in the history of philosophy for his quasialgebraic or combinatorial treatment of metaphysical principles. His logic of divine and creaturely attributes is set forth first in an Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem (1274), next in an Ars demonstrativa (1283–89), then in reworkings of both of these and in the Tree of Knowledge, and finally in the Ars brevis and the Ars generalis ultima (1309–16). Each of these contains tables and diagrams that permit the reader to calculate the interactions of the various principles. Although his dates place him in the period of mature Scholasticism, the vernacular language and the Islamic or Judaic construction of Lull’s works relegate him to the margin of Scholastic debates. His influence is to be sought rather in late medieval and Renaissance cabalistic or hermetic traditions.

Luther: German religious reformer and leader of the Protestant Reformation. He was an Augustinian friar and unsystematic theologian from Saxony, schooled in nominalism (Ockham, Biel, Staupitz) and trained in biblical languages. Luther initially taught philosophy and subsequently Scripture (Romans, Galatians, Hebrews) at Wittenberg University. His career as a church reformer began with his public denunciation, in the 95 theses, of the sale of indulgences in October 1517. Luther produced three incendiary tracts: Appeal to the Nobility, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian Man (1520), which prompted his excommunication. At the 1521 Diet of Worms he claimed: “I am bound by the Scripture I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against my conscience. Here I stand, may God help me.” Despite his modernist stance on the primacy of conscience over tradition, the reformer broke with Erasmus over free will (De servo Arbitrio, 1525), championing an Augustinian, antihumanist position. His crowning achievement, the translation of the Bible into German (1534/45), shaped the modern German language. On the strength of a biblical-Christocentric, anti-philosophical theology, he proclaimed justification by faith alone and the priesthood of all believers. He unfolded a theologia crucis, reformed the Mass, acknowledged only two sacraments (baptism and the Eucharist), advocated consubstantiation instead of transubstantiation, and propounded the Two Kingdoms theory in church–state relations.

lycæum: an extensive sanctuary of Apollo just east off Athens (“so my “Athenian dialectic” has to be taken with a pinch of salt!”) -- the site of public athletic (or gymnastic) facilities where Aristotle teaches, a center for philosophy and systematic research in science and history organized there by Aristotle and his associates; it begins as an informal play group, lacking any legal status until Theophrastus, Aristotle’s colleague and principal heir, acquires land and buildings there. By a principle of metonymy common in philosophy (cf. ‘Academy’, ‘Oxford’, ‘Vienna’),‘Lycæum’ comes to refer collectively to members of the school and their methods and ideas, although the school remained relatively non-doctrinaire. Another ancient label for adherents of the school and their ideas, apparently derived from Aristotle’s habit of lecturing in a portico (peripatos) at the Lycæum, is ‘Peripatetic’. The school had its heyday in its first decades, when members include Eudemus, author of lost histories of mathematics; Aristoxenus, a prolific writer, principally on music (large parts of two treatises survive); Dicaearchus, a polymath who ranged from ethics and politics to psychology and geography; Meno, who compiled a history of medicine; and Demetrius of Phaleron, a dashing intellect who writes extensively and ruled Athens on behalf of dynasts. Under Theophrastus and his successor Strato, the Lycæum  produces original work, especially in natural science. But by the midthird century B.C., the Lycæum had lost its initial vigor. To judge from meager evidence, it offered sound education but few new ideas. Some members enjoyed political influence, but for nearly two centuries, rigorous theorizing is displaced by intellectual history and popular moralizing. In the first century B.C., the school enjoyed a modest renaissance when Andronicus oversaw the first methodical edition of Aristotle’s works and began the exegetical tradition that culminated in the monumental commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Oxonian dialectic and Athenian dialectic.”

Lyotard: philosopher, a leading representative of post-structuralism. Among major post-structuralist theorists (Gilles Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault), Lyotard is most closely associated with post-modernism. With roots in phenomenology (a student of Merleau-Ponty, his first book, Phenomenology [1954], engages phenomenology’s history and engages phenomenology with history) and Marxism (in the 1960s Lyotard was associated with the Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded by Cornelius Castoriadis [1922–97] and Claude Lefort [b.1924]), Lyotard’s work has centered on questions of art, language, and politics. His first major work, Discours, figure (1971), expressed dissatisfaction with structuralism and, more generally, any theoretical approach that sought to escape history through appeal to a timeless, universal structure of language divorced from our experiences. Libidinal Economy (1974) reflects the passion and enthusiasm of the events of May 1968 along with a disappointment with the Marxist response to those events. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), an occasional text written at the request of the Quebec government, catapulted Lyotard to the forefront of critical debate. Here he introduced his definition of the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: the postmodern names not a specific epoch but an antifoundationalist attitude that exceeds the legitimating orthodoxy of the moment. Postmodernity, then, resides constantly at the heart of the modern, challenging those totalizing and comprehensive master narratives (e.g., the Enlightenment narrative of the emancipation of the rational subject) that serve to legitimate its practices. Lyotard suggests we replace these narratives by less ambitious, “little narratives” that refrain from totalizing claims in favor of recognizing the specificity and singularity of events. Many, including Lyotard, regard The Differend (1983) as his most original and important work. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Kant’s Critique of Judgment, it reflects on how to make judgments (political as well as aesthetic) where there is no rule of judgment to which one can appeal. This is the différend, a dispute between (at least) two parties in which the parties operate within radically heterogeneous language games so incommensurate that no consensus can be reached on principles or rules that could govern how their dispute might be settled. In contrast to litigations, where disputing parties share a language with rules of judgment to consult to resolve their dispute, différends defy resolution (an example might be the conflicting claims to land rights by aboriginal peoples and current residents). At best, we can express différends by posing the dispute in a way that avoids delegitimating either party’s claim. In other words, our political task, if we are to be just, is to phrase the dispute in a way that respects the difference between the competing claims. In the years following The Differend, Lyotard published several works on aesthetics, politics, and postmodernism; the most important may well be his reading of Kant’s third Critique in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991).

Mach: philosopher, born in Turas, Moravia, and studied at Vienna. Appointed professor of mathematics at Graz in 1864, he moved in 1867 to the chair of physics at Prague, where he came to be recognized as one of the leading scientists in Europe, contributing not only to a variety of fields of physics (optics, electricity, mechanics, acoustics) but also to the new field of psychophysics, particularly in the field of perception. He returned to Vienna in 1895 to a chair in philosophy, designated for a new academic discipline, the history and theory of inductive science. His writings on the philosophy of science profoundly affected the founders of the Vienna Circle, leading Mach to be regarded as a progenitor of logical positivism. His best-known work, The Science of Mechanics (1883), epitomized the main themes of his philosophy. He set out to extract the logical structure of mechanics from an examination of its history and procedures. Mechanics fulfills the human need to abridge the facts about motion in the most economical way. It rests on “sensations” (akin to the “ideas” or “sense impressions” of classical empiricism); indeed, the world may be said to consist of sensations (a thesis that later led Lenin in a famous polemic to accuse Mach of idealism). Mechanics is inductive, not demonstrative; it has no a priori element of any sort. The divisions between the sciences must be recognized to be arbitrary, a matter of convenience only. The sciences must be regarded as descriptive, not as explanatory. Theories may appear to explain, but the underlying entities they postulate, like atoms, for example, are no more than aids to prediction. To suppose them to represent reality would be metaphysical and therefore idle. Mach’s most enduring legacy to philosophy is his enduring suspicion of anything “metaphysical.”

Machiavelli, Niccolò -- the Italian political theorist commonly considered the most influential political thinker of the Renaissance. Born in Florence, he was educated in the civic humanist tradition. From 1498 to 1512, he was secretary to the second chancery of the republic of Florence, with responsibilities for foreign affairs and the revival of the domestic civic militia. His duties involved numerous diplomatic missions both in and outside Italy. With the fall of the republic in 1512, he was dismissed by the returning Medici regime. From 1513 to 1527 he lived in enforced retirement, relieved by writing and occasional appointment to minor posts. Machaivelli’s writings fall into two genetically connected categories: chancery writings (reports, memoranda, diplomatic writings) and formal books, the chief among them The Prince (1513), the Discourses (1517), the Art of War (1520), Florentine Histories (1525), and the comic drama Mandragola (1518). With Machiavelli a new vision emerges of politics as autonomous activity leading to the creation of free and powerful states. This vision derives its norms from what humans do rather than from what they ought to do. As a result, the problem of evil arises as a central issue: the political actor reserves the right “to enter into evil when necessitated.” The requirement of classical, medieval, and civic humanist political philosophies that politics must be practiced within the bounds of virtue is met by redefining the meaning of virtue itself. Machiavellian virtù is the ability to achieve “effective truth” regardless of moral, philosophical, and theological restraints. He recognizes two limits on virtù: (1) fortuna, understood as either chance or as a goddess symbolizing the alleged causal powers of the heavenly bodies; and (2) the agent’s own temperament, bodily humors, and the quality of the times. Thus, a premodern astrological cosmology and the anthropology and cyclical theory of history derived from it underlie his political philosophy. History is seen as the conjoint product of human activity and the alleged activity of the heavens, understood as the “general cause” of all human motions in the sublunar world. There is no room here for the sovereignty of the Good, nor the ruling Mind, nor Providence. Kingdoms, republics, and religions follow a naturalistic pattern of birth, growth, and decline. But, depending on the outcome of the struggle between virtù and fortuna, there is the possibility of political renewal; and Machiavelli saw himself as the philosopher of political renewal. Historically, Machiavelli’s philosophy came to be identified with Machiavellianism (also spelled Machiavellism), the doctrine that the reason of state recognizes no moral superior and that, in its pursuit, everything is permitted. Although Machiavelli himself does not use the phrase ‘reason of state’, his principles have been and continue to be invoked in its defense.

MacIntyre: Like Kant, Scots philosopher and eminent contemporary representative of Aristotelian ethics. He was born in Scotland, educated in England, and has taught at universities in both England and (mainly) the United States. His early work included perceptive critical discussions of Marx and Freud as well as his influential A Short History of Ethics. His most discussed work, however, has been After Virtue (1981), an analysis and critique of modern ethical views from the standpoint of an Aristotelian virtue ethics. MacIntyre begins with the striking unresolvability of modern ethical disagreements, which he diagnoses as due to a lack of any shared substantive conception of the ethical good. This lack is itself due to the modern denial of a human nature that would provide a meaning and goal for human life. In the wake of the Enlightenment, MacIntyre maintains, human beings are regarded as merely atomistic individuals, employing a purely formal reason to seek fulfillment of their contingent desires. Modern moral theory tries to derive moral values from this conception of human reality. Utilitarians start from desires, arguing that they must be fulfilled in such a way as to provide the greatest happiness (utility). Kantians start from reason, arguing that our commitment to rationality requires recognizing the rights of others to the same goods that we desire for ourselves. MacIntyre, however, maintains that the modern notions of utility and of rights are fictions: there is no way to argue from individual desires to an interest in making others happy or to inviolable rights of all persons. He concludes that Enlightenment liberalism cannot construct a coherent ethics and that therefore our only alternatives are to accept a Nietzschean reduction of morality to will-to-power or to return to an Aristotelian ethics grounded in a substantive conception of human nature. MacIntyre’s positive philosophical project is to formulate and defend an Aristotelian ethics of the virtues (based particularly on the thought of Aquinas), where virtues are understood as the moral qualities needed to fulfill the potential of human nature. His aim is not the mere revival of Aristotelian thought but a reformulation and, in some cases, revision of that thought in light of its history over the last 2,500 years. MacIntyre pays particular attention to formulating concepts of practice (communal action directed toward a intrinsic good), virtue (a habit needed to engage successfully in a practice), and tradition (a historically extended community in which practices relevant to the fulfillment of human nature can be carried out). His conception of tradition is particularly noteworthy. His an effort to provide Aristotelianism with a historical orientation that Aristotle himself never countenanced; and, in contrast to Burke, it makes tradition the locus of rational reflection on and revision of past practices, rather than a merely emotional attachment to them. MacIntyre has also devoted considerable attention to the problem of rationally adjudicating the claims of rival traditions (especially in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 1988) and to making the case for the Aristotelian tradition as opposed to that of the Enlightenment and that of Nietzscheanism (especially in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, 1990).

McTaggart: Irish philosopher, the leading British personal idealist. Aside from his childhood and two extended visits to New Zealand, McTaggart lived in Cambridge as a student and fellow of Trinity College. His influence on others at Trinity, including Russell and Moore, was at times great, but he had no permanent disciples. He began formulating and defending his views by critically examining Hegel. In Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (1896) he argued that Hegel’s dialectic is valid but subjective, since the Absolute Idea Hegel used it to derive contains nothing corresponding to the dialectic. In Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901) he applied the dialectic to such topics as sin, punishment, God, and immortality. In his Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (1910) he concluded that the task of philosophy is to rethink the nature of reality using a method resembling Hegel’s dialectic. McTaggart attempted to do this in his major work, The Nature of Existence (two volumes, 1921 and 1927). In the first volume he tried to deduce the nature of reality from self-evident truths using only two empirical premises, that something exists and that it has parts. He argued that substances exist, that they are related to each other, that they have an infinite number of substances as parts, and that each substance has a sufficient description, one that applies only to it and not to any other substance. He then claimed that these conclusions are inconsistent unless the sufficient descriptions of substances entail the descriptions of their parts, a situation that requires substances to stand to their parts in the relation he called determining correspondence. In the second volume he applied these results to the empirical world, arguing that matter is unreal, since its parts cannot be determined by determining correspondence. In the most celebrated part of his philosophy, he argued that time is unreal by claiming that time presupposes a series of positions, each having the incompatible qualities of past, present, and future. He thought that attempts to remove the incompatibility generate a vicious infinite regress. From these and other considerations he concluded that selves are real, since their parts can be determined by determining correspondence, and that reality is a community of eternal, perceiving selves. He denied that there is an inclusive self or God in this community, but he affirmed that love between the selves unites the community producing a satisfaction beyond human understanding.

magnitude, extent or size of a thing with respect to some attribute; technically, a quantity or dimension. A quantity is an attribute that admits of several or an infinite number of degrees, in contrast to a quality (e.g., triangularity), which an object either has or does not have. Measurement is assignment of numbers to objects in such a way that these numbers correspond to the degree or amount of some quantity possessed by their objects. The theory of measurement investigates the conditions for, and uniqueness of, such numerical assignments. Let D be a domain of objects (e.g., a set of physical bodies) and L be a relation on this domain; i.e., Lab may mean that if a and b are put on opposite pans of a balance, the pan with a does not rest lower than the other pan. Let ; be the operation of weighing two objects together in the same pan of a balance. We then have an empirical relational system E % ‹ D, L, ; (. One can prove that, if E satisfies specified conditions, then there exists a measurement function mapping D to a set Num of real numbers, in such a way that the L and ; relations between objects in D correspond to the m and ! relations between their numerical values. Such an existence theorem for a measurement function from an empirical relational system E to a numerical relational system, N % ‹ Num, m ! (, is called a representation theorem. Measurement functions are not unique, but a uniqueness theorem characterizes all such functions for a specified kind of empirical relational system and specified type of numerical image. For example, suppose that for any measurement functions f, g for E there exists real number a ( 0 such that for any x in D, f(x) % ag(x). Then it is said that the measurement is on a ratio scale, and the function s(x) % ax, for x in the real numbers, is the scale transformation. For some empirical systems, one can prove that any two measurement functions are related by f % ag ! b, where a ( 0 and b are real numbers. Then the measurement is on an interval scale, with the scale transformation s(x) % ax ! b; e.g., measurement of temperature without an absolute zero is on an interval scale. In addition to ratio and interval scales, other scale types are defined in terms of various scale transformations; many relational systems have been mathematically analyzed for possible applications in the behavioral sciences. Measurement with weak scale types may provide only an ordering of the objects, so quantitative measurement and comparative orderings can be treated by the same general methods. The older literature on measurement often distinguishes extensive from intensive magnitudes. In the former case, there is supposed to be an empirical operation (like ; above) that in some sense directly corresponds to addition on numbers. An intensive magnitude supposedly has no such empirical operation. It is sometimes claimed that genuine quantities must be extensive, whereas an intensive magnitude is a quality. This extensive versus intensive distinction (and its use in distinguishing quantities from qualities) is imprecise and has been supplanted by the theory of scale types sketched above.

Maimon: philosopher who became the friend and protégé of Moses Mendelssohn and was an acute early critic and follower of Kant. His most important works were the Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie. Mit einem Anhang über die symbolische Erkenntnis, the Philosophisches Wörterbuch and the Versuch einer neuen Logik oder Theorie des Denkens. Maimon argued against the “thing-in-itself” as it was conceived by Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Gottlieb Ernst Schulze. For Maimon, the thing-in-itself was merely a limiting concept, not a real object “behind” the phenomena. While he thought that Kant’s system was sufficient as a refutation of rationalism or “dogmatism,” he did not think that it had – or could – successfully dispose of skepticism. Indeed, he advanced what can be called a skeptical interpretation of Kant. On the other hand, he also argued against Kant’s sharp distinction between sensibility and understanding and for the necessity of assuming the idea of an “infinite mind.” In this way, he prepared the way for Fichte and Hegel. However, in many ways his own theory is more similar to that of the neoKantian Hermann Cohen.

Maimonides: philosopher, physician, and jurist. Born in Córdova, Maimonides and his family fled the forced conversions of the Almohad invasion in 1148, living anonymously in Fez before finding refuge in 1165 in Cairo. There Maimonides served as physician to the vizier of Saladin, who overthrew the Fatimid dynasty in 1171. He wrote ten medical treatises, but three works secured his position among the greatest rabbinic jurists: his Book of the Commandments, cataloguing the 613 biblical laws; his Commentary on the Mishnah, expounding the rational purposes of the ancient rabbinic code; and the fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah, a codification of Talmudic law that retains almost canonical authority. His Arabic philosophic masterpiece The Guide to the Perplexed mediates between the Scriptural and philosophic idioms, deriving a sophisticated negative theology by subtly decoding biblical anthropomorphisms. It defends divine creation against al-Farabi’s and Avicenna’s eternalism, while rejecting efforts to demonstrate creation apodictically. The radical occasionalism of Arabic dialectical theology (kalam) that results from such attempts, Maimonides argues, renders nature unintelligible and divine governance irrational: if God creates each particular event, natural causes are otiose, and much of creation is in vain. But Aristotle, who taught us the very principles of demonstration, well understood, as his resort to persuasive language reveals, that his arguments for eternity were not demonstrative. They project, metaphysically, an analysis of time, matter, and potentiality as they are now and ignore the possibility that at its origin a thing had a very different nature. We could allegorize biblical creation if it were demonstrated to be false. But since it is not, we argue that creation is more plausible conceptually and preferable theologically to its alternative: more plausible, because a free creative act allows differentiation of the world’s multiplicity from divine simplicity, as the seemingly mechanical necessitation of emanation, strictly construed, cannot do; preferable, because Avicennan claims that God is author of the world and determiner of its contingency are undercut by the assertion that at no time was nature other than it is now. Maimonides read the biblical commandments thematically, as serving to inform human character and understanding. He followed al-Farabi’s Platonizing reading of Scripture as a symbolic elaboration of themes best known to the philosopher. Thus he argued that prophets learn nothing new from revelation; the ignorant remain ignorant, but the gift of imagination in the wise, if they are disciplined by the moral virtues, especially courage and contentment, gives wing to ideas, rendering them accessible to the masses and setting them into practice. In principle, any philosopher of character and imagination might be a prophet; but in practice the legislative, ethical, and mythopoeic imagination that serves philosophy finds fullest articulation in one tradition. Its highest phase, where imagination yields to pure intellectual communion, was unique to Moses, elaborated in Judaism and its daughter religions. Maimonides’ philosophy was pivotal for later Jewish thinkers, highly valued by Aquinas and other Scholastics, studied by Spinoza in Hebrew translation, and annotated by Leibniz in Buxtorf’s 1629 rendering, Doctor Perplexorum.

Malcolm: cited by Grice, profusely -- philosopher who was a prominent figure in post– World War II analytic philosophy and perhaps the foremost American interpreter and advocate of Wittgenstein. His association with Wittgenstein (vividly described in his Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir) began when he was at Cambridge. Other influences were Bouwsma, Malcolm’s tutor at Nebraska, and Moore, whom he knew at Cambridge. Malcolm taught at Cornell, and was associated with King’s, London. Malcolm’s earliest papers (e.g., “The Verification Argument,” and “Knowledge and Belief”) dealt with issues of knowledge and skepticism, and two dealt with Moore (The ones Grice is interested in). “Moore and Ordinary Language” infamously interprets Moore’s defense of common sense as a defense of ordinary (rather than ideal) language, but “Defending Common Sense” argued, -- “even more infamously” – Grice -- that Moore’s “two hands” proof of the external world involves a misuse of ‘know’ (“For surely it would be stupid of Moore to doubt that he has two hands.”). Moore’s proof is the topic of extended discussions between Malcolm and Vitters during the latter’s visit in Ithaca, and these provided the stimulus for Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Malcolm’s “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” was a highly influential discussion of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and especially of his “private language argument.” Two other works of that period were Malcolm’s Dreaming which argued that dreams do not have genuine duration or temporal location, and do not entail having genuine experiences, and “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” which defended a version of the ontological argument. Malcolm, inspired by Grice, wrote extensively on memory, first in his “Three Lectures on Memory,” published in his Knowledge and Certainty, and then in his Memory and Mind. In the latter he criticized both Grice’s philosophical and psychological theories of memory, and argues that the notion of a memory trace “is not a scientific discovery . . . [but] a product of philosophical thinking, of a sort that is natural and enormously tempting, yet thoroughly muddled.” A recurrent theme in Malcolm’s thought was that philosophical understanding requires getting to the root of the temptations to advance some philosophical doctrine, and that once we do so we will see the philosophical doctrines as confused or nonsensical. Although he was convinced that dualism and other Cartesian views about the mind were thoroughly confused, he thought no better of contemporary materialist and Grice’s functionalist views – “One never knows what Malcolm thinks – he doesn’t show, he doesn’t tell!” – Grice -- and of current theorizing in psychology and linguistics (one essay is entitled “The Myth of Cognitive Processes and Structures”). He shared with Wittgenstein both an antipathy to scientism and a respect for religion. He shared with Moore an antipathy to obscurantism and a respect for common sense. Malcolm’s “Nothing Is Hidden” (or implicit) examines the relations between Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophies. His other essays include Problems of Mind, Thought and Knowledge, and Consciousness and Causality, the latter coauthored with Armstrong. “Malcolm’s writings are marked by an exceptionally lucid, direct, and vivid style, if I may myself say so.” – Grice. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Malcolm on Moore: the implicaturum.”

Malebranche: philosopher, an important but unorthodox proponent of Cartesian philosophy. Malebranche was a priest of the Oratory, a religious order founded in 1611 by Cardinal Bérulle, who was favorably inclined toward Descartes. Malebranche himself became a Cartesian after reading Descartes’s physiological Treatise on Man in 1664, although he ultimately introduced crucial modifications into Cartesian ontology, epistemology, and physics. Malebranche’s most important philosophical work is The Search After Truth (1674), in which he presents his two most famous doctrines: the vision in God and occasionalism. He agrees with Descartes and other philosophers that ideas, or immaterial representations present to the mind, play an essential role in knowledge and perception. But whereas Descartes’s ideas are mental entities, or modifications of the soul, Malebranche argues that the ideas that function in human cognition are in God – they just are the essences and ideal archetypes that exist in the divine understanding. As such, they are eternal and independent of finite minds, and make possible the clear and distinct apprehension of objective, neccessary truth. Malebranche presents the vision in God as the proper Augustinian view, albeit modified in the light of Descartes’s epistemological distinction between understanding and sensation. The theory explains both our apprehension of universals and mathematical and moral principles, as well as the conceptual element that, he argues, necessarily informs our perceptual acquaintance with the world. Like Descartes’s theory of ideas, Malebranche’s doctrine is at least partly motivated by an antiskepticism, since God’s ideas cannot fail to reveal either eternal truths or the essences of things in the world created by God. The vision in God, however, quickly became the object of criticism by Locke, Arnauld, Foucher, and others, who thought it led to a visionary and skeptical idealism, with the mind forever enclosed by a veil of divine ideas. Malebranche is also the best-known proponent of occasionalism, the doctrine that finite created beings have no causal efficacy and that God alone is a true causal agent. Starting from Cartesian premises about matter, motion, and causation – according to which the essence of body consists in extension alone, motion is a mode of body, and a causal relation is a logically necessary relation between cause and effect – Malebranche argues that bodies and minds cannot be genuine causes of either physical events or mental states. Extended bodies, he claims, are essentially inert and passive, and thus cannot possess any motive force or power to cause and sustain motion. Moreover, there is no necessary connection between any mental state (e.g. a volition) or physical event and the bodily motions that usually follow it. Such necessity is found only between the will of an omnipotent being and its effects. Thus, all phenomena are directly and immediately brought about by God, although he always acts in a lawlike way and on the proper occasion. Malebranche’s theory of ideas and his occasionalism, as presented in the Search and the later Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688), were influential in the development of Berkeley’s thought; and his arguments for the causal theory foreshadow many of the considerations regarding causation and induction later presented by Hume. In addition to these innovations in Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology, Malebranche also modified elements of Descartes’s physics, most notably in his account of the hardness of bodies and of the laws of motion. In his other major work, the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680), Malebranche presents a theodicy, an explanation of how God’s wisdom, goodness, and power are to be reconciled with the apparent imperfections and evils in the world. In his account, elements of which Leibniz borrows, Malebranche claims that God could have created a more perfect world, one without the defects that plague this world, but that this would have involved greater complexity in the divine ways. God always acts in the simplest way possible, and only by means of lawlike general volitions; God never acts by “particular” or ad hoc volitions. But this means that while on any particular occasion God could intervene and forestall an apparent evil that is about to occur by the ordinary courses of the laws of nature (e.g. a drought), God would not do so, for this would compromise the simplicity of God’s means. The perfection or goodness of the world per se is thus relativized to the simplicity of the laws of that world (or, which is the same thing, to the generality of the divine volitions that, on the occasionalist view, govern it). Taken together, the laws and the phenomena of the world form a whole that is most worthy of God’s nature – in fact, the best combination possible. Malebranche then extends this analysis to explain the apparent injustice in the distribution of grace among humankind. It is just this extension that initiated Arnauld’s attack and drew Malebranche into a long philosophical and theological debate that would last until the end of the century.

Manichaeanism, also Manichaeism, a syncretistic religion founded by the Babylonian prophet Mani, who claimed a revelation from God and saw himself as a member of a line that included the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. In dramatic myths, Manichaeanism posited the good kingdom of God, associated with light, and the evil kingdom of Satan, associated with darkness. Awareness of light caused greed, hate, and envy in the darkness; this provoked an attack of darkness on light. In response the Father sent Primal Man, who lost the fight so that light and darkness were mixed. The Primal Man appealed for help, and the Living Spirit came to win a battle, making heaven and earth out of the corpses of darkness and freeing some capured light. A Third Messenger was sent; in response the power of darkness created Adam and Eve, who contained the light that still remained under his sway. Then Jesus was sent to a still innocent Adam who nonetheless sinned, setting in motion the reproductive series that yields humanity. This is the mythological background to the Manichaean account of the basic religious problem: the human soul is a bit of captured light, and the problem is to free the soul from darkness through asceticism and esoteric knowledge. Manichaeanism denies that Jesus was crucified, and Augustine, himself a sometime Manichaean, viewed the religion as a Docetic heresy that denies the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity in a real human body. The religion exhibits the pattern of escape from embodiment as a condition of salvation, also seen in Hinduism and Buddhism.

Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947), Hungarian-born German social scientist best known for his sociology of knowledge. Born in Budapest, where he took a university degree in philosophy, he settled in Heidelberg in 1919 as a private scholar until his call to Frankfurt as professor of sociology in 1928. Suspended as a Jew and as foreign-born by the Nazis in 1933, he accepted an invitation from the London School of Economics, where he was a lecturer for a decade. In 1943, Mannheim became the first professor of sociology of education at the University of London, a position he held until his death. Trained in the Hegelian tradition, Mannheim defies easy categorization: his mature politics became those of a liberal committed to social planning; with his many studies in the sociology of culture, of political ideologies, of social organization, of education, and of knowledge, among others, he founded several subdisciplines in sociology and political science. While his Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940) expressed his own commitment to social planning, his most famous work, Ideology and Utopia (original German edition, 1929; revised English edition, 1936), established sociology of knowledge as a scientific enterprise and simultaneously cast doubt on the possibility of the very scientific knowledge on which social planning was to proceed. As developed by Mannheim, sociology of knowledge attempts to find the social causes of beliefs as contrasted with the reasons people have for them. Mannheim seemed to believe that this investigation both presupposes and demonstrates the impossibility of “objective” knowledge of society, a theme that relates sociology of knowledge to its roots in German philosophy and social theory (especially Marxism) and earlier in the thought of the idéologues of the immediate post–French Revolution decades.

Mansel: philosopher, a prominent defender of Scottish common sense philosophy. Mansel was the Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy and ecclesiastical history at Oxford, and the dean of St. Paul’s. Much of his philosophy was derived from Kant as interpreted by Hamilton. In “Prolegomena Logica,” Mansel defines logic as the science of the laws of thought, while in “Metaphysics,” he argues that human faculties are not suited to know the ultimate nature of things. He drew the religious implications of these views in his most influential work, The Limits of Religious Thought, by arguing that God is rationally inconceivable and that the only available conception of God is an analogical one derived from revelation. From this he concluded that religious dogma is immune from rational criticism. In the ensuing controversy Mansel was criticized by Spenser, Thomas Henry Huxley, and J. S. Mill.

many-valued logic, a logic that rejects the principle of bivalence: every proposition is true or false. However, there are two forms of rejection: the truth-functional mode (many-valued logic proper), where propositions may take many values beyond simple truth and falsity, values functionally determined by the values of their components; and the truth-value gap mode, in which the only values are truth and falsity, but propositions may have neither. What value they do or do not have is not determined by the values or lack of values of their constituents. Many-valued logic has its origins in the work of Lukasiewicz and (independently) Post around 1920, in the first development of truth tables and semantic methods. Lukasiewicz’s philosophical motivation for his three-valued calculus was to deal with propositions whose truth-value was open or “possible” – e.g., propositions about the future. He proposed they might take a third value. Let 1 represent truth, 0 falsity, and the third value be, say, ½. We take Ý (not) and P (implication) as primitive, letting v(ÝA) % 1 † v(A) and v(A P B) % min(1,1 † v(A)!v(B)). These valuations may be displayed: Lukasiewicz generalized the idea in 1922, to allow first any finite number of values, and finally infinitely, even continuum-many values (between 0 and 1). One can then no longer represent the functionality by a matrix; however, the formulas given above can still be applied. Wajsberg axiomatized Lukasiewicz’s calculus in 1931. In 1953 Lukasiewicz published a four-valued extensional modal logic. In 1921, Post presented an m-valued calculus, with values 0 (truth), . . . , m † 1 (falsity), and matrices defined on Ý and v (or): v(ÝA) % 1 ! v(A) (modulo m) and v(AvB) % min (v(A),v(B)). Translating this for comparison into the same framework as above, we obtain the matrices (with 1 for truth and 0 for falsity): The strange cyclic character of Ý makes Post’s system difficult to interpret – though he did give one in terms of sequences of classical propositions. A different motivation led to a system with three values developed by Bochvar in 1939, namely, to find a solution to the logical paradoxes. (Lukasiewicz had noted that his three-valued system was free of antinomies.) The third value is indeterminate (so arguably Bochvar’s system is actually one of gaps), and any combination of values one of which is indeterminate is indeterminate; otherwise, on the determinate values, the matrices are classical. Thus we obtain for Ý and P, using 1, ½, and 0 as above: In order to develop a logic of many values, one needs to characterize the notion of a thesis, or logical truth. The standard way to do this in manyvalued logic is to separate the values into designated and undesignated. Effectively, this is to reintroduce bivalence, now in the form: Every proposition is either designated or undesignated. Thus in Lukasiewicz’s scheme, 1 (truth) is the only designated value; in Post’s, any initial segment 0, . . . , n † 1, where n‹m (0 as truth). In general, one can think of the various designated values as types of truth, or ways a proposition may be true, and the undesignated ones as ways it can be false. Then a proposition is a thesis if and only if it takes only designated values. For example, p P p is, but p 7 Ýp is not, a Lukasiewicz thesis. However, certain matrices may generate no logical truths by this method, e.g., the Bochvar matrices give ½ for every formula any of whose variables is indeterminate. If both 1 and ½ were designated, all theses of classical logic would be theses; if only 1, no theses result. So the distinction from classical logic is lost. Bochvar’s solution was to add an external assertion and negation. But this in turn runs the risk of undercutting the whole philosophical motivation, if the external negation is used in a Russell-type paradox. One alternative is to concentrate on consequence: A is a consequence of a set of formulas X if for every assignment of values either no member of X is designated or A is. Bochvar’s consequence relation (with only 1 designated) results from restricting classical consequence so that every variable in A occurs in some member of X. There is little technical difficulty in extending many-valued logic to the logic of predicates and quantifiers. For example, in Lukasiewicz’s logic, v(E xA) % min {v(A(a/x)): a 1. D}, where D is, say, some set of constants whose assignments exhaust the domain. This interprets the universal quantifier as an “infinite” conjunction. In 1965, Zadeh introduced the idea of fuzzy sets, whose membership relation allows indeterminacies: it is a function into the unit interval [0,1], where 1 means definitely in, 0 definitely out. One philosophical application is to the sorites paradox, that of the heap. Instead of insisting that there be a sharp cutoff in number of grains between a heap and a non-heap, or between red and, say, yellow, one can introduce a spectrum of indeterminacy, as definite applications of a concept shade off into less clear ones. Nonetheless, many have found the idea of assigning further definite values, beyond truth and falsity, unintuitive, and have instead looked to develop a scheme that encompasses truthvalue gaps. One application of this idea is found in Kleene’s strong and weak matrices of 1938. Kleene’s motivation was to develop a logic of partial functions. For certain arguments, these give no definite value; but the function may later be extended so that in such cases a definite value is given. Kleene’s constraint, therefore, was that the matrices be regular: no combination is given a definite value that might later be changed; moreover, on the definite values the matrices must be classical. The weak matrices are as for Bochvar. The strong matrices yield (1 for truth, 0 for falsity, and u for indeterminacy): An alternative approach to truth-value gaps was presented by Bas van Fraassen in the 1960s. Suppose v(A) is undefined if v(B) is undefined for any subformula B of A. Let a classical extension of a truth-value assignment v be any assignment that matches v on 0 and 1 and assigns either 0 or 1 whenever v assigns no value. Then we can define a supervaluation w over v: w(A) % 1 if the value of A on all classical extensions of v is 1, 0 if it is 0 and undefined otherwise. A is valid if w(A) % 1 for all supervaluations w (over arbitrary valuations). By this method, excluded middle, e.g., comes out valid, since it takes 1 in all classical extensions of any partial valuation. Van Fraassen presented several applications of the supervaluation technique. One is to free logic, logic in which empty terms are admitted.

Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976), Chinese Communist leader, founder of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He believed that Marxist ideas must be adapted to China. Contrary to the Marxist orthodoxy, which emphasized workers, Mao organized peasants in the countryside. His philosophical writings include On Practice (1937) and On Contradiction (1937), synthesizing dialectical materialism and traditional Chinese philosophy. In his later years he departed from the gradual strategy of his On New Democracy (1940) and adopted increasingly radical means to change China. Finally he started the Cultural Revolution in 1967 and plunged China into disaster.

Marcel, Gabriel (1889–1973), French philosopher and playwright, a major representative of French existential thought. He was a member of the Academy of Political and Social Science of the Institute of France. Musician, drama critic, and lecturer of international renown, he authored thirty plays and as many philosophic essays. He considered his principal contribution to be that of a philosopher-dramatist. Together, his dramatic and philosophic works cut a path for Mao Tse-tung Marcel, Gabriel 534 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 534 the reasoned exercise of freedom to enhance the dignity of human life. The conflicts and challenges of his own life he brought to the light of the theater; his philosophic works followed as efforts to discern critically through rigorous, reasoned analyses the alternative options life offers. His dramatic masterpiece, The Broken World, compassionately portrayed the devastating sense of emptiness, superficial activities, and fractured relationships that plague the modern era. This play cleared a way for Marcel to transcend nineteenth-century British and German idealism, articulate his distinction between problem and mystery, and evolve an existential approach that reflectively clarified mysteries that can provide depth and meaningfulness to human life. In the essay “On the Ontological Mystery,” a philosophic sequel to The Broken World, Marcel confronted the questions “Who am I? – Is Being empty or full?” He explored the regions of body or incarnate being, intersubjectivity, and transcendence. His research focused principally on intersubjectivity clarifying the requisite attitudes and essential characteristics of I-Thou encounters, interpersonal relations, commitment and creative fidelity – notions he also developed in Homo Viator (1945) and Creative Fidelity (1940). Marcel’s thought balanced despair and hope, infidelity and fidelity, self-deception and a spirit of truth. He recognized both the role of freedom and the role of fundamental attitudes or prephilosophic dispositions, as these influence one’s way of being and the interpretation of life’s meaning. Concern for the presence of loved ones who have died appears in both Marcel’s dramatic and philosophic works, notably in Presence and Immortality. This concern, coupled with his reflections on intersubjectivity, led him to explore how a human subject can experience the presence of God or the presence of loved ones from beyond death. Through personal experience, dramatic imagination, and philosophic investigation, he discovered that such presence can be experienced principally by way of inwardness and depth. “Presence” is a spiritual influx that profoundly affects one’s being, uplifting it and enriching one’s personal resources. While it does depend on a person’s being open and permeable, presence is not something that the person can summon forth. A conferral or presence is always a gratuitous gift, coauthored and marked by its signal benefit, an incitement to create. So Marcel’s reflection on interpersonal communion enabled him to conceive philosophically how God can be present to a person as a life-giving and personalizing force whose benefit is always an incitement to create.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (from 161) and philosopher. Author of twelve books of Meditations (Greek title, To Himself), Marcus Aurelius is principally interesting in the history of Stoic philosophy (of which he was a diligent student) for his ethical self-portrait. Except for the first book, detailing his gratitude to his family, friends, and teachers, the aphorisms are arranged in no order; many were written in camp during military campaigns. They reflect both the Old Stoa and the more eclectic views of Posidonius, with whom he holds that involvement in public affairs is a moral duty. Marcus, in accord with Stoicism, considers immortality doubtful; happiness lies in patient acceptance of the will of the panentheistic Stoic God, the material soul of a material universe. Anger, like all emotions, is forbidden the Stoic emperor: he exhorts himself to compassion for the weak and evil among his subjects. “Do not be turned into ‘Caesar,’ or dyed by the purple: for that happens” (6.30). “It is the privilege of a human being to love even those who stumble” (7.22). Sayings like these, rather than technical arguments, give the book its place in literary history.

Marcuse: philosopher who reinterpreted the ideas of Marx and Freud. Marcuse’s work is among the most systematic and philosophical of the Frankfurt School theorists. After an initial attempt to unify Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger in an ontology of historicity in his habilitation on Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932), Marcuse was occupied during the 1930s with the problem of truth in a critical historical social theory, defending a contextindependent notion of truth against relativizing tendencies of the sociology of knowledge. Marcuse thought Hegel’s “dialectics” provided an alternative to relativism, empiricism, and positivism and even developed a revolutionary interpretation of the Hegelian legacy in Reason and Revolution (1941) opposed to Popper’s totalitarian one. After World War II, Marcuse appropriated Freud in the same way that he had appropriated Hegel before the war, using his basic concepts for a critical theory of the repressive character of civilization in Eros and Civilization (1955). In many respects, this book comes closer to presenting a positive conception of reason and Enlightenment than any other work of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse argued that civilization has been antagonistic to happiness and freedom through its constant struggle against basic human instincts. According to Marcuse, human existence is grounded in Eros, but these impulses depend upon and are shaped by labor. By synthesizing Marx and Freud, Marcuse holds out the utopian possibility of happiness and freedom in the unity of Eros and labor, which at the very least points toward the reduction of “surplus repression” as the goal of a rational economy and emancipatory social criticism. This was also the goal of his aesthetic theory as developed in The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). In One Dimensional Man (1964) and other writings, Marcuse provides an analysis of why the potential for a free and rational society has never been realized: in the irrationality of the current social totality, its creation and manipulation of false needs (or “repressive desublimation”), and hostility toward nature. Perhaps no other Frankfurt School philosopher has had as much popular influence as Marcuse, as evidenced by his reception in the student and ecology movements.

Mariana: Jesuit historian and political philosopher. Born in Talavera de la Reina, he studied at Alcalá de Henares and taught at Rome, Sicily, and Paris. His political ideas are contained in De rege et regis institutione and De monetae mutatione. Mariana held that political power rests on the community of citizens, and the power of the monarch derives from the people. The natural state of humanity did not include, as Vitoria held, government and other political institutions. The state of nature was one of justice in which all possessions were held in common, and cooperation characterized human relations. Private property is the result of technological advances that produced jealousy and strife. Antedating both Hobbes and Rousseau, Mariana argued that humans made a contract and delegated their political power to leaders in order to eliminate injustice and strife. However, only the people have the right to change the law. A monarch who does not follow the law and ceases to act for the citizens’ welfare may be forcibly removed. Tyrannicide is thus justifiable under some circumstances.

Maritain: philosopher whose innovative interpretation of Aquinas’s philosophy made him a central figure in Neo-Thomism. Bergson’s teaching saved him from metaphysical despair and a suicide pact with his fiancée. After his discovery of Aquinas, he rejected Bergsonism for a realistic account of the concept and a unified theory of knowledge, aligning the empirical sciences with the philosophy of nature, metaphysics, theology, and mysticism in Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge (1932). Maritain opposed the skepticism and idealism that severed the mind from sensibility, typified by the “angelism” of Descartes’s intuitionism. Maritain traced the practical effects of angelism in art, politics, and religion. His Art and Scholasticism (1920) employs ancient and medieval notions of art as a virtue and beauty as a transcendental aspect of being. In politics, especially Man and the State (1961), Maritain stressed the distinction between the person and the individual, the ontological foundation of natural rights, the religious origins of the democratic ideal, and the importance of the common good. He also argued for the possibility of philosophy informed by the data of revelation without compromising its integrity, and an Integral Humanism (1936) that affirms the political order while upholding the eternal destiny of the human person.

Marsilius of Inghen, philosopher, born near Nijmegen, Marsilius studied under Buridan, taught at Paris, then moved to the newly founded ‘studium generale’ at Heidelberg, where he and Albert of Saxony established nominalism in Germany. In logic, he produced an Ockhamist revision of the Tractatus of Peter of Spain, often published as Textus dialectices in early sixteenthcentury Germany, and a commentary on Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. He developed Buridan’s theory of impetus in his own way, accepted Bradwardine’s account of the proportions of velocities, and adopted Nicholas of Oresme’s doctrine of intension and remission of forms, applying the new physics in his commentaries on Aristotle’s physical works. In theology he followed Ockham’s skeptical emphasis on faith, allowing that one might prove the existence of God along Scotistic lines, but insisting that, since natural philosophy could not accommodate the creation of the universe ex nihilo, God’s omnipotence was known only through faith.

Mainardini -- Marsilius of Padua, in Italian, Marsilio dei Mainardini (1275/80–1342), Italian political theorist. He served as rector of the University of Paris between 1312 and 1313; his anti-papal views forced him to flee Paris (1326) for Nuremberg, where he was political and ecclesiastic adviser of Louis of Bavaria. His major work, Defensor pacis (“Defender of Peace,” 1324), attacks the doctrine of the supremacy of the pope and argues that the authority of a secular ruler elected to represent the people is superior to the authority of the papacy and priesthood in both temporal and spiritual affairs. Three basic claims of Marsilius’s theory are that reason, not instinct or God, allows us to know what is just and conduces to the flourishing of human society; that governments need to enforce obedience to the laws by coercive measures; and that political power ultimately resides in the people. He was influenced by Aristotle’s ideal of the state as necessary to foster human flourishing. His thought is regarded as a major step in the history of political philosophy and one of the first defenses of republicanism.

martineau: English philosopher of religion and ethical intuitionist. As a minister and a professor, Martineau defended Unitarianism and opposed pantheism. In A Study of Religion (1888) Martineau agreed with Kant that reality as we experience it is the work of the mind, but he saw no reason to doubt his intuitive conviction that the phenomenal world corresponds to a real world of enduring, causally related objects. He believed that the only intelligible notion of causation is given by willing and concluded that reality is the expression of a divine will that is also the source of moral authority. In Types of Ethical Theory he claimed that the fundamental fact of ethics is the human tendency to approve and disapprove of the motives leading to voluntary actions, actions in which there are two motives present to consciousness. After freely choosing one of the motives, the agent can determine which action best expresses it. Since Martineau thought that agents intuitively know through conscience which motive is higher, the core of his ethical theory is a ranking of the thirteen principal motives, the highest of which is reverence.

Marx: cf. Grice, “Ontological marxism.” German social philosopher, economic theorist, and revolutionary. He lived and worked as a journalist in Cologne, Paris, and Brussels. After the unsuccessful 1848 revolutions in Europe, he settled in London, doing research and writing and earning some money as correspondent for the New York Tribune. In early writings, he articulated his critique of the religiously and politically conservative implications of the then-reigning philosophy of Hegel, finding there an acceptance of existing private property relationships and of the alienation generated by them. Marx understood alienation as a state of radical disharmony (1) among individuals, (2) between them and their own life activity, or labor, and (3) between individuals and their system of production. Later, in his masterwork Capital (1867, 1885, 1894), Marx employed Hegel’s method of dialectic to generate an internal critique of the theory and practice of capitalism, showing that, under assumptions (notably that human labor is the source of economic value) found in such earlier theorists as Adam Smith, this system must undergo increasingly severe crises, resulting in the eventual seizure of control of the increasingly centralized means of production (factories, large farms, etc.) from the relatively small class of capitalist proprietors by the previously impoverished non-owners (the proletariat) in the interest of a thenceforth classless society. Marx’s early writings, somewhat utopian in tone, most never published during his lifetime, emphasize social ethics and ontology. In them, he characterizes his position as a “humanism” and a “naturalism.” In the Theses on Feuerbach, he charts a middle path between Hegel’s idealist account of the nature of history as the selfunfolding of spirit and what Marx regards as the ahistorical, mechanistic, and passive materialist philosophy of Feuerbach; Marx proposes a conception of history as forged by human activity, or praxis, within determinate material conditions that vary by time and place. In later Marxism, this general position is often labeled dialectical materialism. Marx began radically to question the nature of philosophy, coming to view it as ideology, i.e., a thought system parading as autonomous but in fact dependent on the material conditions of the society in which it is produced. The tone of Capital is therefore on the whole less philosophical and moralistic, more social scientific and tending toward historical determinism, than that of the earlier writings, but punctuated by bursts of indignation against the baneful effects of capitalism’s profit orientation and references to the “society of associated producers” (socialism or communism) that would, or could, replace capitalist society. His enthusiastic predictions of immanent worldwide revolutionary changes, in various letters, articles, and the famous Communist Manifesto (1848; jointly authored with his close collaborator, Friedrich Engels), depart from the generally more hypothetical character of the text of Capital itself. The linchpin that perhaps best connects Marx’s earlier and later thought and guarantees his enduring relevance as a social philosopher is his analysis of the role of human labor power as a peculiar type of commodity within a system of commodity exchange (his theory of surplus value). Labor’s peculiarity, according to him, lies in its capacity actively to generate more exchange value than it itself costs employers as subsistence wages. But to treat human beings as profit-generating commodities risks neglecting to treat them as human beings. Marxism, the philosophy of Karl Marx, or any of several systems of thought or approaches to social criticism derived from Marx. The term is also applied, incorrectly, to certain sociopolitical structures created by dominant Communist parties during the mid-twentieth century. Karl Marx himself, apprised of the ideas of certain French critics who invoked his name, remarked that he knew at least that he was not a Marxist. The fact that his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, a popularizer with a greater interest than Marx in the natural sciences, outlived him and wrote, among other things, a “dialectics of nature” that purported to discover certain universal natural laws, added to the confusion. Lenin, the leading Russian Communist revolutionary, near the end of his life discovered previously unacknowledged connections between Marx’s Capital (1867) and Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812–16) and concluded (in his Philosophical Notebooks) that Marxists for a half-century had not understood Marx. Specific political agendas of, among others, the Marxist faction within the turn-of-the-century German Social Democratic Party, the Bolshevik faction of Russian socialists led by Lenin, and later governments and parties claiming allegiance to “Marxist-Leninist principles” have contributed to reinterpretations. For several decades in the Soviet Union and countries allied with it, a broad agreement concerning fundamental Marxist doctrines was established and politically enforced, resulting in a doctrinaire version labeled “orthodox Marxism” and virtually ensuring the widespread, wholesale rejection of Marxism as such when dissidents taught to accept this version as authentic Marxism came to power. Marx never wrote a systematic exposition of his thought, which in any case drastically changed emphases across time and included elements of history, economics, and sociology as well as more traditional philosophical concerns. In one letter he specifically warns against regarding his historical account of Western capitalism as a transcendental analysis of the supposedly necessary historical development of any and all societies at a certain time. It is thus somewhat paradoxical that Marxism is often identified as a “totalizing” if not “totalitarian” system by postmodernist philosophers who reject global theories or “grand narratives” as inherently invalid. However, the evolution of Marxism since Marx’s time helps explain this identification. That “orthodox” Marxism would place heavy emphasis on historical determinism – the inevitability of a certain general sequence of events leading to the replacement of capitalism by a socialist economic system (in which, according to a formula in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, each person would be remunerated according to his/her work) and eventually by a communist one (remuneration in accordance with individual needs) – was foreshadowed by Plekhanov. In The Role of the Individual in History, he portrayed individual idiosyncrasies as accidental: e.g., had Napoleon not existed the general course of history would not have turned out differently. In Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin offered epistemological reinforcement for the notion that Marxism is the uniquely true worldview by defending a “copy” or “reflection” theory of knowledge according to which true concepts simply mirror objective reality, like photographs. Elsewhere, however, he argued against “economism,” the inference that the historical inevitability of communism’s victory obviated political activism. Lenin instead maintained that, at least under the repressive political conditions of czarist Russia, only a clandestine party of professional revolutionaries, acting as the vanguard of the working class and in its interests, could produce fundamental change. Later, during the long political reign of Josef Stalin, the hegemonic Communist Party of the USSR was identified as the supreme interpreter of these interests, thus justifying totalitarian rule. So-called Western Marxism opposed this “orthodox” version, although the writings of one of its foremost early representatives, Georg Lukacs, who brilliantly perceived the close connection between Hegel’s philosophy and the early thought of Marx before the unpublished manuscripts proving this connection had been retrieved from archives, actually tended to reinforce both the view that the party incarnated the ideal interests of the proletariat (see his History and Class Consciousness) and an aesthetics favoring the art of “socialist realism” over more experimental forms. His contemporary, Karl Korsch, in Marxism as Philosophy, instead saw Marxism as above all a heuristic method, pointing to salient phenomena (e.g., social class, material conditioning) generally neglected by other philosophies. His counsel was in effect followed by the Frankfurt School of critical theory, including Walter Benjamin in the area of aesthetics, Theodor Adorno in social criticism, and Wilhelm Reich in psychology. A spate of “new Marxisms” – the relative degrees of their fidelity to Marx’s original thought cannot be weighed here – developed, especially in the wake of the gradual rediscovery of Marx’s more ethically oriented, less deterministic early writings. Among the names meriting special mention in this context are Ernst Bloch, who explored Marxism’s connection with utopian thinking; Herbert Marcuse, critic of the “one-dimensionality” of industrial society; the Praxis school (after the name of their journal and in view of their concern with analyzing social practices) of Yugoslav philosophers; and the later Jean-Paul Sartre. Also worthy of note are the writings, many of them composed in prison under Mussolini’s Italian Fascist rule, of Antonio Gramsci, who stressed the role of cultural factors in determining what is dominant politically and ideologically at any given time. Simultaneous with the decline and fall of regimes in which “orthodox Marxism” was officially privileged has been the recent development of new approaches, loosely connected by virtue of their utilization of techniques favored by British and American philosophers, collectively known as analytic Marxism. Problems of justice, theories of history, and the questionable nature of Marx’s theory of surplus value have been special concerns to these writers. This development suggests that the current unfashionableness of Marxism in many circles, due largely to its understandable but misleading identification with the aforementioned regimes, is itself only a temporary phenomenon, even if future Marxisms are likely to range even further from Marx’s own specific concerns while still sharing his commitment to identifying, explaining, and criticizing hierarchies of dominance and subordination, particularly those of an economic order, in human society. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Ontological marxim.”

materia et forma. If anything characterizes ‘analytic’ philosophy, then it is presumably the emphasis placed on analysis. But as history shows, there is a wide range of conceptions of analysis, so such a characterization says nothing that would distinguish analytic philosophy from much of what has either preceded or developed alongside it. Given that the decompositional conception is usually offered as the main conception, it might be thought that it is this that characterizes analytic philosophy, even Oxonian 'informalists' like Strawson.But this conception was prevalent in the early modern period, shared by both the British Empiricists and Leibniz, for example. Given that Kant denied the importance of de-compositional analysis, however, it might be suggested that what characterizes analytic philosophy is the value it places on such analysis. This might be true of G. E. Moore's early work, and of one strand within analytic philosophy; but it is not generally true. What characterizes analytic philosophy as it was founded by Frege and Russell is the role played by logical analysis, which depended on the development of modern logic. Although other and subsequent forms of analysis, such as 'linguistic' analysis, were less wedded to systems of FORMAL logic, the central insight motivating logical analysis remained.  Pappus's account of method in ancient Greek geometry suggests that the regressive conception of analysis was dominant at the time — however much other conceptions may also have been implicitly involved.In the early modern period, the decompositional conception became widespread.What characterizes analytic philosophy—or at least that central strand that originates in the work of Frege and Russell—is the recognition of what was called earlier the transformative or interpretive dimension of analysis.Any analysis presupposes a particular framework of interpretation, and work is done in interpreting what we are seeking to analyze as part of the process of regression and decomposition. This may involve transforming it in some way, in order for the resources of a given theory or conceptual framework to be brought to bear. Euclidean geometry provides a good illustration of this. But it is even more obvious in the case of analytic geometry, where the geometrical problem is first ‘translated’ into the language of algebra and arithmetic in order to solve it more easily.What Descartes and Fermat did for analytic geometry, Frege and Russell did for analytic PHILOSOPHY. Analytic philosophy is ‘analytic’ much more in the way that analytic geometry (as Fermat's and Descartes's) is ‘analytic’ than in the crude decompositional sense that Kant understood it.  The interpretive dimension of philosophical analysis can also be seen as anticipated in medieval scholasticism and it is remarkable just how much of modern concerns with propositions, meaning, reference, and so on, can be found in the medieval literature. Interpretive analysis is also illustrated in the nineteenth century by Bentham's conception of paraphrasis, which he characterized as "that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity." Bentham, a palaeo-Griceian, applies the idea in ‘analyzing away’ talk of ‘obligations’, and the anticipation that we can see here of Russell's theory of descriptions has been noted by, among others, Wisdom and Quine in ‘Five Milestones of Empiricism.'vide: Wisdom on Bentham as palaeo-Griceian.What was crucial in analytic philosophy, however, was the development of quantificational theory, which provided a far more powerful interpretive system than anything that had hitherto been available. In the case of Frege and Russell, the system into which statements were ‘translated’ was predicate calculus, and the divergence that was thereby opened up between the 'matter' and the logical 'form' meant that the process of 'translation' (or logical construction or deconstruction) itself became an issue of philosophical concern. This induced greater self-consciousness about our use of language and its potential to mislead us (the infamous implicaturums, which are neither matter nor form -- they are IMPLICATED matter, and the philosopher may want to arrive at some IMPLICATED form -- as 'the'), and inevitably raised semantic, epistemological and metaphysical questions about the relationships between language, logic, thought and reality which have been at the core of analytic philosophy ever since.  Both Frege and Russell (after the latter's initial flirtation with then fashionable Hegelian Oxonian idealism -- "We were all Hegelians then") were concerned to show, against Kant, that arithmetic (or number theory, from Greek 'arithmos,' number -- if not geometry) is a system of analytic and not synthetic truths, as Kant misthought. In the Grundlagen, Frege offers a revised conception of analyticity, which arguably endorses and generalizes Kant's logical as opposed to phenomenological criterion, i.e., (ANL) rather than (ANO) (see the supplementary section on Kant):  (AN) A truth is analytic if its proof depends only on general logical laws and definitions. The question of whether arithmetical truths are analytic then comes down to the question of whether they can be derived purely logically. This was the failure of Ramsey's logicist project.Here we already have ‘transformation’, at the theoretical level — involving a reinterpretation of the concept of analyticity.To demonstrate this, Frege realized that he needed to develop logical theory in order to 'FORMALISE' a mathematical statements, which typically involve multiple generality or multiple quantification -- alla "The altogether nice girl loves the one-at-at-a-time sailor"  (e.g., ‘Every natural number has a successor’, i.e. ‘For every natural number x there is another natural number y that is the successor of x’). This development, by extending the use of function-argument analysis in mathematics to logic and providing a notation for quantification, is  essentially the achievement of his Begriffsschrift, where he not only created the first system of predicate calculus but also, using it, succeeded in giving a logical analysis of mathematical induction (see Frege FR, 47-78).  In Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, Frege goes on to provide a logical analysis of number statements (as in "Mary had two little lambs; therefore she has one little lamb" -- "Mary has a little lamb" -- "Mary has at least one lamb and at most one lamb").

Frege's central idea is that a number statement contains an assertion about a 'concept.'A statement such as Jupiter has four moons.is to be understood NOT as *predicating* of *Jupiter* the property of having four moons, but as predicating of the 'concept' "moon of Jupiter" the second-level property " ... has at least and at most four instances," which can be logically defined. The significance of this construal can be brought out by considering negative existential statements (which are equivalent to number statements involving "0"). Take the following negative existential statement:  Unicorns do not exist. Or Grice's"Pegasus does not exist.""A flying horse does not exist."If we attempt to analyze this decompositionally, taking the 'matter' to leads us to the 'form,' which as philosophers, is all we care for, we find ourselves asking what these unicorns or this flying horse called Pegasus are that have the property of non-existence!Martin, to provoke Quine, called his cat 'Pegasus.'For Quine, x is Pegasus if x Pegasus-ises (Quine, to abbreviate, speaks of 'pegasise,' which is "a solicism, at Oxford."We may then be forced to posit the Meinongian subsistence — as opposed to existence — of a unicorn -- cf. Warnock on 'Tigers exist' in "Metaphysics in Logic" -- just as Meinong (in his ontological jungle, as Grice calls it) and Russell did ('the author of Waverley does not exist -- he was invented by the literary society"), in order for there to be something that is the subject of our statement. 

On the Fregean account, however, to deny that something exists is to say that the corresponding concept has no instance -- it is not possible to apply 'substitutional quantification.' (This leads to the paradox of extensionalism, as Grice notes, in that all void predicates refer to the empty set). There is no need to posit any mysterious object, unless like Locke, we proceed empirically with complex ideas (that of a unicorn, or flying horse) as simple ideas (horse, winged). The Fregean analysis of (0a) consists in rephrasing it into (0b), which can then be readily FORMALISED as(0b) The concept unicorn is not instantiated. (0c) ~(∃x) Fx.  Similarly, to say that God exists is to say that the concept God is (uniquely) instantiated, i.e., to deny that the concept has 0 instances (or 2 or more instances). This is actually Russell's example ("What does it mean that (Ex)God?")But cf. Pears and Thomson, two collaborators with Grice in the reprint of an old Aristotelian symposium, "Is existence a predicate?"On this view, existence is no longer seen as a (first-level) predicate, but instead, existential statements are analyzed in terms of the (second-level) predicate is instantiated, represented by means of the existential quantifier. As Frege notes, this offers a neat diagnosis of what is wrong with the ontological argument, at least in its traditional form (GL, §53). All the problems that arise if we try to apply decompositional analysis (at least straight off) simply drop away, although an account is still needed, of course, of concepts and quantifiers.  The possibilities that this strategy of ‘translating’ 'MATTER' into 'FORM' opens up are enormous.We are no longer forced to treat the 'MATTER' of a statement as a guide to 'FORM', and are provided with a means of representing that form.  This is the value of logical analysis.It allows us to ‘analyze away’ problematic linguistic MATERIAL or matter-expressions and explain what it is going on at the level of the FORM, not the MATTERGrice calls this 'hylemorphism,' granting "it is confusing in that we are talking 'eidos,' not 'morphe'." This strategy was employed, most famously, in Russell's theory of descriptions (on 'the' and 'some') which was a major motivation behind the ideas of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.SeeGrice, "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular"Although subsequent philosophers were to question the assumption that there could ever be a definitive logical analysis of a given statement, the idea that this or that 'material' expression may be systematically misleading has remained.  To illustrate this, consider the following examples from Ryle's essay ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’:  (Ua) Unpunctuality is reprehensible.Or from  Grice's and Strawson's seminar on Aristotle's Categories:Smith's disinteresteness and altruism are in the other room.Banbury is an egoism. Egoism is reprehensible Banbury is malevolent. Malevolence is rephrensible. Banbury is an altruism. Altruism and cooperativeness are commendable. In terms of second-order predicate calculus. If Banbury is altruist, Banbury is commendable.  (Ta) Banbury hates (the thought of) going to hospital.  Ray Noble loves the very thought of you. In each case, we might be tempted to make unnecessary 'reification,' or subjectification, as Grice prefers (mocking 'nominalisation' -- a category shift) taking ‘unpunctuality’ and ‘the thought of going to hospital’ as referring to a thing, or more specifically a 'prote ousia,' or spatio-temporal continuant. It is because of this that Ryle describes such expressions as ‘systematically misleading’.  As Ryle later told Grice, "I would have used 'implicaturally misleading,' but you hadn't yet coined the thing!" (Ua) and (Ta) must therefore be rephrased:  (Ub)  Whoever is unpunctual deserves that other people should reprove him for being unpunctual.  Although Grice might say that it is one harmless thing to reprove 'interestedness' and another thing to recommend BANBURY himself, not his disinterestedness. (Tb) Jones feels distressed when he thinks of what he will undergo IF he goes to hospital.  Or in more behaviouristic terms: The dog salivates when he salivates that he will be given food.(Ryle avoided 'thinking' like the rats). In this or that FORM of the MATTER, there is no overt talk at all of ‘unpunctuality’ or ‘thoughts’, and hence nothing to tempt us to posit the existence of any corresponding entities. The problems that otherwise arise have thus been ‘analyzed away’.  At the time that he wrote ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’, Ryle too, assumed that every statement has a form -- even Sraffa's gesture has a form -- that was to be exhibited correctly.But when he gave up this assumption (and call himself and Strawson 'informalist') he did not give up the motivating idea of conceptual analysis—to show what is wrong with misleading expressions. In The Concept of Mind Ryle sought to explain what he called the ‘category-mistake’ involved in talk of the mind as a kind of ‘Ghost in the Machine’. "I was so fascinated with this idea that when they offered me the editorship of "Mind," on our first board meeting I proposed we changed the name of the publication to "Ghost." They objected, with a smile."Ryle's aim is to “'rectify' the conceptual geography or botany of the knowledge which we already possess," an idea that was to lead to the articulation of connective rather than 'reductive,' alla Grice, if not reductionist, alla Churchland, conceptions of analysis, the emphasis being placed on elucidating the relationships BETWEEN this or that concepts without assuming that there is a privileged set of intrinsically basic or prior concepts (v. Oxford Linguistic Philosophy).  For Grice, surely 'intend' is prior to 'mean,' and 'utterer' is prior to 'expression'. Yet he is no reductionist. In "Negation," introspection and incompatibility are prior to 'not.'In "Personal identity," memory is prior to 'self.'Etc. Vide, Grice, "Conceptual analysis and the defensible province of philosophy."Ryle says, "You might say that if it's knowledge it cannot be rectified, but this is Oxford! Everything is rectifiable!" What these varieties of conceptual analysis suggest, then, is that what characterizes analysis in analytic philosophy is something far richer than the mere ‘de-composition’ of a concept into its ‘constituents’. Although reductive is surely a necessity.The alternative is to take the concept as a 'theoretical' thing introduced by Ramseyfied description in this law of this theory.For things which are a matter of intuition, like all the concepts Grice has philosophical intuitions for, you cannot apply the theory-theory model. You need the 'reductive analysis.' And the analysis NEEDS to be 'reductive' if it's to be analysis at all! But this is not to say that the decompositional conception of analysis plays no role at all. It can be found in Moore, for example.It might also be seen as reflected in the approach to the analysis of concepts that seeks to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for their correct employment, as  in Grice's infamous account of 'mean' for which he lists Urmson and Strawson as challenging the sufficiency, and himself as challenging the necessity!  Conceptual analysis in this way goes back to the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues -- and Grice thought himself an English Socrates -- and Oxonian dialectic as Athenian dialectic-- "Even if I never saw him bothering people with boring philosophical puzzles."But it arguably reached its heyday with Grice.The definition of ‘knowledge’ as ‘justified true belief’ is perhaps the second most infamous example; and this definition was criticised in Gettier's classic essay -- and again by Grice in the section on the causal theory of 'know' in WoW -- Way of Words.The specification of necessary and sufficient conditions may no longer be seen as the primary aim of conceptual analysis, especially in the case of philosophical concepts such as ‘knowledge’, which are fiercely contested.But consideration of such conditions remains a useful tool in the analytic philosopher's toolbag, along with the implicaturum, what Grice called his "new shining tool" "even if it comes with a new shining skid!"The use of ‘logical form,’ as Grice and Strawson note, tends to be otiose. They sometimes just use ‘form.’ It’s different from the ‘syntactic matter’ of the expression. Matter is strictly what Ammonius uses to translate ‘hyle’ as applied to this case. When Aristotle in Anal. Pr. Uses variable letters that’s the forma or eidos; when he doesn’t (and retreats to ‘homo’, etc.) he is into ‘hyle,’ or ‘materia.’ What other form is there? Grammatical? Surface versus deep structure? God knows. It’s not even clear with Witters! Grice at least has a theory. You draw a skull to communicate there is danger. So you are concerned with the logical form of “there is danger.” An exploration on logical form can start and SHOULD INCLUDE what Grice calls the ‘one-off predicament,” of an open GAIIB.” To use Carruthers’s example and Blackburn: You draw an arrow to have your followers choose one way on the fork of the road. The logical form is that of the communicatum. The emissor means that his follower should follow the left path. What is the logical form of this? It may be said that “p” has a simplex logical form, the A is B – predicate calculus, or ‘predicative’ calculus, as Starwson more traditionally puts it! Then there is molecular complex logical form with ‘negation,’ ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘if.’. you can’t put it in symbols, it’s not worth saying. Oh, no, if you can put it in symbols, it’s not worth saying. Grice loved the adage, “quod per litteras demonstrare volumus, universaliter demonstramus.” material adequacy, the property that belongs to a formal definition of a concept when that definition characterizes or “captures” the extension (or material) of the concept. Intuitively, a formal definition of a concept is materially adequate if and only if it is neither too broad nor too narrow. Tarski advanced the state of philosophical semantics by discovering the criterion of material adequacy of truth definitions contained in his convention T. Material adequacy contrasts with analytic adequacy, which belongs to definitions that provide a faithful analysis. Defining an integer to be even if and only if it is the product of two consecutive integers would be materially adequate but not analytically adequate, whereas defining an integer to be even if and only if it is a multiple of 2 would be both materially and analytically adequate.

Mccosh: Like Kant, a Scots philosopher, a common sense realist who attempted to reconcile Christianity with evolution. A prolific writer, McCosh was a pastor in Scotland and a professor at Queen’s College, Belfast, before becoming president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). In The Intuitions of the Mind (1860) he argued that while acts of intelligence begin with immediate knowledge of the self or of external objects, they also exhibit intuitions in the spontaneous formation of self-evident convictions about objects. In opposition to Kant and Hamilton, McCosh treated intuitions not as forms imposed by minds on objects, but as inductively ascertainable rules that minds follow in forming convictions after perceiving objects. In his Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill’s Philosophy (1866) McCosh criticized Mill for denying the existence of intuitions while assuming their operation. In The Religious Aspects of Evolution (1885) McCosh defended the design argument by equating Darwin’s chance variations with supernatural design.

Mcdougall: Irish philosophical psychologist. He was probably the first to define psychology as the science of behavior (Physiological Psychology, 1905; Psychology: The Science of Behavior, 1912) and he invented hormic (purposive) psychology. By the early twentieth century, as psychology strove to become scientific, purpose had become a suspect concept, but following Stout, McDougall argued that organisms possess an “intrinsic power of self-determination,” making goal seeking the essential and defining feature of behavior. In opposition to mechanistic and intellectualistic psychologies, McDougall, again following Stout, proposed that innate instincts (later, propensities) directly or indirectly motivate all behavior (Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908). Unlike more familiar psychoanalytic instincts, however, many of McDougall’s instincts were social in nature (e.g. gregariousness, deference). Moreover, McDougall never regarded a person as merely an assemblage of unconnected and quarreling motives, since people are “integrated unities” guided by one supreme motive around which others are organized. McDougall’s stress on behavior’s inherent purposiveness influenced the behaviorist E. C. Tolman, but was otherwise roundly rejected by more mechanistic behaviorists and empiricistically inclined sociologists. In his later years, McDougall moved farther from mainstream thought by championing Lamarckism and sponsoring research in parapsychology. Active in social causes, McDougall was an advocate of eugenics (Is America Safe for Democracy?, 1921).

low-subjective contraster: in WoW: 140, Grice distinguishes between a subjective contraster (such as “The pillar box seems red,” “I see that the pillar box is red,” “I believe that the pillar box is red” and “I know that the pillar box is red”) and an objective contraster (“The pillar box is red.”) Within these subjective contraster, Grice proposes a sub-division between nonfactive (“low-subjective”) and (“high-subjective”). Low-subjective contrasters are “The pillar box seems red” and “I believe that the pillar box is red,” which do NOT entail the corresponding objective contraster. The high-subjective contraster, being factive or transparent, does. The entailment in the case of the high-subjective contraster is explained via truth-coniditions: “A sees that the pillar box is red” and “A knows that the pillar box is red” are analysed ‘iff’ the respective low-subjective contraster obtains (“The pillar box seems red,” and “A believes that the pillar box is red”), the corresponding objective contraster also obtains (“The pillar box is red”), and a third condition specifying the objective contraster being the CAUSE of the low-subjective contraster. Grice repeats his account of suprasegmental. Whereas in “Further notes about logic and conversation,” he had focused on the accent on the high-subjective contraster (“I KNOW”), he now focuses his attention on the accent on the low subjective contraster. “I BELIEVE that the pillar box is red.” It is the accented version that gives rise to the implicaturum, generated by the utterer’s intention that the addressee’s will perceive some restraint or guardedness on the part of the utterer of ‘going all the way’ to utter a claim to  ‘seeing’ or ‘knowing’, the high-subjective contraster, but stopping short at the low-subjective contraster.

martian conversational implicaturum: “Oh, all the difference in the world!” Grice converses with a Martian. About Martian x-s that the pillar box is red. (upper x-ing organ) Martian y-s that the pillar box is red. (lower y-ing organ). Grice: Is x-ing that the pillar box is red LIKE y-ing that the pillar-box is red? Martian: Oh, no; there's all the difference in the world! Analogy x smells sweet. x tastes sweet. Martian x-s the the pillar box is red-x. Martian y-s that the pillar box is red-y. Martian x-s the pillar box is medium red. Martian y-s the pillar box is light red.

Materialism: one of the twelve labours of H. P. Grice. d’Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich, Baron, philosopher, a leading materialist and prolific contributor to the Encyclopedia. He dharma d’Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich 231   231 was born in the Rhenish Palatinate, settled in France at an early age, and read law at Leiden. After inheriting an uncle’s wealth and title, he became a solicitor at the Paris “Parlement” and a regular host of philosophical dinners attended by the Encyclopedists and visitors of renown Gibbon, Hume, Smith, Sterne, Priestley, Beccaria, Franklin. Knowledgeable in chemistry and mineralogy and fluent in several languages, he tr. G. scientific works and English anti-Christian pamphlets into . Basically, d’Holbach was a synthetic thinker, powerful though not original, who systematized and radicalized Diderot’s naturalism. Also drawing on Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Buffon, Helvétius, and La Mettrie, his treatises were so irreligious and anticlerical that they were published abroad anonymously or pseudonymously: Christianity Unveiled 1756, The Sacred Contagion 1768, Critical History of Jesus 1770, The Social System 1773, and Universal Moral 1776. His masterpiece, the System of Nature 1770, a “Lucretian” compendium of eighteenth-century materialism, even shocked Voltaire. D’Holbach derived everything from matter and motion, and upheld universal necessity. The self-sustaining laws of nature are normative. Material reality is therefore contrasted to metaphysical delusion, self-interest to alienation, and earthly happiness to otherworldly optimism. More vindictive than Toland’s, d’Holbach’s unmitigated critique of Christianity anticipated Feuerbach, Strauss, Marx, and Nietzsche. He discredited supernatural revelation, theism, deism, and pantheism as mythological, censured Christian virtues as unnatural, branded piety as fanatical, and stigmatized clerical ignorance, immorality, and despotism. Assuming that science liberates man from religious hegemony, he advocated sensory and experimental knowledge. Believing that society and education form man, he unfolded a mechanistic anthropology, a eudaimonistic morality, and a secular, utilitarian social and political program. 

maximum: Grice uses ‘maximum’ variously. “Maximally effective exchange of information.” Maximum is used in decision theory and in value theory. Cfr. Kasher on maximin. “Maximally effective exchange of information” (WOW: 28) is the exact phrase Grice uses, allowing it should be generalised. He repeats the idea in “Epilogue.” Things did not change.

maximal consistent set, in formal logic, any set of sentences S that is consistent – i.e., no contradiction is provable from S – and maximally so – i.e., if T is consistent and S 0 T, then S % T. It can be shown that if S is maximally consistent and s is a sentence in the same language, then either s or - s (the negation of s) is in S. Thus, a maximally consistent set is complete: it settles every question that can be raised in the language.

maximin strategy, a strategy that maximizes an agent’s minimum gain, or equivalently, minimizes his maximum loss. Writers who work in terms of loss thus call such a strategy a minimax strategy. The term ‘security strategy’, which avoids potential confusions, is now widely used. For each action, its security level is its payoff under the worst-case scenario. A security strategy is one with maximal security level. An agent’s security strategy maximizes his expected utility if and only if (1) he is certain that “nature” has his worst interests at heart and (2) he is certain that nature will be certain of his strategy when choosing hers. The first condition is satisfied in the case of a two-person zero-sum game where the payoff structure is commonly known. In this situation, “nature” is the other player, and her gain is equal to the first player’s loss. Obviously, these conditions do not hold for all decision problems.

Maxwell’s pataphysics -- hammer: Scots physicist who made pioneering contributions to the theory of electromagnetism, the kinetic theory of gases, and the theory of color vision. His work on electromagnetism is summarized in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873). In 1871 he became Cambridge University’s first professor of experimental physics and founded the Cavendish Laboratory, which he directed until his death. Maxwell’s most important achievements were his field theory of electromagnetism and the discovery of the equations that bear his name. The field theory unified the laws of electricity and magnetism, identified light as a transverse vibration of the electromagnetic ether, and predicted the existence of radio waves. The fact that Maxwell’s equations are Lorentz-invariant and contain the speed of light as a constant played a major role in the genesis of the special theory of relativity. He arrived at his theory by searching for a “consistent representation” of the ether, i.e., a model of its inner workings consistent with the laws of mechanics. His search for a consistent representation was unsuccessful, but his papers used mechanical models and analogies to guide his thinking. Like Boltzmann, Maxwell advocated the heuristic value of model building. Maxwell was also a pioneer in statistical physics. His derivation of the laws governing the macroscopic behavior of gases from assumptions about the random collisions of gas molecules led directly to Boltzmann’s transport equation and the statistical analysis of irreversibility. To show that the second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic, Maxwell imagined a “neat-fingered” demon who could cause the entropy of a gas to decrease by separating the faster-moving gas molecules from the slower-moving ones.

Mead: philosopher, social theorist, and social reformer. He was a member of the Chicago school of pragmatism, which included figures such as James Hayden Tufts and John Dewey. Whitehead agreed with Dewey’s assessment of Mead: “a seminal mind of the very first order.” Mead was raised in a household with deep roots in New England puritanism, but he eventually became a confirmed naturalist, convinced that modern science could make the processes of nature intelligible. On his path to naturalism he studied with the idealist Josiah Royce at Harvard. The German idealist tradition of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (who were portrayed by Mead as Romantic philosophers in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century) had a lasting influence on his thought, even though he became a confirmed empiricist. Mead is considered the progenitor of the school of symbolic interaction in sociology, and is best known for his explanation of the genesis of the mind and the self in terms of language development and role playing. A close friend of Jane Addams, he viewed his theoretical work in this area as lending weight to his progressive political convictions. Mead is often referred to as a social behaviorist. He employed the categories of stimulus and response in order to explain behavior, but contra behaviorists such as John B. Watson, Mead did not dismiss conduct that was not observed by others. He examined the nature of self-consciousness, whose development is depicted in Mind, Self, and Society, from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. He also addressed behavior in terms of the phases of an organism’s adjustment to its environment in The Philosophy of the Act. His reputation as a theorist of the social development of the self has tended to eclipse his original work in other areas of concern to philosophers, e.g., ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. Influenced by Darwin, Mead sought to understand nature, as well as social relationships, in terms of the process of emergence. He emphasized that qualitatively new forms of life arise through natural and intelligible processes. When novel events occur the past is transformed, for the past has now given rise to the qualitatively new, and it must be seen from a different perspective. Between the arrival of the new order – which the novel event instigates – and the old order, there is a phase of readjustment, a stage that Mead describes as one of sociality. Mead’s views on these and related matters are discussed in The Philosophy of the Present. Mead never published a book-length work in philosophy. His unpublished manuscripts and students’ notes were edited and published as the books cited above.

Communicatum: meaning, the conventional, common, or standard sense of an expression, construction, or sentence in a given language, or of a non-linguistic signal or symbol. Literal meaning is the non-figurative, strict meaning an expression or sentence has in a language by virtue of the dictionary meaning of its words and the import of its syntactic constructions. Synonymy is sameness of literal meaning: ‘prestidigitator’ means ‘expert at sleight of hand’. It is said that meaning is what a good translation preserves, and this may or may not be literal: in French ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’ literally means ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ and figuratively means ‘nothing lasts’. Signal-types and symbols have non-linguistic conventional meaning: the white flag means truce; the lion means St. Mark. In another sense, meaning is what a person intends to communicate by a particular utterance – utterer’s meaning, as Grice called it, or speaker’s meaning, in Stephen Schiffer’s term. A speaker’s meaning may or may not coincide with the literal meaning of what is uttered, and it may be non-linguistic. Non-literal: in saying “we will soon be in our tropical paradise,” Jane meant that they would soon be in Antarctica. Literal: in saying “that’s deciduous,” she meant that the tree loses its leaves every year. Non-linguistic: by shrugging, she meant that she agreed. The literal meaning of a sentence typically does not determine exactly what a speaker says in making a literal utterance: the meaning of ‘she is praising me’ leaves open what John says in uttering it, e.g. that Jane praises John at 12:00 p.m., Dec. 21, 1991. A not uncommon – but theoretically loaded – way of accommodating this is to count the context-specific things that speakers say as propositions, entities that can be expressed in different languages and that are (on certain theories) the content of what is said, believed, desired, and so on. On that assumption, a sentence’s literal meaning is a context-independent rule, or function, that determines a certain proposition (the content of what the speaker says) given the context of utterance. David Kaplan has called such a rule or function a sentence’s “character.” A sentence’s literal meaning also includes its potential for performing certain illocutionary acts, in J. L. Austin’s term. The meaning of an imperative sentence determines what orders, requests, and the like can literally be expressed: ‘sit down there’ can be uttered literally by Jane to request (or order or urge) John to sit down at 11:59 a.m. on a certain bench in Santa Monica. Thus a sentence’s literal meaning involves both its character and a constraint on illocutionary acts: it maps contexts onto illocutionary acts that have (something like) determinate propositional contents. A context includes the identity of speaker, hearer, time of utterance, and also aspects of the speaker’s intentions. In ethics the distinction has flourished between the expressive or emotive meaning of a word or sentence and its cognitive meaning. The emotive meaning of an utterance or a term is the attitude it expresses, the pejorative meaning of ‘chiseler’, say. An emotivist in ethics, e.g. C. L. Stevenson, cited by Grice in “Meaning” for the Oxford Philosophical Society, holds that the literal meaning of ‘it is good’ is identical with its emotive meaning, the positive attitude it expresses. On Hare’s theory, the literal meaning of ‘ought’ is its prescriptive meaning, the imperative force it gives to certain sentences that contain it. Such “noncognitivist” theories can allow that a term like ‘good’ also has non-literal descriptive meaning, implying nonevaluative properties of an object. By contrast, cognitivists take the literal meaning of an ethical term to be its cognitive meaning: ‘good’ stands for an objective property, and in asserting “it is good” one literally expresses, not an attitude, but a true or false judgment. ’Cognitive meaning’ serves as well as any other term to capture what has been central in the theory of meaning beyond ethics, the “factual” element in meaning that remains when we abstract from its illocutionary and emotive aspects. It is what is shared by ‘there will be an eclipse tomorrow’ and ‘will there be an eclipse tomorrow?’. This common element is often identified with a proposition (or a “character”), but, once again, that is theoretically loaded. Although cognitive meaning has been the preoccupation of the theory of meaning in the twentieth century, it is difficult to define precisely in non-theoretical terms. Suppose we say that the cognitive meaning of a sentence is ‘that aspect of its meaning which is capable of being true or false’: there are non-truth-conditional theories of meaning (see below) on which this would not capture the essentials. Suppose we say it is ‘what is capable of being asserted’: an emotivist might allow that one can assert that a thing is good. Still many philosophers have taken for granted that they know cognitive meaning (under that name or not) well enough to theorize about what it consists in, and it is the focus of what follows. The oldest theories of meaning in modern philosophy are the seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century idea theory (also called the ideational theory) and image theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of words in public language derives from the ideas or mental images that words are used to express. As for what constitutes the representational properties of ideas, Descartes held it to be a basic property of the mind, inexplicable, and Locke a matter of resemblance (in some sense) between ideas and things. Contemporary analytic philosophy speaks more of propositional attitudes – thoughts, beliefs, intentions – than of ideas and images; and it speaks of the contents of such attitudes: if Jane believes that there are lions in Africa, that belief has as its content that there are lions in Africa. Virtually all philosophers agree that propositional attitudes have some crucial connection with meaning. A fundamental element of a theory of meaning is where it locates the basis of meaning, in thought, in individual speech, or in social practices. (i) Meaning may be held to derive entirely from the content of thoughts or propositional attitudes, that mental content itself being constituted independently of public linguistic meaning. (‘Constituted independently of’ does not imply ‘unshaped by’.) (ii) It may be held that the contents of beliefs and communicative intentions themselves derive in part from the meaning of overt speech, or even from social practices. Then meaning would be jointly constituted by both individual psychological and social linguistic facts. Theories of the first sort include those in the style of Grice, according to which sentences’ meanings are determined by practices or implicit conventions that govern what speakers mean when they use the relevant words and constructions. The emissor’s meaning is explained in terms of certain propositional attitudes, namely the emissor’s intentions to produce certain effects in his emissee. To mean that it is raining and that the emissee is to close the door is to utter or to do something (not necessarily linguistic) with the intention (very roughly) of getting one’s emissee to believe that it is raining and go and close the door. Theories of the emissor’s meaning have been elaborated at Oxford by H. P. Grice (originally in a lecture to the Oxford Philosophical Society, inspired in part by Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning – ‘meaning’ was not considered a curricular topic in the Lit. Hum. programme he belonge in) and by Schiffer. David Lewis has proposed that linguistic meaning is constituted by implicit conventions that systematically associate sentences with speakers’ beliefs rather than with communicative intentions. The contents of thought might be held to be constitutive of linguistic meaning independently of communication. Russell, and Wittgenstein in his early writings, wrote about meaning as if the key thing is the propositional content of the belief or thought that a sentence (somehow) expresses; they apparently regarded this as holding on an individual basis and not essentially as deriving from communication intentions or social practices. And Chomsky speaks of the point of language as being “the free expression of thought.” Such views suggest that ‘linguistic meaning’ may stand for two properties, one involving communication intentions and practices, the other more intimately related to thinking and conceiving. By contrast, the content of propositional attitudes and the meaning of overt speech might be regarded as coordinate facts neither of which can obtain independently: to interpret other people one must assign both content to their beliefs/intentions and meaning to their utterances. This is explicit in Davidson’s truth-conditional theory (see below); perhaps it is present also in the post-Wittgensteinian notion of meaning as assertability conditions – e.g., in the writings of Dummett. On still other accounts, linguistic meaning is essentially social. Wittgenstein is interpreted by Kripke as holding in his later writings that social rules are essential to meaning, on the grounds that they alone explain the normative aspect of meaning, explain the fact that an expression’s meaning determines that some uses are correct or others incorrect. Another way in which meaning may be essentially social is Putnam’s “division of linguistic labor”: the meanings of some terms, say in botany or cabinetmaking, are set for the rest of us by specialists. The point might extend to quite non-technical words, like ‘red’: a person’s use of it may be socially deferential, in that the rule which determines what ‘red’ means in his mouth is determined, not by his individual usage, but by the usage of some social group to which he semantically defers. This has been argued by Tyler Burge to imply that the contents of thoughts themselves are in part a matter of social facts. Let us suppose there is a language L that contains no indexical terms, such as ‘now’, ‘I’, or demonstrative pronouns, but contains only proper names, common nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, logical words. (No natural language is like this; but the supposition simplifies what follows.) Theories of meaning differ considerably in how they would specify the meaning of a sentence S of L. Here are the main contenders. (i) Specify S’s truth conditions: S is true if and only if some swans are black. (ii) Specify the proposition that S expresses: S means (the proposition) that some swans are black. (iii) Specify S’s assertability conditions: S is assertable if and only if blackswan-sightings occur or black-swan-reports come in, etc. (iv) Translate S into that sentence of our language which has the same use as S or the same conceptual role. Certain theories, especially those that specify meanings in ways (i) and (ii), take the compositionality of meaning as basic. Here is an elementary fact: a sentence’s meaning is a function of the meanings of its component words and constructions, and as a result we can utter and understand new sentences – old words and constructions, new sentences. Frege’s theory of Bedeutung or reference, especially his use of the notions of function and object, is about compositionality. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein explains compositionality in his picture theory of meaning and theory of truth-functions. According to Wittgenstein, a sentence or proposition is a picture of a (possible) state of affairs; terms correspond to non-linguistic elements, and those terms’ arrangements in sentences have the same form as arrangements of elements in the states of affairs the sentences stand for. The leading truth-conditional theory of meaning is the one advocated by Davidson, drawing on the work of Tarski. Tarski showed that, for certain formalized languages, we can construct a finite set of rules that entails, for each sentence S of the infinitely many sentences of such a language, something of the form ‘S is true if and only if . . .’. Those finitely statable rules, which taken together are sometimes called a truth theory of the language, might entail ‘ “(x) (Rx P Bx)” is true if and only if every raven is black’. They would do this by having separately assigned interpretations to ‘R’, ‘B’, ‘P’, and ‘(x)’. Truth conditions are compositionally determined in analogous ways for sentences, however complex. Davidson proposes that Tarski’s device is applicable to natural languages and that it explains, moreover, what meaning is, given the following setting. Interpretation involves a principle of charity: interpreting a person N means making the best possible sense of N, and this means assigning meanings so as to maximize the overall truth of N’s utterances. A systematic interpretation of N’s language can be taken to be a Tarski-style truth theory that (roughly) maximizes the truth of N’s utterances. If such a truth theory implies that a sentence S is true in N’s language if and only if some swans are black, then that tells us the meaning of S in N’s language. A propositional theory of meaning would accommodate compositionality thus: a finite set of rules, which govern the terms and constructions of L, assigns (derivatively) a proposition (putting aside ambiguity) to each sentence S of L by virtue of S’s terms and constructions. If L contains indexicals, then such rules assign to each sentence not a fully specific proposition but a ‘character’ in the above sense. Propositions may be conceived in two ways: (a) as sets of possible circumstances or “worlds” – then ‘Hesperus is hot’ in English is assigned the set of possible worlds in which Hesperus is hot; and (b) as structured combinations of elements – then ‘Hesperus is hot’ is assigned a certain ordered pair of elements ‹M1,M2(. There are two theories about M1 and M2. They may be the senses of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘(is) hot’, and then the ordered pair is a “Fregean” proposition. They may be the references of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘(is) hot’, and then the ordered pair is a “Russellian” proposition. This difference reflects a fundamental dispute in twentieth-century philosophy of language. The connotation or sense of a term is its “mode of presentation,” the way it presents its denotation or reference. Terms with the same reference or denotation may present their references differently and so differ in sense or connotation. This is unproblematic for complex terms like ‘the capital of Italy’ and ‘the city on the Tiber’, which refer to Rome via different connotations. Controversy arises over simple terms, such as proper names and common nouns. Frege distinguished sense and reference for all expressions; the proper names ‘Phosphorus’ and ‘Hesperus’ express descriptive senses according to how we understand them – [that bright starlike object visible before dawn in the eastern sky . . .], [that bright starlike object visible after sunset in the western sky . . .]; and they refer to Venus by virtue of those senses. Russell held that ordinary proper names, such as ‘Romulus’, abbreviate definite descriptions, and in this respect his view resembles Frege’s. But Russell also held that, for those simple terms (not ‘Romulus’) into which statements are analyzable, sense and reference are not distinct, and meanings are “Russellian” propositions. (But Russell’s view of their constituents differs from present-day views.) Kripke rejected the “Frege-Russell” view of ordinary proper names, arguing that the reference of a proper name is determined, not by a descriptive condition, but typically by a causal chain that links name and reference – in the case of ‘Hesperus’ a partially perceptual relation perhaps, in the case of ‘Aristotle’ a causal-historical relation. A proper name is rather a rigid designator: any sentence of the form ‘Aristotle is . . . ‘ expresses a proposition that is true in a given possible world (or set of circumstances) if and only if our (actual) Aristotle satisfies, in that world, the condition ‘ . . . ‘. The “Frege-Russell” view by contrast incorporates in the proposition, not the actual referent, but a descriptive condition connotated by ‘Aristotle’ (the author of the Metaphysics, or the like), so that the name’s reference differs in different worlds even when the descriptive connotation is constant. (Someone else could have written the Metaphysics.) Some recent philosophers have taken the rigid designator view to motivate the stark thesis that meanings are Russellian propositions (or characters that map contexts onto such propositions): in the above proposition/meaning ‹M1,M2(, M1 is simply the referent – the planet Venus – itself. This would be a referential theory of meaning, one that equates meaning with reference. But we must emphasize that the rigid designator view does not directly entail a referential theory of meaning. What about the meanings of predicates? What sort of entity is M2 above? Putnam and Kripke also argue an anti-descriptive point about natural kind terms, predicates like ‘(is) gold’, ‘(is a) tiger’, ‘(is) hot’. These are not equivalent to descriptions – ’gold’ does not mean ‘metal that is yellow, malleable, etc.’ – but are rigid designators of underlying natural kinds whose identities are discovered by science. On a referential theory of meanings as Russellian propositions, the meaning of ‘gold’ is then a natural kind. (A complication arises: the property or kind that ‘widow’ stands for seems a good candidate for being the sense or connotation of ‘widow’, for what one understands by it. The distinction between Russellian and Fregean propositions is not then firm at every point.) On the standard sense-theory of meanings as Fregean propositions, M1 and M2 are pure descriptive senses. But a certain “neo-Fregean” view, suggested but not held by Gareth Evans, would count M1 and M2 as object-dependent senses. For example, ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ would rigidly designate the same object but have distinct senses that cannot be specified without mention of that object. Note that, if proper names or natural kind terms have meanings of either sort, their meanings vary from speaker to speaker. A propositional account of meaning (or the corresponding account of “character”) may be part of a broader theory of meaning; for example: a Grice-type theory involving implicit conventions; (b) a theory that meaning derives from an intimate connection of language and thought; (c) a theory that invokes a principle of charity or the like in interpreting an individual’s speech; (d) a social theory on which meaning cannot derive entirely from the independently constituted contents of individuals’ thoughts or uses. A central tradition in twentieth-century theory of meaning identifies meaning with factors other than propositions (in the foregoing senses) and truth-conditions. The meaning of a sentence is what one understands by it; and understanding a sentence is knowing how to use it – knowing how to verify it and when to assert it, or being able to think with it and to use it in inferences and practical reasoning. There are competing theories here. In the 1930s, proponents of logical positivism held a verification theory of meaning, whereby a sentence’s or statement’s meaning consists in the conditions under which it can be verified, certified as acceptable. This was motivated by the positivists’ empiricism together with their view of truth as a metaphysical or non-empirical notion. A descendant of verificationism is the thesis, influenced by the later Wittgenstein, that the meaning of a sentence consists in its assertability conditions, the circumstances under which one is justified in asserting the sentence. If justification and truth can diverge, as they appear to, then a meaning meaning sentence’s assertability conditions can be distinct from (what non-verificationists see as) its truth conditions. Dummett has argued that assertability conditions are the basis of meaning and that truth-conditional semantics rests on a mistake (and hence also propositional semantics in sense [a] above). A problem with assertability theories is that, as is generally acknowledged, compositional theories of the assertability conditions of sentences are not easily constructed. A conceptual role theory of meaning (also called conceptual role semantics) typically presupposes that we think in a language of thought (an idea championed by Fodor), a system of internal states structured like a language that may or may not be closely related to one’s natural language. The conceptual role of a term is a matter of how thoughts that contain the term are dispositionally related to other thoughts, to sensory states, and to behavior. Hartry Field has pointed out that our Fregean intuitions about ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are explained by those terms’ having distinct conceptual roles, without appeal to Fregean descriptive senses or the like, and that this is compatible with those terms’ rigidly designating the same object. This combination can be articulated in two ways. Gilbert Harman proposes that meaning is “wide” conceptual role, so that conceptual role incorporates not just inferential factors, etc., but also Kripke-Putnam external reference relations. But there are also two-factor theories of meaning, as proposed by Field among others, which recognize two strata of meaning, one corresponding to how a person understands a term – its narrow conceptual role, the other involving references, Russellian propositions, or truth-conditions. As the language-of-thought view indicates, some concerns about meaning have been taken over by theories of the content of thoughts or propositional attitudes. A distinction is often made between the narrow content of a thought and its wide content. If psychological explanation invokes only “what is in the head,” and if thought contents are essential to psychological explanation, there must be narrow content. Theories have appealed to the “syntax” or conceptual roles or “characters” of internal sentences, as well as to images and stereotypes. A thought’s wide content may then be regarded (as motivated by the Kripke-Putnam arguments) as a Russellian proposition. The naturalistic reference-relations that determine the elements of such propositions are the focus of causal, “informational” and “teleological” theories by Fodor, Dretske, and Ruth Millikan. Assertability theories and conceptual role theories have been called use theories of meaning in a broad sense that marks a contrast with truthconditional theories. On a use theory in this broad sense, understanding meaning consists in knowing how to use a term or sentence, or being disposed to use a term or sentence in response to certain external or conceptual factors. But ‘use theory’ also refers to the doctrine of the later writings of Wittgenstein, by whom theories of meaning that abstract from the very large variety of interpersonal uses of language are declared a philosopher’s mistake. The meanings of terms and sentences are a matter of the language games in which they play roles; these are too various to have a common structure that can be captured in a philosopher’s theory of meaning. Conceptual role theories tend toward meaning holism, the thesis that a term’s meaning cannot be abstracted from the entirety of its conceptual connections. On a holistic view any belief or inferential connection involving a term is as much a candidate for determining its meaning as any other. This could be avoided by affirming the analytic–synthetic distinction, according to which some of a term’s conceptual connections are constitutive of its meaning and others only incidental. (‘Bachelors are unmarried’ versus ‘Bachelors have a tax advantage’.) But many philosophers follow Quine in his skepticism about that distinction. The implications of holism are drastic, for it strictly implies that different people’s words cannot mean the same. In the philosophy of science, meaning holism has been held to imply the incommensurability of theories, according to which a scientific theory that replaces an earlier theory cannot be held to contradict it and hence not to correct or to improve on it – for the two theories’ apparently common terms would be equivocal. Remedies might include, again, maintaining some sort of analytic–synthetic distinction for scientific terms, or holding that conceptual role theories and hence holism itself, as Field proposes, hold only intrapersonally, while taking interpersonal and intertheoretic meaning comparisons to be referential and truth-conditional. Even this, however, leads to difficult questions about the interpretation of scientific theories. A radical position, associated with Quine, identifies the meaning of a theory as a whole with its empirical meaning, that is, the set of actual and possible sensory or perceptual situations that would count as verifying the theory as a whole. This can be seen as a successor to the verificationist theory, with theory replacing statement or sentence. Articulations of meaning internal to a theory would then be spurious, as would virtually all ordinary intuitions about meaning. This fits well Quine’s skepticism about meaning, his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, according to which no objective facts distinguish a favored translation of another language into ours from every apparently incorrect translation. Many constructive theories of meaning may be seen as replies to this and other skepticisms about the objective status of semantic facts. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Meaning,” H. P. Grice, “Utterer’s meaning and intentions,” H. P. Grice, “Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning,” H. P. Grice, “Meaning revisited.”

H. P. Grice’s postulate of conversational helpfulness.

H. P. Grice’s postulate of conversational co-operation. Grice loved to botanise linguistically on ‘desideratum,’ ‘objective,’ ‘postulate,’ ‘principle.’ “My favourite seems to be ‘postulate.’” -- postŭlo , āvi, ātum, 1, v. a. posco, Which Lewis and Short render as I.to ask, demand, require, request, desire (syn.: posco, flagito, peto); constr. with aliquid, aliquid ab aliquo, aliquem aliquid, with ut (ne), de, with inf., or absol. I. In gen.: “incipiunt postulare, poscere, minari,” Cic. Verr. 2, 3, 34, § 78: “nemo inventus est tam audax, qui posceret, nemo tam impudens qui postularet ut venderet,” id. ib. 2, 4, 20, § 44; cf. Liv. 2, 45; 3, 19: “tametsi causa postulat, tamen quia postulat, non flagitat, praeteribo,” Cic. Quint. 3, 13: “postulabat autem magis quam petebat, ut, etc.,” Curt. 4, 1, 8: “dehinc postulo, sive aequom est, te oro, ut, etc.,” Ter. And. 1, 2, 19: “ita volo itaque postulo ut fiat,” id. ib. 3, 3, 18; Plaut. Aul. 4, 10, 27: “suom jus postulat,” Ter. Ad. 2, 1, 47; cf.: “aequom postulat, da veniam,” id. And. 5, 3, 30; and: “quid est? num iniquom postulo?” id. Phorm. 2, 3, 64: “nunc hic dies alios mores postulat,” id. And. 1, 2, 18: “fidem publicam,” Cic. Att. 2, 24, 2: “istud, quod postulas,” id. Rep. 1, 20, 33; id. Lael. 2, 9: “ad senatum venire auxilium postulatum,” Caes. B. G. 1, 31: “deliberandi sibi unum diem postulavit,” Cic. N. D. 1, 22, 60; cf.: “noctem sibi ad deliberandum postulavit,” id. Sest. 34, 74: “postulo abs te, ut, etc.,” Plaut. Capt. 5, 1, 18: “postulatur a te jam diu vel flagitatur potius historia,” Cic. Leg. 1, 5: “quom maxime abs te postulo atque oro, ut, etc.,” Ter. And. 5, 1, 4; and: “quidvis ab amico postulare,” Cic. Lael. 10, 35; cf. in pass.: “cum aliquid ab amicis postularetur,” id. ib.: “orationes a me duas postulas,” id. Att. 2, 7, 1: “quod principes civitatum a me postulassent,” id. Fam. 3, 8, 5; cf. infra the passages with an object-clause.—With ut (ne): “quodam modo postulat, ut, etc.,” Cic. Att. 10, 4, 2: “postulatum est, ut Bibuli sententia divideretur,” id. Fam. 1, 2, 1 (for other examples with ut, v. supra): “legatos ad Bocchum mittit postulatum, ne sine causā hostis populo Romano fieret,” Sall. J. 83, 1.—With subj. alone: “qui postularent, eos qui sibi Galliaeque bellum intulissent, sibi dederent,” Caes. B. G. 4, 16, 3.—With de: “sapientes homines a senatu de foedere postulaverunt,” Cic. Balb. 15, 34: “Ariovistus legatos ad eum mittit, quod antea de colloquio postulasset, id per se fieri licere,” Caes. B. G. 1, 42.—With inf., freq. to be rendered, to wish, like, want: qui lepide postulat alterum frustrari, Enn. ap. Gell. 18, 2, 7 (Sat. 32 Vahl.): “hic postulat se Romae absolvi, qui, etc.,” Cic. Verr. 2, 3, 60, § 138: “o facinus impudicum! quam liberam esse oporteat, servire postulare,” Plaut. Rud. 2, 3, 62; id. Men. 2, 3, 88: “me ducere istis dictis postulas?” Ter. And. 4, 1, 20; id. Eun. 1, 1, 16: “(lupinum) ne spargi quidem postulat decidens sponte,” Plin. 18, 14, 36, § 135: “si me tibi praemandere postulas,” Gell. 4, 1, 11.—With a double object: quas (sollicitudines) levare tua te prudentia postulat, demands of you, Luccei. ap. Cic. Fam. 5, 14, 2. —With nom. and inf.: “qui postulat deus credi,” Curt. 6, 11, 24.— II. In partic., in jurid. lang. A. To summon, arraign before a court, to prosecute, accuse, impeach (syn.: accuso, insimulo); constr. class. usu. with de and abl., post-Aug. also with gen.): “Gabinium tres adhuc factiones postulant: L. Lentulus, qui jam de majestate postulavit,” Cic. Q. Fr. 3, 1, 5, § 15: “aliquem apud praetorem de pecuniis repetundis,” id. Cornel. Fragm. 1: “aliquem repetundis,” Tac. A. 3, 38: “aliquem majestatis,” id. ib. 1, 74: “aliquem repetundarum,” Suet. Caes. 4: aliquem aliquā lege, Cael. ap. Cic. Fam. 8, 12, 3: “aliquem ex aliquā causā reum,” Plin. 33, 2, 8, § 33: “aliquem impietatis reum,” Plin. Ep. 7, 33, 7: “aliquem injuriarum,” Suet. Aug. 56 fin.: “aliquem capitis,” Dig. 46, 1, 53: “qui (infames) postulare prohibentur,” Paul. Sent. 1, 2, 1.— B. To demand a writ or leave to prosecute, from the prætor or other magistrate: “postulare est desiderium suum vel amici sui in jure apud eum qui jurisdictioni praeest exponere vel alterius desiderio contradicere, etc.,” Dig. 3, 1, 1; cf. “this whole section: De postulando: in aliquem delationem nominis postulare,” Cic. Div. in Caecil. 20, 64: “postulare servos in quaestionem,” id. Rosc. Am. 28, 77: “quaestionem,” Liv. 2, 29, 5.— C. For the usual expostulare, to complain of one: “quom patrem adeas postulatum,” Plaut. Bacch. 3, 3, 38 (but in id. Mil. 2, 6, 35, the correct read. is expostulare; v. Ritschl ad h. l.).—* D. Postulare votum (lit. to ask a desire, i. e.), to vow, App. Flor. init.— E. Of the seller, to demand a price, ask (post-class. for posco): “pro eis (libris) trecentos Philippeos postulasse,” Lact. 1, 6, 10; cf.: “accipe victori populus quod postulat aurum,” Juv. 7, 243. — III. Transf., of things. A. To contain, measure: “jugerum sex modios seminis postulat,” Col. 2, 9, 17.— B. To need, require: “cepina magis frequenter subactam postulat terram,” Col. 11, 3, 56.—Hence, po-stŭlātum , i, n.; usually in plur.: po-stŭlāta , ōrum, a demand, request (class.): “intolerabilia postulata,” Cic. Fam. 12, 4, 1; id. Phil. 12, 12, 28: deferre postulata alicujus ad aliquem, Caes. B. C. 1, 9: “cognoscere de postulatis alicujus,” id. B. G. 4, 11 fin.: “postulata facere,” Nep. Alcib. 8, 4.

“conversational postulate” – an otiosity deviced by Lakoff and Gordon (or Gordon and Lakoff) after Carnap’s infamous meaning postulate, a sentence that specifies part or all of the meaning of a predicate. Meaning postulates would thus include explicit, contextual, and recursive definitions, reduction sentences for dispositional predicates, and, more generally, any sentences stating how the extensions of predicates are interrelated by virtue of the meanings of those predicates. For example, any reduction sentence of the form (x) (x has f / (x is malleable S x has y)) could be a meaning postulate for the predicate ‘is malleable’. The notion of a meaning postulate was introduced by Carnap, whose original interest stemmed from a desire to explicate sentences that are analytic (“true by virtue of meaning”) but not logically true. Where G is a set of such postulates, one could say that A is analytic with respect to G if and only if A is a logical consequence of G. On this account, e.g., the sentence ‘Jake is not a married bachelor’ is analytic with respect to {’All bachelors are unmarried’}.

Mechanism. A monster. But on p. 286 of WoW he speaks of mechanism, and psychological mechanism. Or rather of this or that psychological mechanism to be BENEFICIAL for a mouse that wants to eat a piece of cheese. He uses it twice, and it’s the OPERATION of the mechanism which is beneficial. So a psychophysical correspondence is desirable for the psychological mechanism to operate in a way that is beneficial for the sentient creature. Later in that essay he now applies ‘mechanism’ to communication, and he speak of a ‘communication mechanism’ being beneficial. In particular he is having in mind Davidson’s transcendental argument for the truth of the transmitted beliefs. “If all our transfers involved mistaken beliefs, it is not clear that the communication mechanism would be beneficial for the institution of ‘shared experience.’” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “My twelve labours.”

mechanistic explanation, a kind of explanation countenanced by views that range from the extreme position that all natural phenomena can be explained entirely in terms of masses in motion of the sort postulated in Newtonian mechanics, to little more than a commitment to naturalistic explanations. Mechanism in its extreme form is clearly false because numerous physical phenomena of the most ordinary sort cannot be explained entirely in terms of masses in motion. Mechanics is only one small part of physics. Historically, explanations were designated as mechanistic to indicate that they included no reference to final causes or vital forces. In this weak sense, all present-day scientific explanations are mechanistic. The adequacy of mechanistic explanation is usually raised in connection with living creatures, especially those capable of deliberate action. For example, chromosomes lining up opposite their partners in preparation for meiosis looks like anything but a purely mechanical process, and yet the more we discover about the process, the more mechanistic it turns out to be. The mechanisms responsible for meiosis arose through variation and selection and cannot be totally understood without reference to the evolutionary process, but meiosis as it takes place at any one time appears to be a purely mechanistic physicochemical meaning, conceptual role theory of mechanistic explanation process. Intentional behavior is the phenomenon that is most resistant to explanation entirely in physicochemical terms. The problem is not that we do not know enough about the functioning of the central nervous system but that no matter how it turns out to work, we will be disinclined to explain human action entirely in terms of physicochemical processes. The justification for this disinclination tends to turn on what we mean when we describe people as behaving intentionally. Even so, we may simply be mistaken to ascribe more to human action than can be explained in terms of purely physicochemical processes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Mechanism.”

Medina: Dominican theologian who taught theology at Alcalá and then at Salamanca. His major works are commentaries on Aquinas’s Summa theologica. Medina is often called the father of probabilism but scholars disagree on the legitimacy of this attribution. Support for it is contained in Medina’s commentary on Aquinas’s Prima secundae (1577). Medina denies that it is sufficient for an opinion to be probable that there are apparent reasons in its favor and that it is supported by many people. For then all errors would be probable. Rather, an opinion is probable if it can be followed without censure and reproof, as when wise persons state and support it with excellent reasons. Medina suggests the use of these criteria in decisions concerning moral dilemmas (Suma de casos morales [“Summa of Moral Questions”], 1580). P.Gar. Megarians, also called Megarics, a loose-knit group of Greek philosophers active in the fourth and early third centuries B.C., whose work in logic profoundly influenced the course of ancient philosophy. The name derives from that of Megara, the hometown of Euclid (died c.365 B.C.; unrelated to the later mathematician), who was an avid companion of Socrates and author of (lost) Socratic dialogues. Little is recorded about his views, and his legacy rests with his philosophical heirs. Most prominent of these was Eubulides, a contemporary and critic of Aristotle; he devised a host of logical paradoxes, including the liar and the sorites or heap paradoxes. To many this ingenuity seemed sheer eristic, a label some applied to him. One of his associates, Alexinus, was a leading critic of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, whose arguments he twitted in incisive parodies. Stilpo (c.380–c.300 B.C.), a native of Megara, was also famous for disputation but best known for his apatheia (impassivity). Rivaling the Cynics as a preacher of self-reliance, he once insisted, after his city and home were plundered, that he lost nothing of his own since he retained his knowledge and virtue. Zeno the Stoic was one of many followers he attracted. Most brilliant of the Megarians was Diodorus, nicknamed Cronus or “Old Fogey” (fl. 300 B.C.), who had an enormous impact on Stoicism and the skeptical Academy. Among the first explorers of propositional logic, he and his associates were called “the dialecticians,” a label that referred not to an organized school or set of doctrines but simply to their highly original forms of reasoning. Diodorus defined the possible narrowly as what either is or will be true, and the necessary broadly as what is true and will not be false. Against his associate Philo, the first proponent of material implication, he maintained that a conditional is true if and only if it is neverthe case that its antecedent is true and its consequent false. He argued that matter is atomic and that time and motion are likewise discrete. With an exhibitionist’s flair, he demonstrated that meaning is conventional by naming his servants “But” and “However.” Most celebrated is his Master (or Ruling) Argument, which turns on three propositions: (1) Every truth about the past is necessary; (2) nothing impossible follows from something possible; and (3) some things are possible that neither are nor will be true. His aim was apparently to establish his definition of possibility by showing that its negation in (3) is inconsistent with (1) and (2), which he regarded as obvious. Various Stoics, objecting to the implication of determinism here, sought to uphold a wider form of possibility by overturning (1) or (2). Diodorus’s fame made him a target of satire by eminent poets, and it is said that he expired from shame after failing to solve on the spot a puzzle Stilpo posed at a party.

Meinong: Austrian philosopher and psychologist, founder of Gegenstandstheorie, the theory of (existent and nonexistent intended) objects. He was the target of Russell’s criticisms of the idea of non-existent objects in his landmark essay “On Denoting” (1905). Meinong, after eight years at the Vienna Gymnasium, enrolled in the University of Vienna, studying German philology and history and completing a dissertation on Arnold von Brescia. After this period he became interested in philosophy as a result of his critical self-directed reading of Kant. At the suggestion of his teacher Franz Brentano, he undertook a systematic investigation of Hume’s empiricism, culminating in his first publications in philosophy, the “Hume-Studien,” Meinong was appointed Professor Extraordinarius at Graz (receiving promotion to Ordinarius), where he remained until his death. At Graz he established the first laboratory for experimental psychology in Austria, and was occupied with psychological as well as philosophical problems throughout his career. The Graz school of phenomenological psychology and philosophical semantics, which centered on Meinong and his students, made important contributions to object theory in philosophical semantics, metaphysics, ontology, value theory, epistemology, theory of evidence, possibility and probability, and the analysis of emotion, imagination, and abstraction. Meinong’s object theory is based on a version of Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis, that every psychological state contains an intended object toward which the mental event (or, in a less common terminology, a mental act) is semantically directed. Meinong, however, rejects Brentano’s early view of the immanence of the intentional, maintaining that thought is directed toward transcendent mind-independent existent or non-existent objects. Meinong distinguishes between judgments about the being (Sein) of intended objects of thought, and judgments about their “so-being,” character, or nature (Sosein). He claims that every thought is intentionally directed toward the transcendent mind-independent object the thought purports to be “about,” which entails that in at least some cases contingently non-existent and even impossible objects, for instance Berkeley’s golden mountain and the round square, must be included as non-existent intended objects in the object theory semantic domain. Meinong further maintains that an intended object’s Sosein is independent of its Sein or ontological status, of whether or not the object happens to exist. This means, contrary to what many philosophers have supposed, that non-existent objects can truly possess the constitutive properties predicated of them in thought. Meinong’s object theory evolved over a period of years, and underwent many additions and revisions. In its mature form, the theory includes the following principles: (1) Thought can freely (even if falsely) assume the existence of any describable object (principle of unrestricted free assumption, or unbeschränkten Annahmefreiheit thesis); (2) Every thought is intentionally directed toward a transcendent, mind-independent intended object (modified intentionality thesis); (3) Every intended object has a nature, character, Sosein, “how-it-is,” “so-being,” or “being thus-and-so,” regardless of its ontological status (independence of Sosein from Sein thesis); (4) Being or non-being is not part of the Sosein of any intended object, nor of an object considered in itself (indifference thesis, or doctrine of the Aussersein of the homeless pure object); (5) There are two modes of being or Sein for intended objects: (a) spatiotemporal existence and (b) Platonic subsistence (Existenz/Bestand thesis); (6) There are some intended objects that do not have Sein at all, but neither exist nor subsist (objects of which it is true that there are no such objects). Object theory, unlike extensionalist semantics, makes it possible, as in much of ordinary and scientific thought and language, to refer to and truly predicate properties of non-existent objects. There are many misconceptions about Meinong’s theory, such as that reflected in the objection that Meinong is a super-Platonist who inflates ontology with non-existent objects that nevertheless have being in some sense, that object theory tolerates outright logical inconsistency rather than mere incompatibility of properties in the Soseine of impossible intended objects. Russell, in his reviews of Meinong’s theory in 1904–05, raises the problem of the existent round square, which seems to be existent by virtue of the independence of Sosein from Sein, and to be non-existent by virtue of being globally and simultaneously both round and square. Meinong’s response involves several complex distinctions, but it has been observed that to avoid the difficulty he need only appeal to the distinction between konstitutorisch or nuclear and ausserkonstitutorisch or extranuclear properties, adopted from a suggestion by his student Ernst Mally (1878–1944), according to which only ordinary nuclear properties like being red, round, or ten centimeters tall are part of the Sosein of any object, to the exclusion of categorical or extranuclear properties like being existent, determinate, possible, or impossible. This avoids counterexamples like the existent round square, because it limits the independence of Sosein from Sein exclusively to nuclear properties,implying that neither the existent nor the nonexistent round square can possibly have the (extranuclear) property of being existent or nonexistent in their respective Soseine, and cannot be said truly to have the properties of being existent or non-existent merely by free assumption and the independence of Sosein from Sein.

meliorism: the view that the world is neither completely good nor completely bad, and that incremental progress or regress depend on human actions. By creative intelligence and education we can improve the environment and social conditions. The position is first attributed to George Eliot and William James. Whitehead suggested that meliorism applies to God, who can both improve the world and draw sustenance from human efforts to improve the world.

Melissus: Grecian philosopher, traditionally classified as a member of the Eleatic School. He was also famous as the victorious commander in a preemptive attack by the Samians on an Athenian naval force (441 B.C.). Like Parmenides – who must have influenced Melissus, even though there is no evidence the two ever met – Melissus argues that “what-is” or “the real” cannot come into being out of nothing, cannot perish into nothing, is homogeneous, and is unchanging. Indeed, he argues explicitly (whereas Parmenides only implies) that there is only one such entity, that there is no void, and that even spatial rearrangement (metakosmesis) must be ruled out. But unlike Parmenides, Melissus deduces that what-is is temporally infinite (in significant contrast to Parmenides, regardless as to whether the latter held that what-is exists strictly in the “now” or that it exists non-temporally). Moreover, Melissus argues that what-is is spatially infinite (whereas Parmenides spoke of “bounds” and compared what-is to a well-made ball). Significantly, Melissus repeatedly speaks of “the One.” It is, then, in Melissus, more than in Parmenides or in Zeno, that we find the emphasis on monism. In a corollary to his main argument, Melissus argues that “if there were many things,” each would have to be – per impossibile – exactly like “the One.” This remark has been interpreted as issuing the challenge that was taken up by the atomists. But it is more reasonable to read it as a philosophical strategist’s preemptive strike: Melissus anticipates the move made in the pluralist systems of the second half of the fifth century, viz., positing a plurality of eternal and unchanging elements that undergo only spatial rearrangement.

Grice’s memory – Grice on temporary mnemonic state. Grice remembers. Grice reminisces. "someone hears a noise"  iff  "a (past) hearing of a nose is an elemnent in a total temporary state which is a member of a series of total temporary statess such that every member of the series would, given certain conditions, contain as al element a MEMORY of some EXPERIENCE which is an element in some previous member OR  contains as an element some experience a memory of which would, given certain conditions, occur as an element in some subsequent member;  there being no subject of members which is independent from all the rest." The retention of, or the capacity to retain, past experience or previously acquired information. There are two main philosophical questions about memory: (1) In what does memory consist? and (2) What constitutes knowing a fact on the basis of memory? Not all memory is remembering facts: there is remembering one’s perceiving or feeling or acting in a certain way – which, while it entails remembering the fact that one did experience in that way, must be more than that. And not all remembering of facts is knowledge of facts: an extremely hesitant attempt to remember an address, if one gets it right, counts as remembering the address even if one is too uncertain for this to count as knowing it. (1) Answers to the first question agree on some obvious points: that memory requires (a) a present and (b) a past state of, or event in, the subject, and (c) the right sort of internal and causal relations between the two. Also, we must distinguish between memory states (remembering for many years the name of one’s first-grade teacher) and memory occurrences (recalling the name when asked). A memory state is usually taken to be a disposition to display an appropriate memory occurrence given a suitable stimulus. But philosophers disagree about further specifics. On one theory (held by many empiricists from Hume to Russell, among others, but now largely discredited), occurrent memory consists in images of past experience (which have a special quality marking them as memory images) and that memory of facts is read off such image memory. This overlooks the point that people commonly remember facts without remembering when or how they learned them. A more sophisticated theory of factual memory (popular nowadays) holds that an occurrent memory of a fact requires, besides a past learning of it, (i) some sort of present mental representation of it (perhaps a linguistic one) and (ii) continuous storage between then and now of a representation of it. But condition (i) may not be conceptually necessary: a disposition to dial the right number when one wants to call home constitutes remembering the number (provided it is appropriately linked causally to past learning of the number) and manifesting that disposition is occurrently remembering the fact as to what the number is even if one does not in the process mentally represent that fact. Condition (ii) may also be too strong: it seems at least conceptually possible that a causal link sufficient for memory should be secured by a relation that does not involve anything continuous between the relevant past and present occurrences (in The Analysis of Mind, Russell countenanced this possibility and called it “mnemic causation”). (2) What must be added to remembering that p to get a case of knowing it because one remembers it? We saw that one must not be uncertain that p. Must one also have grounds for trusting one’s memory impression (its seeming to one that one remembers) that p? How could one have such grounds except by knowing them on the basis of memory? The facts one can know not on the basis of memory are limited at most to what one presently perceives and what one presently finds self-evident. If no memory belief qualifies as knowledge unless it is supported by memory knowledge of the reliability of one’s memory, then the process of qualifying as memory knowledge cannot succeed: there would be an endless chain, or loop, of facts – this belief is memory knowledge if and only if this other belief is, which is if and only if this other one is, and so on – which never becomes a set that entails that any belief is memory knowledge. On the basis of such reasoning a skeptic might deny the possibility of memory knowledge. We may avoid this consequence without going to the lax extreme of allowing that any correct memory impression is knowledge; we can impose the (frequently satisfied) requirement that one not have reasons specific to the particular case for believing that one’s memory impression might be unreliable. Finally, remembering that p becomes memory knowledge that p only if one believes that p because it seems to one that one remembers it. One might remember that p and confidently believe that p, but if one has no memory impression of having previously learned it, or one has such an impression but does not trust it and believes that p only for other reasons (or no reason), then one should not be counted as knowing that p on the basis of memory. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Memory and personal identity.” H. P. Grice, “Benjamin on Broad on ‘remembering’”

Mendel, Austrian discoverer of the basic ‘laws’ of heredity. An Augustinian monk who conducted plant-breeding experiments in a monastery garden in Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic), Mendel discovered that certain characters of a common variety of garden pea are transmitted in a strikingly regular way. The characters with which he dealt occur in two distinct states, e.g., pods that are smooth or ridged. In characters such as these, one state is dominant to its recessive partner, i.e., when varieties of each sort are crossed, all the offspring exhibit the dominant character. However, when the offspring of these crosses are themselves crossed, the result is a ratio of three dominants to one recessive. In modern terms, pairs of genes (alleles) separate at reproduction (segregation) and each offspring receives only one member of each pair. Of equal importance, the recessive character reappears unaffected by its temporary suppression. Alleles remain pure. Mendel also noted that the pairs of characters that he studied assort independently of each other, i.e., if two pairs of characters are followed through successive crosses, no statistical correlations in their transmission can be found. As genetics developed after the turn of the century, the simple “laws” that Mendel had set out were expanded and altered. Only a relatively few characters exhibit two distinct states, one dominant to the other. In many, the heterozygote exhibits an intermediate state. In addition, genes do not exist in isolation from each other but together on chromosomes. Only those genes that reside on different pairs of chromosomes assort in total independence of each other. During his research, Mendel corresponded with Karl von Nägeli (1817–91), a major authority in plant hybridization. Von Nägeli urged Mendel to cross varieties of the common hawkweed. When Mendel took his advice, he failed to discover the hereditary patterns that he had found in garden peas. In 1871 Mendel ceased his research to take charge of his monastery. In 1900 Hugo de Vries (1848–1935) stumbled upon several instances of three-to-one ratios while developing his own theory of the origin of species. No sooner did he publish his results than two young biologists announced independent discovery of what came to be known as Mendel’s laws. The founders of modern genetics abandoned attempts to work out the complexities of embryological development and concentrated just on transmission. As a result of several unfortunate misunderstandings, early Mendelian geneticists thought that their theory of genetics was incompatible with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Eventually, however, the two theories were merged to form the synthetic theory of evolution. In the process, R. A. Fisher (1890–1962) questioned the veracity of Mendel’s research, arguing that the only way that Mendel could have gotten data as good as he did was by sanitizing it. Present-day historians view all of the preceding events in a very different light. The science of heredity that developed at the turn of the century was so different from anything that Mendel had in mind that Mendel hardly warrants being considered its father. The neglect of Mendel’s work is made to seem so problematic only by reading later developments back into Mendel’s original paper. Like de Vries, Mendel was interested primarily in developing a theory of the origin of species. The results of Mendel’s research on the hawkweed brought into question the generalizability of the regularities that he had found in peas, but they supported his theory of species formation through hybridization. Similarly, the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws can be viewed as an instance of multiple, simultaneous discovery only by ignoring important differences in the views expressed by these authors. Finally, Mendel certainly did not mindlessly organize and report his data, but the methods that he used can be construed as questionable only in contrast to an overly empirical, inductive view of science. Perhaps Mendel was no Mendelian, but he was not a fraud either.

Mendelssohn, M.: German philosopher known as “the Jewish Socrates.” He began as a Bible and Talmud scholar. After moving to Berlin he learned Latin and German, and became a close friend of Lessing, who modeled the Jew in his play Nathan the Wise after him. Mendelssohn began writing on major philosophical topics of the day, and won a prize from the Berlin Academy in 1764. He was actively engaged in discussions about aesthetics, psychology, and religion, and offered an empirical, subjectivist view that was very popular at the time. His most famous writings are Morgenstunden (Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God, 1785), Phaedon (Phaedo, or on the Immortality of the Soul, 1767), and Jerusalem (1783). He contended that one could prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. He accepted the ontological argument and the argument from design. In Phaedo he argued that since the soul is a simple substance it is indestructible. Kant criticized his arguments in the first Critique. Mendelssohn was pressed by the Swiss scientist Lavater to explain why he, as a reasonable man, did not accept Christianity. At first he ignored the challenge, but finally set forth his philosophical views about religion and Judaism in Jerusalem, where he insisted that Judaism is not a set of doctrines but a set of practices. Reasonable persons can accept that there is a universal religion of reason, and there are practices that God has ordained that the Jews follow. Mendelssohn was a strong advocate of religious toleration and separation of church and state. His views played an important part in the emancipation of the Jews, and in the Jewish Enlightenment that flowered in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

mens rea versus mens casta – actus reus versus actus castus -- One of the two main prerequisites, along with “actus reus” for prima facie liability to criminal punishment in the English legal systems. To be punishable in such systems, one must not only have performed a legally prohibited action, such as killing another human being; one must have done so with a culpable state of mind, or mens rea. Such culpable mental states are of three kinds: they are either motivational states of purpose, cognitive states of belief, or the non-mental state of negligence. To illustrate each of these with respect to the act of killing: a killer may kill either having another’s death as ultimate purpose, or as mediate purpose on the way to achieving some further, ultimate end. Alternatively, the killer may act believing to a practical certainty that his act will result in another’s death, even though such death is an unwanted side effect, or he may believe that there is a substantial and unjustified risk that his act will cause another’s death. The actor may also be only negligent, which is to take an unreasonable risk of another’s death even if the actor is not aware either of such risk or of the lack of justification for taking it. Mens rea usually does not have to do with any awareness by the actor that the act done is either morally wrong or legally prohibited. Neither does mens rea have to do with any emotional state of guilt or remorse, either while one is acting or afterward. Sometimes in its older usages the term is taken to include the absence of excuses as well as the mental states necessary for prima facie liability; in such a usage, the requirement is helpfully labeled “general mens rea,” and the requirement above discussed is labeled “special mens rea.”

“Mentalese” – Grice on ‘modest mentalism’ -- the language of thought (the title of an essay by Fodor) or of “brain writing” (a term of Dennett’s); specifically, a languagelike medium of representation in which the contents of mental events are supposedly expressed or recorded. (The term was probably coined by Wilfrid Sellars, with whose views it was first associated.) If what one believes are propositions, then it is tempting to propose that believing something is having the Mentalese expression of that proposition somehow written in the relevant place in one’s mind or brain. Thinking a thought, at least on those occasions when we think “wordlessly” (without formulating our thoughts in sentences or phrases composed of words of a public language), thus appears to be a matter of creating a short-lived Mentalese expression in a special arena or work space in the mind. In a further application of the concept, the process of coming to understand a sentence of natural language can be viewed as one of translating the sentence into Mentalese. It has often been argued that this view of understanding only postpones the difficult questions of meaning, for it leaves unanswered the question of how Mentalese expressions come to have the meanings they do. There have been frequent attempts to develop versions of the hypothesis that mental activity is conducted in Mentalese, and just as frequent criticisms of these attempts. Some critics deny there is anything properly called representation in the mind or brain at all; others claim that the system of representation used by the brain is not enough like a natural language to be called a language. Even among defenders of Mentalese, it has seldom been claimed that all brains “speak” the same Mentalese.

mentalism: Cfr. ‘psychism,’ animism.’ ‘spiritualism,’ cfr. Grice’s modest mentalism; any theory that posits explicitly mental events and processes, where ‘mental’ means exhibiting intentionality, not necessarily being immaterial or non-physical. A mentalistic theory is couched in terms of belief, desire, thinking, feeling, hoping, etc. A scrupulously non-mentalistic theory would be couched entirely in extensional terms: it would refer only to behavior or to neurophysiological states and events. The attack on mentalism by behaviorists was led by B. F. Skinner, whose criticisms did not all depend on the assumption that mentalists were dualists, and the subsequent rise of cognitive science has restored a sort of mentalism (a “thoroughly modern mentalism,” as Fodor has called it) that is explicitly materialistic. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Myro’s modest mentalism.”

mentatum: Grice prefers psi-transmission. He knows that ‘mentatum’ sounds too much like ‘mind,’ and the mind is part of the ‘rational soul,’ not even encompassing the rational pratical soul. If perhaps Grice was unhappy about the artificial flavour to saying that a word is a sign, Grice surely should have checked with all the Grecian-Roman cognates of mean, as in his favourite memorative-memorable distinction, and the many Grecian realisations, or with Old Roman mentire and mentare. Lewis and Short have “mentĭor,” f. mentire, L and S note, is prob. from root men-, whence mens and memini, q. v. The original meaning, they say, is to invent,  hence, but alla Umberto Eco with sign, mentire comes to mean in later use what Grice (if not the Grecians) holds is the opposite of mean. Short and Lewis render mentire as to lie, cheat, deceive, etc., to pretend, to declare falsely: mentior nisi or si mentior, a form of asseveration, I am a liar, if, etc.: But also, animistically (modest mentalism?) of things, as endowed with a mind. L and S go on: to deceive, impose upon, to deceive ones self, mistake, to lie or speak falsely about, to assert falsely, make a false promise about; to feign, counterfeit, imitate a shape, nature, etc.: to devise a falsehood,  to assume falsely,  to promise falsely, to invent, feign, of a poetical fiction: “ita mentitur (sc. Homerus),  Trop., of inanim. grammatical Subjects, as in Semel fac illud, mentitur tua quod subinde tussis, Do what your cough keeps falsely promising, i. e. die, Mart. 5, 39, 6. Do what your cough means! =imp. die!; hence, mentĭens,  a fallacy, sophism: quomodo mentientem, quem ψευδόμενον vocant, dissolvas;” mentītus, imitated, counterfeit, feigned (poet.): “mentita tela;” For “mentior,” indeed, there is a Griceian implicaturum involving rational control. The rendition of mentire as to lie stems from a figurative shift from to be mindful, or inventive, to have second thoughts" to "to lie, conjure up". But Grice would also have a look at cognate “memini,” since this is also cognate with “mind,” “mens,” and covers subtler instances of mean, as in Latinate, “mention,” as in Grices “use-mention” distinction. mĕmĭni, cognate with "mean" and German "meinen," to think = Grecian ὑπομένειν, await (cf. Schiffer, "remnants of meaning," if I think, I hesitate, and therefore re-main, cf. Grecian μεν- in μένω, Μέντωρ; μαν- in μαίνομαι, μάντις; μνᾶ- in μιμνήσκω, etc.; cf.: maneo, or manere, as in remain. The idea, as Schiffer well knows or means, being that if you think, you hesitate, and therefore, wait and remain], moneo, reminiscor [cf. reminiscence], mens, Minerva, etc. which L and S render as “to remember, recollect, to think of, be mindful of a thing; not to have forgotten a person or thing, to bear in mind (syn.: reminiscor, recordor).” Surely with a relative clause, and to make mention of, to mention a thing, either in speaking or writing (rare but class.). Hence. mĕmĭnens, mindful And then Grice would have a look at moneo, as in adMONish, also cognate is “mŏnĕo,” monere, causative from the root "men;" whence memini, q. v., mens (mind), mentio (mention); lit. to cause to think, to re-mind, put in mind of, bring to ones recollection; to admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach (syn.: hortor, suadeo, doceo). L and S are Griceian if not Grecian when they note that ‘monere’ can be used "without the accessory notion [implicaturum or entanglement, that is] of reminding or admonishing, in gen., to teach, instruct, tell, inform, point out; also, to announce, predict, foretell, even if also to punish, chastise (only in Tacitus): “puerili verbere moneri.” And surely, since he loved to re-minisced, Grice would have allowed to just earlier on just minisced. Short and Lewis indeed have rĕmĭniscor, which, as they point out, features the root men; whence mens, memini; and which they compare to comminiscere, v. comminiscor, to recall to mind, recollect, remember (syn. recordor), often used by the Old Romans  with with Grices beloved that-clause, for sure. For what is the good of reminiscing or comminiscing, if you cannot reminisce that Austin always reminded Grice that skipping the dictionary was his big mistake! If Grice uses mention, cognate with mean, he loved commenting Aristotle. And commentare is, again, cognate with mean. As opposed to the development of the root in Grecian, or English, in Roman the root for mens is quite represented in many Latinate cognates. But a Roman, if not a Grecian, would perhaps be puzzled by a Grice claiming, by intuition, to retrieve the necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of this or that expression. When the Roman is told that the Griceian did it for fun, he understands, and joins in the fun! Indeed, hardly a natural kind in the architecture of the world, but one that fascinated Grice and the Grecian philosophers before him! Communication.

Mercier: philosopher, a formative figure in NeoThomism and founder of the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie at Louvain. Created at the request of Pope Leo XIII, Mercier’s institute treated Aquinas as a subject of historical research and as a philosopher relevant to modern thought. His approach to Neo-Thomism was distinctive for its direct response to the epistemological challenges posed by idealism, rationalism, and positivism. Mercier’s epistemology was termed a criteriology; it intended to defend the certitude of the intellect against skepticism by providing an account of the motives and rules that guide judgment. Truth is affirmed by intellectual judgment by conforming itself not to the thing-in-itself but to its abstract apprehension. Since the certitude of judgment is a state of the cognitive faculty in the human soul, Mercier considered criteriology as psychology; see Critériologie générale ou Théorie générale de la certitude (1906), Origins of Contemporary Psychology (trans. 1918), and Manual of Scholastic Philosophy (trans. 1917–18).

mereology: The mereological implicaturum. Grice. "In a burst of inspiration, Leśniewski coins "mereology" on a Tuesday evening in March 1927, from the Grecian "μέρος," Polish for "part." From Leśniewski's Journal -- translation from the Polish by Grice: "Dear Anne, I have just coined a word. MEREOLOGY. I want to refer to a FORMA, not informal as in Husserl, which is in German, anyway (his section, "On the whole and the parts") theory of part-whole. I hope you love it! Love, L. --- "Leśniewski's tutee, another Pole, Alfred Tarski, in his Appendix E to Woodger oversimplified, out of envey's Leśniewski's formalism." "But then more loyal tutees (and tutees of tutees) of Lesniewski elaborated this "Polish mereology." "For a good selection of the literature on Polish mereology, see Srzednicki and Rickey (1984). For a survey of Polish mereology, see Simons (1987). Since 1980 or so, however, research on Polish mereology has been almost entirely historical in nature." Which is just as well. The theory of the totum and the pars. -- parts. Typically, a mereological theory employs notions such as the following: “proper part,” “mproper part,” “overlapping” (having a part in common), disjoint (not overlapping), mereological product (the “intersection” of overlapping objects), mereological sum (a collection of parts), mereological difference, the universal sum, mereological complement, and atom (that which has no proper parts). A formal mereology is an axiomatic system. Goodman’s “Calculus of Individuals” is compatible with Nominalism, i.e., no reference is made to sets, properties, or any other abstract entity. Goodman hopes that his mereology, with its many parallels to set theory, may provide an alternative to set theory as a foundation for mathematics. Fundamental and controversial implications of Goodman’s theories include their extensionality and collectivism. An extensional theory implies that for any individuals, x and y, x % y provided x and y have the same proper parts. One reason extensionality is controversial is that it rules out an object’s acquiring or losing a part, and therefore is inconsistent with commonsense beliefs such as that a car has a new tire or that a table has lost a sliver of wood. A second reason for controversy is that extensionality is incompatible with the belief that a statue and the piece of bronze of which it is made have the same parts and yet are diverse objects. Collectivism implies that any individuals, no matter how scattered, have a mereological sum or constitute an object. Moreover, according to collectivism, assembling or disassembling parts does not affect the existence of things, i.e., nothing is created or destroyed by assembly or disassembly, respectively. Thus, collectivism is incompatible with commonsense beliefs such as that when a watch is disassembled, it is destroyed, or that when certain parts are assembled, a watch is created. Because the aforementioned formal theories shun modality, they lack the resources to express the thesis that a whole has each of its parts necessarily. This thesis of mereological essentialism has recently been defended by Roderick Chisholm.

meritum, a meritarian is one who asserts the relevance of individual merit, as an independent justificatory condition, in attempts to design social structures or distribute goods. ‘Meritarianism’ is a recently coined term in social and political philosophy, closely related to ‘meritocracy’, and used to identify a range of related concerns that supplement or oppose egalitarian, utilitarian, and contractarian principles and principles based on entitlement, right, interest, and need, among others. For example, one can have a pressing need for an Olympic medal but not merit it; one can have the money to buy a masterpiece but not be worthy of it; one can have the right to a certain benefit but not deserve it. Meritarians assert that considerations of desert are always relevant and sometimes decisive in such cases. What counts as merit, and how important should it be in moral, social, and political decisions? Answers to these questions serve to distinguish one meritarian from another, and sometimes to blur the distinctions between the meritarian position and others. Merit may refer to any of these: comparative rank, capacities, abilities, effort, intention, or achievement. Moreover, there is a relevance condition to be met: to say that highest honors in a race should go to the most deserving is presumably to say that the honors should go to those with the relevant sort of merit – speed, e.g., rather than grace. Further, meritarians may differ about the strength of the merit principle, and how various political or social structures should be influenced by it.

meritocracy, in ordinary usage, a system in which advancement is based on ability and achievement, or one in which leadership roles are held by talented achievers. The term may also refer to an elite group of talented achievers. In philosophical usage, the term’s meaning is similar: a meritocracy is a scheme of social organization in which essential offices, and perhaps careers and jobs of all sorts are (a) open only to those who have the relevant qualifications for successful performance in them, or (b) awarded only to the candidates who are likely to perform the best, or (c) managed so that people advance in and retain their offices and jobs solely on the basis of the quality of their performance in them, or (d) all of the above.

Merleau-Ponty: philosopher disliked by Austin, loved by Grice, and described by Paul Ricoeur as “the greatest of the French phenomenologists.” MerleauPonty occupied the chair of child psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne and was later professor of philosophy at the Collège de France. His sudden death preceded completion of an important manuscript; this was later edited and published by Claude Lefort under the title The Visible and the Invisible. The relation between the late, unfinished work and his early Phenomenology of Perception (1945) has received much scholarly discussion. While some commentators see a significant shift in direction in his later thought, others insist on continuity throughout his work. Thus, the exact significance of his philosophy, which in his life was called both a philosophy of ambiguity and an ambiguous philosophy, retains to this day its essential ambiguity. With his compatriot and friend, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was responsible for introducing the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl into France. Impressed above all by the later Husserl and by Husserl’s notion of the life-world (Lebenswelt), Merleau-Ponty combined Husserl’s transcendental approach to epistemological issues with an existential orientation derived from Heidegger and Marcel. Going even further than Heidegger, who had himself sought to go beyond Husserl by “existentializing” Husserl’s Transcendental Ego (referring to it as Dasein), MerleauPonty sought to emphasize not only the existential (worldly) nature of the human subject but, above all, its bodily nature. Thus his philosophy could be characterized as a philosophy of the lived body or the body subject (le corps propre). Although Nietzsche called attention to the all-importance of the body, it was MerleauPonty who first made the body the central theme of a detailed philosophical analysis. This provided an original perspective from which to rethink such perennial philosophical issues as the nature of knowledge, freedom, time (temporality), language, and intersubjectivity. Especially in his early work, Merleau-Ponty battled against absolutist thought (“la pensée de l’absolu”), stressing the insurmountable ambiguity and contingency of all meaning and truth. An archopponent of Cartesian rationalism, he was an early and ardent spokesman for that position now called antifoundationalism. Merleau-Ponty’s major early work, the Phenomenology of Perception, is best known for its central thesis concerning “the primacy of perception.” In this lengthy study he argued that all the “higher” functions of consciousness (e.g., intellection, volition) are rooted in and depend upon the subject’s prereflective, bodily existence, i.e., perception (“All consciousness is perceptual, even the consciousness of ourselves”). MerleauPonty maintained, however, that perception had never been adequately conceptualized by traditional philosophy. Thus the book was to a large extent a dialectical confrontation with what he took to be the two main forms of objective thinking – intellectualism and empiricism – both of which, he argued, ignored the phenomenon of perception. His principal goal was to get beyond the intellectual constructs of traditional philosophy (such as sense-data) and to effect “a return to the phenomena,” to the world as we actually experience it as embodied subjects prior to all theorizing. His main argument (directed against mainline philosophy) was that the lived body is not an object in the world, distinct from the knowing subject (as in Descartes), but is the subject’s own point of view on the world; the body is itself the original knowing subject (albeit a nonor prepersonal, “anonymous” subject), from which all other forms of knowledge derive, even that of geometry. As a phenomenological (or, as he also said, “archaeological”) attempt to unearth the basic (corporeal) modalities of human existence, emphasizing the rootedness (enracinement) of the personal subject in the obscure and ambiguous life of the body and, in this way, the insurpassable contingency of all meaning, the Phenomenology was immediately and widely recognized as a major statement of French existentialism. In his subsequent work in the late 1940s and the 1950s, in many shorter essays and articles, Merleau-Ponty spelled out in greater detail the philosophical consequences of “the primacy of perception.” These writings sought to respond to widespread objections that by “grounding” all intellectual and cultural acquisitions in the prereflective and prepersonal life of the body, the Phenomenology of Perception results in a kind of reductionism and anti-intellectualism and teaches only a “bad ambiguity,” i.e., completely undermines the notions of reason and truth. By shifting his attention from the phenomenon of perception to that of (creative) expression, his aim was to work out a “good ambiguity” by showing how “communication with others and thought take up and go beyond the realm of perception which initiated us to the truth.” His announced goal after the Phenomenology was “working out in a rigorous way the philosophical foundations” of a theory of truth and a theory of intersubjectivity (including a theory of history). No such large-scale work (a sequel, as it were, to the Phenomenology) ever saw the light of day, although in pursuing this project he reflected on subjects as diverse as painting, literary language, Saussurian linguistics, structuralist anthropology, politics, history, the human sciences, psychoanalysis, contemporary science (including biology), and the philosophy of nature. Toward the end of his life, however, MerleauPonty did begin work on a projected large-scale manuscript, the remnants of which were published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible. A remarkable feature of this work (as Claude Lefort has pointed out) is the resolute way in which Merleau-Ponty appears to be groping for a new philosophical language. His express concerns in this abortive manuscript are explicitly ontological (as opposed to the more limited phenomenological concerns of his early work), and he consistently tries to avoid the subject (consciousness)–object language of the philosophy of consciousness (inherited from Husserl’s transcendental idealism) that characterized the Phenomenology of Perception. Although much of Merleau-Ponty’s later thought was a response to the later Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty sets himself apart from Heidegger in this unfinished work by claiming that the only ontology possible is an indirect one that can have no direct access to Being itself. Indeed, had he completed it, Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology would probably have been one in which, as Lefort has remarked, “the word Being would not have to be uttered.” He was always keenly attuned to “the sensible world”; the key term in his ontological thinking is not so much ‘Being’ as it is ‘the flesh’, a term with no equivalent in the history of philosophy. What traditional philosophy referred to as “subject” and “object” were not two distinct sorts of reality, but merely “differentiations of one sole and massive adhesion to Being [Nature] which is the flesh.” By viewing the perceiving subject as “a coiling over of the visible upon the visible,” Merleau-Ponty was attempting to overcome the subject–object dichotomy of modern philosophy, which raised the intractable problems of the external world and other minds. With the notion of the flesh he believed he could finally overcome the solipsism of modern philosophy and had discovered the basis for a genuine intersubjectivity (conceived of as basically an intercorporeity). Does ‘flesh’ signify something significantly different from ‘body’ in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier thought? Did his growing concern with ontology (and the question of nature) signal abandonment of his earlier phenomenology (to which the question of nature is foreign)? This has remained a principal subject of conflicting interpretations in Merleau-Ponty scholarship. As illustrated by his last, unfinished work, Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre as a whole is fragmentary. He always insisted that true philosophy is the enemy of the system, and he disavowed closure and completion. While Heidegger has had numerous disciples and epigones, it is difficult to imagine what a “Merleau-Ponty school of philosophy” would be. This is not to deny that Merleau-Ponty’s work has exerted considerable influence. Although he was relegated to a kind of intellectual purgatory in France almost immediately upon his death, the work of his poststructuralist successors such as Foucault and Jacques Derrida betrays a great debt to his previous struggles with philosophical modernity. And in Germany, Great Britain, and, above all, North America, Merleau-Ponty has continued to be a source of philosophical inspiration and the subject of extensive scholarship. Although his work does not presume to answer the key questions of existence, it is a salient model of philosophy conceived of as unremitting interrogation. It is this questioning (“zetetic”) attitude, combined with a non-dogmatic humanism, that continues to speak not only to philosophers but also to a wide audience among practitioners of the human sciences (phenomenological psychology being a particularly noteworthy example). Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception is unpopular at Oxford,” J. L. Austin, “What Merleau-Ponty thinks he perceives.”

Mersenne: he compiled massive works on philosophy, mathematics, music, and natural science, and conducted an enormous correspondence with such figures as Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes. He translated Galileo’s Mechanics and Herbert of Cherbury’s De Veritate and arranged for publication of Hobbes’s De Cive. He is best known for gathering the objections published with Descartes’s Meditations. Mersenne served a function in the rise of modern philosophy and science that is today served by professional journals and associations. His works contain attacks on deists, atheists, libertines, and skeptics; but he also presents mitigated skepticism as a practical method for attaining scientific knowledge. He did not believe that we can attain knowledge of inner essences, but argued – by displaying it – that we have an immense amount of knowledge about the material world adequate to our needs. Like Gassendi, Mersenne advocated mechanistic explanations in science, and following Galileo, he proposed mathematical models of material phenomena. Like the Epicureans, he believed that mechanism was adequate to save the phenomena. He thus rejected Aristotelian forms and occult powers. Mersenne was another of the great philosopher-priests of the seventeenth century who believed that to increase scientific knowledge is to know and serve God.

merton: merton holds a portrait of H. P. Grice. And the association is closer. Grice was sometime Harmsworth Scholar at Merton. It was at Merton he got the acquaintance with S. Watson, later historian at St. John’s. Merton is the see of the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. What does that mean? It means that the Lit. Hum. covers more than philosophy. Grice was Lit. Hum. (Phil.), which means that his focus was on this ‘sub-faculty.’ The faculty itself is for Lit. Hum. in general, and it is not held anywhere specifically. Grice loved Ryle’s games with this:: “Oxford is a universale, with St. John’s being a particulare which can become your sense-datum.’

meta-ethics. “philosophia moralis” was te traditional label – until Nowell-Smith. Hare is professor of moral philosophy, not meta-ethics. Strictly, ‘philosophia practica’ as opposed to ‘philosophia speculativa’. Philosophia speculativa is distinguished from philosophia practica; the former is further differentiated into physica, mathematica, and theologia; the latter into moralis, oeconomica and politica.  Surely the philosophical mode does not change when he goes into ethics or other disciplines. Philosophy is ENTIRE. Ethics relates to metaphysics, but this does not mean that the philosopher is a moralist. In this respect, unlike, say Philippa Foot, Grice remains a meta-ethicist. Grice is ‘meta-ethically’ an futilitarian, since he provides a utilitarian backing of Kantian rationalism, within his empiricist, naturalist, temperament. For Grice it is complicated, since there is an ethical or practical side even to an eschatological argument. Grice’s views on ethics are Oxonian. At Oxford, meta-ethics is a generational thing: there’s Grice, and the palaeo-Gricieans, and the post-Gricieans. There’s Hampshire, and Hare, and Nowell-Smith, and Warnock. P. H. Nowell Smith felt overwhelmed by Grice’s cleverness and they would hardly engage in meta-ethical questions. But Nowell Smith felt that Grice was ‘too clever.’ Grice objected Hare’s use of descriptivism and Strawsons use of definite descriptor. Grice preferred to say “the the.”. “Surely Hare is wrong when sticking with his anti-descriptivist diatribe. Even his dictum is descriptive!” Grice was amused that it all started with Abbott BEFORE 1879, since Abbott’s first attempt was entitled, “Kant’s theory of ethics, or practical philosophy” (1873). ”! Grices explorations on morals are language based. With a substantial knowledge of the classical languages (that are so good at verb systems and modes like the optative, that English lacks), Grice explores modals like should, (Hampshire) ought to (Hare) and, must (Grice ‒ necessity). Grice is well aware of Hares reflections on the neustic qualifications on the phrastic. The imperative has usually been one source for the philosophers concern with the language of morals. Grice attempts to balance this with a similar exploration on good, now regarded as the value-paradeigmatic notion par excellence. We cannot understand, to echo Strawson, the concept of a person unless we understand the concept of a good person, i.e. the philosopher’s conception of a good person.   Morals is very Oxonian. There were in Grices time only three chairs of philosophy at Oxford: the three W: the Waynflete chair of metaphysical philosophy, the Wykeham chair of logic (not philosophy, really), and the White chair of moral philosophy. Later, the Wilde chair of philosophical psychology was created. Grice was familiar with Austin’s cavalier attitude to morals as Whites professor of moral philosophy, succeeding Kneale. When Hare succeeds Austin, Grice knows that it is time to play with the neustic implicaturum! Grices approach to morals is very meta-ethical and starts with a fastidious (to use Blackburns characterisation, not mine!) exploration of modes related to propositional phrases involving should, ought to, and must. For Hampshire, should is the moral word par excellence. For Hare, it is ought. For Grice, it is only must that preserves that sort of necessity that, as a Kantian rationalist, he is looking for. However, Grice hastens to add that whatever hell say about the buletic, practical or boulomaic must must also apply to the doxastic must, as in What goes up must come down. That he did not hesitate to use necessity operators is clear from his axiomatic treatment, undertaken with Code, on Aristotelian categories of izzing and hazzing. To understand Grices view on ethics, we should return to the idea of creature construction in more detail. Suppose we are genitors-demigods-designing living creatures, creatures Grice calls Ps. To design a type of P is to specify a diagram and table for that type plus evaluative procedures, if any. The design is implemented in animal stuff-flesh and bones typically. Let us focus on one type of P-a very sophisticated type that Grice, borrowing from Locke, calls very intelligent rational Ps. Let me be a little more explicit, and a great deal more speculative, about the possible relation to ethics of my programme for philosophical psychology. I shall suppose that the genitorial programme has been realized to the point at which we have designed a class of Ps which, nearly following Locke, I might call very intelligent rational Ps. These Ps will be capable of putting themselves in the genitorial position, of asking how, if they were constructing themselves with a view to their own survival, they would execute this task; and, if we have done our work aright, their answer will be the same as ours . We might, indeed, envisage the contents of a highly general practical manual, which these Ps would be in a position to compile. The contents of the initial manual would have various kinds of generality which are connected with familiar discussions of universalizability. The Ps have, so far, been endowed only with the characteristics which belong to the genitorial justified psychological theory; so the manual will have to be formulated in terms of that theory, together with the concepts involved in the very general description of livingconditions which have been used to set up that theory; the manual will therefore have conceptual generality. There will be no way of singling out a special subclass of addressees, so the injunctions of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any very intelligent rational P, and will thus have generality of form. And since the manual can be thought of as being composed by each of the so far indistinguishable Ps, no P would include in the manual injunctions prescribing a certain line of conduct in circumstances to which he was not likely to be Subjects; nor indeed could he do so even if he would. So the circumstances for which conduct is prescribed could be presumed to be such as to be satisfied, from time to time, by any addressee; the manual, then, will have generality of application. Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an immanuel; and the very intelligent rational Ps, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course). Refs.: Most of Grice’s theorizing on ethics counts as ‘meta-ethic,’ especially in connection with R. M. Hare, but also with less prescriptivist Oxonian philosophers such as Nowell-Smith, with his bestseller for Penguin, Austin, Warnock, and Hampshire. Keywords then are ‘ethic,’ and ‘moral.’ There are many essays on both Kantotle, i.e. on Aristotle and Kant. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.

meta-language: versus object-language – where Russell actually means thing-language (German: meta-sprache und ding-sprache). In formal semantics, a language used to describe another language (the object language). The object language may be either a natural language or a formal language. The goal of a formal semantic theory is to provide an axiomatic or otherwise systematic theory of meaning for the object language. The metalanguage is used to specify the object language’s symbols and formation rules, which determine its grammatical sentences or well-formed formulas, and to assign meanings or interpretations to these sentences or formulas. For example, in an extensional semantics, the metalanguage is used to assign denotations to the singular terms, extensions to the general terms, and truth conditions to sentences. The standard format for assigning truth conditions, as in Tarski’s formulation of his “semantical conception of truth,” is a T-sentence, which takes the form ‘S is true if and only if p.’ Davidson adapted this format to the purposes of his truth-theoretic account of meaning. Examples of T-sentences, with English as the metalanguage, are ‘ “La neige est blanche” is true if and only if snow is white’, where the object langauge is French and the homophonic (Davidson) ‘“Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white’, where the object language is English as well. Although for formal purposes the distinction between metalanguage and object language must be maintained, in practice one can use a langauge to talk about expressions in the very same language. One can, in Carnap’s terms, shift 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 560 from the material mode to the formal mode, e.g. from ‘Every veterinarian is an animal doctor’ to ‘ “Veterinarian” means “animal doctor”.’ This shift is important in discussions of synonymy and of the analytic–synthetic distinction. Carnap’s distinction corresponds to the use–mention distinction. We are speaking in the formal mode – we are mentioning a linguistic expression – when we ascribe a property to a word or other expression type, such as its spelling, pronunciation, meaning, or grammatical category, or when we speak of an expression token as misspelled, mispronounced, or misused. We are speaking in the material mode when we say “Reims is hard to find” but in the formal mode when we say “ ‘Reims’ is hard to pronounce.”

Triviality: Grice: “Austin once confessed that he felt it was unworthy of a philosopher to spend his time on trivialities, but what was he to do?” --

metaphilosophy, the theory of the nature of philosophy, especially its goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions. First-order philosophical inquiry includes such disciplines as epistemology, ontology, ethics, and value theory. It thus constitutes the main activity of philosophers, past and present. The philosophical study of firstorder philosophical inquiry raises philosophical inquiry to a higher order. Such higher-order inquiry is metaphilosophy. The first-order philosophical discipline of (e.g.) epistemology has the nature of knowledge as its main focus, but that discipline can itself be the focus of higher-order philosophical inquiry. The latter focus yields a species of metaphilosophy called metaepistemology. Two other prominent species are metaethics and metaontology. Each such branch of metaphilosophy studies the goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions of a first-order philosophical discipline. Typical metaphilosophical topics include (a) the conditions under which a claim is philosophical rather than non-philosophical, and (b) the conditions under which a first-order philosophical claim is either meaningful, true, or warranted. Metaepistemology, e.g., pursues not the nature of knowledge directly, but rather the conditions under which claims are genuinely epistemological and the conditions under which epistemological claims are either meaningful, or true, or warranted. The distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy has an analogue in the familiar distinction between mathematics and metamathematics. Questions about the autonomy, objectivity, relativity, and modal status of philosophical claims arise in metaphilosophy. Questions about autonomy concern the relationship of philosophy to such disciplines as those constituting the natural and social sciences. For instance, is philosophy methodologically independent of the natural sciences? Questions about objectivity and relativity concern the kind of truth and warrant available to philosophical claims. For instance, are philosophical truths characteristically, or ever, made true by mind-independent phenomena in the way that typical claims of the natural sciences supposedly are? Or, are philosophical truths unavoidably conventional, being fully determined by (and thus altogether relative to) linguistic conventions? Are they analytic rather than synthetic truths, and is knowledge of them a priori rather than a posteriori? Questions about modal status consider whether philosophical claims are necessary rather than contingent. Are philosophical claims necessarily true or false, in contrast to the contingent claims of the natural sciences? The foregoing questions identify major areas of controversy in contemporary metaphilosophy.

Metaphoricum implicaturum: Grice, “You’re the cream in my coffee” – “You’re the salt in my stew” – “You’re the starch in my collar” – “You’re the lace in my shoe.” metaphor, a figure of speech (or a trope) in which a word or phrase that literally denotes one thing is used to denote another, thereby implicitly comparing the two things. In the normal use of the sentence ‘The Mississippi is a river’, ‘river’ is used literally – or as some would prefer to say, used in its literal sense. By contrast, if one assertively uttered “Time is a river,” one would be using ‘river’ metaphorically – or be using it in a metaphorical sense. Metaphor has been a topic of philosophical discussion since Aristotle; in fact, it has almost certainly been more discussed by philosophers than all the other tropes together. Two themes are prominent in the discussions up to the nineteenth century. One is that metaphors, along with all the other tropes, are decorations of speech; hence the phrase ‘figures of speech’. Metaphors are adornments or figurations. They do not contribute to the cognitive meaning of the discourse; instead they lend it color, vividness, emotional impact, etc. Thus it was characteristic of the Enlightenment and proto-Enlightenment philosophers – Hobbes and Locke are good examples – to insist that though philosophers may sometimes have good reason to communicate their thought with metaphors, they themselves should do their thinking entirely without metaphors. The other theme prominent in discussions of metaphor up to the nineteenth century is that metaphors are, so far as their cognitive force is concerned, elliptical similes. The cognitive force of ‘Time is a river’, when ‘river’ in that sentence is used metaphorically, is the same as ‘Time is like a river’. What characterizes almost all theories of metaphor from the time of the Romantics up through our own century is the rejection of both these traditional themes. Metaphors – so it has been argued – are not cognitively dispensable decorations. They contribute to the cognitive meaning of our discourse; and they are indispensable, not only to religious discourse, but to ordinary, and even scientific, discourse, not to mention poetic. Nietzsche, indeed, went so far as to argue that all speech is metaphorical. And though no consensus has yet emerged on how and what metaphors contribute to meaning, nor how we recognize what they contribute, nearconsensus has emerged on the thesis that they do not work as elliptical similes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why it is not the case that you’re the cream in my coffee.”

Aristkantian metaphysical deduction: cf. the transcendental club. or argument. transcendental argument Metaphysics, epistemology An argument that starts from some accepted experience or fact to prove that there must be something which is beyond experience but which is a necessary condition for making the accepted experience or fact possible. The goal of a transcendental argument is to establish the transcendental dialectic truth of this precondition. If there is something X of which Y is a necessary condition, then Y must be true. This form of argument became prominent in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where he argued that the existence of some fundamental a priori concepts, namely the categories, and of space and time as pure forms of sensibility, are necessary to make experience possible. In contemporary philosophy, transcendental arguments are widely proposed as a way of refuting skepticism. Wittgenstein used this form of argument to reject the possibility of a private language that only the speaker could understand. Peter Strawson employs a transcendental argument to prove the perception-independent existence of material particulars and to reject a skeptical attitude toward the existence of other minds. There is disagreement about the kind of necessity involved in transcendental arguments, and Barry Stroud has raised important questions about the possibility of transcendental arguments succeeding. “A transcendental argument attempts to prove q by proving it is part of any correct explanation of p, by proving it a precondition of p’s possibility.” Nozick Philosophical Explanations transcendental deduction Metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics For Kant, the argument to prove that certain a priori concepts are legitimately, universally, necessarily, and exclusively applicable to objects of experience. Kant employed this form of argument to establish the legitimacy of space and time as the forms of intuition, of the claims of the moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason, and of the claims of the aesthetic judgment of taste in the Critique of Judgement. However, the most influential example of this form of argument appeared in the Critique of Pure Reason as the transcendental deduction of the categories. The metaphysical deduction set out the origin and character of the categories, and the task of the transcendental deduction was to demonstrate that these a priori concepts do apply to objects of experience and hence to prove the objective validity of the categories. The strategy of the proof is to show that objects can be thought of only by means of the categories. In sensibility, objects are subject to the forms of space and time. In understanding, experienced objects must stand under the conditions of the transcendental unity of apperception. Because these conditions require the determination of objects by the pure concepts of the understanding, there can be no experience that is not subject to the categories. The categories, therefore, are justified in their application to appearances as conditions of the possibility of experience. In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant extensively rewrote the transcendental deduction, although he held that the result remained the same. The first version emphasized the subjective unity of consciousness, while the second version stressed the objective character of the unity, and it is therefore possible to distinguish between a subjective and objective deduction. The second version was meant to clarify the argument, but remained extremely difficult to interpret and assess. The presence of the two versions of this fundamental argument makes interpretation even more demanding. Generally speaking, European philosophers prefer the subjective version, while Anglo-American philosophers prefer the objective version. The transcendental deduction of the categories was a revolutionary development in modern philosophy. It was the main device by which Kant sought to overcome the errors and limitations of both rationalism and empiricism and propelled philosophy into a new phase. “The explanation of the manner in which concepts can thus relate a priori to objects I entitle their transcendental deduction.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. metaphysical realism, in the widest sense, the view that (a) there are real objects (usually the view is concerned with spatiotemporal objects), (b) they exist independently of our experience or our knowledge of them, and (c) they have properties and enter into relations independently of the concepts with which we understand them or of the language with which we describe them. Anti-realism is any view that rejects one or more of these three theses, though if (a) is rejected the rejection of (b) and (c) follows trivially. (If it merely denies the existence of material things, then its traditional name is ‘idealism.’) Metaphysical realism, in all of its three parts, is shared by common sense, the sciences, and most philosophers. The chief objection to it is that we can form no conception of real objects, as understood by it, since any such conception must rest on the concepts we already have and on our language and experience. To accept the objection seems to imply that we can have no knowledge of real objects as they are in themselves, and that truth must not be understood as correspondence to such objects. But this itself has an even farther reaching consequence: either (i) we should accept the seemingly absurd view that there are no real objects (since the objection equally well applies to minds and their states, to concepts and words, to properties and relations, to experiences, etc.), for we should hardly believe in the reality of something of which we can form no conception at all; or (ii) we must face the seemingly hopeless task of a drastic change in what we mean by ‘reality’, ‘concept’, ‘experience’, ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, and much else. On the other hand, the objection may be held to reduce to a mere tautology, amounting to ‘We (can) know reality only as we (can) know it’, and then it may be argued that no substantive thesis, which anti-realism claims to be, is derivable from a mere tautology. Yet even if the objection is a tautology, it serves to force us to avoid a simplistic view of our cognitive relationship to the world. In discussions of universals, metaphysical realism is the view that there are universals, and usually is contrasted with nominalism. But this either precludes a standard third alternative, namely conceptualism, or simply presupposes that concepts are general words (adjectives, common nouns, verbs) or uses of such words. If this presupposition is accepted, then indeed conceptualism would be the same as nominalism, but this should be argued, not legislated verbally. Traditional conceptualism holds that concepts are particular mental entities, or at least mental dispositions, that serve the classificatory function that universals have been supposed to serve and also explain the classificatory function that general words undoubtedly also serve. -- metaphysics, most generally, the philosophical investigation of the nature, constitution, and structure of reality. It is broader in scope than science, e.g., physics and even cosmology (the science of the nature, structure, and origin of the universe as a whole), since one of its traditional concerns is the existence of non-physical entities, e.g., God. It is also more fundamental, since it investigates questions science does not address but the answers to which it presupposes. Are there, for instance, physical objects at all, and does every event have a cause? So understood, metaphysics was rejected by positivism on the ground that its statements are “cognitively meaningless” since they are not empirically verifiable. More recent philosophers, such as Quine, reject metaphysics on the ground that science alone provides genuine knowledge. In The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism (1954), Bergmann argued that logical positivism, and any view such as Quine’s, presupposes a metaphysical theory. And the positivists’ criterion of cognitive meaning was never formulated in a way satisfactory even to them. A successor of the positivist attitude toward metaphysics is Grice’s tutee at St. John’s – for his Logic Paper for the PPE -- P. F. Strawson’s preference (especially in Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics) for what he calls descriptive metaphysics, which is “content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world,” as contrasted with revisionary metaphysics, which is “concerned to produce a better structure.” The view, sometimes considered scientific (but an assumption rather than an argued theory), that all that there is, is spatiotemporal (a part of “nature”) and is knowable only through the methods of the sciences, is itself a metaphysics, namely metaphysical naturalism (not to be confused with natural philosophy). It is not part of science itself. In its most general sense, metaphysics may seem to coincide with philosophy as a whole, since anything philosophy investigates is presumably a part of reality, e.g., knowledge, values, and valid reasoning. But it is useful to reserve the investigation of such more specific topics for distinct branches of philosophy, e.g., epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic, since they raise problems peculiar to themselves. Perhaps the most familiar question in metaphysics is whether there are only material entities – materialism – or only mental entities, i.e., minds and their states – idealism – or both – dualism. Here ‘entity’ has its broadest sense: anything real. More specific questions of metaphysics concern the existence and nature of certain individuals – also called particulars – (e.g., God), or certain properties (e.g., are there properties that nothing exemplifies?) or relations (e.g., is there a relation of causation that is a necessary connection rather than a mere regular conjunction between events?). The nature of space and time is another important example of such a more specific topic. Are space and time peculiar individuals that “contain” ordinary individuals, or are they just systems of relations between individual things, such as being (spatially) higher or (temporally) prior. Whatever the answer, space and time are what render a world out of the totality of entities that are parts of it. Since on any account of knowledge, our knowledge of the world is extremely limited, concerning both its spatial and temporal dimensions and its inner constitution, we must allow for an indefinite number of possible ways the world may be, might have been, or will be. And this thought gives rise to the idea of an indefinite number of possible worlds. This idea is useful in making vivid our understanding of the nature of necessary truth (a necessarily true proposition is one that is true in all possible worlds) and thus is commonly employed in modal logic. But the idea can also make possible worlds seem real, a highly controversial doctrine. The notion of a spatiotemporal world is commonly that employed in discussions of the socalled issue of realism versus anti-realism, although this issue has also been raised with respect to universals, values, and numbers, which are not usually considered spatiotemporal. While there is no clear sense in asserting that nothing is real, there seems to be a clear sense in asserting that there is no spatiotemporal world, especially if it is added that there are minds and their ideas. This was Berkeley’s view. But contemporary philosophers who raise questions about the reality of the spatiotemporal world are not comfortable with Berkeleyan minds and ideas and usually just somewhat vaguely speak of “ourselves” and our “representations.” The latter are themselves often understood as material (states of our brains), a clearly inconsistent position for anyone denying the reality of the spatiotemporal world. Usually, the contemporary anti-realist does not actually deny it but rather adopts a view resembling Kant’s transcendental idealism. Our only conception of the world, the anti-realist would argue, rests on our perceptual and conceptual faculties, including our language. But then what reason do we have to think that this conception is true, that it corresponds to the world as the world is in itself? Had our faculties and language been different, surely we would have had very different conceptions of the world. And very different conceptions of it are possible even in terms of our present faculties, as seems to be shown by the fact that very different scientific theories can be supported by exactly the same data. So far, we do not have anti-realism proper. But it is only a short step to it: if our conception of an independent spatiotemporal world is necessarily subjective, then we have no good reason for supposing that there is such a world, especially since it seems selfcontradictory to speak of a conception that is independent of our conceptual faculties. It is clear that this question, like almost all the questions of general metaphysics, is at least in part epistemological. Metaphysics can also be understood in a more definite sense, suggested by Aristotle’s notion (in his Metaphysics, the title of which was given by an early editor of his works, not by Aristotle himself) of “first philosophy,” namely, the study of being qua being, i.e., of the most general and necessary characteristics that anything must have in order to count as a being, an entity (ens). Sometimes ‘ontology’ is used in this sense, but this is by no means common practice, ‘ontology’ being often used as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’. Examples of criteria (each of which is a major topic in metaphysics) that anything must meet in order to count as a being, an entity, are the following. (A) Every entity must be either an individual thing (e.g., Socrates and this book), or a property (e.g., Socrates’ color and the shape of this book), or a relation (e.g., marriage and the distance between two cities), or an event (e.g., Socrates’ death), or a state of affairs (e.g., Socrates’ having died), or a set (e.g., the set of Greek philosophers). These kinds of entities are usually called categories, and metaphysics is very much concerned with the question whether these are the only categories, or whether there are others, or whether some of them are not ultimate because they are reducible to others (e.g., events to states of affairs, or individual things to temporal series of events). (B) The existence, or being, of a thing is what makes it an entity. (C) Whatever has identity and is distinct from everything else is an entity. (D) The nature of the “connection” between an entity and its properties and relations is what makes it an entity. Every entity must have properties and perhaps must enter into relations with at least some other entities. (E) Every entity must be logically self-consistent. It is noteworthy that after announcing his project of first philosophy, Aristotle immediately embarked on a defense of the law of non-contradiction. Concerning (A) we may ask (i) whether at least some individual things (particulars) are substances, in the Aristotelian sense, i.e., enduring through time and changes in their properties and relations, or whether all individual things are momentary. In that case, the individuals of common sense (e.g., this book) are really temporal series of momentary individuals, perhaps events such as the book’s being on a table at a specific instant. We may also ask (ii) whether any entity has essential properties, i.e., properties without which it would not exist, or whether all properties are accidental, in the sense that the entity could exist even if it lost the property in question. We may ask (iii) whether properties and relations are particulars or universals, e.g., whether the color of this page and the color of the next page, which (let us assume) are exactly alike, are two distinct entities, each with its separate spatial location, or whether they are identical and thus one entity that is exemplified by, perhaps even located in, the two pages. Concerning (B), we may ask whether existence is itself a property. If it is, how is it to be understood, and if it is not, how are we to understand ‘x exists’ and ‘x does not exist’, which seem crucial to everyday and scientific discourse, just as the thoughts they express seem crucial to everyday and scientific thinking? Should we countenance, as Meinong did, objects having no existence, e.g. golden mountains, even though we can talk and think about them? We can talk and think about a golden mountain and even claim that it is true that the mountain is golden, while knowing all along that what we are thinking and talking about does not exist. If we do not construe non-existent objects as something, then we are committed to the somewhat startling view that everything exists. Concerning (C) we may ask how to construe informative identity statements, such as, to use Frege’s example, ‘The Evening Star is identical with the Morning Star’. This contrasts with trivial and perhaps degenerate statements, such as ‘The Evening Star is identical with the Evening Star’, which are almost never made in ordinary or scientific discourse. The former are essential to any coherent, systematic cognition (even to everyday recognition of persons and places). Yet they are puzzling. We cannot say that they assert of two things that they are one, even though ordinary language suggests precisely this. Neither can we just say that they assert that a certain thing is identical with itself, for this view would be obviously false if the statements are informative. The fact that Frege’s example includes definite descriptions (‘the Evening Star’, ‘the Morning Star’) is irrelevant, contrary to Russell’s view. Informative identity statements can also have as their subject terms proper names and even demonstrative pronouns (e.g., ‘Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus’ and ‘This [the shape of this page] is identical with that [the shape of the next page]’), the reference of which is established not by description but ostensively, perhaps by actual pointing. Concerning (D) we can ask about the nature of the relationship, usually called instantiation or exemplification, between an entity and its properties and relations. Surely, there is such a relationship. But it can hardly be like an ordinary relation such as marriage that connects things of the same kind. And we can ask what is the connection between that relation and the entities it relates, e.g., the individual thing on one hand and its properties and relations on the other. Raising this question seems to lead to an infinite regress, as Bradley held; for the supposed connection is yet another relation to be connected with something else. But how do we avoid the regress? Surely, an individual thing and its properties and relations are not unrelated items. They have a certain unity. But what is its character? Moreover, we can hardly identify the individual thing except by reference to its properties and relations. Yet if we say, as some have, that it is nothing but a bundle of its properties and relations, could there not be another bundle of exactly the same properties and relations, yet distinct from the first one? (This question concerns the so-called problem of individuation, as well as the principle of the identity of indiscernibles.) If an individual is something other than its properties and relations (e.g., what has been called a bare particular), it would seem to be unobservable and thus perhaps unknowable. Concerning (E), virtually no philosopher has questioned the law of non-contradiction. But there are important questions about its status. Is it merely a linguistic convention? Some have held this, but it seems quite implausible. Is the law of non-contradiction a deep truth about being qua being? If it is, (E) connects closely with (B) and (C), for we can think of the concepts of self-consistency, identity, and existence as the most fundamental metaphysical concepts. They are also fundamental to logic, but logic, even if ultimately grounded in metaphysics, has a rich additional subject matter (sometimes merging with that of mathematics) and therefore is properly regarded as a separate branch of philosophy. The word ‘metaphysics’ has also been used in at least two other senses: first, the investigation of entities and states of affairs “transcending” human experience, in particular, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will (this was Kant’s conception of the sort of metaphysics that, according to him, required “critique”); and second, the investigation of any alleged supernatural or occult phenomena, such as ghosts and telekinesis. The first sense is properly philosophical, though seldom occurring today. The second is strictly popular, since the relevant supernatural phenomena are most questionable on both philosophical and scientific grounds. They should not be confused with the subject matter of philosophical theology, which may be thought of as part of metaphysics in the general philosophical sense, though it was included by Aristotle in the subject matter of metaphysics in his sense of the study of being qua being. Refs.: H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, “Seminars on Aristotle’s Categoriae,” Oxford.

metaphysical wisdom: J. London-born philosopher, cited by H. P. Grice in his third programme lecture on Metaphysics. “Wisdom used to say that metaphysics is nonsense, but INTERESTING nonsense.” Some more “contemporary” accounts of “metaphysics” sound, on the face of it at least, very different from either of these.   Consider, for example, from the OTHER place, John Wisdom's description of a metaphysical, shall we say, ‘statement’ – I prefer ‘utterance’ or pronouncement!  Wisdom says that a metaphysical, shall we say, ‘proposition’ is, characteristically, a sort of illuminating falsehood, a pointed paradox, which uses what Wisdom calls ‘ordinary language’ in a disturbing, baffling, and even shocking way, but not otiosely, but in order to make your tutee aware of a hidden difference or a hidden resemblance between this thing and that thing – a difference and a resemblance hidden by our ordinary ways of “talking.”  The metaphysician renders what is clear, obscure.  And the metaphysician MUST retort to some EXTRA-ordinary language, as Wisdom calls it!    Of course, to be fair to Wisdom and the OTHER place, Wisdom does not claim this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one.   Since Wisdom loves a figure of speech and a figure of thought!  Perhaps what Wisdom claims should *itself* be seen as an illuminating paradox, a meta-meta-physical one!  In any case, its relation to Aristotle's, or, closer to us, F. H. Bradley's, account of the matter is not obvious, is it?  But perhaps a relation CAN be established.   Certainly not every metaphysical statement is a paradox serving to call attention to an usually unnoticed difference or resemblance.   For many a metaphysical statement is so obscure (or unperspicuous, as I prefer) that it takes long training, usually at Oxford, before the metaphysician’s meaning can be grasped.  A paradox, such as Socrates’s, must operate with this or that familiar concept.  For the essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock your tutee when he is standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations.   Nevertheless there IS a connection between “metaphysics” and Wisdom's kind of paradox.   He is not speaking otiosely!  Suppose we consider the paradox:  i. Everyone is really always alone.   Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram -- rather a flat one  - about the human condition.   The implicaturum, via hyperbole, is “I am being witty.”  The pronouncement (i)  might be said, at least, to minimise the difference between “being BY oneself” and “being WITH other people,” Heidegger’s “Mit-Sein.”  But now consider the pronouncement (i), not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of “metaphysical” argument: by a “metaphysical” argument to the effect that what passes for “knowledge” of the other's mental or psychological process is, at best, an unverifiable conjecture, since the mind (or soul) and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind (or soul, as Aristotle would prefer, ‘psyche’) is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations, as Witters would have it. (Not in vain Wisdom calls himself or hisself a disciple of Witters!)   When this solitude-affirming paradox, (i) is seen in the context of a general theory about the soul and the body and the possibilities and limits of so-called “knowledge” (as in “Knowledge of other minds,” to use Wisdom’s fashionable sobriquet), when it is seen as embodying such a “metaphysical” theory, indeed the paradox BECOMES clearly a “metaphysical” statement.   But the fact that the statement or proposition is most clearly seen as “metaphysical” in such a setting does not mean that there is no “metaphysics” at all in it when it is deprived of the setting. (Cf. my “The general theory of context.”). An utterance like  (ii) Everyone is alone.  invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at and talking about things, and hints (or the metaphysician implicates rather) that the changed view the tutee gets is the truer, the profounder, view.   Cf. Cook Wilson, “What we know we know,” as delighting this air marshal. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, “The nature of metaphysics: the Third-Programme Lectures for 1953.”

methodological holism, also called metaphysical holism, the thesis that with respect to some system there is explanatory emergence, i.e., the laws of the more complex situations in the system are not deducible by way of any composition laws or laws of coexistence from the laws of the simpler or simplest situation(s). Explanatory emergence may exist in a system for any of the following reasons: that at some more complex level a variable interacts that does not do so at simpler levels, that a property of the “whole” interacts with properties of the “parts,” that the relevant variables interact by different laws at more complex levels owing to the complexity of the levels, or (the limiting case) that strict lawfulness breaks down at some more complex level. Thus, explanatory emergence does not presuppose descriptive emergence, the thesis that there are properties of “wholes” (or more complex situations) that cannot be defined through the properties of the “parts” (or simpler situations). The opposite of methodological holism is methodological individualism, also called explanatory reductionism, according to which all laws of the “whole” (or more complex situations) can be deduced from a combination of the laws of the simpler or simplest situation(s) and either some composition laws or laws of coexistence (depending on whether or not there is descriptive emergence). Methodological individualists need not deny that there may be significant lawful connections among properties of the “whole,” but must insist that all such properties are either definable through, or connected by laws of coexistence with, properties of the “parts.”

middle knowledge, knowledge of a particular kind of propositions, now usually called “counterfactuals of freedom,” first attributed to God by Molina. These propositions state, concerning each possible free creature God could create, what that creature would do in each situation of (libertarian) free choice in which it could possibly find itself. The claim that God knows these propositions offers important theological advantages; it helps in explaining both how God can have foreknowledge of free actions and how God can maintain close providential control over a world containing libertarian freedom. Opponents of middle knowledge typically argue that it is impossible for there to be true counterfactuals of freedom.

Middle Platonism, the period of Platonism between Antiochus of Ascalon (c.130–68 B.C.) and Plotinus (A.D. 204–70), characterized by a rejection of the skeptical stance of the New Academy and by a gradual advance, with many individual variations, toward a comprehensive dogmatic position on metaphysical principles, while exhibiting a certain latitude, as between Stoicizing and Peripateticizing positions, in the sphere of ethics. Antiochus himself was much influenced by Stoic materialism (though disagreeing with the Stoics in ethics), but in the next generation a neo-Pythagorean influence made itself felt, generating the mix of doctrines that one may most properly term Middle Platonic. From Eudorus of Alexandria (fl. c.25 B.C.) on, a transcendental, two-world metaphysic prevailed, featuring a supreme god, or Monad, a secondary creator god, and a world soul, with which came a significant change in ethics, substituting, as an ‘end of goods’ (telos), “likeness to God” (from Plato, Theaetetus 176b), for the Stoicizing “assimilation to nature” of Antiochus. Our view of the period is hampered by a lack of surviving texts, but it is plain that, in the absence of a central validating authority (the Academy as an institution seems to have perished in the wake of the capture of Athens by Mithridates in 88 B.C.), a considerable variety of doctrine prevailed among individual Platonists and schools of Platonists, particularly in relation to a preference for Aristotelian or Stoic principles of ethics. Most known activity occurred in the late first and second centuries A.D. Chief figures in this period are Plutarch of Chaeronea (c.45–125), Calvenus Taurus (fl. c.145), and Atticus (fl. c.175), whose activity centered on Athens (though Plutarch remained loyal to Chaeronea in Boeotia); Gaius (fl. c.100) and Albinus (fl. c.130) – not to be identified with “Alcinous,” author of the Didaskalikos; the rhetorician Apuleius of Madaura (fl. c.150), who also composed a useful treatise on the life and doctrines of Plato; and the neo-Pythagoreans Moderatus of Gades (fl. c.90), Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl. c.140), and Numenius (fl. c.150), who do not, however, constitute a “school.” Good evidence for an earlier stage of Middle Platonism is provided by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c.25 B.C.–A.D. 50). Perhaps the single most important figure for the later Platonism of Plotinus and his successors is Numenius, of whose works we have only fragments. His speculations on the nature of the first principle, however, do seem to have been a stimulus to Plotinus in his postulation of a supraessential One. Plutarch is important as a literary figure, though most of his serious philosophical works are lost; and the handbooks of Alcinous and Apuleius are significant for our understanding of second-century Platonism.

Middle Vitters: Grice: “Phrase used by H. P. Grice to refer to the middle period of Vitters’s philosophy. Vitters lived 54 years. The first Vitters goes from 0 to the third of his life. The latter Vitters go to the last third. The middle Vitters is the middle Vitters.” Plantinga, in revenge, refers to “the middle grice” as the pig in the middle of the trio. Refs.: Grice, “Strawson’s love for the middle Vitters.”

Miletusians, or Ionian Miletusians, or Milesians, the pre-Socratic philosophers of Miletus, a Grecian city-state on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes produced the earliest philosophies, stressing an “arche” or material source from which the cosmos and all things in it were generated: water for Thales, and then there’s air, fire, and earth – the fifth Grice called the ‘quintessentia.’

Mill: Scots-born philosopher (“One should take grice to one mill but not to the mill –“ Grice --) and social theorist. He applied the utilitarianism of his contemporary Bentham to such social matters as systems of education and government, law and penal systems, and colonial policy. He also advocated the associationism of Hume. Mill was an influential thinker in early nineteenth-century London, but his most important role in the history of philosophy was the influence he had on his son, J. S. Mill. He raised his more famous son as a living experiment in his associationist theory of education. His utilitarian views were developed and extended by J. S. Mill, while his associationism was also adopted by his son and became a precursor of the latter’s phenomenalism.

Mill, Scots London-born empiricist philosopher and utilitarian social reformer. He was the son of Mill, a leading defender of Bentham’s utilitarianism, and an advocate of reforms based on that philosophy. Mill was educated by his father (and thus “at Oxford we always considered him an outsider!” – Grice) in accordance with the principles of the associationist psychology adopted by the Benthamites and deriving from David Hartley, and was raised with the expectation that he would become a defender of the principles of the Benthamite school. Mill begins the study of Grecian at three and Roman at eight, and later assisted Mill in educating his brothers. He went to France to learn the language (“sc. French --” Grice ), and studied chemistry and mathematics at Montpellier. He wrote regularly for the Westminster Review, the Benthamite journal. He underwent a mental crisis that lasted some months. This he later attributed to his rigid education; in any case he emerged from a period of deep depression still advocating utilitarianism but in a very much revised version. Mill visits Paris during the revolution, meeting Lafayette and other popular leaders, and was introduced to the writings of Saint-Simon and Comte. He also met Harriet Taylor, to whom he immediately became devoted. They married only in 1851, when Taylor died. He joined the India House headquarters of the East India Company, serving as an examiner until the company was dissolved in 1858 in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny. Mill sat in Parliament. Harriet dies and is buried at Avignon, where Mill thereafter regularly resided for half of each year. Mill’s major works are his “System of Logic, Deductive and Inductive,” “Political Economy,” “On Liberty,” “Utilitarianism,” in Fraser’s Magazine, “The Subjection of Women” – Grice: “I wrote a paper for Hardie on this. His only comment was: ‘what do you mean by ‘of’?” --; “An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy,” and “Religion.” His writing style is excellent, and his history of his own mental development, the “Autobiography” is a major Victorian literary text. His main opponents philosophically are Whewell and Hamilton, and it is safe to say that after Mill their intuitionism in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and ethics could no longer be defended. Mill’s own views were later to be eclipsed by those of such Oxonian lumaries as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and the other Oxonian Hegelian idealists (Bosanquet, Pater). His views in metaphysics and philosophy of science have been revived and defended by Russell and the logical positivists, while his utilitarian ethics has regained its status as one of the major ethical theories. His social philosophy deeply infuenced the Fabians and other groups on the English left; its impact continues. Mill was brought up on the basis of, and to believe in, the strict utilitarianism of his father. His own development largely consisted in his attempts to broaden it, to include a larger and more sympathetic view of human nature, and to humanize its program to fit this broader view of human beings. In his own view, no doubt largely correct, he did not so much reject his father’s principles as fill in the gaps and eliminate rigidities and crudities. He continued throughout his life his father’s concern to propagate principles conceived as essential to promoting human happiness. These extended from moral principles to principles of political economy to principles of logic and metaphysics. Mill’s vision of the human being was rooted in the psychological theories he defended. Arguing against the intuitionism of Reid and Whewell, he extended the associationism of his father. On this theory, ideas have their genetic antecedents in sensation, a complex idea being generated out of a unique set of simple, elementary ideas, through associations based on regular patterns in the presented sensations. Psychological analysis reveals the elementary parts of ideas and is thus the means for investigating the causal origins of our ideas. The elder Mill followed Locke in conceiving analysis on the model of definition, so that the psychological elements are present in the idea they compose and the idea is nothing but its associated elements. Mill emerged from his mental crisis with the recognition that mental states are often more than the sum of the ideas that are their genetic antecedents. On the revised model of analysis, the analytical elements are not actually present in the idea, but are present only dispositionally, ready to be recovered by association under the analytical set. Moreover, it is words that are defined, not ideas, though words become general only by becoming associated with ideas. Analysis thus became an empirical task, rather than something settled a priori according to one’s metaphysical predispositions, as it had been for Mill’s predecessors. The revised psychology allowed the younger Mill to account empirically in a much more subtle way than could the earlier associationists for the variations in our states of feeling. Thus, for example, the original motive to action is simple sensations of pleasure, but through association things originally desired as means become associated with pleasure and thereby become desirable as ends, as parts of one’s pleasure. But these acquired motives are not merely the sum of the simple pleasures that make them up; they are more than the sum of those genetic antecedents. Thus, while Mill holds with his father that persons seek to maximize their pleasures, unlike his father he also holds that not all ends are selfish, and that pleasures are not only quantitatively but also qualitatively distinct. In ethics, then, Mill can hold with the intuitionists that our moral sentiments are qualitatively distinct from the lower pleasures, while denying the intuitionist conclusion that they are innate. Mill urges, with his father and Bentham, that the basic moral norm is the principle of utility, that an action is right provided it maximizes human welfare. Persons always act to maximize their own pleasure, but the general human welfare can be among the pleasures they seek. Mill’s position thus does not have the problems that the apparently egoistic psychology of his father created. The only issue is whether a person ought to maximize human welfare, whether he ought to be the sort of person who is so motivated. Mill’s own ethics is that this is indeed what one ought to be, and he tries to bring this state of human being about in others by example, and by urging them to expand the range of their human sympathy through poetry like that of Wordsworth, through reading the great moral teachers such as Jesus and Socrates, and by other means of moral improvement. Mill also offers an argument in defense of the principle of utility. Against those who, like Whewell, argue that there is no basic right to pleasure, he argues that as a matter of psychological fact, people seek only pleasure, and concludes that it is therefore pointless to suggest that they ought to do anything other than this. The test of experience thus excludes ends other than pleasure. This is a plausible argument. Less plausible is his further argument that since each seeks her own pleasure, the general good is the (ultimate) aim of all. This latter argument unfortunately presupposes the invalid premise that the law for a whole follows from laws about the individual parts of the whole. Other moral rules can be justified by their utility and the test of experience. For example, such principles of justice as the rules of property and of promise keeping are justified by their role in serving certain fundamental human needs. Exceptions to such secondary rules can be justified by appeal to the principle of utility. But there is also utility in not requiring in every application a lengthy utilitarian calculation, which provides an objective justification for overlooking what might be, objectively considered in terms of the principle of utility, an exception to a secondary rule. Logic and philosophy of science. The test of experience is also brought to bear on norms other than those of morality, e.g., those of logic and philosophy of science. Mill argues, against the rationalists, that science is not demonstrative from intuited premises. Reason in the sense of deductive logic is not a logic of proof but a logic of consistency. The basic axioms of any science are derived through generalization from experience. The axioms are generic and delimit a range of possible hypotheses about the specific subject matter to which they are applied. It is then the task of experiment and, more generally, observation to eliminate the false and determine which hypothesis is true. The axioms, the most generic of which is the law of the uniformity of nature, are arrived at not by this sort of process of elimination but by induction by simple enumeration: Mill argues plausibly that on the basis of experience this method becomes more reliable the more generic is the hypothesis that it is used to justify. But like Hume, Mill holds that for any generalization from experience the evidence can never be sufficient to eliminate all possibility of doubt. Explanation for Mill, as for the logical positivists, is by subsumption under matter-of-fact generalizations. Causal generalizations that state sufficient or necessary and sufficient conditions are more desirable as explanations than mere regularities. Still more desirable is a law or body of laws that gives necessary and sufficient conditions for any state of a system, i.e., a body of laws for which there are no explanatory gaps. As for explanation of laws, this can proceed either by filling in gaps or by subsuming the law under a generic theory that unifies the laws of several areas. Mill argues that in the social sciences the subject matter is too complex to apply the normal methods of experiment. But he also rejects the purely deductive method of the Benthamite political economists such as his father and David Ricardo. Rather, one must deduce the laws for wholes, i.e., the laws of economics and sociology, from the laws for the parts, i.e., the laws of psychology, and then test these derived laws against the accumulated data of history. Mill got the idea for this methodology of the social sciences from Comte, but unfortunately it is vitiated by the false idea, already noted, that one can deduce without any further premise the laws for wholes from the laws for the parts. Subsequent methodologists of the social sciences have come to substitute the more reasonable methods of statistics for this invalid method Mill proposes. Mill’s account of scientific method does work well for empirical sciences, such as the chemistry of his day. He was able to show, too, that it made good sense of a great deal of physics, though it is arguable that it cannot do justice to theories that explain the atomic and subatomic structure of matter – something Mill himself was prepared to acknowledge. He also attempted to apply his views to geometry, and even more implausibly, to arithmetic. In these areas, he was certainly bested by Whewell, and the world had to wait for the logical work of Russell and Whitehead before a reasonable empiricist account of these areas became available. Metaphysics. The starting point of all inference is the sort of observation we make through our senses, and since we know by experience that we have no ideas that do not derive from sense experience, it follows that we cannot conceive a world beyond what we know by sense. To be sure, we can form generic concepts, such as that of an event, which enable us to form concepts of entities that we cannot experience, e.g., the concept of the tiny speck of sand that stopped my watch or the concept of the event that is the cause of my present sensation. Mill held that what we know of the laws of sensation is sufficient to make it reasonable to suppose that the immediate cause of one’s present sensation is the state of one’s nervous system. Our concept of an objective physical object is also of this sort; it is the set of events that jointly constitute a permanent possible cause of sensation. It is our inductive knowledge of laws that justifies our beliefs that there are entities that fall under these concepts. The point is that these entities, while unsensed, are (we reasonably believe) part of the world we know by means of our senses. The contrast is to such things as the substances and transcendent Ideas of rationalists, or the God of religious believers, entities that can be known only by means that go beyond sense and inductive inferences therefrom. Mill remained essentially pre-Darwinian, and was willing to allow the plausibility of the hypothesis that there is an intelligent designer for the perceived order in the universe. But this has the status of a scientific hypothesis rather than a belief in a substance or a personal God transcending the world of experience and time. Whewell, at once the defender of rationalist ideas for science and for ethics and the defender of established religion, is a special object for Mill’s scorn. Social and political thought. While Mill is respectful of the teachings of religious leaders such as Jesus, the institutions of religion, like those of government and of the economy, are all to be subjected to criticism based on the principle of utility: Do they contribute to human welfare? Are there any alternatives that could do better? Thus, Mill argues that a free-market economy has many benefits but that the defects, in terms of poverty for many, that result from private ownership of the means of production may imply that we should institute the alternative of socialism or public ownership of the means of production. He similarly argues for the utility of liberty as a social institution: under such a social order individuality will be encouraged, and this individuality in turn tends to produce innovations in knowledge, technology, and morality that contribute significantly to improving the general welfare. Conversely, institutions and traditions that stifle individuality, as religious institutions often do, should gradually be reformed. Similar considerations argue on the one hand for democratic representative government and on the other for a legal system of rights that can defend individuals from the tyranny of public opinion and of the majority. Status of women. Among the things for which Mill campaigned were women’s rights, women’s suffrage, and equal access for women to education and to occupations. He could not escape his age and continued to hold that it was undesirable for a woman to work to help support her family. While he disagreed with his father and Bentham that all motives are egoistic and self-interested, he nonetheless held that in most affairs of economics and government such motives are dominant. He was therefore led to disagree with his father that votes for women are unnecessary since the male can speak for the family. Women’s votes are needed precisely to check the pursuit of male self-interest. More generally, equality is essential if the interests of the family as such are to be served, rather than making the family serve male self-interest as had hitherto been the case. Changing the relation between men and women to one of equality will force both parties to curb their self-interest and broaden their social sympathies to include others. Women’s suffrage is an essential step toward the moral improvement of humankind. Grice: “I am fascinated by how Griceian Mill can be.” “In treating of the ‘proposition,’ some considerations of a comparatively elementary nature respecting its form must be premised,and the ‘import’ which the emisor conveyed by a token of an expression of a ‘proposition’ – for one cannot communicate but that the cat is on the mat -- . A proposition is a move in the conversational game in which a feature (P) is predicated of the subject (S) – The S is P – The subject and the predicate – as in “Strawson’s dog is shaggy” -- are all that is necessarily required to make up a proposition. But as we can not conclude from merely seeing two “Strawson’s dog” and “shaggy” put together, that “Strawson’s dog” is the subject and “shaggy” the predicate, that is, that the predicate is intended to be ‘predicated’ of the subject, it is necessary that there should be some mode or form of indicating that such is, in Griceian parlance, the ‘intention,’ sc. some sign to signal this predication – my father says that as I was growing up, I would say “dog shaggy” – The explicit communication of a predication is sometimes done by a slight alteration of the expression that is the predicate or the expression that is the subject – sc., a ‘casus’ – even if it is ‘rectum’ – or ‘obliquum’ --  inflectum.” Grice: “The example Mill gives is “Fire burns.”” “The change from ‘burn’ to ‘burns’ shows that the emisor intends to predicate the predicate “burn” of the subject “fire.” But this function is more commonly fulfilled by the copula, which serves the purporse of the sign of predication, “est,” (or by nothing at all as in my beloved Grecian! “Anthropos logikos,” -- when the predication is, again to use Griceian parlance, ‘intended.’” Grice: “Mill gives the example, ‘The king of France is smooth.” “It may seem to be implied, or implicated – implicatum, implicaturum -- not only that the quality ‘smooth’ can be predicated of the king of France, but moreover that there is a King of France. Grice: “Mill notes: ‘It’s different with ‘It is not the case that the king of France is smooth’”. “This, however should not rush us to think that ‘is’ is aequi-vocal, and that it can be ‘copula’ AND ‘praedicatum’, e. g. ‘… is a spatio-temporal continuant.’ Grice: “Mill then gives my example: ‘Pegasus is [in Grecian mythology – i. e. Pegasus is *believed* to exist by this or that Grecian mythographer], but does not exist.’” “A flying horse is a fiction of some Grecian poets.” Grice: “Mill hastens to add that the annulation of the implicaturum is implicit or contextual.” “By uttering ‘A flying horse is a Griceian allegory’ the emisor cannot possibly implicate that a flying horse is a spatio-temporal continuant, since by uttering the proposition itself the emisor is expressly asserting that the thing has no real existence.” “Many volumes might be filled” – Grice: “And will be filled by Strawson!” -- with the frivolous speculations concerning the nature of being (ƒø D½, øPÃw±, ens, entitas, essentia, and the like), which have arisen from overlooking the implicaturum of ‘est’; from supposing that when by uttering “S est P” the emisor communicates that S is a spatio-temporal continuant. when by uttering it, the emisor communicates that the S is some *specified* thing, a horse and a flier, to be a phantom, a mythological construct, or the invention of the journalists (like Marmaduke Bloggs, who climbed Mt. Everest on hands and knees) even to be a nonentity (as a squared circle) it must still, at bottom, answer to the same idea; and that a proposition must be found for it which shall suit all these cases. The fog which rises from this very narrow spot diffuses itself over the whole surface of ontology. Yet it becomes us not to triumph over the great intellect of Ariskant because we are now able to preserve ourselves from many errors into which he, perhaps inevitably, fell. The fire-teazer of a steam-engine produces by his exertions far greater effects than Milo of Crotona could, but he is not therefore a stronger man. The Grecians – like some uneducated Englishman -- seldom knew any language but their own! This render it far more difficult for *them* than it is for us, to acquire a readiness in detecting the implicaturum. One of the advantages of having accurately studied Grecian and Roman at Clifton, especially of those languages which Ariskant used as the vehicle of his thought, is the practical lesson we learn respecting the implicaturm, by finding that the same expression in Grecian, say (e. g. ‘is’) corresponds, on different occasions, to a different expression in Gricese, say (i. e. ‘hazz’). When not thus exercised, even the strongest understandings find it difficult to believe that things which fall under a class, have not in some respect or other a common nature; and often expend much labour very unprofitably (as is frequently done by Ariskant) in a vain attempt to discover in what this common nature consists. But, the habit once formed, intellects much inferior are capable of detecting even an impicaturum which is common or generalised to Grecian and Griceses: and it is surprising that this sous-entendu or impicaturum now under consideration, though it is ordinary at Oxford as well as in the ancient, should have been overlooked by almost every philosopher until Grice. Grice: “Mill was proud of Mill.” “The quantity of futilitarian speculation which had been caused by a misapprehension of the nature of the copula, is hinted at by Hobbes; but my father is the first who distinctly characterized the implicaturm, and point out to me how many errors in the received systems of philosophy it has had to answer for. It has, indeed, misled the moderns scarcely less than the ancients, though their mistakes, because our understandings are not yet so completely emancipated from their influence, do not appear equally irrational. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice to the Mill,” L. G. Wilton, “Mill’s mentalism,” for the Grice Club. Grice treasured Hardie’s invocation of Mill’s method during a traffic incident on the HIhg. Mill’s methods, procedures for discovering necessary conditions, sufficient conditions, and necessary and sufficient conditions, where these terms are used as follows: if whenever A then B (e.g., whenever there is a fire then oxygen is present), then B is a necessary (causal) condition for A; and if whenever C then D (e.g., whenever sugar is in water, then it dissolves), then C is a sufficient (causal) condition for D. Method of agreement. Given a pair of hypotheses about necessary conditions, e.g., (1) whenever A then B1 whenever A then B2, then an observation of an individual that is A but not B2 will eliminate the second alternative as false, enabling one to conclude that the uneliminated hypothesis is true. This method for discovering necessary conditions is called the method of agreement. To illustrate the method of agreement, suppose several people have all become ill upon eating potato salad at a restaurant, but have in other respects had quite different meals, some having meat, some vegetables, some desserts. Being ill and not eating meat eliminates the latter as the cause; being ill and not eating dessert eliminates the latter as cause; and so on. It is the condition in which the individuals who are ill agree that is not eliminated. We therefore conclude that this is the cause or necessary condition for the illness. Method of difference. Similarly, with respect to the pair of hypotheses concerning sufficient conditions, e.g., (2) whenever C1 then D whenever C2 then D, an individual that is C1 but not D will eliminate the first hypothesis and enable one to conclude that the second is true. This is the method of difference. A simple change will often yield an example of an inference to a sufficient condition by the method of difference. If something changes from C1 to C2, and also thereupon changes from notD to D, one can conclude that C2, in respect of which the instances differ, is the cause of D. Thus, Becquerel discovered that burns can be caused by radium, i.e., proximity to radium is a sufficient but not necessary condition for being burned, when he inferred that the radium he carried in a bottle in his pocket was the cause of a burn on his leg by noting that the presence of the radium was the only relevant causal difference between the time when the burn was present and the earlier time when it was not. Clearly, both methods can be generalized to cover any finite number of hypotheses in the set of alternatives. The two methods can be combined in the joint method of agreement and difference to yield the discovery of conditions that are both necessary and sufficient. Sometimes it is possible to eliminate an alternative, not on the basis of observation, but on the basis of previously inferred laws. If we know by previous inductions that no C2 is D, then observation is not needed to eliminate the second hypothesis of (2), and we can infer that what remains, or the residue, gives us the sufficient condition for D. Where an alternative is eliminated by previous inductions, we are said to use the method of residues. The methods may be generalized to cover quantitative laws. A cause of Q may be taken not to be a necessary and sufficient condition, but a factor P on whose magnitude the magnitude of Q functionally depends. If P varies when Q varies, then one can use methods of elimination to infer that P causes Q. This has been called the method of concomitant variation. More complicated methods are needed to infer what precisely is the function that correlates the two magnitudes. Clearly, if we are to conclude that one of (1) is true on the basis of the given data, we need an additional premise to the effect that there is at least one necessary condition for B and it is among the set consisting of A1 and A2. 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 571 Mimamsa mimesis 572 The existence claim here is known as a principle of determinism and the delimited range of alternatives is known as a principle of limited variety. Similar principles are needed for the other methods. Such principles are clearly empirical, and must be given prior inductive support if the methods of elimination are to be conclusive. In practice, generic scientific theories provide these principles to guide the experimenter. Thus, on the basis of the observations that justified Kepler’s laws, Newton was able to eliminate all hypotheses concerning the force that moved the planets about the sun save the inverse square law, provided that he also assumed as applying to this specific sort of system the generic theoretical framework established by his three laws of motion, which asserted that there exists a force accounting for the motion of the planets (determinism) and that this force satisfies certain conditions, e.g., the action-reaction law (limited variety). The eliminative methods constitute the basic logic of the experimental method in science. They were first elaborated by Francis Bacon (see J. Weinberg, Abstraction, Relation, and Induction, 1965). They were restated by Hume, elaborated by J. F. W. Herschel, and located centrally in scientific methodology by J. S. Mill. Their structure was studied from the perspective of modern developments in logic by Keynes, W. E. Johnson, and especially Broad. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice to the Mill,” G. L. Brook, “Mill’s Mentalism”, Sutherland, “Mill in Dodgson’s Semiotics.”

Iconicity and mimesis. Grice: “If it hurts, you involuntarily go ‘Ouch.’ ‘Ouch’ can voluntarily become a vehicle for communication, under voluntary control. But we must allow for any expression to become a vehicle for communication, even if there is no iconic or mimetic association -- (from Greek mimesis, ‘imitation’), the modeling of one thing on another, or the presenting of one thing by another; imitation. The concept played a central role in the account formulated by Plato and Aristotle of what we would now call the fine arts. The poet, the dramatist, the painter, the musician, the sculptor, all compose a mimesis of reality. Though Plato, in his account of painting, definitely had in mind that the painter imitates physical reality, the general concept of mimesis used by Plato and Aristotle is usually better translated by ‘representation’ than by ‘imitation’: it belongs to the nature of the work of art to represent, to re-present, reality. This representational or mimetic theory of art remained far and away the dominant theory in the West until the rise of Romanticism – though by no means everyone agreed with Plato that it is concrete items of physical reality that the artist represents. The hold of the mimetic theory was broken by the insistence of the Romantics that, rather than the work of art being an imitation, it is the artist who, in his or her creative activity, imitates Nature or God by composing an autonomous object. Few contemporary theorists of art would say that the essence of art is to represent; the mimetic theory is all but dead. In part this is a reflection of the power of the Romantic alternative to the mimetic theory; in part it is a reflection of the rise to prominence over the last century of nonobjective, abstract painting and sculpture and of “absolute” instrumental music. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of representation has not ceased to draw the attention of theorists. In recent years three quite different general theories of representation have appeared: Nelson Goodman’s (The Languages of Art), Nicholas Wolterstorff’s (Works and Worlds of Art), and Kendall Walton’s (Mimesis as Make-Believe). Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aristotle’s mimesis and Paget’s ta-ta theory of communication.”

Paget: author beloved by Grice, inventor of the ta-ta theory of communication.

The bellow -- “Ouch” – Grice’s theory of communication in “Meaning revisited.” Grice’s paradox of the ta-ta. Why would a simulation of pain be taken as a sign of pain if the sendee recognises that the emisor is simulating a ‘causally provoked,’ rather than under voluntary control, expression of pain. Grice’s wording is subtle and good. “Stage one in the operation involves the supposition that the creature actually voluntarily produces a certain sort of behaviour which is such that its nonvoluntary production would be evidence that the creature is, let us say, in pain.” Cf. Ockham, ‘risus naturaliter significat interiorem laetitiam.’ But the laughter does NOT resemble the inner joy. There is natural causality, but not iconicity. So what Grice and Ockham are after is ‘artificial laughter’ which does imitate (mimic) natural laughter. “Risus significat naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.” “Risus voluntaries significat NON-naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.” Ockham wants to say that it is via the iconicity of the artificial laughter that the communication is effected. So if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, non-natural communication recapitulates natural communication. “Risus voluntarius non-significat naturaliter (via risus involutarius significans naturaliter) interiorem laetitiam.  “The kinds of cases of this which come most obviously to mind will be cases of faking or deception.” “A creature normally voluntarily produces behaviour not only when, but *because*, its nonvoluntary production would be evidence that the creature is in a certain state, with the effect that the rest of the world, other creatures around, treat the production, which is in fact voluntary, as if it were a nonvoluntary production.” “That is, they come to just the same conclusion about the creature’s being in the state in question, the signalled state.” Note Grice’s technical use of Shannon’s ‘signal.’  “The purpose of the creature’s producing the behaviour voluntarily would be so that the rest of the world should think that it is in the state which the nonvoluntary production would signify.”  Note that at this point, while it is behaviour that signifies – the metabolia has to apply ultimately to the emisor. So that it is the creature who signifies – or it signifies. The fact that Grice uses ‘it’ for the creature is telling – For, if Grice claims that only rational Homo sapiens can communicate, Homo sapiens is an ‘it.’  “In stage two not only does creature X produce this behaviour voluntarily, instead of nonvoluntarily, as in the primitive state.” By primitive he means Stage 0. “… but we also assume that it is *recognised* by another creature Y, involved with X in some transaction, as being the voluntary production of certain form of behaviour the nonvoluntary production of which evidences, say, pain.” So again, there is no iconicity. Does the “Ouch” in Stage 0 ‘imitate’ the pain. How can ‘pain,’ which is a state of the soul, be ‘imitated’ via a physical, material, medium? There are ways. Pain may involve some discomfort in the soul. The cry, “Ouch,” involuntary, ‘imitates this disturbance or discomfort. But what about inner joy and the laughter. Ape studies have demonstrated that the show of teeth is a sign of agreession. It’s not Mona Lisa’s smile. So Mona Lisa’s inner joy is signified by her smile. Is this iconic? Is there a resemblance or imitation here? Yes. Because the inner joy is the opposite of discomfort, and the distended muscles around the mouth resemble the distended state of the immaterial soul of Mona Lisa. As a functionalist, Grice was also interested in the input. What makes Mona Lisa smile? What makes you to utter “Ouch” when you step on a thorn? Is the disturbance (of pain, since this is the example Grice uses) or the distension of joy resemble the external stimulus? Yes. Because a thorn on the ground is NOT to be there – it is a disturbance of the environment. Looking at Leonardo da Vinci who actually is commanding, “Smile!” is enough of a stimulus for “The Gioconda” to become what Italians call ‘the gioconda.’  “That is, creature X is now supposed not just to simulate pain-behaviour, but also to be recognised as simulating pain-behaviour.” “The import of the recognition by Y that the production is voluntary UNDERMINES, of course, any tendency on the part of Y to come to the conclusion that creature X is in pain.” “So, one might ask, what would be required to restore the situation: what COULD be ADDED which would be an ‘antidote,’ so to speak, to the dissolution on the part of Y of the idea that X is in pain?” “A first step in this direction would be to go to what we might think of as stage three.” “Here, we suppose that creature Y not only recognises that the behaviour is voluntary on the part of X, but also recognises that X *intends* Y to recognise HIS [no longer its] behaviour as voluntary.” “That is, we have now undermined the idea that this is a straightforward piece of deception.” “Deceiving consists in trying to get a creature to accept certain things AS SIGNS [but cf. Grice on words not being signs in ‘Meaning’] as something or other without knowing that this is a faked case.” “Here,  however, we would have a sort of perverse faked case, in which something is faked but at the same time a clear indication is put in that the faking has been done.” Cf. Warhol on Campbell soup and why Aristotle found ‘mimesis’ so key “Creature Y can be thought of as initially BAFFLED by this conflicting performance.” “There is this creature, as it were, simulating pain, but announcing, in a certain sense, that this is what IT [again it, not he] is doing.” “What on earth can IT be up to?” “It seems to me that if Y does raise the question of why X should be doing this, it might first come up with the idea that X is engaging in some form of play or make-believe, a game to which, since X’s behaviour is seemingly directed TOWARDS Y [alla Kurt Lewin], Y is EXPECTED OR INTENDED to make some appropriate contribution. “Cases susceptible of such an interpretation I regard as belonging to stage four.” “But, we may suppose, there might be cases which could NOT be handled in this way.” “If Y is to be expected to be a fellow-participant with X in some form of play, it ought to be possible for Y to recognise what kind of contribution Y [the sendee – the signalee] is supposed to make; and we can envisage the possibility that Y has no clue on which to base such recognition, or again that though SOME form of contribution seems to be SUGGESTED, when Y obliges by coming up with it, X, instead of producing further pain-behaviour, gets cross and perhaps repeats its original, and now problematic, performance.” [“Ouch!”].  “We now reach stage five, at which Y supposes not that X is engaged in play, but that what X is doing is trying to get Y to believe OR ACCEPT THAT X *is* in pain.” That is, not just faking that he is in pain, but faking that he is in pain because he IS in pain. Surely the pain cannot be that GROSS if he has time to consider all this! So “communicating pain” applies to “MINOR pain,” which the Epicureans called “communicable pains” (like a tooth-ache – Vitters after reading Diels, came up with the idea that Marius was wrong and that a tooth-pain is NOT communicable!  “: that is, trying to get Y to believe in or accept the presence of that state in X which the produced behaviour, when produced NONVOLUNTARILY, in in fact a natural sign of, naturally means.” Here the under-metabolis is avoidable: “when produced nonvolutarily, in in fact THE EFFECT OF, or the consequence of.” And if you want to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition: “that STATE in X of which the produced behaviour is the CONSEQUENCE or EFFECT. CAUSATUM. The causans-causatum distinction.  “More specifically, one might say that at stage five, creature Y recognises that creature X in the first place INTENDS that Y recognise the production of the sign of pain (of what is USUALLY the sign of pain) to be voluntary, and further intends that Y should regard this first intention I1 as being a sufficient reason for Y to BELIEVE that X is in pain.” But would that expectation occur in a one-off predicament? “And that X has these intentions because he has the additional further INTENTION I3 that Y should not MERELY have sufficient REASON for believing that X is in pain, but should actually [and AND] believe it.” This substep shows that for Grice it’s the INFLUENCING and being influenced by others (or the institution of decision), rather than the exchange of information (giving and receiving information), which is basic. The protreptic, not the exhibitive. “Whether or not in these circumstances X will not merely recognise that X intends, in a certain rather QUEER way, to get Y to believe that X is in pain, whether Y not only recognises this but actually goes on to believe that X is in pain, would presumably DEPEND on a FURTHER SET OF CONDITIONS which can be summed up under the general heading that Y should regard X as TRUSTWORTHY [as a good meta-faker!] in one or another of perhaps a variety of ways.” This is Grice’s nod to G. J. Warnock’s complex analysis of the variety of ways in which one can be said to be ‘trustworthy’ – last chapter of ‘trustworthiness in conversation,’ in Warnock’s brilliant, “The object of morality.” “For example, suppose Y thinks that, either in general or at least in THIS type of CASE [this token, a one-off predicament? Not likely!] X would NOT want Y to believe that X is in pain UNLESS [to use R. Hall and H. L. A. Hart’s favourite excluder defeater] X really WERE in pain.” [Cf. Hardie, “Why do you use the subjunctive?” “Were Hardie to be here, I would respond!” – Grice]. “Suppose also (this would perhaps not apply to a case of pain but might apply to THE COMMUNICATION of other states [what is communicated is ONLY a state of the soul] that Y also believes that X is trustworthy, not just in the sense of not being malignant [malevolent, ill-willed, maleficent], but also in the sense of being, as it were, in general [semiotically] responsible, for example, being the sort of creature, who takes adequate trouble to make sure that what HE [not it] is trying to get the other creature to believe is in fact the case.” Sill, “’I have a toothache” never entails that the emisor has a toothache! – a sign is anything we can lie with!” (Eco). “… and who is not careless, negligent, or rash.” “Then, given the general fulfilment of the idea that Y regards X either in general or in this particular case of being trustworthy in this kind of competent, careful, way, one would regard it as RATIONAL [reasonable] not only for Y to recognise these intentions on the part of X that Y should have certain beliefs about X’s being in pain, but also for Y actually to pass to adopting these beliefs.” Stage six annuls mimesis, or lifts  the requirement of mimesis – “we relax this requirement.” “As Judith Baker suggests, it would be unmanly to utter (or ‘let out’) a (natural) bellow!” Here Grice speaks of the decibels of the emission of the bellow – as indicating this or that degree of pain. But what about “It’s raining.” We have a state of affairs (not necessarily a state in the soul of the emissor). So by relaxing the requirement, the emissor chooses a behaviour which is “suggestive, in some recognizable way” with the state of affairs of rain “without the performance having to be the causal effect of (or ‘response to,’ as Grice also has it) that state of affairs, sc. that it is raining.  The connection becomes “non-natural,” or ‘artificial’: any link will do – as long as the correlation is OBVIOUS, pre-arranged, or foreknown. – ‘one-off predicament’.

There are problems with ‘stage zero’ and ‘stage six.’ When it comes to stage zero, Grice is supposing, obviously that a state of affairs is the CAUSE of some behaviour in a creature – since there is no interpretant – the phenomenon may very obliquely called ‘semiotic.’ “If a tree falls in the wood and nobody is listening…” – So stage zero need not involve a mimetic aspect. Since stage one involves ‘pain,’ i.e. the proposition that ‘X is in pain,’ as Grice has it. Or as we would have it, ‘A is in pain’ or ‘The emisor is in pain.’ Althought he uses the metaphor of the play where B is expected or intended to make an appropriate contribution or move in the game, it is one of action, he will have to accept that ‘The emisor is in pain’ and act appropriately. But Grice is not at all interested in the cycle of what B might do – as Gardiner is, when he talks of a ‘conversational dyad.’ Grice explores the conversational ‘dyad’ in his Oxford lectures on the conversational imlicaturum. A poetic line might not do but: “A: I’m out of gas.” B: “There’s a garage round the corner.” – is the conversational dyad. In B’s behaviour, we come to see that he has accepted that A is out of gas. And his ‘appropriate contribution’ in the game goes beyond that acceptance – he makes a ‘sentence’ move (“There is a garage round the corner.”). So strictly a conversational implicaturum is the communicatum by the second item in a conversational dyad.

Now there are connections to be made between stage zero and stage six. Why? Well, because stage six is intended to broaden the range of propositions that are communicated to be OTHER than a ‘state’ in the emisor – X is in pain --. But Grice does not elaborate on the ‘essential psychological attitude’ requirement. Even if we require this requirement – Grice considers two requirements. The requirement he is interested in relaxing is that of the CAUSAL connection – he keeps using ‘natural’ misleadingly --. But can he get rid of it so easily? Because in stage six, if the emisor wants to communicate that the cat is on the mat, or that it is raining, it will be via his BELIEF that the cat is on the mat or that it is raining. The cat being on the mat or it being raining would CAUSE the emisor to have that belief. Believing is the CAUSAL consequence.

Grice makes a comparison between the mimesis or resemblance of a bellow produced voluntarily or not – and expands on the decibels. The ‘information’ one may derive at stage 0 of hearing an emisor (who is unaware that he is being observed) is one that is such and such – and it is decoded by de-correlating the decibels of the bellow. More decibels, higher pain. There is a co-relation here. Grice ventures that perhaps that’s too much information (he is following someone’s else objection). Why would not X just ‘let out a natural bellow.’ Grice states there are – OBVIOUSLY – varioius reasons why he would not – the ‘obviously’ implicates the objection is silly (typical tutee behaviour).  The first is charming. Grice, seeing the gender of the tutee, says that it woud be UNMANLY for A to let out a natural bellow. He realizes that ‘unmanly’ may be considered ‘artless sexism’ (this is the late mid-70s, and in the provinces!) – So he turns the ‘unmanly’ into the charmingly Oxonian, “ or otherwise uncreaturely.” – which is a genial piece of ironic coinage! Surely ‘manly’ and ‘unmanly,’ if it relates to ‘Homo sapiens,’ need not carry a sexist implicaturum. Another answer to the obvious objection that Grice gives relates to the level of informativeness – the ‘artificial’ (as he calls it) – His argument is that if one takes Aristotle’s seriously, and the ‘artificial bellow’ is to ‘imitate’ the ‘natural bellow,’ it may not replicate ALL THE ‘FEATURES’ – which is the expression Grice uses --  he means semiotic distinctive feature --. So he does not have to calculate the ‘artificial bellow’ to correlate exactly to the quantity of decibels that the ‘natural bellow’ does. This is important from a CAUSAL point of view, or in terms of Grice’s causal theory of behaviour. A specific pain (prooked by Stimulus S1) gives the RESPONSE R2 – with decibels D1. A different stimulus S2 woud give a different RESPONSE R2, with different decibels D2. So Grice is exploring the possibility of variance here. In a causal involuntary scenario, there is nothing the creature can do. The stimulus Sn will produce the creature Cn to be such that its response is Rn (where Rn is a response with decibels – this being the semiotic distinctive feature Fn – Dn. When it comes to the ‘artificial bellow,’ the emisor’s only point is to express the proposition, ‘I am in pain,’ and not ‘I am in pain such that it causes a natural bellow of decibels Dn,” which would flout the conversational postulate of conversational fortitude. The overinformativeness would baffle the sendee, if not the sender). At this point there is a break in the narrative, and Grice, in a typical Oxonian way, goes on to say, “But then, we might just as well relax the requirement that the proposition concerns a state of the sender.” He gives no specific example, but refers to a ‘state of affairs’ which does NOT involve a state of the sender – AND ONE TO WHICH, HOWEVER, THE SENDER RESPONDS with a behaviour. I. e. the state of the affairs, whatever it is, is the stimulus, and the creature’s behaviour is the response. While ‘The cat is on the mat’ or ‘It is raining’ does NOT obviously ‘communicate’ that the sender BELIEVES that to be, the ‘behaviour’ which is the response to the external state of affairs is mediated by this state – this is pure functionalism. So, in getting at stage six – due to the objection by his tutee – he must go back to stage zero. Now, he adds MANY CRUCIAL features with these relaxations of the requirements. Basically he is getting at GRICESE. And what he says is very jocular. He knows he is lecturing to ‘service professionals,’ not philosophers, so he keep adding irritating notes for them (but which we philosophers find charming), “and we get to something like what people are getting at (correctly, I would hope) when they speak of a semiotic system!” These characteristics are elaborated under ‘gricese’ – But in teleological terms they can even be ordered. What is the order that Grice uses? At this stage, he has already considered in detail the progression, with his ‘the dog is shaggy,’ so we know where he is getting at – but he does not want to get philosophically technical at the lecture. He is aiming then at compositionality. There is utterance-whole and utterance-part, or as he prefers ‘complete utterance’ and ‘non-complete utterance’. ‘dog’ and ‘shaggy’ would be non-complete. So the external ‘state of affairs’ is Grice’s seeing that Strawson’s dog is shaggy and wanting to communicate this to Pears (Grice co-wrote an essay only with two Englishmen, these being Strawson and Pears – ‘The three Englishmen’s essay,’ as he called it’ --. So there is a state of affairs, pretty harmless, Strawson’s dog is being shaggy – perhaps he needs a haircut, or some brooming. “Shaggy” derives from ‘shag’ plus –y, as in ‘’twas brillig.’ – so this tells that it is an adjectival or attribute predication – of the feature of being ‘shaggy’ to ‘dog.’ When the Anglo-Saxons first used ‘dog’ – the Anglo-Saxon ‘Adam,’ he should have used ‘hound’. Grice is not concerned at the point with ‘dog,’ since he KNOWS that Strawson’s dog is “Fido” – dogs being characteristically faithful and the Strawsons not being very original – “I kid” --. In this case, we need a ‘communication function.’ The sender perceives that Fido is shaggy and forms the proposition ‘Fido is shaggy.’ This is via his belief, caused by his seeing that Fido is shaggy. He COMPOSES a complete utterance. He could just utter, elliptically, ‘shaggy’ – but under quieter circumstances, he manages to PREDICATE ‘shagginess’ to Strawson’s dog – and comes out with “Fido is shaggy.” That is all the ‘syntactics’ that Gricese needs (Palmer, “Remember when all we had to care about was nouns and verbs?”) (Strictly, “I miss the good old days when all we had to care was nouns and verbs”). Well here we have a ‘verb,’ “is,” and a noun – “nomen adjectivum” – or ‘adjective noun’, shaggy. Grice is suggesting that the lexicon (or corpus) is hardly relevant. What is important is the syntax. Having had to read Chomsky under Austin’s tutelage (they spent four Saturday mornings with the Mouton paperback, and Grice would later send a letter of recommendation on one of his tutees for study with Chomsky overseas). But Grice has also read Peano. So he needs a set of FINITE set of formation rules – that will produce an INFINITE SET of ‘sentences’ where Grice highers the decibels when he says ‘infinite,’ hoping it will upset the rare Whiteheadian philosopher in the audience! Having come up with “Fido is shaggy,’ the sender sends it to the sendee. “Any link will do” – The link is ‘arranged’ somehow – arranged simpliciter in a one-off predicament, or pre-arranged in two-off predicament, etc. Stages 2, 3, 4, and 5 – have all to do with ‘trustworthy’ – which would one think otiose seeing that Sir John Lyons has said that prevarication in the golden plover and the Homo sapiens is an essential feature of language! (But we are at the Oxford of Warnock!). So, the sender sends “Fido is shaggy,’ and Pears gets it. He takes Grice to be expressing his belief that Strawson’s dog is shaggy, and comes not only to accept that Grice believes this, but to accept that Strawson’s dog is shaggy. As it happens, Pears recommends a bar of soap to make his hairs at least look ‘cuter.’ Refs.: H. P. Grice, “A teleological model of communication.”