bœthius: Grice loved
Boethius – “He made Aristotle intelligible at Clifton!” -- Anicius Manlius
Severinus, Roman philosopher and Aristotelian translator and commentator. He
was born into a wealthy patrician family in Rome and had a distinguished
political career under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric before being arrested and
executed on charges of treason. His logic and philosophical theology contain important
contributions to the philosophy of the late classical and early medieval
periods, and his translations of and commentaries on Aristotle profoundly
influenced the history of philosophy, particularly in the medieval Latin West.
His most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, composed during his
imprisonment, is a moving reflection on the nature of human happiness and the
problem of evil and contains classic discussions of providence, fate, chance,
and the apparent incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free choice.
He was known during his own lifetime, however, as a brilliant scholar whose
knowledge of the Grecian language and ancient Grecian philosophy set him apart
from his Latin contemporaries. He conceived his scholarly career as devoted to
preserving and making accessible to the Latin West the great philosophical
achievement of ancient Greece. To this end he announced an ambitious plan to
translate into Latin and write commenbodily continuity Boethius, Anicius
Manlius Severinus 91 91 taries on all
of Plato and Aristotle, but it seems that he achieved this goal only for
Aristotle’s Organon. His extant translations include Porphyry’s Isagoge an
introduction to Aristotle’s Categories and Aristotle’s Categories, On
Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. He wrote
two commentaries on the Isagoge and On Interpretation and one on the
Categories, and we have what appear to be his notes for a commentary on the
Prior Analytics. His translation of the Posterior Analytics and his commentary
on the Topics are lost. He also commented on Cicero’s Topica and wrote his own
treatises on logic, including De syllogismis hypotheticis, De syllogismis
categoricis, Introductio in categoricos syllogismos, De divisione, and De topicis
differentiis, in which he elaborates and supplements Aristotelian logic.
Boethius shared the common Neoplatonist view that the Platonist and
Aristotelian systems could be harmonized by following Aristotle in logic and
natural philosophy and Plato in metaphysics and theology. This plan for
harmonization rests on a distinction between two kinds of forms: 1 forms that
are conjoined with matter to constitute bodies
these, which he calls “images” imagines, correspond to the forms in
Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of corporeal substances; and 2 forms that are
pure and entirely separate from matter, corresponding to Plato’s ontologically
separate Forms. He calls these “true forms” and “the forms themselves.” He
holds that the former, “enmattered” forms depend for their being on the latter,
pure forms. Boethius takes these three sorts of entities bodies, enmattered forms, and separate
forms to be the respective objects of
three different cognitive activities, which constitute the three branches of
speculative philosophy. Natural philosophy is concerned with enmattered forms
as enmattered, mathematics with enmattered forms considered apart from their
matter though they cannot be separated from matter in actuality, and theology
with the pure and separate forms. He thinks that the mental abstraction
characteristic of mathematics is important for understanding the Peripatetic
account of universals: the enmattered, particular forms found in sensible
things can be considered as universal when they are considered apart from the
matter in which they inhere though they cannot actually exist apart from
matter. But he stops short of endorsing this moderately realist Aristotelian
account of universals. His commitment to an ontology that includes not just
Aristotelian natural forms but also Platonist Forms existing apart from matter
implies a strong realist view of universals. With the exception of De fide
catholica, which is a straightforward credal statement, Boethius’s theological
treatises De Trinitate, Utrum Pater et Filius, Quomodo substantiae, and Contra
Euthychen et Nestorium show his commitment to using logic and metaphysics,
particularly the Aristotelian doctrines of the categories and predicables, to
clarify and resolve issues in Christian theology. De Trinitate, e.g., includes
a historically influential discussion of the Aristotelian categories and the
applicability of various kinds of predicates to God. Running through these
treatises is his view that predicates in the category of relation are unique by
virtue of not always requiring for their applicability an ontological ground in
the subjects to which they apply, a doctrine that gave rise to the common
medieval distinction between so-called real and non-real relations. Regardless
of the intrinsic significance of Boethius’s philosophical ideas, he stands as a
monumental figure in the history of medieval philosophy rivaled in importance
only by Aristotle and Augustine. Until the recovery of the works of Aristotle
in the mid-twelfth century, medieval philosophers depended almost entirely on
Boethius’s translations and commentaries for their knowledge of pagan ancient
philosophy, and his treatises on logic continued to be influential throughout
the Middle Ages. The preoccupation of early medieval philosophers with logic
and with the problem of universals in particular is due largely to their having
been tutored by Boethius and Boethius’s Aristotle. The theological treatises
also received wide attention in the Middle Ages, giving rise to a commentary
tradition extending from the ninth century through the Renaissance and shaping
discussion of central theological doctrines such as the Trinity and
Incarnation.
boltzmann: cited by Grice in
his discussion of “Eddington’s Two Tables” -- physicist who was a spirited
advocate of the atomic theory and a pioneer in developing the kinetic theory of
gases and statistical mechanics. Boltzmann’s most famous achievements were the
transport equation, the H-theorem, and the probabilistic interpretation of
entropy. This work is summarized in his Vorlesungen über Gastheorie “Lectures
on the Theory of Gases,” 698. He held chairs in physics at the universities of
Graz, Vienna, Munich, and Leipzig before returning to Vienna as professor of
theoretical physics in 2. In 3 he succeeded Mach at Boltzmann, Ludwig
Boltzmann, Ludwig 92 92 Vienna and
lectured on the philosophy of science. In the 0s the atomic-kinetic theory was
attacked by Mach and by the energeticists led by Wilhelm Ostwald. Boltzmann’s
counterattack can be found in his Populäre Schriften “Popular Writings,” 5.
Boltzmann agreed with his critics that many of his mechanical models of gas
molecules could not be true but, like Maxwell, defended models as invaluable
heuristic tools. Boltzmann also insisted that it was futile to try to eliminate
all metaphysical pictures from theories in favor of bare equations. For
Boltzmann, the goal of physics is not merely the discovery of equations but the
construction of a coherent picture of reality. Boltzmann defended his H-theorem
against the reversibility objection of Loschmidt and the recurrence objection
of Zermelo by conceding that a spontaneous decrease in entropy was possible but
extremely unlikely. Boltzmann’s views that irreversibility depends on the
probability of initial conditions and that entropy increase determines the
direction of time are defended by Reichenbach in The Direction of Time 6.
bolzano: b., an
intentionalist philosopher considered by most as a pre-Griceian, philosopher.
He studied philosophy, mathematics, physics, and theology in Prague; received
the Ph.D.; was ordained a priest 1805; was appointed to a chair in religion at
Charles in 1806; and, owing to his
criticism of the Austrian constitution, was dismissed in 1819. He composed his
two main works from 1823 through 1841: the Wissenschaftslehre 4 vols., 1837 and
the posthumous Grössenlehre. His ontology and logical semantics influenced
Husserl and, indirectly, Lukasiewicz, Tarski, and others of the Warsaw School.
His conception of ethics and social philosophy affected both the cultural life
of Bohemia and the Austrian system of education. Bolzano recognized a profound
distinction between the actual thoughts and judgments Urteile of human beings,
their linguistic expressions, and the abstract propositions Sätze an sich and
their parts which exist independently of those thoughts, judgments, and
expressions. A proposition in Bolzano’s sense is a preexistent sequence of
ideas-as-such Vorstellungen an sich. Only propositions containing finite
ideas-as-such are accessible to the mind. Real things existing concretely in
space and time have subsistence Dasein whereas abstract objects such as
propositions have only logical existence. Adherences, i.e., forces, applied to
certain concrete substances give rise to subjective ideas, thoughts, or
judgments. A subjective idea is a part of a judgment that is not itself a
judgment. The set of judgments is ordered by a causal relation. Bolzano’s
abstract world is constituted of sets, ideas-as-such, certain properties
Beschaffenheiten, and objects constructed from these. Thus, sentence shapes are
a kind of ideas-as-such, and certain complexes of ideas-as-such constitute
propositions. Ideas-as-such can be generated from expressions of a language by
postulates for the relation of being an object of something. Analogously,
properties can be generated by postulates for the relation of something being
applied to an object. Bolzano’s notion of religion is based on his distinction
between propositions and judgments. His Lehrbuch der Religionswissenschaft 4
vols., 1834 distinguishes between religion in the objective and subjective
senses. The former is a set of religious propositions, whereas the latter is
the set of religious views of a single person. Hence, a subjective religion can
contain an objective one. By defining a religious proposition as being moral
and imperatives the rules of utilitarianism, Bolzano integrated his notion of
religion within his ontology. In the Grössenlehre Bolzano intended to give a
detailed, well-founded exposition of contemporary mathematics and also to
inaugurate new domains of research. Natural numbers are defined, half a century
before Frege, as properties of “bijective” sets the members of which can be put
in one-to-one correspondence, and real numbers are conceived as properties of
sets of certain infinite sequences of rational numbers. The analysis of
infinite sets brought him to reject the Euclidean doctrine that the whole is
always greater than any of its parts and, hence, to the insight that a set is
infinite if and only if it is bijective to a proper subset of itself. This
anticipates Peirce and Dedekind. Bolzano’s extension of the linear continuum of
finite numbers by infinitesimals implies a relatively constructive approach to
nonstandard analysis. In the development of standard analysis the most
remarkable result of the Grössenlehre is the anticipation of Weirstrass’s
discovery that there exist nowhere differentiable continuous functions. The
Wissenschaftslehre was intended to lay the logical and epistemological
foundations of Bolzano’s mathematics. A theory of science in Bolzano’s sense is
a collection of rules for delimiting the set of scientific textbooks. Whether a
Bolzano, Bernard Bolzano, Bernard 93 93
class of true propositions is a worthwhile object of representation in a
scientific textbook is an ethical question decidable on utilitarian principles.
Bolzano proceeded from an expanded and standardized ordinary language through
which he could describe propositions and their parts. He defined the semantic
notion of truth and introduced the function corresponding to a “replacement”
operation on propositions. One of his major achievements was his definition of
logical derivability logische Ableitbarkeit between sets of propositions: B is
logically derivable from A if and only if all elements of the sum of A and B
are simultaneously true for some replacement of their non-logical ideas-as-such
and if all elements of B are true for any such replacement that makes all
elements of A true. In addition to this notion, which is similar to Tarski’s
concept of consequence of 6, Bolzano introduced a notion corresponding to
Gentzen’s concept of consequence. A proposition is universally valid
allgemeingültig if it is derivable from the null class. In his proof theory Bolzano
formulated counterparts to Gentzen’s cut rule. Bolzano introduced a notion of
inductive probability as a generalization of derivability in a limited domain.
This notion has the formal properties of conditional probability. These
features and Bolzano’s characterization of probability density by the technique
of variation are reminiscent of Vitters’s inductive logic and Carnap’s theory
of regular confirmation functions. The replacement of conceptual complexes in
propositions would, if applied to a formalized language, correspond closely to
a substitutionsemantic conception of quantification. His own philosophical
language was based on a kind of free logic. In essence, Bolzano characterized a
substitution-semantic notion of consequence with a finite number of
antecedents. His quantification over individual and general concepts amounts to
the introduction of a non-elementary logic of lowest order containing a
quantification theory of predicate variables but no set-theoretical principles
such as choice axioms. His conception of universal validity and of the semantic
superstructure of logic leads to a semantically adequate extension of the
predicate-logical version of Lewis’s system S5 of modal logic without
paradoxes. It is also possible to simulate Bolzano’s theory of probability in a
substitution-semantically constructed theory of probability functions. Hence,
by means of an ontologically parsimonious superstructure without
possible-worlds metaphysics, Bolzano was able to delimit essentially the realms
of classical logical truth and additive probability spaces. In geometry Bolzano
created a new foundation from a topological point of view. He defined the
notion of an isolated point of a set in a way reminiscent of the notion of a
point at which a set is well-dimensional in the sense of Urysohn and Menger. On
this basis he introduced his topological notion of a continuum and formulated a
recursive definition of the dimensionality of non-empty subsets of the
Euclidean 3-space, which is closely related to the inductive dimension concept
of Urysohn and Menger. In a remarkable paragraph of an unfinished late
manuscript on geometry he stated the celebrated curve theorem of Jordan.
bonaria – a church on an
Italian island – Grice sailed there during his Grand Tour to Italy and Greece.
He loved it! And he loved reading the Latin inscriptions and practicing the
Latin he had learned at Clifton. H. P.
Grice was going to visit the River Plate with Noel Coward, but he got sick -- –
or South American philosophy – “Bonaria” was settled by Italians after the
matron saint of sailors, “Bonaria,” – itself settled by Ligurians, the first
Italians to settle in Buenos Aires and the Argentine area of the River Plate --
the philosophy of South America, which is European in origin and constitutes a
chapter in the history of Western philosophy (rather than say, Japanese – there was a strong emigration
of Japanese to Buenos Aires, but they remained mainly in the dry laundry
business). Pre-Columbian (“Indian”) indigenous cultures had developed ideas
about the world that have been interpreted by some scholars as philosophical,
but there is no evidence that any of those ideas were incorporated into the
philosophy later practiced in Latin America. It is difficult to characterize
Latin American philosophy in a way applicable to all of its 500-year history.
The most one can say is that, in contrast with European and Anglo-American
philosophy, it has maintained a strong human and social interest, has been
consistently affected by Scholastic and Catholic thought, and has significantly
affected the social and political institutions in the region. South American
philosophers (especially if NOT from Buenos Aires) tend to be active in the
educational, political, and social lives of their countries and deeply
concerned with their own cultural identity (except if they are from Buenos
Aires, who have their identity well settled in Europe, as European exiles or
expatriates that that they are) The history of philosophy in Latin America can
be divided into four periods: colonial, independentist, positivist, and
contemporary. Colonial period (c.1550–c.1750). This period was dominated by the
type of Scholasticism officially practiced in the Iberian peninsula. The texts
studied were those of medieval Scholastics, primarily Aquinas and Duns Scotus,
and of their Iberian commentators, Vitoria, Soto, Fonseca, and, above all,
Suárez. The university curriculum was modeled on that of major Iberian
universities (Salamanca, Alcalá, Coimbra), and instructors produced both systematic
treatises and commentaries on classical, medieval, and contemporary texts. The
philosophical concerns in the colonies were those prevalent in Spain and
Portugal and centered on logical and metaphysical issues inherited from the
Middle Ages and on political and legal questions raised by the discovery and
colonization of America. Among the former were issues involving the logic of
terms and propositions and the problems of universals and individuation; among
the latter were questions concerning the rights of Indians and the relations of
the natives with the conquerors. The main philosophical center during the early
colonial period was Mexico; Peru became important in the seventeenth century.
Between 1700 and 1750 other centers developed, but by that time Scholasticism
had begun to decline. The founding of the Royal and Pontifical University of
Mexico in 1553 inaugurated Scholastic instruction in the New World. The first
teacher of philosophy at the university was Alonso de la Vera Cruz (c.1504–84),
an Augustinian and disciple of Soto. He composed several didactic treatises on
La Peyrère, Isaac Latin American philosophy 483 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM
Page 483 logic, metaphysics, and science, including Recognitio summularum
(“Introductory Logic,” 1554), Dialectica resolutio (“Advanced Logic,” 1554),
and Physica speculatio (“Physics,” 1557). He also wrote a theologico-legal
work, the Speculum conjugiorum (“On Marriage,” 1572), concerned with the status
of precolonial Indian marriages. Alonso’s works are eclectic and didactic and
show the influence of Aristotle, Peter of Spain, and Vitoria in particular.
Another important Scholastic figure in Mexico was the Dominican Tomás de
Mercado (c.1530–75). He produced commentaries on the logical works of Peter of
Spain and Aristotle and a treatise on international commerce, Summa de tratos y
contratos (“On Contracts,” 1569). His other sources are Porphyry and Aquinas.
Perhaps the most important figure of the period was Antonio Rubio (1548–1615),
author of the most celebrated Scholastic book written in the New World, Logica
mexicana (“Mexican Logic,” 1605). It underwent seven editions in Europe and
became a logic textbook in Alcalá. Rubio’s sources are Aristotle, Porphyry, and
Aquinas, but he presents original treatments of several logical topics. Rubio
also commented on several of Aristotle’s other works. In Peru, two authors
merit mention. Juan Pérez Menacho (1565–1626) was a prolific writer, but only a
moral treatise, Theologia et moralis tractatus (“Treatise on Theology and
Morals”), and a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae remain. The
Chilean-born Franciscan, Alfonso Briceño (c.1587–1669), worked in Nicaragua and
Venezuela, but the center of his activities was Lima. In contrast with the
Aristotelian-Thomistic flavor of the philosophy of most of his contemporaries,
Briceño was a Scotistic Augustinian. This is evident in Celebriores
controversias in primum sententiarum Scoti (“On Scotus’s First Book of the
Sentences,” 1638) and Apologia de vita et doctrina Joannis Scotti (“Apology for
John Scotus,” 1642). Although Scholasticism dominated the intellectual life of
colonial Latin America, some authors were also influenced by humanism. Among
the most important in Mexico were Juan de Zumárraga (c.1468–1548); the celebrated
defender of the Indians, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566); Carlos Sigüenza y
Góngora (1645–1700); and Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1651–95). The last one is a
famous poet, now considered a precursor of the feminist movement. In Peru,
Nicolás de Olea (1635–1705) stands out. Most of these authors were trained in
Scholasticism but incorporated the concerns and ideas of humanists into their
work. Independentist period (c.1750–c.1850). Just before and immediately after
independence, leading Latin American intellectuals lost interest in Scholastic
issues and became interested in social and political questions, although they
did not completely abandon Scholastic sources. Indeed, the theories of natural
law they inherited from Vitoria and Suárez played a significant role in forming
their ideas. But they also absorbed non-Scholastic European authors. The
rationalism of Descartes and other Continental philosophers, together with the
empiricism of Locke, the social ideas of Rousseau, the ethical views of
Bentham, the skepticism of Voltaire and other Encyclopedists, the political
views of Condorcet and Montesquieu, the eclecticism of Cousin, and the ideology
of Destutt de Tracy, all contributed to the development of liberal ideas that
were a background to the independentist movement. Most of the intellectual
leaders of this movement were men of action who used ideas for practical ends,
and their views have limited theoretical value. They made reason a measure of
legitimacy in social and governmental matters, and found the justification for
revolutionary ideas in natural law. Moreover, they criticized authority; some,
regarding religion as superstitious, opposed ecclesiastical power. These ideas
paved the way for the later development of positivism. The period begins with
the weakening hold of Scholasticism on Latin American intellectuals and the
growing influence of early modern philosophy, particularly Descartes. Among the
first authors to turn to modern philosophy was Juan Benito Díaz de Gamarra y
Dávalos (1745–83) in Mexico who wrote Errores del entendimiento humano (“Errors
of Human Understanding,” 1781) and Academias filosóficas (“Philosophical
Academies,” 1774). Also in Mexico was Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–87),
author of a book on physics and a general history of Mexico. In Brazil the turn
away from Scholasticism took longer. One of the first authors to show the
influence of modern philosophy was Francisco de Mont’Alverne (1784– 1858) in
Compêndio de filosofia (1883). These first departures from Scholasticism were
followed by the more consistent efforts of those directly involved in the
independentist movement. Among these were Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), leader of
the rebellion against Spain in the Andean countries of South America, and the
Mexicans Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753– 1811), José María Morelos y Paván
(1765– 1815), and José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi Latin American philosophy
Latin American philosophy 484 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 484
(1776–1827). In Argentina, Mariano Moreno (1778–1811), Juan Crisóstomo Lafimur
(d. 1823), and Diego Alcorta (d. 1808), among others, spread the liberal ideas
that served as a background for independence. Positivist period
(c.1850–c.1910). During this time, positivism became not only the most popular
philosophy in Latin America but also the official philosophy of some countries.
After 1910, however, positivism declined drastically. Latin American positivism
was eclectic, influenced by a variety of thinkers, including Comte, Spencer,
and Haeckel. Positivists emphasized the explicative value of empirical science
while rejecting metaphysics. According to them, all knowledge is based on
experience rather than theoretical speculation, and its value lies in its
practical applications. Their motto, preserved on the Brazilian flag, was
“Order and Progress.” This positivism left little room for freedom and values;
the universe moved inexorably according to mechanistic laws. Positivism was a
natural extension of the ideas of the independentists. It was, in part, a response
to the needs of the newly liberated countries of Latin America. After
independence, the concerns of Latin American intellectuals shifted from
political liberation to order, justice, and progress. The beginning of
positivism can be traced to the time when Latin America, responding to these
concerns, turned to the views of French socialists such as Saint-Simon and
Fourier. The Argentinians Esteban Echevarría (1805–51) and Juan Bautista
Alberdi (1812–84) were influenced by them. Echevarría’s Dogma socialista
(“Socialist Dogma,” 1846) combines socialist ideas with eighteenth-century
rationalism and literary Romanticism, and Alberdi follows suit, although he
eventually turned toward Comte. Alberdi is, moreover, the first Latin American
philosopher to worry about developing a philosophy adequate to the needs of
Latin America. In Ideas (1842), he stated that philosophy in Latin America
should be compatible with the economic, political, and social requirements of
the region. Another transitional thinker, influenced by both Scottish
philosophy and British empiricism, was the Venezuelan Andrés Bello (1781–1865).
A prolific writer, he is the most important Latin American philosopher of the
nineteenth century. His Filosofía del entendimiento (“Philosophy of Understanding,”
1881) reduces metaphysics to psychology. Bello also developed original ideas
about language and history. After 1829, he worked in Chile, where his influence
was strongly felt. The generation of Latin American philosophers after Alberdi
and Bello was mostly positivistic. Positivism’s heyday was the second half of
the nineteenth century, but two of its most distinguished advocates, the
Argentinian José Ingenieros (1877–1925) and the Cuban Enrique José Varona
(1849–1933), worked well into the twentieth century. Both modified positivism
in important ways. Ingenieros left room for metaphysics, which, according to
him, deals in the realm of the “yet-to-be-experienced.” Among his most
important books are Hacia una moral sin dogmas (“Toward a Morality without Dogmas,”
1917), where the influence of Emerson is evident, Principios de psicologia
(“Principles of Psychology,” 1911), where he adopts a reductionist approach to
psychology, and El hombre mediocre (“The Mediocre Man,” 1913), an inspirational
book popular among Latin American youths. In Conferencias filosóficas
(“Philosophical Lectures,” 1880–88), Varona went beyond the mechanistic
explanations of behavior common among positivists. In Mexico the first and
leading positivist was Gabino Barreda (1818–81), who reorganized Mexican
education under President Juárez. An ardent follower of Comte, Barreda made
positivism the basis of his educational reforms. He was followed by Justo
Sierra (1848–1912), who turned toward Spencer and Darwin and away from Comte,
criticizing Barreda’s dogmatism. Positivism was introduced in Brazil by Tobias
Barreto (1839–89) and Silvio Romero (1851– 1914) in Pernambuco, around 1869. In
1875 Benjamin Constant (1836–91) founded the Positivist Society in Rio de
Janeiro. The two most influential exponents of positivism in the country were
Miguel Lemos (1854–1916) and Raimundo Teixeira Mendes (1855–1927), both
orthodox followers of Comte. Positivism was more than a technical philosophy in
Brazil. Its ideas spread widely, as is evident from the inclusion of positivist
ideas in the first republican constitution. The most prominent Chilean
positivists were José Victorino Lastarria (1817–88) and Valentín Letelier
(1852–1919). More dogmatic adherents to the movement were the Lagarrigue
brothers, Jorge (d. 1894), Juan Enrique (d. 1927), and Luis (d. 1953), who
promoted positivism in Chile well after it had died everywhere else in Latin
America. Contemporary period (c.1910–present). Contemporary Latin American
philosophy began Latin American philosophy Latin American philosophy 485
4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 485 with the demise of positivism. The
first part of the period was dominated by thinkers who rebelled against
positivism. The principal figures, called the Founders by Francisco Romero, were
Alejandro Korn (1860–1936) in Argentina, Alejandro Octavio Deústua (1849–1945)
in Peru, José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) and Antonio Caso (1883–1946) in Mexico,
Enrique Molina (1871– 1964) in Chile, Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872–1958) in
Uruguay, and Raimundo de Farias Brito (1862–1917) in Brazil. In spite of little
evidence of interaction among these philosophers, their aims and concerns were
similar. Trained as positivists, they became dissatisfied with positivism’s
dogmatic intransigence, mechanistic determinism, and emphasis on pragmatic
values. Deústua mounted a detailed criticism of positivistic determinism in Las
ideas de orden y de libertad en la historia del pensamiento humano (“The Ideas
of Order and Freedom in the History of Human Thought,” 1917–19). About the same
time, Caso presented his view of man as a spiritual reality that surpasses
nature in La existencia como economía, como desinterés y como caridad
(“Existence as Economy, Disinterestedness, and Charity,” 1916). Following in
Caso’s footsteps and inspired by Pythagoras and the Neoplatonists, Vasconcelos
developed a metaphysical system with aesthetic roots in El monismo estético
(“Aesthetic Monism,” 1918). An even earlier criticism of positivism is found in
Vaz Ferreira’s Lógica viva (“Living Logic,” 1910), which contrasts the
abstract, scientific logic favored by positivists with a logic of life based on
experience, which captures reality’s dynamic character. The earliest attempt at
developing an alternative to positivism, however, is found in Farias Brito.
Between 1895 and 1905 he published a trilogy, Finalidade do mundo (“The World’s
Goal”), in which he conceived the world as an intellectual activity which he
identified with God’s thought, and thus as essentially spiritual. The intellect
unites and reflects reality but the will divides it. Positivism was superseded
by the Founders with the help of ideas imported first from France and later
from Germany. The process began with the influence of Étienne Boutroux
(1845–1921) and Bergson and of French vitalism and intuitionism, but it was
cemented when Ortega y Gasset introduced into Latin America the thought of
Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and other German philosophers during his visit to
Argentina in 1916. The influence of Bergson was present in most of the
founders, particularly Molina, who in 1916 wrote La filosofía de Bergson (“The
Philosophy of Bergson”). Korn was exceptional in turning to Kant in his search
for an alternative to positivism. In La libertad creadora (“Creative Freedom,”
1920–22), he defends a creative concept of freedom. In Axiología (“Axiology,”
1930), his most important work, he defends a subjectivist position. The impact
of German philosophy, including Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the
neo-Kantians, and of Ortega’s philosophical perspectivism and historicism, were
strongly felt in the generation after the founders. The Mexican Samuel Ramos
(1897–1959), the Argentinians Francisco Romero (1891–1962) and Carlos Astrada
(1894–1970), the Brazilian Alceu Amoroso Lima (1893–1982), the Peruvian José
Carlos Mariátegui (1895–1930), and others followed the Founders’ course,
attacking positivism and favoring, in many instances, a philosophical style
that contrasted with its scientistic emphasis. The most important of these
figures was Romero, whose Theory of Man (1952) developed a systematic
philosophical anthropology in the context of a metaphysics of transcendence.
Reality is arranged according to degrees of transcendence, the lowest of which
is the physical and the highest the spiritual. The bases of Ramos’s thought are
found in Ortega as well as in Scheler and N. Hartmann. Ramos appropriated
Ortega’s perspectivism and set out to characterize the Mexican situation in
Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1962). Some precedent existed for the
interest in the culturally idiosyncratic in Vasconcelos’s Raza cósmica (“Cosmic
Race,” 1925), but Ramos opened the doors to a philosophical awareness of Latin
American culture that has been popular ever since. Ramos’s most traditional
work, Hacia un nuevo humanismo (“Toward a New Humanism,” 1940), presents a
philosophical anthropology of Orteguean inspiration. Astrada studied in Germany
and adopted existential and phenomenological ideas in El juego existential
(“The Existential Game,” 1933), while criticizing Scheler’s axiology. Later, he
turned toward Hegel and Marx in Existencialismo y crisis de la filosofía
(“Existentialism and the Crisis of Philosophy,” 1963). Amoroso Lima worked in
the Catholic tradition and his writings show the influence of Maritain. His O
espírito e o mundo (“Spirit and World,” 1936) and Idade, sexo e tempo (“Age,
Sex, and Time,” 1938) present a spiritual view of human beings, which he
contrasted with Marxist and existentialist views. Mariátegui is the most
distinguished representative of MarxLatin American phiism in Latin America. His
Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (“Seven Essays on the
Interpretation of Peruvian Reality,” 1928) contains an important statement of
social philosophy, in which he uses Marxist ideas freely to analyze the
Peruvian sociopolitical situation. In the late 1930s and 1940s, as a
consequence of the political upheaval created by the Spanish Civil War, a
substantial group of peninsular philosophers settled in Latin America. Among
the most influential were Joaquín Xirau (1895– 1946), Eduardo Nicol (b.1907),
Luis Recaséns Siches (b.1903), Juan D. García Bacca (b.1901), and, perhaps most
of all, José Gaos (1900–69). Gaos, like Caso, was a consummate teacher,
inspiring many students. Apart from the European ideas they brought, these
immigrants introduced methodologically more sophisticated ways of doing
philosophy, including the practice of studying philosophical sources in the
original languages. Moreover, they helped to promote Pan-American
communication. The conception of hispanidad they had inherited from Unamuno and
Ortega helped the process. Their influence was felt particularly by the
generation born around 1910. With this generation, Latin American philosophy
established itself as a professional and reputable discipline, and
philosophical organizations, research centers, and journals sprang up. The core
of this generation worked in the German tradition. Risieri Frondizi (Argentina,
1910–83), Eduardo García Máynez (Mexico, b.1908), Juan Llambías de Azevedo
(Uruguay, 1907–72), and Miguel Reale (Brazil, b.1910) were all influenced by
Scheler and N. Hartmann and concerned themselves with axiology and
philosophical anthropology. Frondizi, who was also influenced by empiricist
philosophy, defended a functional view of the self in Substancia y función en
el problema del yo (“The Nature of the Self,” 1952) and of value as a Gestalt
quality in Qué son los valores? (“What is Value?” 1958). Apart from these
thinkers, there were representatives of other traditions in this generation.
Following Ramos, Leopoldo Zea (Mexico, b.1912) stimulated the study of the
history of ideas in Mexico and initiated a controversy that still rages
concerning the identity and possibility of a truly Latin American philosophy.
Representing existentialism was Vicente Ferreira da Silva (Brazil, b.1916), who
did not write much but presented a vigorous criticism of what he regarded as
Hegelian and Marxist subjectivism in Ensaios filosóficos (“Philosophical
Essays,” 1948). Before he became interested in existentialism, he had been
interested in logic, publishing the first textbook of mathematical logic
written in South America – Elementos de lógica matemática (“Elements of
Mathematical Logic,” 1940). A philosopher whose interest in mathematical logic
moved him away from phenomenology is Francisco Miró Quesada (Peru, b.1918). He
explored rationality and eventually the perspective of analytic philosophy.
Owing to the influence of Maritain, several members of this generation adopted
a NeoThomistic or Scholastic approach. The main figures to do so were Oswaldo
Robles (b.1904) in Mexico, Octavio Nicolás Derisi (b.1907) in Argentina,
Alberto Wagner de Reyna (b.1915) in Peru, and Clarence Finlayson (1913–54) in
Chile and Colombia. Even those authors who worked in this tradition addressed
issues of axiology and philosophical anthropology. There was, therefore,
considerable thematic unity in South American philosophy. The overall
orientation was not drastically different from the preceding period. The
Founders vitalism against positivism, and the following generation, with
Ortega’s help, took over the process, incorporating spiritualism and the new
ideas introduced by phenomenology and existentialism to continue in a similar
direction. As a result, the phenomenology amd existentialism dominated
philosophy in South America. To this must be added the renewed impetus of
neoScholasticism. Few philosophers worked outside these philosophical currents,
and those who did had no institutional power. Among these were sympathizers of
philosophical analysis, and those who contributed to the continuing development
of Marxism. This situation has begun to change substantially as a result of a
renewed interest in Marxism, the progressive influence of Oxford analytic
philosophy (with a number of philosophers from Buenos Aires studying usually
under British-Council scholarships, under P. F. Strawson, D. F. Pears, H. L. A.
Hart, and others – these later founded the Buenos-Aires-based Argentine Society
for Philosophical Analysis --. In Buenos Aires, English philosophy and culture
in general is rated higher than others, due to the influence of the British
emigration to the River-Plate area – The pragmatics of H. P. Grice is
particularly influential in that it brings a breath of fresh area to the more
ritualistic approach as favoured by his nemesis, J. L. Austin --. American
philosophers are uually read provided they, too, had the proper Oxonian
education or background -- and the development of a new philosophical current
called the philosophy of liberation. Moreover, the question raised by Zea
concerning the identity and possibility of a South American philosophy remains
a focus of attention and controversy. And, more recently, there has been
interest in postmodernism, the theory of communicative action,
deconstructionism, neopragmatism, and feminism. Socialist thought is not new to
South America. In this century, Emilio Frugoni (1880–1969) in Uruguay and
Mariátegui in Peru, among others, adopted a Marxist perspective, although a
heterodox one. But only in the last three decades has Marxism been taken
seriously in Latin American academic circles. Indeed, until recently Marxism
was a marginal philosophical movement in Latin America. The popularity of the
Marxist perspective has made possible its increasing institutionalization.
Among its most important thinkers are Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (Spain, b.1915),
Vicente Lombardo Toledano (b.1894) and Eli de Gortari (b.1918) in Mexico, and
Caio Prado Júnior (1909–86) in Brazil. In contrast to Marxism, philosophical
analysis arrived late in Latin America and, owing to its technical and academic
character, has not yet influenced more than a relatively small number of
philosophers – and also because in the milieu of Buenos Aires, the influence of
French culture is considered to have much more prestige in mainstream culture
than the more parochial empiricist brand coming from the British Isles – unless
it’s among the Friends of the Argentine Centre for English Culture. German
philosophy is considered rough in contrast to the pleasing to the ear sounds of
French philosophy, and Buenos Aires locals find the very sound of the long
German philosophical terms a source of amusement and mirth. Since Buenos Aires
habitants are Italians, it is logical that they do not have much affinity for
Italian philosophy, which they think it’s too local and less extravagant than
the French. There was a strong immigration of German philosophers to Buenos
Aires after the end of the Second World War, too. Colonials from New Zealand,
Australia, Canada, or the former colonies in North America are never as
welcomed in Buenos Aires as those from the very Old World. The reason is
obvious: as being New-Worlders, if they are going to be educated, it is by
Older-Worlders – Nobody in Buenos Aires would follow a New-World philosopher or
a colonial philosopher – but at most a school which originated in the Continent
of Europe. The British are regarded as by nature unphilosophical and to follow
a British philosopher in Buenos Aires is considered an English joke!
Nonetheless, and thanks in part to its high theoretical caliber, analysis has
become one of the most forceful philosophical currents in the region. The
publication of journals with an analytic bent such as Crítica in Mexico,
Análisis Filosófico in Argentina, and Manuscrito in Brazil, the foundation of
The Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico (SADAF) in Argentina and the
Sociedad Filosófica Iberoamericana (SOFIA) in Mexico, and the growth of
analytic publications in high-profile journals of neutral philosophical
orientation, such as Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía, indicate that
philosophical analysis is well established in at least the most European bit of
the continent: the river Plate area of Buenos Aires. The main centers of
analytic activity are Buenos Aires, on the River Plate, and far afterwards, the
much less British-influenced centers like Mexico City, or the provincial
varsity of Campinas and São Paulo in Brazil. The interests of South American
philosophical analysts center on questions of pragmatics, rather than
semantics, -- and are generally sympathetic to Griceian developments -- ethical
and legal philosophy, the philosophy of science, and more recently cognitive
science. Among its most important proponents are Genaro R. Carrio (b.1922),
Gregorio Klimovsky (b.1922), and Tomas Moro Simpson (b.1929), E. A. Rabossi (b.
Buenos Aires), O. N. Guariglia (b. Buenos Aires), in Argentina – Strawson was a
frequent lecturer at the Argentine Society for Philosopohical Analysis, and
many other Oxonian philosophers on sabbatical leave. The Argentine Society for
Philosophical Analysis, usually in conjunction with the Belgravia-based
Anglo-Argentine Society organize seminars and symposia – when an Argentine
philosopher emigrates he ceases to be considered an Argentine philosopher –
students who earn their maximal degrees overseas are not counted either as
Argentine philosophers by Argentine (or specifically Buenos Aires) philosophers
(They called them braindrained, brainwashed!) Luis Villoro (Spain, b. 1922) in
Mexico; Francisco Miró Quesada in Peru; Roberto Torretti (Chile, b.1930) in
Puerto Rico; Mario Bunge (Argentina, b.1919), who emigrated to Canada; and
Héctor-Neri Castañeda (Guatemala, 1924–91). The philosophy of liberation is an
autochthonous Latin American movement that mixes an emphasis on Latin American
intellectual independence with Catholic and Marxist ideas. The historicist
perspective of Leopoldo Zea, the movement known as the theology of liberation,
and some elements from the national-popular Peronist ideology prepared the
ground for it. The movement started in the early 1970s with a group of
Argentinian philosophers, who, owing to the military repression of 1976–83 in
Argentina, went into exile in various countries of Latin America. This early
diaspora created permanent splits in the movement and spread its ideas
throughout the region. Although proponents of this viewpoint do not always
agree on their goals, they share the notion of liberation as a fundamental
concept: the liberation from the slavery imposed on Latin America by imported
ideologies and the development of a genuinely autochthonous thought resulting
from reflection on the South American reality. As such, their views are an
extension of the thought of Ramos and others who earlier in the century
initiated the discussion of the cultural identity of South America.
bonum: One of the four
transcendentals, along with ‘unum,’ ‘pulchrum,’ and ‘verum’. Grice makes fun of
Hare n “Language of Morals.” To what extent is Hare saying that to say ‘x is
good’ means ‘I approve of x’? (Strictly: “To say that something is good is to
recommend it”). To say " I approve of x "
is in part to do the same thing as when we say " x is good " a
statement of the form " X is good" strictly designates " I approve of X "
and suggests " Do so as well". It should be in Part II to
“Language of Morals”. Old Romans did not have an article, so for them it is
unum, bonum, verum, and pulchrum. They were trying to translate the very articled
Grecian things, ‘to agathon,’ ‘to alethes,’ and ‘to kallon.’ The three
references given by Liddell and Scott are good ones. τὸ ἀ., the good,
Epich.171.5, cf. Pl.R.506b, 508e, Arist.Metaph.1091a31, etc. The Grecian Grice
is able to return to the ‘article’. Grice has an early essay on ‘the good,’ and
he uses the same expression at Oxford for the Locke lectures when looking for a
‘desiderative’ equivalent to ‘the true.’ Hare had dedicated the full part of
his “Language of Morals” to ‘good,’ so Grice is well aware of the centrality of
the topic. He was irritated by what he called a performatory approach to the
good, where ‘x is good’ =df. ‘I approve of x.’ Surely that’s a conversational implicaturum.
However, in his analysis of reasoning (the demonstratum – since he uses the
adverb ‘demonstrably’ as a marker of pretty much like ‘concusively,’ as applied
to both credibility and desirability, we may focus on what Grice sees as
‘bonum’ as one of the ‘absolutes,’ the absolute in the desirability realm, as
much as the ‘verum’ is the absolute in the credibility realm. Grice has an
excellent argument regarding ‘good.’ His example is ‘cabbage,’ but also
‘sentence.’ Grice’s argument is to turn the disimpicatum into an explicitum. To
know what a ‘cabbage,’ or a formula is, you need to know first what a ‘good’
cabbage is or a ‘well-formed formula,’ is. An ill-formed sentence is not deemed
by Grice a sentence. This means that we define ‘x’ as ‘optimum x.’ This is not
so strange, seeing that ‘optimum’ is actually the superlative of ‘bonum’ (via
the comparative). It does not require very
sharp eyes, but only the willingness to use the eyes one has, to see that our
speech and thought are permeated with the notion of purpose; to say what a
certain kind of thing is is only too frequently partly to say what it is for.
This feature applies to our talk and thought of, for example, ships, shoes,
sealing wax, and kings; and, possibly and perhaps most excitingly, it extends
even to cabbages.“There is a range of cases in which, so far from its
being the case that, typically, one first learns what it is to be a F and then,
at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good F from a F which is
less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good
F, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good
F will qualify an item as a F; if the gap between some item x and good Fs is
sufficently horrendous, x is debarred from counting as a F at all, even as a
bad F.”“In the John Locke Lectures, I called a concept which exhibits this
feature as a ‘value-paradeigmatic’ concept. One example of a
value-paradeigmatic concept is the concept of reasoning; another, I now suggest,
is that of sentence. It may well be that the existence of value-oriented
concepts (¢b ¢ 2 . • • . ¢n) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational
concepts ( ¢~, ¢~ . . . . ¢~), such that an item x qualifies for the
application of the concept ¢ 2 if and only if x satisfies a rationally-approved
form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept ¢'. We have a
(primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a
certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another. ---
bonum commune -- common good, a normative standard in Thomistic and
Neo-Thomistic ethics for evaluating the justice of social, legal, and political
arrangements, referring to those arrangements that promote the full flourishing
of everyone in the community. Every good can be regarded as both a goal to be
sought and, when achieved, a source of human fulfillment. A common good is any
good sought by and/or enjoyed by two or more persons as friendship is a good
common to the friends; the common good is the good of a “perfect” i.e.,
complete and politically organized human community a good that is the common goal of all who
promote the justice of that community, as well as the common source of
fulfillment of all who share in those just arrangements. ‘Common’ is an
analogical term referring to kinds and degrees of sharing ranging from mere
similarity to a deep ontological communion. Thus, any good that is a genuine
perfection of our common human nature is a common good, as opposed to merely
idiosyncratic or illusory goods. But goods are common in a deeper sense when
the degree of sharing is more than merely coincidental: two children engaged in
parallel play enjoy a good in common, but they realize a common good more fully
by engaging each other in one game; similarly, if each in a group watches the
same good movie alone at home, they have enjoyed a good in common but they
realize this good at a deeper level when they watch the movie together in a
theater and discuss it afterward. In short, common good includes aggregates of
private, individual goods but transcends these aggregates by the unique
fulfillment afforded by mutuality, shared activity, and communion of persons.
As to the sources in Thomistic ethics for this emphasis on what is deeply
shared over what merely coincides, the first is Aristotle’s understanding of us
as social and political animals: many aspects of human perfection, on this
view, can be achieved only through shared activities in communities, especially
the political community. The second is Christian Trinitarian theology, in which
the single Godhead involves the mysterious communion of three divine “persons,”
the very exemplar of a common good; human personhood, by analogy, is similarly
perfected only in a relationship of social communion. The achievement of such
intimately shared goods requires very complex and delicate arrangements of
coordination to prevent the exploitation and injustice that plague shared
endeavors. The establishment and maintenance of these social, legal, and
political arrangements is “the” common good of a political society, because the
enjoyment of all goods is so dependent upon the quality and the justice of
those arrangements. The common good of the political community includes, but is
not limited to, public goods: goods characterized by non-rivalry and
non-excludability and which, therefore, must generally be provided by public
institutions. By the principle of subsidiarity, the common good is best
promoted by, in addition to the state, many lower-level non-public societies,
associations, and individuals. Thus, religiously affiliated schools educating
non-religious minority chilcommission common good 161 161 dren might promote the common good
without being public goods.
booleian: algebra: Peirce
was irritated by the spelling “Boolean” “Surely it is Booleian.” 1 an ordered
triple B,†,3, where B is a set containing at least two elements and † and 3 are
unary and binary operations in B such that i a 3 b % b 3 a, ii a 3 b 3 c % a 3
b 3 c, iii a 3 † a % b 3 † b, and iv a 3 b = a if and only if a 3 † b % a 3 †
a; 2 the theboo-hurrah theory Boolean algebra 95 95 ory of such algebras. Such structures are
modern descendants of algebras published by the mathematician G. Boole in 1847
and representing the first successful algebraic treatment of logic.
Interpreting † and 3 as negation and conjunction, respectively, makes Boolean
algebra a calculus of propositions. Likewise, if B % {T,F} and † and 3 are the
truth-functions for negation and conjunction, then B,†,3 the truth table for those two connectives forms a two-element Boolean algebra.
Picturing a Boolean algebra is simple. B,†,3 is a full subset algebra if B is
the set of all subsets of a given set and † and 3 are set complementation and
intersection, respectively. Then every finite Boolean algebra is isomorphic to
a full subset algebra, while every infinite Boolean algebra is isomorphic to a
subalgebra of such an algebra. It is for this reason that Boolean algebra is
often characterized as the calculus of classes.
bootstrap: Grice certainly
didn’t have a problem with meta-langauge paradoxes. Two of his maxims are self
refuting and ‘sic’-ed: “be perspicuous [sic]” and “be brief (avoid unnecessary
prolixity) [sic].” The principle introduced by Grice in “Prejudices and
predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice,” to limit
the power of the meta-language. The weaker your metalanguage the easier you’ll
be able to pull yourself by your own bootstraps. He uses bootlaces in
“Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato’s Republic.”
border-line: case, in the
logical sense, a case that falls within the “gray area” or “twilight zone”
associated with a vague concept; in the pragmatic sense, a doubtful, disputed,
or arguable case. These two senses are not mutually exclusive, of course. A
moment of time near sunrise or sunset may be a borderline case of daytime or
nighttime in the logical sense, but not in the pragmatic sense. A sufficiently
freshly fertilized ovum may be a borderline case of a person in both senses.
Fermat’s hypothesis, or any of a large number of other disputed mathematical
propositions, may be a borderline case in the pragmatic sense but not in the
logical sense. A borderline case per se in either sense need not be a limiting
case or a degenerate case.
bosanquet: b.: Cited by H. P. Grice. Very English
philosopher (almost like Austin or Grice), the most systematic Oxford absolute
idealist and, with F. H. Bradley, the leading Oxford defender of absolute
idealism. Although he derived his last name from Huguenot ancestors, Bosanquet
was thoroughly English. Born at Altwick and educated at Harrow and Balliol,
Oxford, he was for eleven years a fellow of
University College, Oxford. The death of his father in 0 and the
resulting inheritance enabled Bosanquet to leave Oxford for London and a career
as a writer and social activist. While writing, he taught courses for the
London Ethical Society’s Center for
Extension and donated time to the Charity Organization Society. In 5 he
married his coworker in the Charity Organization Society, Helen Dendy, who was
also the translator of Christoph Sigwart’s Logic. Bosanquet was professor of
moral philosophy at St. Andrews from 3 to 8. He gave the Gifford Lectures in 1
and 2. Otherwise he lived in London until his death. Bosanquet’s most
comprehensive work, his two-volume Gifford Lectures, The Principle of
Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual, covers
most aspects of his philosophy. In The Principle of Individuality and Value he
argues that the search for truth proceeds by eliminating contradictions in
experience. For Bosanquet a contradiction arises when there are incompatible
interpretations of the same fact. This involves making distinctions that
harmonize the incompatible interpretations in a larger body of knowledge.
Bosanquet thought there was no way to arrest this process short of recognizing
that all human experience forms a comprehensive whole which is reality.
Bosanquet called this totality “the Absolute.” Just as conflicting
interpretations of the same fact find harmonious places in the Absolute, so
conflicting desires are also included. The Absolute thus satisfies all desires
and provides Bosanquet’s standard for evaluating other objects. This is because
in his view the value of an object is determined by its ability to satisfy
desires. From this Bosanquet concluded that human beings, as fragments of the
Absolute, acquire greater value as they realize themselves by partaking more
fully in the Absolute. In The Value and Destiny of the Individual Bosanquet
explained how human beings could do this. As finite, human beings face
obstacles they cannot overcome; yet they desire the good i.e., the Absolute
which for Bosanquet overcomes all obstacles and satisfies all desires. Humans
can best realize a desire for the good, Bosanquet thinks, by surrendering their
private desires for the sake of the good. This attitude of surrender, which
Bosanquet calls the religious consciousness, relates human beings to what is
permanently valuable in reality and increases their own value and satisfaction
accordingly. Bosanquet’s defense of this metaphysical vision rests heavily on
his first major work, Logic or the Morphology of Knowledge 8; 2d ed., 1. As the
subtitle indicates, Bosanquet took the subject matter of Logic to be the
structure of knowledge. Like Hegel, who was in many ways his inspiration,
Bosanquet thought that the nature of knowledge was defined by structures
repeated in different parts of knowledge. He called these structures forms of
judgment and tried to show that simple judgments are dependent on increasingly
complex ones and finally on an all-inclusive judgment that defines reality. For
example, the simplest element of knowledge is a demonstrative judgment like
“This is hot.” But making such a judgment presupposes understanding the
contrast between ‘this’ and ‘that’. Demonstrative judgments thus depend on
comparative judgments like “This is hotter than that.” Since these judgments
are less dependent on other judgments, they more fully embody human knowledge.
Bosanquet claimed that the series of increasingly complex judgments are not
arranged in a simple linear order but develop along different branches finally
uniting in disjunctive judgments that attribute to reality an exhaustive set of
mutually exclusive alternatives which are themselves judgments. When one
contained judgment is asserted on the basis of another, a judgment containing
both is an inference. For Bosanquet inferences are mediated judgments that
assert their conclusions based on grounds. When these grounds are made fully
explicit in a judgment containing them, that judgment embodies the nature of
inference: that one must accept the conclusion or reject the whole of
knowledge. Since for Bosanquet the difference between any judgment and the
reality it represents is that a judgment is composed of ideas that abstract
from reality, a fully comprehensive judgment includes all aspects of reality.
It is thus identical to reality. By locating all judgments within this one,
Bosanquet claimed to have described the morphology of knowledge as well as to
have shown that thought is identical to reality. Bosanquet removed an objection
to this identification in History of Aesthetics 2, where he traces the
development of the philosophy of the beautiful from its inception through
absolute idealism. According to Plato and Aristotle beauty is found in
imitations of reality, while in objective idealism it is reality in sensuous
form. Drawing heavily on Kant, Bosanquet saw this process as an overcoming of
the opposition between sense and reason by showing how a pleasurable feeling
can partake of reason. He thought that absolute idealism explained this by
showing that we experience objects as beautiful because their sensible
qualities exhibit the unifying activity of reason. Bosanquet treated the
political implications of absolute idealism in his Philosophical Theory of the
State 8; 3d ed., 0, where he argues that humans achieve their ends only in
communities. According to Bosanquet, all humans rationally will their own ends.
Because their ends differ from moment to moment, the ends they rationally will
are those that harmonize their desires at particular moments. Similarly,
because the ends of different individuals overlap and conflict, what they
rationally will are ends that harmonize their desires, which are the ends of
humans in communities. They are willed by the general will, the realization of
which is self-rule or liberty. This provides the rational ground of political
obligation, since the most comprehensive system of modern life is the state,
the end of which is the realization of the best life for its citizens. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “Bosanquet’s implicaturum.”
boscovich: An example of
minimalism, according to Grice. Roger Joseph, or Rudjer Josip Bos v kovic’,
philosopher. Born of Serbian and
parents, he was a Jesuit and polymath best known for his A Theory of
Natural Philosophy Reduced to a Single Law of the Actions Existing in Nature.
This work attempts to explain all physical phenomena in terms of the
attractions and repulsions of point particles puncta that are indistinguishable
in their intrinsic qualitative properties. According to Boscovich’s single law,
puncta at a certain distance attract, until upon approaching one another they
reach a point at which they repel, and eventually reach equilibrium. Thus,
Boscovich defends a form of dynamism, or the theory that nature is to be
understood in terms of force and not mass where forces are functions of time
and distance. By dispensing with extended substance, Boscovich avoided
epistemological difficulties facing Locke’s natural philosophy and anticipated
developments in modern physics. Among those influenced by Boscovich were Kant
who defended a version of dynamism, Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Lord
Kelvin. Boscovich’s theory has proved to be empirically inadequate to account
for phenomena such as light. A philosophical difficulty for Boscovich’s puncta,
which are physical substances, arises out of their zero-dimensionality. It is
plausible that any power must have a basis in an object’s intrinsic properties,
and puncta appear to lack such support for their powers. However, it is
extensional properties that puncta lack, and Boscovich could argue that the
categorial property of being an unextended spatial substance provides the
needed basis.
bouwsma: Gruce:
“Philosopher almost impossible to pronounce.” -- o. k., philosopher, a
practitioner of ordinary language philosophy and celebrated teacher. Through
work on Moore and contact with students such as Norman Malcolm and Morris
Lazerowitz, whom he sent from Nebraska to work with Moore, Bouwsma discovered
Vitters. He became known for conveying an understanding of Vitters’s techniques
of philosophical analysis through his own often humorous grasp of sense and
nonsense. Focusing on a particular pivotal sentence in an argument, he provided
imaginative surroundings for it, showing how, in the philosopher’s mouth, the
sentence lacked sense. He sometimes described this as “the method of failure.”
In connection with Descartes’s evil genius, e.g., Bouwsma invents an elaborate
story in which the evil genius tries but fails to permanently deceive by means
of a totally paper world. Our inability to imagine such a deception undermines
the sense of the evil genius argument. His writings are replete with similar
stories, analogies, and teases of sense and nonsense for such philosophical
standards as Berkeley’s idealism, Moore’s theory of sensedata, and Anselm’s
ontological argument. Bouwsma did not advocate theories nor put forward
refutations of other philosophers’ views. His talent lay rather in exposing
some central sentence in an argument as disguised nonsense. In this, he went
beyond Vitters, working out the details of the latter’s insights into language.
In addition to this appropriation of Vitters, Bouwsma also appropriated
Kierkegaard, understanding him too as one who dispelled philosophical
illusions those arising from the attempt
to understand Christianity. The ordinary language of religious philosophy was
that of scriptures. He drew upon this language in his many essays on religious
themes. His religious dimension made whole this person who gave no quarter to
traditional metaphysics. His papers are published under the titles
Philosophical Essays, Toward a New Sensibility, Without Proof or Evidence, and
Vitters Conversations 951. His philosophical notebooks are housed at the
Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas.
boyle: r.: Grice was a
closet corpularianist. a major figure in seventeenthcentury natural philosophy.
To his contemporaries he was “the restorer” in England of the mechanical
philosophy. His program was to replace the vacuous explanations characteristic
of Peripateticism the “quality of whiteness” in snow explains why it dazzles
the eyes by explanations employing the “two grand and most catholic principles
of bodies, matter and motion,” matter being composed of corpuscles, with motion
“the grand agent of all that happens in nature.” Boyle wrote influentially on
scientific methodology, emphasizing experimentation a Baconian influence,
experimental precision, and the importance of devising “good and excellent”
hypotheses. The dispute with Spinoza on the validation of explanatory
hypotheses contrasted Boyle’s experimental way with Spinoza’s way of rational
analysis. The 1670s dispute with Henry More on the ontological grounds of
corporeal activity confronted More’s “Spirit of Nature” with the “essential
modifications” motion and the “seminal principle” of activity with which Boyle
claimed God had directly endowed matter. As a champion of the corpuscularian philosophy,
Boyle was an important link in the development before Locke of the distinction
between primary and secondary qualities. A leading advocate of natural
theology, he provided in his will for the establishment of the Boyle Lectures
to defend Protestant Christianity against atheism and materialism.
bradley: One of the few
English philosophers who saw philosophy, correctly, as a branch of literature!
(Essay-writing, strictly). f. h., Cited by H. P. Grice in “Prolegomena,” now
repr. in “Studies in the Way of Words.” Also in Grice, “Metaphysics,” in D. F.
Pears, “The nature of metaphysics,” -- the most original and influential
nineteenth-century British idealist. Born at Clapham, he was the fourth son of
an evangelical minister. His younger brother A. C. Bradley was a well-known
Shakespearean critic. From 1870 until his death Bradley was a fellow of Merton
, Oxford. A kidney ailment, which first occurred in 1871, compelled him to lead
a retiring life. This, combined with his forceful literary style, his love of
irony, the dedication of three of his books to an unknown woman, and acclaim as
the greatest British idealist since Berkeley, has lent an aura of mystery to
his personal life. The aim of Bradley’s first important work, Ethical Studies
1876, is not to offer guidance for dealing with practical moral problems
Bradley condemned this as casuistry, but rather to explain what makes morality
as embodied in the consciousness of individuals and in social institutions
possible. Bradley thought it was the fact that moral agents take morality as an
end in itself which involves identifying their wills with an ideal provided in
part by their stations in society and then transferring that ideal to reality
through action. Bradley called this process “selfrealization.” He thought that
moral agents could realize their good selves only by suppressing their bad
selves, from which he concluded that morality could never be completely
realized, since realizing a good self requires having a bad one. For this
reason Bradley believed that the moral consciousness would develop into
religious consciousness which, in his secularized version of Christianity,
required dying to one’s natural self through faith in the actual existence of
the moral ideal. In Ethical Studies Bradley admitted that a full defense of his
ethics would require a metaphysical system, something he did not then have.
Much of Bradley’s remaining work was an attempt to provide the outline of such
a system by solving what he called “the great problem of the relation between
thought and reality.” He first confronted this problem in The Principles of
Logic3, which is his description of thought. He took thought to be embodied in
judgments, which are distinguished from other mental activities by being true
or false. This is made possible by the fact that their contents, which Bradley
called ideas, represent reality. A problem arises because ideas are universals
and so represent kinds of things, while the things themselves are all
individuals. Bradley solves this problem by distinguishing between the logical
and grammatical forms of a judgment and arguing that all judgments have the
logical form of conditionals. They assert that universal connections between
qualities obtain in reality. The qualities are universals, the connections
between them are conditional, while reality is one individual whole that we
have contact with in immediate experience. All judgments, in his view, are
abstractions from a diverse but non-relational immediate experience. Since
judgments are inescapably relational, they fail to represent accurately
non-relational reality and so fail to reach truth, which is the goal of
thought. From this Bradley concluded that, contrary to what some of his more
Hegelian contemporaries were saying, thought is not identical to reality and is
never more than partially true. Appearance and Reality 3 is Bradley’s
description of reality: it is experience, all of it, all at once, blended in a
harmonious way. Bradley defended this view by means of his criterion for
reality. Reality, he proclaimed, does not contradict itself; anything that does
is merely appearance. In Part I of Appearance and Reality Bradley relied on an
infinite regress argument, now called Bradley’s regress, to contend that
relations and all relational phenomena, including thought, are contradictory.
They are appearance, not reality. In Part II he claimed that appearances are
contradictory because they are abstracted by thought from the immediate
experience of which they are a part. Appearances constitute the content of this
whole, which in Bradley’s view is experience. In other words, reality is
experience in its totality. Bradley called this unified, consistent
all-inclusive reality “the Absolute.” Today Bradley is mainly remembered for
his argument against the reality of relations, and as the philosopher who
provoked Russell’s and Moore’s revolution in philosophy. He would be better
remembered as a founder of twentiethcentury philosophy who based metaphysical
conclusions on his account of the logical forms of judgments.
brandt: R. B.,-- read by Grice for his ‘ideal observer
theory” or creature construction in “Method” moral philosopher, most closely
associated with rule utilitarianism which term he coined, earned degrees from
Denison and Cambridge , and obtained a
Ph.D. from Yale in 6. He taught at Swarthmore
from 7 to 4 and at the of
Michigan from 4 to 1. His six books and nearly one hundred articles included
work on philosophy of religion, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of
action, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. His greatest contributions
were in moral philosophy. He first defended rule utilitarianism in his textbook
Ethical Theory 9, but greatly refined his view in the 0s in a series of
articles, which were widely discussed and reprinted and eventually collected
together in Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights 2. Further refinements appear
in his A Theory of the Good and the Right 9 and Facts, Values, and Morality 6.
Brandt famously argued for a “reforming definition” of ‘rational person’. He
proposed that we use it to designate someone whose desires would survive
exposure to all relevant empirical facts and to correct logical reasoning. He
also proposed a “reforming definition” of ‘morally right’ that assigns it the
descriptive meaning ‘would be permitted by any moral code that all or nearly
all rational people would publicly favor for the agent’s society if they
expected to spend a lifetime in that society’. In his view, rational choice
between moral codes is determined not by prior moral commitments but by
expected consequences. Brandt admitted that different rational people may favor
different codes, since different rational people may have different levels of
natural benevolence. But he also contended that most rational people would favor
a rule-utilitarian code.
brentano: f., philosopher,
one of the most intellectually influential and personally charismatic of his
time. He is known especially for his distinction between psychological and
physical phenomena on the basis of intentionality or internal
object-directedness of thought, his revival of Aristotelianism and empirical
methods in philosophy and psychology, and his value theory and ethics supported
by the concept of correct pro- and anti-emotions or love and hate attitudes.
Brentano made noted contributions to the theory of metaphysical categories,
phenomenology, epistemology, syllogistic logic, and philosophy of religion. His
teaching made a profound impact on his students in Würzburg and Vienna, many of
whom became internationally respected thinkers in their fields, including
Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski, Christian von Ehrenfels, Anton Marty, and Freud.
Brentano began his study of philosophy at the Aschaffenburg Royal Bavarian
Gymnasium; in 185658 he attended the universities of Munich and Würzburg, and
then enrolled at the of Berlin, where he
undertook his first investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics under the
supervision of F. A. Trendelenburg. In 1859 60, he attended the Academy in
Münster, reading intensively in the medieval Aristotelians; in 1862 he received
the doctorate in philosophy in absentia from the of Tübingen. He was ordained a Catholic
priest in 1864, and was later involved in a controversy over the doctrine of
papal infallibility, eventually leaving the church in 1873. He taught first as
Privatdozent in the Philosophical Faculty of the of Würzburg 186674, and then accepted a
professorship at the of Vienna. In 0 he
decided to marry, temporarily resigning his position to acquire Saxon
citizenship, in order to avoid legal difficulties in Austria, where marriages
of former priests were not officially recognized. Brentano was promised
restoration of his position after his circumvention of these restrictions, but
although he was later reinstated as lecturer, his appeals for reappointment as
professor were answered only with delay and equivocation. He left Vienna in 5,
retiring to Italy, his family’s country of origin. At last he moved to Zürich,
Switzerland, shortly before Italy entered World War I. Here he remained active
both in philosophy and psychology, despite his ensuing blindness, writing and
revising numerous books and articles, frequently meeting with former students
and colleagues, and maintaining an extensive philosophical-literary
correspondence, until his death. In Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt
“Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,” 1874, Brentano argued that
intentionality is the mark of the mental, that every psychological experience
contains an intended object also called
an intentional object which the thought
is about or toward which the thought is directed. Thus, in desire, something is
desired. According to the immanent intentionality thesis, this means that the
desired object is literally contained within the psychological experience of
desire. Brentano claims that this is uniquely true of mental as opposed to
physical or non-psychological phenomena, so that the intentionality of the
psychological distinguishes mental from physical states. The immanent
intentionality thesis proBrentano, Franz Brentano, Franz 100 100 vides a framework in which Brentano
identifies three categories of psychological phenomena: thoughts Vorstellungen,
judgments, and emotive phenomena. He further maintains that every thought is
also self-consciously reflected back onto itself as a secondary intended object
in what he called the eigentümliche Verfleckung. From 5 through 1, with the
publication in that year of Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene,
Brentano gradually abandoned the immanent intentionality thesis in favor of his
later philosophy of reism, according to which only individuals exist, excluding
putative nonexistent irrealia, such as lacks, absences, and mere possibilities.
In the meantime, his students Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reacting
negatively to the idealism, psychologism, and related philosophical problems
apparent in the early immanent intentionality thesis, developed alternative
non-immanence approaches to intentionality, leading, in the case of Twardowski
and Meinong and his students in the Graz school of phenomenological psychology,
to the construction of Gegenstandstheorie, the theory of transcendent existent
and nonexistent intended objects, and to Husserl’s later transcendental
phenomenology. The intentionality of the mental in Brentano’s revival of the
medieval Aristotelian doctrine is one of his most important contributions to
contemporary non-mechanistic theories of mind, meaning, and expression.
Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis was, however, rejected by
philosophers who otherwise agreed with his underlying claim that thought is
essentially object-directed. Brentano’s value theory Werttheorie offers a
pluralistic account of value, permitting many different kinds of things to be
valuable although, in keeping with his
later reism, he denies the existence of an abstract realm of values. Intrinsic
value is objective rather than subjective, in the sense that he believes the
pro- and anti-emotions we may have toward an act or situation are objectively
correct if they present themselves to emotional preference with the same
apodicity or unquestionable sense of rightness as other selfevident matters of
non-ethical judgment. Among the controversial consequences of Brentano’s value
theory is the conclusion that there can be no such thing as absolute evil. The
implication follows from Brentano’s observation, first, that evil requires evil
consciousness, and that consciousness of any kind, even the worst imaginable
malice or malevolent ill will, is considered merely as consciousness
intrinsically good. This means that necessarily there is always a mixture of
intrinsic good even in the most malicious possible states of mind, by virtue
alone of being consciously experienced, so that pure evil never obtains.
Brentano’s value theory admits of no defense against those who happen not to
share the same “correct” emotional attitudes toward the situations he
describes. If it is objected that to another person’s emotional preferences
only good consciousness is intrinsically good, while infinitely bad
consciousness despite being a state of consciousness appears instead to contain
no intrinsic good and is absolutely evil, there is no recourse within
Brentano’s ethics except to acknowledge that this contrary emotive attitude toward
infinitely bad consciousness may also be correct, even though it contradicts
his evaluations. Brentano’s empirical psychology and articulation of the
intentionality thesis, his moral philosophy and value theory, his
investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics at a time when Aristotelian realism
was little appreciated in the prevailing climate of post-Kantian idealism, his
epistemic theory of evident judgment, his suggestions for the reform of
syllogistic logic, his treatment of the principle of sufficient reason and
existence of God, his interpretation of a fourstage cycle of successive trends
in the history of philosophy, together with his teaching and personal moral
example, continue to inspire a variety of divergent philosophical
traditions.
broad: cited by H. P.
Grice in “Personal identity” and “Prolegomena” (re: Benjamin on Broad on
remembering). Charlie Dunbar 71, English epistemologist, metaphysician, moral
philosopher, and philosopher of science. He was educated at Trinity ,
Cambridge, taught at several universities in Scotland, and then returned to
Trinity, first as lecturer in moral science and eventually as Knightbridge
Professor of Moral Philosophy. His philosophical views are in the broadly
realist tradition of Moore and Russell, though with substantial influence also
from his teachers at Cambridge, McTaggart and W. E. Johnson. Broad wrote
voluminously and incisively on an extremely wide range of philosophical topics,
including most prominently the nature of perception, a priori knowledge and concepts,
the problem of induction, the mind Brentano’s thesis Broad, Charlie Dunbar
101 101 body problem, the free will
problem, various topics in moral philosophy, the nature and philosophical
significance of psychical research, the nature of philosophy itself, and
various historical figures such as Leibniz, Kant, and McTaggart. Broad’s work
in the philosophy of perception centers on the nature of sense-data or sensa,
as he calls them and their relation to physical objects. He defends a rather
cautious, tentative version of the causal theory of perception. With regard to
a priori knowledge, Broad rejects the empiricist view that all such knowledge
is of analytic propositions, claiming instead that reason can intuit necessary
and universal connections between properties or characteristics; his view of
concept acquisition is that while most concepts are abstracted from experience,
some are a priori, though not necessarily innate. Broad holds that the
rationality of inductive inference depends on a further general premise about
the world, a more complicated version of the thesis that nature is uniform,
which is difficult to state precisely and even more difficult to justify.
Broad’s view of the mindbody problem is a version of dualism, though one that
places primary emphasis on individual mental events, is much more uncertain
about the existence and nature of the mind as a substance, and is quite
sympathetic to epiphenomenalism. His main contribution to the free will problem
consists in an elaborate analysis of the libertarian conception of freedom,
which he holds to be both impossible to realize and at the same time quite
possibly an essential precondition of the ordinary conception of obligation.
Broad’s work in ethics is diverse and difficult to summarize, but much of it
centers on the issue of whether ethical judgments are genuinely cognitive in
character. Broad was one of the few philosophers to take psychical research
seriously. He served as president of the Society for Psychical Research and was
an occasional observer of experiments in this area. His philosophical writings
on this subject, while not uncritical, are in the main sympathetic and are
largely concerned to defend concepts like precognition against charges of
incoherence and also to draw out their implications for more familiar
philosophical issues. As regards the nature of philosophy, Broad distinguishes
between “critical” and “speculative” philosophy. Critical philosophy is
analysis of the basic concepts of ordinary life and of science, roughly in the
tradition of Moore and Russell. A very high proportion of Broad’s own work
consists of such analyses, often amazingly detailed and meticulous in
character. But he is also sympathetic to the speculative attempt to arrive at
an overall conception of the nature of the universe and the position of human
beings therein, while at the same time expressing doubts that anything even
remotely approaching demonstration is possible in such endeavors. The foregoing
catalog of views reveals something of the range of Broad’s philosophical
thought, but it fails to bring out what is most strikingly valuable about it.
Broad’s positions on various issues do not form anything like a system he
himself is reported to have said that there is nothing that answers to the description
“Broad’s philosophy”. While his views are invariably subtle, thoughtful, and
critically penetrating, they rarely have the sort of one-sided novelty that has
come to be so highly valued in philosophy. What they do have is exceptional
clarity, dialectical insight, and even-handedness. Broad’s skill at uncovering
and displaying the precise shape of a philosophical issue, clarifying the
relevant arguments and objections, and cataloging in detail the merits and
demerits of the opposing positions has rarely been equaled. One who seeks a
clear-cut resolution of an issue is likely to be impatient and disappointed
with Broad’s careful, measured discussions, in which unusual effort is made to
accord all positions and arguments their due. But one who seeks a comprehensive
and balanced understanding of the issue in question is unlikely to find a more
trustworthy guide.
brouwer: L. E. J:
Discussed by H. P. Grice in connection with ‘intuititionist negation’ and the
elimination of negation -- philosopher and founder of the intuitionist school
in the philosophy of mathematics. Educated at the Municipal of Amsterdam, where he received his doctorate
in 7, he remained there for his entire professional career, as Privaat-Docent 912
and then professor 255. He was among the preeminent topologists of his time,
proving several important results. Philosophically, he was also unique in his
strongly held conviction that philosophical ideas and arguments concerning the
nature of mathematics ought to affect and be reflected in its practice. His
general orientation in the philosophy of mathematics was Kantian. This was
manifested in his radical critique of the role accorded to logical reasoning by
classical mathematics; a role that Brouwer, following Kant, believed to be
incompatible with the role that intuition must properly play in mathematical
reasoning. The bestknown, if not the most fundamental, part of his Brouwer,
Luitzgen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, Luitzgen Egbertus Jan 102 102 critique of the role accorded to logic
by classical mathematics was his attack on the principle of the excluded middle
and related principles of classical logic. He challenged their reliability,
arguing that their unrestricted use leads to results that, intuitionistically
speaking, are not true. However, in its fundaments, Brouwer’s critique was not
so much an attack on particular principles of classical logic as a criticism of
the general role that classical mathematics grants to logical reasoning. He
believed that logical structure and hence logical inference is a product of the
linguistic representation of mathematical thought and not a feature of that
thought itself. He stated this view in the so-called First Act of Intuitionism,
which contains not only the chief critical idea of Brouwer’s position, but also
its core positive element. This positive element says, with Kant, that
mathematics is an essentially languageless activity of the mind. Brouwer went
on to say something with which Kant would only have partially agreed: that this
activity has its origin in the perception of a move of time. The critical
element complements this by saying that mathematics is thus to be kept wholly
distinct from mathematical language and the phenomena of language described by
logic. The so-called Second Act of Intuitionism then extends the positive part
of the First Act by stating that the “self-unfolding” of the primordial
intuition of a move of time is the basis not only of the construction of the
natural numbers but also of the intuitionistic continuum. Together, these two
ideas form the basis of Brouwer’s philosophy of mathematics a philosophy that is radically at odds with
most of twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics.
bruno: g., apeculative
philosopher. He was born in Naples, where he entered the Dominican order in
1565. In 1576 he was suspected of heresy and abandoned his order. He studied
and taught in Geneva, but left because of difficulties with the Calvinists.
Thereafter he studied and taught in Toulouse, Paris, England, various G.
universities, and Prague. In 1591 he rashly returned to Venice, and was
arrested by the Venetian Inquisition in 1592. In 1593 he was handed over to the
Roman Inquisition, which burned him to death as a heretic. Because of his
unhappy end, his support for the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis, and his
pronounced anti-Aristotelianism, Bruno has been mistakenly seen as the
proponent of a scientific worldview against medieval obscurantism. In fact, he
should be interpreted in the context of Renaissance hermetism. Indeed, Bruno was
so impressed by the hermetic corpus, a body of writings attributed to the
mythical Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, that he called for a return to the
magical religion of the Egyptians. He was also strongly influenced by Lull,
Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, and Agrippa von Nettesheim, an early
sixteenth-century author of an influential treatise on magic. Several of
Bruno’s works were devoted to magic, and it plays an important role in his
books on the art of memory. Techniques for improving the memory had long been a
subject of discussion, but he linked them with the notion that one could so
imprint images of the universe on the mind as to achieve special knowledge of
divine realities and the magic powers associated with such knowledge. He
emphasized the importance of the imagination as a cognitive power, since it
brings us into contact with the divine. Nonetheless, he also held that human
ideas are mere shadows of divine ideas, and that God is transcendent and hence
incomprehensible. Bruno’s best-known works are the dialogues he wrote while in England,
including the following, all published in 1584: The Ash Wednesday Supper; On
Cause, Principle and Unity; The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; and On the
Infinite Universe and Worlds. He presents a vision of the universe as a living
and infinitely extended unity containing innumerable worlds, each of which is
like a great animal with a life of its own. He maintained the unity of matter
with universal form or the World-Soul, thus suggesting a kind of pantheism attractive
to later G. idealists, such as Schelling. However, he never identified the
World-Soul with God, who remained separate from matter and form. He combined
his speculative philosophy of nature with the recommendation of a new
naturalistic ethics. Bruno’s support of Copernicus in The Ash Wednesday Supper
was related to his belief that a living earth must move, and he specifically
rejected any appeal to mere mathematics to prove cosmological hypotheses. In
later work he described the monad as a living version of the Democritean atom.
Despite some obvious parallels with both Spinoza and Leibniz, he seems not to
have had much direct influence on seventeenth-century thinkers.
brunschvicg, l.: H. P. Grice
is very popular in France, and so is Brunschvicg, philosopher, an influential
professor at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and a
founder of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 3 and the Société Française
de Philosophie 1. In 0 he was forced by the Nazis to leave Paris and sought refuge
in the nonoccupied zone, where he died. A monistic idealist, Brunschvicg
unfolded a philosophy of mind Introduction to the Life of the Mind, 0. His
epistemology highlights judgment. Thinking is judging and judging is acting. He
defined philosophy as “the mind’s methodical self-reflection.” Philosophy
investigates man’s growing self-understanding. The mind’s recesses, or
metaphysical truth, are accessible through analysis of the mind’s timely
manifestations. His major works therefore describe the progress of science as
progress of consciousness: The Stages of Mathematical Philosophy 2, Human
Experience and Physical Causality 2, The Progress of Conscience in Western
Philosophy 7, and Ages of Intelligence 4. An heir of Renouvier, Cournot, and
Revaisson, Brunschvicg advocated a moral and spiritual conception of science
and attempted to reconcile idealism and positivism.
buber: M. G.: H. P. Grice is all about ‘I’ and ‘thou,’
as Buber is. Jewish philosopher, theologian, and political leader. Buber’s
early influences include Hasidism and neo-Kantianism. Eventually he broke with
the latter and became known as a leading religious existentialist. His chief
philosophic works include his most famous book, Ich und du “I and Thou,” 3;
Moses 6; Between Man and Man 7; and Eclipse of God 2. The crux of Buber’s
thought is his conception of two primary relationships: I-Thou and I-It. IThou
is characterized by openness, reciprocity, and a deep sense of personal
involvement. The I confronts its Thou not as something to be studied, measured,
or manipulated, but as a unique presence that responds to the I in its
individuality. I-It is characterized by the tendency to treat something as an
impersonal object governed by causal, social, or economic forces. Buber rejects
the idea that people are isolated, autonomous agents operating according to
abstract rules. Instead, reality arises between agents as they encounter and
transform each other. In a word, reality is dialogical. Buber describes God as
the ultimate Thou, the Thou who can never become an It. Thus God is reached not
by inference but by a willingness to respond to the concrete reality of the
divine presence.
buchmanism: also called the
Moral Rearmament Movement, a non-creedal international movement that sought to
bring about universal brotherhood through a commitment to an objectivist moral
system derived largely from the Gospels. It was founded by Frank Buchman 18781,
an Lutheran minister who resigned from
his church in 8 in order to expand his ministry. To promote the movement,
Buchman founded the Oxford Group at Oxford. H. P. Grice was a member.
bundle: theory: Is Grice
proposing a ‘bundle theory’ of “Personal identity”: He defines “I” as an
interlinked chain of mnemonic states, a view that accepts the idea that concrete
objects consist of properties but denies the need for introducing substrata to
account for their diversity. By contrast, one traditional view of concrete
particular objects is that they are complexes consisting of two more
fundamental kinds of entities: properties that can be exemplified by many
different objects and a substratum that exemplifies those properties belonging
to a particular object. Properties account for the qualitative identity of such
objects while substrata account for their numerical diversity. The bundle
theory is usually glossed as the view that a concrete object is nothing but a
bundle of properties. This gloss, however, is inadequate. For if a “bundle” of
properties is, e.g., a set of properties, then bundles of properties differ in
significant ways from concrete objects. For sets of properties are necessary
and eternal while concrete objects are contingent and perishing. A more
adequate statement of the theory holds that a concrete object is a complex of
properties which all stand in a fundamental contingent relation, call it
co-instantiation, to one another. On this account, complexes of properties are
neither necessary nor eternal. Critics of the theory, however, maintain that
such complexes have all their properties essentially and cannot change
properties, whereas concrete objects have some of their properties accidentally
and undergo change. This objection fails to recognize that there are two
distinct problems addressed by the bundle theory: a individuation and b
identity through time. The first problem arises for all objects, both momentary
and enduring. The second, however, arises only for enduring objects. The bundle
theory typically offers two different solutions to these problems. An enduring
concrete object is analyzed as a series of momentary objects which stand in
some contingent relation R. Different versions of the theory offer differing
accounts of the relation. For example, Hume holds that the self is a series of
co-instantiated impressions and ideas, whose members are related to one another
by causation and resemblance this is his bundle theory of the self. A momentary
object, however, is analyzed as a complex of properties all of which stand in
the relation of co-instantiation to one another. Consequently, even if one
grants that a momentary complex of properties has all of its members
essentially, it does not follow that an enduring object, which contains the
complex as a temporal part, has those properties essentially unless one
endorses the controversial thesis that an enduring object has its temporal
parts essentially. Similarly, even if one grants that a momentary complex of
properties cannot change in its properties, it does not follow that an enduring
object, which consists of such complexes, cannot change its properties. Critics
of the bundle theory argue that its analysis of momentary objects is also
problematic. For it appears possible that two different momentary objects have
all properties in common, yet there cannot be two different complexes with all
properties in common. There are two responses available to a proponent of the
theory. The first is to distinguish between a strong and a weak version of the
theory. On the strong version, the thesis that a momentary object is a complex
of co-instantiated properties is a necessary truth, while on the weak version
it is a contingent truth. The possibility of two momentary objects with all
properties in common impugns only the strong version of the theory. The second
is to challenge the basis of the claim that it is possible for two momentary
objects to have all their properties in common. Although critics allege that
such a state of affairs is conceivable, proponents argue that investigation
into the nature of conceivability does not underwrite this claim.
buridan – and his ass –
and the Griceian implicaturum -- j. philosopher. He was born in Béthune and
educated at the of Paris. Unlike most
philosophers of his time, Buridan spent his academic career as a master in the
faculty of arts, without seeking an advanced degree in theology. He was also
unusual in being a secular cleric rather than a member of a religious order.
Buridan wrote extensively on logic and natural philosophy, although only a few
of his works have appeared in modern editions. The most important on logic are
the Summulae de dialectica “Sum of Dialectic”, an introduction to logic
conceived as a revision of, and extended commentary on, the Summulae logicales
of Peter of Spain, a widely used logic textbook of the period; and the
Tractatus de consequentiis, a treatise on modes of inference. Most of Buridan’s
other writings are short literal commentaries expositiones and longer critical
studies quaestiones of Aristotle’s works. Like most medieval nominalists,
Buridan argued that universals have no real existence, except as concepts by
which the mind “conceives of many things indifferently.” Likewise, he included
only particular substances and qualities in his basic ontology. But his
nominalist program is distinctive in its implementation. He differs, e.g., from
Ockham in his accounts of motion, time, and quantity appealing, in the latter
case, to quantitative forms to explain the impenetrability of bodies. In
natural philosophy, Buridan is best known for introducing to the West the
non-Aristotelian concept of impetus, or impressed force, to explain projectile
motion. Although asses appear often in his examples, the particular example
that has come via Spinoza and others to be known as “Buridan’s ass,” an ass
starving to death between two equidistant and equally tempting piles of hay, is
unknown in Buridan’s writings. It may, however, have originated as a caricature
of Buridan’s theory of action, which attempts to find a middle ground between
Aristotelian intellectualism and Franciscan voluntarism by arguing that the
will’s freedom to act consists primarily in its ability to defer choice in the
absence of a compelling reason to act one way or the other. Buridan’s
intellectual legacy was considerable. His works continued to be read and
discussed in universities for centuries after his death. Three of his students
and disciples, Albert of Saxony, Marsilius of Inghen, and Nicole Oresme, went
on to become distinguished philosophers in their own right.
burke: e. discussed by
H. P. Grice in his exploration on legal versus moral right, statesman and one
of the eighteenth century’s greatest political writers. Born in Dublin, he
moved to London to study law, then undertook a literary and political career.
He sat in the House of Commons from 1765 to 1794. In speeches and pamphlets
during these years he offered an ideological perspective on politics that
endures to this day as the fountain of conservative wisdom. The philosophical
stance that pervades Burke’s parliamentary career and writings is skepticism, a
profound distrust of political rationalism, i.e., the achievement in the
political realm of abstract and rational structures, ideals, and objectives.
Burkean skeptics are profoundly anti-ideological, detesting what they consider
the complex, mysterious, and existential givens of political life distorted,
criticized, or planned from a perspective of abstract, generalized, and
rational categories. The seminal expression of Burke’s skeptical conservatism
is found in the Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790. The conservatism
of the Reflections was earlier displayed, however, in Burke’s response to
radical demands in England for democratic reform of Parliament in the early
1780s. The English radicals assumed that legislators could remake governments,
when all wise men knew that “a prescriptive government never was made upon any
foregone theory.” How ridiculous, then, to put governments on Procrustean beds
and make them fit “the theories which learned and speculative men have made.”
Such prideful presumption required much more rational capacity than could be
found among ordinary mortals. One victim of Burke’s skepticism is the vaunted
liberal idea of the social contract. Commonwealths were neither constructed nor
ought they to be renovated according to a priori principles. The concept of an
original act of contract is just such a principle. The only contract in
politics is the agreement that binds generations past, present, and future, one
that “is but a clause in the great primeval contract of an eternal society.” Burke
rejects the voluntaristic quality of rationalist liberal contractualism.
Individuals are not free to create their own political institutions. Political
society and law are not “subject to the will of those who, by an obligation
above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that
law.” Men and groups “are not morally at liberty, at their pleasure, and on
their speculations of a contingent improvement” to rip apart their communities
and dissolve them into an “unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos.” Burke saw our
stock of reason as small; despite this people still fled their basic
limitations in flights of ideological fancy. They recognized no barrier to
their powers and sought in politics to make reality match their speculative visions.
Burke devoutly wished that people would appreciate their weakness, their
“subordinate rank in the creation.” God has “subjected us to act the part which
belongs to the place assigned us.” And that place is to know the limits of
one’s rational and speculative faculties. Instead of relying on their own
meager supply of reason, politicians should avail themselves “of the general
bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Because people forget this they weave
rational schemes of reform far beyond their power to implement. Buridan’s ass
Burke, Edmund 108 108 Burke stands as
the champion of political skepticism in revolt against Enlightenment
rationalism and its “smugness of adulterated metaphysics,” which produced the
“revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma.” The sins of the were produced by the “clumsy subtlety of
their political metaphysics.” The “faith in the dogmatism of philosophers” led
them to rely on reason and abstract ideas, on speculation and a priori principles
of natural right, freedom, and equality as the basis for reforming governments.
Englishmen, like Burke, had no such illusions; they understood the complexity
and fragility of human nature and human institutions, they were not “the
converts of Rousseau . . . the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius [had] made no
progress amongst [them].”
burleigh: W. H. P. Grice
preferred the spelling “Burleigh,” or “Burleighensis” if you must – “That’s how
we called him at Oxford!” English philosopher who taught philosophy at Oxford
and theology at Paris. An orthodox Aristotelian and a realist, he attacked
Ockham’s logic and his interpretation of the Aristotelian categories. Burley
commented on almost of all of Aristotle’s works in logic, natural philosophy,
and moral philosophy. An early Oxford Calculator, Burley began his work as a
fellow of Merton in 1301. By 1310, he
was at Paris. A student of Thomas Wilton, he probably incepted before 1322; by
1324 he was a fellow of the Sorbonne. His commentary on Peter Lombard’s
Sentences has been lost. After leaving Paris, Burley was associated with the
household of Richard of Bury and the court of Edward III, who sent him as an
envoy to the papal curia in 1327. De vita et moribus philosophorum “On the Life
and Manners of Philosophers”, an influential, popular account of the lives of
the philosophers, has often been attributed to Burley, but modern scholarship
suggests that the attribution is incorrect. Many of Burley’s independent works
dealt with problems in natural philosophy, notably De intensione et remissione formarum
“On the Intension and Remission of Forms”, De potentiis animae “On the
Faculties of the Soul”, and De substantia orbis. De primo et ultimo instanti
“On First and Last Instants” discusses which temporal processes have intrinsic,
which extrinsic limits. In his Tractatus de formis Burley attacks Ockham’s
theory of quantity. Similarly, Burley’s theory of motion opposed Ockham’s
views. Ockham restricts the account of motion to the thing moving, and the
quality, quantity, and place acquired by motion. By contrast, Burley emphasizes
the process of motion and the quantitative measurement of that process. Burley
attacks the view that the forms successively acquired in motion are included in
the form finally acquired. He ridicules the view that contrary qualities hot
and cold could simultaneously inhere in the same subject producing intermediate
qualities warmth. Burley emphasized the formal character of logic in his De
puritate artis logicae “On the Purity of the Art of Logic”, one of the great
medieval treatises on logic. Ockham attacked a preliminary version of De
puritate in his Summa logicae; Burley called Ockham a beginner in logic. In De
puritate artis logicae, Burley makes syllogistics a subdivision of
consequences. His treatment of negation is particularly interesting for his
views on double negation and the restrictions on the rule that notnot-p implies
p. Burley distinguished between analogous words and analogous concepts and
natures. His theory of analogy deserves detailed discussion. These views, like
the views expressed in most of Burley’s works, have seldom been carefully studied
by modern philosophers.
butlerianism: J., cited by H.
P. Grice, principle of conversational benevolence. English theologian and
Anglican bishop who made important contributions to moral philosophy, to the
understanding of moral agency, and to the development of deontological ethics.
Better known in his own time for The Analogy of Religion 1736, a defense, along
broadly empiricist lines, of orthodox, “revealed” Christian doctrine against
deist criticism, Butler’s main philosophical legacy was a series of highly
influential arguments and theses contained in a collection of Sermons 1725 and
in two “Dissertations” appended to The Analogy
one on virtue and the other on personal identity. The analytical method
of these essays “everything is what it is and not another thing” provided a
model for much of English-speaking moral philosophy to follow. For example,
Butler is often credited with refuting psychological hedonism, the view that
all motives can be reduced to the desire for pleasure or happiness. The sources
of human motivation are complex and structurally various, he argued. Appetites
and passions seek their own peculiar objects, and pleasure must itself be
understood as involving an intrinsic positive regard for a particular object.
Other philosophers had maintained, like Butler, that we can desire, e.g., the
happiness of others intrinsically, and not just as a means to our own
happiness. And others had argued that the person who aims singlemindedly at his
own happiness is unlikely to attain it. Butler’s distinctive contribution was
to demonstrate that happiness and pleasure themselves require completion by
specific objects for which we have an intrinsic positive regard. Self-love, the
desire for our own happiness, is a reflective desire for, roughly, the
satisfaction of our other desires. But self-love is not our only reflective
desire; we also have “a settled reasonable principle of benevolence.” We can
consider the goods of others and come on reflection to desire their welfare
more or less independently of particular emotional involvement such as
compassion. In morals, Butler equally opposed attempts to reduce virtue to
benevolence, even of the most universal and impartial sort. Benevolence seeks
the good or happiness of others, whereas the regulative principle of virtue is
conscience, the faculty of moral approval or disapproval of conduct and
character. Moral agency requires, he argued, the capacities to reflect disinterestedly
on action, motive, and character, to judge these in distinctively moral terms
and not just in terms of their relation to the non-moral good of happiness, and
to guide conduct by such judgments. Butler’s views about the centrality of
conscience in the moral life were important in the development of deontological
ethics as well as in the working out of an associated account of moral agency.
Along the first lines, he argued in the “Dissertation” that what it is right
for a person to do depends, not just on the non-morally good or bad
consequences of an action, but on such other morally relevant features as the
relationships the agent bears to affected others e.g., friend or beneficiary,
or whether fraud, injustice, treachery, or violence is involved. Butler thus
distinguished analytically between distinctively moral evaluation of action and
assessing an act’s relation to such non-moral values as happiness. And he
provided succeeding deontological theorists with a litany of examples where the
right thing to do is apparently not what would have the best consequences.
Butler believed God instills a “principle of reflection” or conscience in us
through which we intrinsically disapprove of such actions as fraud and
injustice. But he also believed that God, being omniscient and benevolent,
fitted us with these moral attitudes because “He foresaw this constitution of
our nature would produce more happiness, than forming us with a temper of mere
general benevolence.” This points, however, toward a kind of anti-deontological
or consequentialist view, sometimes called indirect consequentialism, which
readily acknowledges that what it is right to do does not depend on which act
will have the best consequences. It is entirely appropriate, according to
indirect consequentialism, that conscience approve or disapprove of acts on
grounds other than a calculation of consequences precisely because its doing so
has the best consequences. Here we have a version of the sort of view later to
be found, for example, in Mill’s defense of utilitarianism against the
objection that it conflicts with justice and rights. Morality is a system of
social control that demands allegiance to considerations other than utility,
e.g., justice and honesty. But it is justifiable only to the extent that the
system itself has utility. This sets up something of a tension. From the
conscientious perspective an agent must distinguish between the question of
which action would have the best consequences and the question of what he
should do. And from that perspective, Butler thinks, one will necessarily
regard one’s answer to the second question as authoritative for conduct.
Conscience necessarily implicitly asserts its own authority, Butler famously
claimed. Thus, insofar as agents come to regard their conscience as simply a
method of social control with good consequences, they will come to be alienated
from the inherent authority their conscience implicitly claims. A similar issue
arises concerning the relation between conscience and self-love. Butler says that
both self-love and conscience are “superior principles in the nature of man” in
that an action will be unsuitable to a person’s nature if it is contrary to
either. This makes conscience’s authority conditional on its not conflicting
with self-love and vice versa. Some scholars, moreover, read other passages as
implying that no agent could reasonably follow conscience unless doing so was
in the agent’s interest. But again, it would seem that an agent who
internalized such a view would be alienated from the authority that, if Butler
is right, conscience implicitly claims. For Butler, conscience or the principle
of reflection is uniquely the faculty of practical judgment. Unlike either
self-love or benevolence, even when these are added to the powers of inference
and empirical cognition, only conscience makes moral agency possible. Only a
creature with conscience can accord with or violate his own judgment of what he
ought to do, and thereby be a “law to himself.” This suggests a view that, like
Kant’s, seeks to link deontology to a conception of autonomous moral agency.
byzantine. This is important
since it displays Grice’s disrespect for stupid traditions. There is Austin
trying to lecture what he derogatorily called ‘philosophical hack’ (“I expect
he was being ironic”) into learning through the Little Oxford Dictionary.
HARDLY Grice’s cup of tea. Austiin, or the ‘master,’ as Grice ironically calls
him, could patronize less patrician play group members, but not him! In any
case, Austin grew so tiresome, that Grice grabbed the Little Dictionary. Austin
had gave him license to go and refute Ryle on ‘feeling’. “So, go and check with
the dictionary, to see howmany things you can feel.” Grice started with the A
and got as far as the last relevant item under the ‘B,” he hoped. “And then I
realised it was all hopeless. A waste. Language botany, indeed!” At a later
stage, he grew more affectionate, especially when seeing that this was part of
his armoury (as Gellner had noted): a temperament, surely not shared by Strawson,
for subtleties and nuances. How Byzantine can Grice feel? Vide ‘agitation.’ Does
feeling Byzantine entail a feeling of BEING Byzantine? originally used of the style of art and architecture developed there
4c.-5c. C.E.; later in reference to the complex, devious, and intriguing
character of the royal court of Constantinople (1937). Bȳzantĭum ,
ii, n., = Βυζάντιον,I.a city in Thrace, on
the Bosphorus, opposite
the Asiatic Chalcedon, later Constantinopolis, now Constantinople; among the
Turks, Istamboul or Stamboul (i.e. εις τὴν πόλιν), Mel. 2, 2, 6; Plin. 4, 11, 18, § 46; 9, 15, 20, § 50 sq.; Nep. Paus. 2, 2; Liv. 38, 16, 3 sq.; Tac. A. 12, 63 sq.; id. H. 2. 83; 3, 47 al.—II. Derivv.A. Bȳzantĭus ,
a, um, adj., of Byzantium, Byzantine: “litora,” the Strait of
Constantinople, Ov. Tr. 1, 10, 31: “portus,” Plin. 9, 15, 20, § 51.—Subst.: Bȳ-zantĭi ,
ōrum, m., the inhabitants of
Byzantium, Cic. Prov. Cons. 3, 5; 4, 6 sq.; Cic. Verr. 2, 2, 31, § 76; Nep. Timoth. 1, 2; Liv. 32, 33, 7.—B. Bȳzantĭăcus ,
a, um, adj., of Byzantium:
“lacerti,” Stat. S. 4, 9, 13. — C. Bȳzantīnus ,
a, um, adj., the same (post-class.): “Lygos,” Aus.
Clar. Urb. 2: “frigora,” Sid.
Ep. 7, 17. Byzantine feeling -- Einfühlung G., ‘feeling into’,
empathy. In contrast to sympathy, where one’s identity is preserved in feeling
with or for the other, in empathy or Einfühlung one tends to lose oneself in
the other. The concept of Einfühlung received its classical formulation in the
work of Theodor Lipps, who characterized it as a process of involuntary, inner
imitation whereby a subject identifies through feeling with the movement of
another body, whether it be the real leap of a dancer or the illusory upward
lift of an architectural column. Complete empathy is considered to be
aesthetic, providing a non-representational access to beauty. Husserl used a
phenomenologically purified concept of Einfühlung to account for the way the
self directly recognizes the other. Husserl’s student Edith Stein described
Einfühlung as a blind egoism Einfühlung 255
255 mode of knowledge that reaches the experience of the other without
possessing it. Einfühlung is not to be equated with Verstehen or human
understanding, which, as Dilthey pointed out, requires the use of all one’s
mental powers, and cannot be reduced to a mere mode of feeling. To understand
is not to apprehend something empathetically as the projected locus of an
actual experience, but to apperceive the meaning of expressions of experience
in relation to their context. Whereas understanding is reflective, empathy is
prereflective.
cabala – or kabala – cited by Grice
“Perhaps Moses brought more than the ten commandments from Sinai.” from Hebrew
qabbala, ‘tradition’, a system of Jewish mysticism and theosophy practiced from
the thirteenth to the eighteenth century; loosely, all forms of Jewish
mysticism. Believed by its adherents to be a tradition communicated to Moses at
Sinai, the main body of cabalistic writing, the Zohar, is thought to be the
work primarily of Moses de León of Guadalajara, in the thirteenth century,
though he attributed it to the second-century rabbi Simon bar Yohai. The Zohar
builds on earlier Jewish mysticism, and is replete with gnostic and Neoplatonic
themes. It offers the initiated access to the mysteries of God’s being, human
destiny, and the meaning of the commandments. The transcendent and strictly
unitary God of rabbinic Judaism here encounters ten apparently real divine
powers, called sefirot, which together represent God’s being and appearance in
the cosmos and include male and female principles. Evil in the world is seen as
a reflection of a cosmic rupture in this system, and redemption on earth
entails restoration of the divine order. Mankind can assist in this task
through knowledge, piety, and observance of the law. Isaac Luria in the
sixteenth century developed these themes with graphic descriptions of the
dramas of creation, cosmic rupture, and restoration, the latter process
requiring human assistance more than ever.
cæteris paribus: Strawson and Wiggins: that the
principle holds ceteris paribus is a necessary condition for the very existence
of the activity in question. Central. Grice technically directs his attenetion
to this in his “Method”. There, he tries to introduce “WILLING” as a predicate,
i.e. a theoretical concept which is implicitly defined by the LAW in a THEORY
that it occurs. This theory is ‘psychology,’ but understood as a ‘folk
science.’ So the conditionals are ‘ceteris paribus.’ Schiffer and Cartwright
were aware of this. Especially Cartwright who attended seminars on this with
Grice on ‘as if.’ Schiffer was well aware of the topic via Loar and others.
Griceians who were trying to come up with a theory of content without relying
on semantic stuff would involve ‘caeteris paribus’ ‘laws.’ Grice in discussion
with Davidson comes to the same conclusion, hence his “A T C,’ all things
considered and prima facie. H. L. A. Hart, with his concept of ‘defeasibility’
relates. Vide Baker. And obviously those who regard ‘implicaturum’ as
nonmonotonic. Caeteris paribus -- Levinon “generalised implicaturum as by
default” default logic, a formal system for reasoning with defaults, developed
by Raymond Reiter in 0. Reiter’s defaults have the form ‘P:MQ1 , . . . ,
MQn/R’, read ‘If P is believed and Q1 . . . Qn are consistent with one’s
beliefs, then R may be believed’. Whether a proposition is consistent with
one’s beliefs depends on what defaults have already been applied. Given the
defaults P:MQ/Q and R:M-Q/-Q, and the facts P and R, applying the first default
yields Q while applying the second default yields -Q. So applying either
default blocks the other. Consequently, a default theory may have several
default extensions. Normal defaults having the form P:MQ/Q, useful for
representing simple cases of nonmonotonic reasoning, are inadequate for more
complex cases. Reiter produces a reasonably clean proof theory for normal
default theories and proves that every normal default theory has an
extension.
cairdianism: e. Oxford Hegelian of the type Grice saw
mostly every day! philosopher, a leading absolute idealist. Influential as both
a writer and a teacher, Caird was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow and
master of Balliol , Oxford. His aim in philosophy was to overcome intellectual
oppositions. In his main work, The Critical Philosophy of Kant 9, he argued
that Kant had done this by using reason to synthesize rationalism and
empiricism while reconciling science and religion. In Caird’s view, Kant
unfortunately treated reason as subjective, thereby retaining an opposition
between self and world. Loosely following Hegel, Caird claimed that objective
reason, or the Absolute, was a larger whole in which both self and world were
fragments. In his Evolution of Religion 3 Caird argued that religion
progressively understands God as the Absolute and hence as what reconciles self
and world. This allowed him to defend Christianity as the highest evolutionary
stage of religion without defending the literal truth of Scripture.
cajetan, original name, --
H. P. Grice thinks that Shropshire borrowed his proof for the immortality of
the soul from Cajetan -- Tommaso de Vio, prelate and theologian. Born in Gaeta
from which he took his name, he entered the Dominican order in 1484 and studied
philosophy and theology at Naples, Bologna, and Padua. He became a cardinal in
1517; during the following two years he traveled to G.y, where he engaged in a
theological controversy with Luther. His major work is a Commentary on St.
Thomas’ Summa of Theology 1508, which promoted a renewal of interest in
Scholastic and Thomistic philosophy during the sixteenth century. In agreement
with Aquinas, Cajetan places the origin of human knowledge in sense perception.
In contrast with Aquinas, he denies that the immortality of the soul and the
existence of God as our creator can be proved. Cajetan’s work in logic was
based on traditional Aristotelian syllogistic logic but is original in its
discussion of the notion of analogy. Cajetan distinguishes three types: analogy
of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportion. Whereas he
rejected the first two types as improper, he regarded the last as the basic
type of analogy and appealed to it in explaining how humans come to know God
and how analogical reasoning applied to God and God’s creatures avoids being
equivocal.
calculus: -- Hobbes uses
‘calculation – How latin is that? calcŭlo , āre, v. a. id., I.to calculate, compute, reckon (late Lat.). from
diminutive of ‘calx,’ a stone usef for reckon --- I. Lit., Prud. στεφ. 3, 131.—
II. Trop., to consider as, to esteem, Sid. Ep. 7, 9.Grice uses ‘calculus’
slightly different, in the phrase “first-order predicate calculus with
time-relative identity” -- a central branch of mathematics, originally
conceived in connection with the determination of the tangent or normal to a
curve and of the area between it and some fixed axis; but it also embraced the
calculation of volumes and of areas of curved surfaces, the lengths of curved
lines, and so on. Mathematical analysis is a still broader branch that subsumed
the calculus under its rubric see below, together with the theories of functions
and of infinite series. Still more general and/or abstract versions of analysis
have been developed during the twentieth century, with applications to other
branches of mathematics, such as probability theory. The origins of the
calculus go back to Grecian mathematics, usually in problems of determining the
slope of a tangent to a curve and the area enclosed underneath it by some fixed
axes or by a closed curve; sometimes related questions such as the length of an
arc of a curve, or the area of a curved surface, were considered. The subject
flourished in the seventeenth century when the analytical geometry of Descartes
gave algebraic means to extend the procedures. It developed further when the
problems of slope and area were seen to require the finding of new functions,
and that the pertaining processes were seen to be inverse. Newton and Leibniz
had these insights in the late seventeenth century, independently and in
different forms. In the Leibnizian differential calculus the differential dx
was proposed as an infinitesimal increment on x, and of the same dimension as
x; the slope of the tangent to a curve with y as a function of x was the ratio
dy/dx. The integral, ex, was infinitely large and of the dimension of x; thus
for linear variables x and y the area ey dx was the sum of the areas of
rectangles y high and dx wide. All these quantities were variable, and so could
admit higher-order differentials and integrals ddx, eex, and so on. This theory
was extended during the eighteenth century, especially by Euler, to functions
of several independent variables, and with the creation of the calculus of
variations. The chief motivation was to solve differential equations: they were
motivated largely by problems in mechanics, which was then the single largest
branch of mathematics. Newton’s less successful fluxional calculus used limits
in its basic definitions, thereby changing dimensions for the defined terms.
The fluxion was the rate of change of a variable quantity relative to “time”;
conversely, that variable was the “fluent” of its fluxion. These quantities
were also variable; fluxions and fluents of higher orders could be defined from
them. A third tradition was developed during the late eighteenth century by J.
L. Lagrange. For him the “derived functions” of a function fx were definable by
purely algebraic means from its Taylorian power-series expansion about any
value of x. By these means it was hoped to avoid the use of both infinitesimals
and limits, which exhibited conceptual difficulties, the former due to their
unclear ontology as values greater than zero but smaller than any orthodox
quantity, the latter because of the naive theories of their deployment. In the
early nineteenth century the Newtonian tradition died away, and Lagrange’s did
not gain general conviction; however, the LeibnizEuler line kept some of its
health, for its utility in physical applications. But all these theories
gradually became eclipsed by the mathematical analysis of A. L. Cauchy. As with
Newton’s calculus, the theory of limits was central, but they were handled in a
much more sophisticated way. He replaced the usual practice of defining the
integral as more or less automatically the inverse of the differential or
fluxion or whatever by giving independent definitions of the derivative and the
integral; thus for the first time the fundamental “theorem” of the calculus,
stating their inverse relationship, became a genuine theorem, requiring
sufficient conditions upon the function to ensure its truth. Indeed, Cauchy
pioneered the routine specification of necessary and/or sufficient conditions
for truth of theorems in analysis. His discipline also incorporated the theory
of discontinuous functions and the convergence or divergence of infinite
series. Again, general definitions were proffered and conditions sought for
properties to hold. Cauchy’s discipline was refined and extended in the second
half of the nineteenth century by K. Weierstrass and his followers at Berlin.
The study of existence theorems as for irrational numbers, and also technical
questions largely concerned with trigonometric series, led to the emergence of
set topology. In addition, special attention was given to processes involving
several variables changing in value together, and as a result the importance of
quantifiers was recognized for example,
reversing their order from ‘there is a y such that for all x . . .’ to ‘for all
x, there is a y . . .’. This developed later into general set theory, and then
to mathematical logic: Cantor was the major figure in the first aspect, while
G. Peano pioneered much for the second. Under this regime of “rigor,”
infinitesimals such as dx became unacceptable as mathematical objects. However,
they always kept an unofficial place because of their utility when applying the
calculus, and since World War II theories have been put forward in which the
established level of rigor and generality are preserved and even improved but
in which infinitesimals are reinstated. The best-known of these theories, the
non-standard analysis of A. Robinson, makes use of model theory by defining
infinitesimals as arithmetical inverses of the transfinite integers generated
by a “non-standard model” of Peano’s postulates for the natural numbers.
calvin: j.: As C. of E.,
Grice was aware of the problems his father, a non-conformist, brought to his
High Anglican household, theologian and church reformer, a major figure in the
Protestant Reformation. He was especially important for the so-called Reformed
churches in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, G.y, Scotland, and England.
Calvin was a theologian in the humanist tradition rather than a philosopher. He
valued philosophy as “a noble gift of God” and cited philosophers especially
Plato when it suited his purposes; but he rejected philosophical speculation about
“higher things” and despised though
sometimes exploiting its resources the
dominant Scholastic philosophy of his time, to which he had been introduced at
the of Paris. His eclectic culture also
included a variety of philosophical ideas, of whose source he was often
unaware, that inevitably helped to shape his thought. His Christianae
religionis institutio first ed. 1536 but repeatedly enlarged; in English
generally cited as Institutes, his theological treatises, his massive biblical
commentaries, and his letters, all of which were tr. into most European
languages, thus helped to transmit various philosophical motifs and attitudes
in an unsystematic form both to contemporaries and to posterity. He passed on
to his followers impulses derived from both the antiqui and the moderni. From
the former he inherited an intellectualist anthropology that conceived of the
personality as a hierarchy of faculties properly subordinated to reason, which
was at odds with his evangelical theology; and, though he professed to scorn
Stoicism, a moralism often more Stoic than evangelical. He also relied
occasionally on the Scholastic quaestio, and regularly treated substantives,
like the antiqui, as real entities. These elements in his thought also found
expression in tendencies to a natural theology based on an innate and universal
religious instinct that can discern evidences of the existence and attributes
of God everywhere in nature, and a conception of the Diety as immutable and
intelligible. This side of Calvinism eventually found expression in
Unitarianism and universalism. It was, however, in uneasy tension with other
tendencies in his thought that reflect both his biblicism and a nominalist and
Scotist sense of the extreme transcendence of God. Like other humanists, therefore,
he was also profoundly skeptical about the capacity of the human mind to grasp
ultimate truth, an attitude that rested, for him, on both the consequences of
original sin and the merely conventional origins of language. Corollaries of
this were his sense of the contingency of all human intellectual constructions
and a tendency to emphasize the utility rather than the truth even of such
major elements in his theology as the doctrine of predestination. It may well
be no accident, therefore, that later skepticism and pragmatism have been
conspicuous in thinkers nurtured by later Calvinism, such as Bayle, Hume, and
James.
cambridge change, a non-genuine
change: Grice loved the phrase seeing that, “while at Oxford we had a minor
revolution, at Cambridge, if the place counts, they didn’t. “I went to Oxford.
You went to Cambridge. He went to the London School of Economics.” If I turn
pale, I am changing, whereas your turning pale is only a Cambridge change in
me. When I acquire the property of being such that you are pale, I do not
change. In general, an object’s acquiring a new property is not a sufficient
condition for that object to change although some other object may genuinely
change. Thus also, my being such that you are pale counts only as a Cambridge
property of me, a property such that my gaining or losing it is only a
Cambridge change. Cambridge properties are a proper subclass of extrinsic
properties: being south of Chicago is considered an extrinsic property of me,
but since my moving to Canada would be a genuine change, being south of Chicago
cannot, for me, be a Cambridge property. The concept of a Cambridge change
reflects a way of thinking entrenched in common sense, but it is difficult to
clarify, and its philosophical value is controversial. Neither science nor
formal semantics, e.g., supports this viewpoint. Perhaps calculus, fluxional
Cambridge changes and properties are, for better or worse, inseparable from a vague,
intuitive metaphysics.
campanella: t. H. P. Grice
enjoyed his philosophical poems.-
15681639, theologian,
philosopher, and poet. He joined the Dominican order in 1582. Most of the years
between 1592 and 1634 he spent in prison for heresy and for conspiring to
replace rule in southern Italy with a
utopian republic. He fled to France in 1634 and spent his last years in
freedom. Some of his best poetry was written while he was chained in a dungeon;
and during less rigorous confinement he managed to write over a hundred books,
not all of which survive. His best-known work, The City of the Sun 1602;
published 1623, describes a community governed in accordance with astrological
principles, with a priest as head of state. In later political writings,
Campanella attacked Machiavelli and called for either a universal monarchy with the pope as spiritual head or a
universal theocracy with the pope as both spiritual and temporal leader. His
first publication was Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses 1591, which
supported the theories of Telesio and initiated his lifelong attack on Aristotelianism.
He hoped to found a new Christian philosophy based on the two books of nature
and Scripture, both of which are manifestations of God. While he appealed to
sense experience, he was not a straightforward empiricist, for he saw the
natural world as alive and sentient, and he thought of magic as a tool for
utilizing natural processes. In this he was strongly influenced by Ficino.
Despite his own difficulties with Rome, he wrote in support of Galileo.
campbell: n. r. – H. P.
Grice drew some ideas on scientific laws from Campbell -- British physicist and philosopher of science.
A successful experimental physicist, Campbell with A. Wood discovered the
radioactivity of potassium. His analysis of science depended on a sharp
distinction between experimental laws and theories. Experimental laws are
generalizations established by observations. A theory has the following
structure. First, it requires a largely arbitrary hypothesis, which in itself
is untestable. To render it testable, the theory requires a “dictionary” of
propositions linking the hypothesis to scientific laws, which can be
established experimentally. But theories are not merely logical relations
between hypotheses and experimental laws; they also require concrete analogies
or models. Indeed, the models suggest the nature of the propositions in the
dictionary. The analogies are essential components of the theory, and, for
Campbell, are nearly always mechanical. His theory of science greatly
influenced Nagel’s The Structure of Science 1.
camus, A.: H. P. Grice
said that Martin Heidegger is the greatest philosopher alive – He was aware
that he was contesting with Camus – but Grice saw Camus moer as a ‘novelist’
than a philosopher. -- philosophical
novelist and essayist who was also a prose poet and the conscience of his
times. He was born and raised in Algeria, and his experiences as a fatherless,
tubercular youth, as a young playwright and journalist in Algiers, and later in
the anti-G. resistance in Paris during World War II informed everything he
wrote. His best-known writings are not overtly political; his most famous
works, the novel The Stranger written in 0, published in 2 and his book-length
essay The Myth of Sisyphus written in 1, published in 3 explore the notion of
“the absurd,” which Camus alternatively describes as the human condition and as
“a widespread sensitivity of our times.” The absurd, briefly defined, is the
confrontation between ourselves with our
demands for rationality and justice and
an “indifferent universe.” Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to the
endless, futile task of rolling a rock up a mountain whence it would roll back
down of its own weight, thus becomes an exemplar of the human condition,
struggling hopelessly and pointlessly to achieve something. The odd antihero of
The Stranger, on the other hand, unconsciously accepts the absurdity of life.
He makes no judgments, accepts the most repulsive characters as his friends and
neighbors, and remains unmoved by the death of his mother and his own killing
of a man. Facing execution for his crime, he “opens his heart to the benign
indifference of the universe.” But such stoic acceptance is not the message of
Camus’s philosophy. Sisyphus thrives he is even “happy” by virtue of his scorn
and defiance of the gods, and by virtue of a “rebellion” that refuses to give
in to despair. This same theme motivates Camus’s later novel, The Plague7, and
his long essay The Rebel 1. In his last work, however, a novel called The Fall
published in 6, the year before he won the Nobel prize for literature, Camus
presents an unforgettably perverse character named Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who
exemplifies all the bitterness and despair rejected by his previous characters
and in his earlier essays. Clamence, like the character in The Stranger,
refuses to judge people, but whereas Meursault the “stranger” is incapable of
judgment, Clamence who was once a lawyer makes it a matter of philosophical
principle, “for who among us is innocent?” It is unclear where Camus’s thinking
was heading when he was killed in an automobile accident with his publisher,
Gallimard, who survived.
canguilhem: g. H. P. Grice
drew some ideas on scientific laws from Canguillhem -- historian and
philosopher of science. Canguilhem succeeded Gaston Bachelard as director of
the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques at the of Paris. He developed and sometimes revised
Bachelard’s view of science, extending it to issues in the biological and
medical sciences, where he focused particularly on the concepts of the normal
and the pathological The Normal and the Pathological, 6. On his account norms
are not objective in the sense of being derived from value-neutral scientific
inquiry, but are rooted in the biological reality of the organisms that they
regulate. Canguilhem also introduced an important methodological distinction
between concepts and theories. Rejecting the common view that scientific
concepts are simply functions of the theories in which they are embedded, he
argued that the use of concepts to interpret data is quite distinct from the
use of theories to explain the data. Consequently, the same concepts may occur
in very different theoretical contexts. Canguilhem made particularly effective
use of this distinction in tracing the origin of the concept of reflex
action.
captainship. Strawson calls
Grice his captain. In the inaugural lecture. . A struggle on what seems to be
such a From Meaning and Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) TRUTH AND
MEANING central issue in philosophy should have something of a Homeric quality;
and a Homeric struggle calls for gods and heroes. I can at least, though
tentatively, name some living captains and benevolent shades: on the one side,
say, Grice, Austin, and the later Wittgenstein; on the other, Chomsky, Frege,
and the earlier Wittgenstein.
cardinal -- H. P. Grice and
The cardinal virtues, prudence prudential (in ratione) practical wisdom,
courage (fortitude in irascibili), temperance (temperantia in concuspicibili),
and justice (iustitia in voluntate). Grice thought them oxymoronic: “Virtue is
entire, surely!” -- Medievals deemed them cardinal from Latin cardo, ‘hinge’
because of their important or pivotal role in human flourishing. In Plato’s
Republic, Socrates explains them through a doctrine of the three parts of the
soul, suggesting that a person is prudent when knowledge of how to live wisdom
informs her reason, courageous when informed reason governs her capacity for
wrath, temperate when it also governs her appetites, and just when each part
performs its proper task with informed reason in control. Development of
thought on the cardinal virtues was closely tied to the doctrine of the unity
of the virtues, i.e., that a person possessing one virtue will have them
all.
carlyleianim:, T.: When Grice
was feeling that his mode operators made for poor prose he would wonder, “what
Carlyle might think of this!” -- Scottish-born essayist, historian, and social
critic, one of the most popular writers and lecturers in nineteenth-century
Britain. His works include literary criticism, history, and cultural criticism.
With respect to philosophy, his views on the theory of history are his most
significant contributions. According to Carlyle, great personages are the most
important causal factor in history. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in
History 1841 asserts, “Universal History, the history of what man has
accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have
worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers,
patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men
contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in
the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and
embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the
soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the
history of these.” Carlyle’s doctrine has been challenged from many different
directions. Hegelian and Marxist philosophers maintain that the so-called great
men of history are not really the engine of history, but merely reflections of
deeper forces, such as economic ones, while contemporary historians emphasize
the priority of “history from below” the
social history of everyday people as far
more representative of the historical process.
carnapianism: r: the inventor,
with Russell, of the pirot. -- G.-born
philosopher, one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle, a movement loosely
called logical positivism or logical empiricism. He made fundamental
contributions to semantics and the philosophy of science, as well as to the
foundations of probability and inductive logic. He was a staunch advocate of,
and active in, the unity of science movement. Carnap received his Ph.D. in
philosophy from the of Jena in 1. His
first major work was Die Logische Aufbau der Welt 8, in which he sought to
apply the new logic recently developed by Frege and by Russell and Whitehead to
problems in the philosophy of science. Although influential, it was not tr.
until 7, when it appeared as The Logical Structure of the World. It was
important as one of the first clear and unambiguous statements that the
important work of philosophy concerned logical structure: that language and its
logic were to be the focus of attention. In 5 Carnap left his native G.y for
the United States, where he taught at the
of Chicago and then at UCLA. Die Logiche Syntax der Sprach 4 was rapidly
tr. into English, appearing as The Logical Syntax of Language 7. This was
followed in 1 by Introduction to Semantics, and in 2 by The Formalization of
Logic. In 7 Meaning and Necessity appeared; it provided the groundwork for a
modal logic that would mirror the meticulous semantic development of
first-order logic in the first two volumes. One of the most important concepts
introduced in these volumes was that of a state description. A state
description is the linguistic counterpart of a possible world: in a given
language, the most complete description of the world that can be given. Carnap
then turned to one of the most pervasive and important problems to arise in
both the philosophy of science and the theory of meaning. To say that the
meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions under which it would be
verified as the early positivists did or that a scientific theory is verified
by predictions that turn out to be true, is clearly to speak loosely. Absolute
verification does not occur. To carry out the program of scientific philosophy
in a realistic way, we must be able to speak of the support given by
inconclusive evidence, either in providing epistemological justification for
scientific knowledge, or in characterizing the meanings of many of the terms of
our scientific language. This calls for an understanding of probability, or as
Carnap preferred to call it, degree of confirmation. We must distinguish
between two senses of probability: what he called probability1, corresponding
to credibility, and probability2, corresponding to the frequency or empirical
conception of probability defended by Reichenbach and von Mises. ‘Degree of
confirmation’ was to be the formal concept corresponding to credibility. The
first book on this subject, written from the same point of view as the works on
semantics, was The Logical Foundations of Probability 0. The goal was a logical
definition of ‘ch,e’: the degree of confirmation of a hypothesis h, relative to
a body of evidence e, or the degree of rational belief that one whose total
evidence was e should commit to h. Of course we must first settle on a formal
language in which to express the hypothesis and the evidence; for this Carnap
chooses a first-order language based on a finite number of one-place
predicates, and a countable number of individual constants. Against this
background, we perform the following reductions: ‘ch,e’ represents a
conditional probability; thus it can be represented as the ratio of the
absolute probabilCarlyle, Thomas Carnap, Rudolf 118 118 ity of h & e to the absolute
probability of e. Absolute probabilities are represented by the value of a
measure function m, defined for sentences of the language. The problem is to
define m. But every sentence in Carnap’s languages is equivalent to a
disjunction of state descriptions; the measure to be assigned to it must,
according to the probability calculus, be the sum of the measures assigned to
its constituent state descriptions. Now the problem is to define m for state
descriptions. Recall that state descriptions were part of the machinery Carnap
developed earlier. The function c† is a confirmation function based on the
assignment of equal measures to each state description. It is inadequate,
because if h is not entailed by e, c†h,e % m†h, the a priori measure assigned
to h. We cannot “learn from experience.” A measure that does not have that
drawback is m*, which is based on the assignment of equal measures to each
structure description. A structure description is a set of state descriptions;
two state descriptions belong to the same structure description just in case
one can be obtained from the other by a permutation of individual constants.
Within the structure description, equal values are assigned to each state
description. In the next book, The Continuum of Inductive Methods, Carnap takes
the rate at which we learn from experience to be a fundamental parameter of his
assignments of probability. Like measures on state descriptions, the values of
the probability of the singular predictive inference determine all other
probabilities. The “singular predictive inference” is the inference from the
observation that individual 1 has one set of properties, individual 2 has
another set of properties, etc., to the conclusion: individual j will have
property k. Finally, in the last works Studies in Inductive Logic and
Probability, vols. I [1] and II [0], edited with Richard Jeffrey Carnap offered
two long articles constituting his Basic System of Inductive Logic. This system
is built around a language having families of attributes e.g., color or sound
that can be captured by predicates. The basic structure is still monadic, and
the logic still lacks identity, but there are more parameters. There is a
parameter l that reflects the “rate of learning from experience”; a parameter h
that reflects an inductive relation between values of attributes belonging to
families. With the introduction of arbitrary parameters, Carnap was edging
toward a subjective or personalistic view of probability. How far he was
willing to go down the subjectivist garden path is open to question; that he
discovered more to be relevant to inductive logic than the “language” of
science seems clear. Carnap’s work on probability measures on formal languages
is destined to live for a long time. So too is his work on formal semantics. He
was a staunch advocate of the fruitfulness of formal studies in philosophy, of
being clear and explicit, and of offering concrete examples. Beyond the
particular philosophical doctrines he advocated, these commitments characterize
his contribution to philosophy.
cartesianism: The word
‘Cartesianism’ shows that the ‘de’ that the English adored (“How to become a
Brit” – Mykes) is mostly otiose! -- Descartes, R.: v. H. P. Grice, “Descartes
on clear and distinct perception,” -- philosopher, a founder of the “modern
age” and perhaps the most important figure in the intellectual revolution of
the seventeenth century in which the traditional systems of understanding based
on Aristotle were challenged and, ultimately, overthrown. His conception of
philosophy was all-embracing: it encompassed mathematics and the physical
sciences as well as psychology and ethics, and it was based on what he claimed
to be absolutely firm and reliable metaphysical foundations. His approach to
the problems of knowledge, certainty, and the nature of the human mind played a
major part in shaping the subsequent development of philosophy. Life and works.
Descartes was born in a small town near Tours that now bears his name. He was
brought up by his maternal grandmother his mother having died soon after his
birth, and at the age of ten he was sent to the recently founded Jesuit of La Flèche in Anjou, where he remained as a
boarding pupil for nine years. At La Flèche he studied classical literature and
traditional classics-based subjects such as history and rhetoric as well as
natural philosophy based on the Aristotelian system and theology. He later
wrote of La Flèche that he considered it “one of the best schools in Europe,”
but that, as regards the philosophy he had learned there, he saw that “despite
being cultivated for many centuries by the best minds, it contained no point
which was not disputed and hence doubtful.” At age twenty-two having taken a
law degree de re Descartes, René 223
223 at Poitiers, Descartes set out on a series of travels in Europe,
“resolving,” as he later put it, “to seek no knowledge other than that which
could be found either in myself or the great book of the world.” The most
important influence of this early period was Descartes’s friendship with the
Dutchman Isaac Beeckman, who awakened his lifelong interest in mathematics a science in which he discerned precision and
certainty of the kind that truly merited the title of scientia Descartes’s term
for genuine systematic knowledge based on reliable principles. A considerable
portion of Descartes’s energies as a young man was devoted to pure mathematics:
his essay on Geometry published in 1637 incorporated results discovered during
the 1620s. But he also saw mathematics as the key to making progress in the
applied sciences; his earliest work, the Compendium Musicae, written in 1618
and dedicated to Beeckman, applied quantitative principles to the study of
musical harmony and dissonance. More generally, Descartes saw mathematics as a
kind of paradigm for all human understanding: “those long chains composed of
very simple and easy reasonings, which geometers customarily use to arrive at
their most difficult demonstrations, gave me occasion to suppose that all the
things which fall within the scope of human knowledge are interconnected in the
same way” Discourse on the Method, Part II. In the course of his travels,
Descartes found himself closeted, on November 10, 1619, in a “stove-heated
room” in a town in southern G.y, where after a day of intense meditation, he
had a series of vivid dreams that convinced him of his mission to found a new
scientific and philosophical system. After returning to Paris for a time, he
emigrated to Holland in 1628, where he was to live though with frequent changes
of address for most of the rest of his life. By 1633 he had ready a treatise on
cosmology and physics, Le Monde; but he cautiously withdrew the work from
publication when he heard of the condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition for
rejecting as Descartes himself did the traditional geocentric theory of the
universe. But in 1637 Descartes released for publication, in , a sample of his
scientific work: three essays entitled the Optics, Meteorology, and Geometry.
Prefaced to that selection was an autobiographical introduction entitled
Discourse on the Method of rightly conducting one’s reason and reaching the
truth in the sciences. This work, which includes discussion of a number of
scientific issues such as the circulation of the blood, contains in Part IV a
summary of Descartes’s views on knowledge, certainty, and the metaphysical
foundations of science. Criticisms of his arguments here led Descartes to
compose his philosophical masterpiece, the Meditations on First Philosophy,
published in Latin in 1641 a dramatic
account of the voyage of discovery from universal doubt to certainty of one’s
own existence, and the subsequent struggle to establish the existence of God,
the nature and existence of the external world, and the relation between mind
and body. The Meditations aroused enormous interest among Descartes’s
contemporaries, and six sets of objections by celebrated philosophers and
theologians including Mersenne, Hobbes, Arnauld, and Gassendi were published in
the same volume as the first edition a seventh set, by the Jesuit Pierre
Bourdin, was included in the second edition of 1642. A few years later,
Descartes published, in Latin, a mammoth compendium of his metaphysical and
scientific views, the Principles of Philosophy, which he hoped would become
a textbook to rival the standard texts
based on Aristotle. In the later 1640s, Descartes became interested in
questions of ethics and psychology, partly as a result of acute questions about
the implications of his system raised by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia in a
long and fruitful correspondence. The fruits of this interest were published in
1649 in a lengthy treatise entitled The
Passions of the Soul. The same year, Descartes accepted after much hesitation
an invitation to go to Stockholm to give philosophical instruction to Queen Christina
of Sweden. He was required to provide tutorials at the royal palace at five
o’clock in the morning, and the strain of this break in his habits he had
maintained the lifelong custom of lying in bed late into the morning led to his
catching pneumonia. He died just short of his fifty-fourth birthday. The
Cartesian system. In a celebrated simile, Descartes described the whole of
philosophy as like a tree: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk physics, and
the branches are the various particular sciences, including mechanics,
medicine, and morals. The analogy captures at least three important features of
the Cartesian system. The first is its insistence on the essential unity of
knowledge, which contrasts strongly with the Aristotelian conception of the
sciences as a series of separate disciplines, each with its own methods and
standards of precision. The sciences, as Descartes put it in an early notebook,
are all “linked together” in a sequence that is in principle as simple and
straightforward as the series of numbers. The second point conveyed by the tree
simile is the utility of philosophy for ordinary living: the tree is valued for
its fruits, and these are gathered, Descartes points out, “not from the roots
or the trunk but from the ends of the branches”
the practical sciences. Descartes frequently stresses that his principal
motivation is not abstract theorizing for its own sake: in place of the
“speculative philosophy taught in the Schools,” we can and should achieve
knowledge that is “useful in life” and that will one day make us “masters and
possessors of nature.” Third, the likening of metaphysics or “first philosophy”
to the roots of the tree nicely captures the Cartesian belief in what has come
to be known as foundationalism the view
that knowledge must be constructed from the bottom up, and that nothing can be
taken as established until we have gone back to first principles. Doubt and the
foundations of belief. In Descartes’s central work of metaphysics, the
Meditations, he begins his construction project by observing that many of the preconceived
opinions he has accepted since childhood have turned out to be unreliable; so
it is necessary, “once in a lifetime” to “demolish everything and start again,
right from the foundations.” Descartes proceeds, in other words, by applying
what is sometimes called his method of doubt, which is explained in the earlier
Discourse on the Method: “Since I now wished to devote myself solely to the
search for truth, I thought it necessary to . . . reject as if absolutely false
everything in which one could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if I was
left believing anything that was entirely indubitable.” In the Meditations we
find this method applied to produce a systematic critique of previous beliefs,
as follows. Anything based on the senses is potentially suspect, since “I have
found by experience that the senses sometimes deceive, and it is prudent never
to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.” Even such seemingly
straightforward judgments as “I am sitting here by the fire” may be false,
since there is no guarantee that my present experience is not a dream. The
dream argument as it has come to be called leaves intact the truths of
mathematics, since “whether I am awake or asleep two and three make five”; but
Descartes now proceeds to introduce an even more radical argument for doubt
based on the following dilemma. If there is an omnipotent God, he could
presumably cause me to go wrong every time I count two and three; if, on the
other hand, there is no God, then I owe my origins not to a powerful and
intelligent creator, but to some random series of imperfect causes, and in this
case there is even less reason to suppose that my basic intuitions about
mathematics are reliable. By the end of the First Meditation, Descartes finds
himself in a morass of wholesale doubt, which he dramatizes by introducing an
imaginary demon “of the utmost power and cunning” who is systematically
deceiving him in every possible way. Everything I believe in “the sky, the earth and all external
things” might be illusions that the
demon has devised in order to trick me. Yet this very extremity of doubt, when
pushed as far as it will go, yields the first indubitable truth in the
Cartesian quest for knowledge the
existence of the thinking subject. “Let the demon deceive me as much as he may,
he can never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I think I am
something. . . . I am, I exist, is certain, as often as it is put forward by me
or conceived in the mind.” Elsewhere, Descartes expresses this cogito argument
in the famous phrase “Cogito ergo sum” “I am thinking, therefore I exist”.
Having established his own existence, Descartes proceeds in the Third
Meditation to make an inventory of the ideas he finds within him, among which
he identifies the idea of a supremely perfect being. In a much criticized
causal argument he reasons that the representational content or “objective
reality” of this idea is so great that it cannot have originated from inside
his own imperfect mind, but must have been planted in him by an actual perfect
being God. The importance of God in the
Cartesian system can scarcely be overstressed. Once the deity’s existence is
established, Descartes can proceed to reinstate his belief in the world around
him: since God is perfect, and hence would not systematically deceive, the
strong propensity he has given us to believe that many of our ideas come from
external objects must, in general, be sound; and hence the external world
exists Sixth Meditation. More important still, Descartes uses the deity to set
up a reliable method for the pursuit of truth. Human beings, since they are
finite and imperfect, often go wrong; in particular, the data supplied by the
senses is often, as Descartes puts it, “obscure and confused.” But each of us
can nonetheless avoid error, provided we remember to withhold judgment in such
doubtful cases and confine ourselves to the “clear and distinct” perceptions of
the pure intellect. A reliable intellect was God’s gift to man, and if we use
it with the greatest posDescartes, René Descartes, René 225 225 sible care, we can be sure of avoiding
error Fourth Meditation. In this central part of his philosophy, Descartes
follows in a long tradition going back to Augustine with its ultimate roots in
Plato that in the first place is skeptical about the evidence of the senses as
against the more reliable abstract perceptions of the intellect, and in the
second place sees such intellectual knowledge as a kind of illumination derived
from a higher source than man’s own mind. Descartes frequently uses the ancient
metaphor of the “natural light” or “light of reason” to convey this notion that
the fundamental intuitions of the intellect are inherently reliable. The label
‘rationalist’, which is often applied to Descartes in this connection, can be
misleading, since he certainly does not rely on reason alone: in the
development of his scientific theories he allows a considerable role to
empirical observation in the testing of hypotheses and in the understanding of
the mechanisms of nature his “vortex theory” of planetary revolutions is based
on observations of the behavior of whirlpools. What is true, nonetheless, is
that the fundamental building blocks of Cartesian science are the innate ideas
chiefly those of mathematics whose reliability Descartes takes as guaranteed by
their having been implanted in the mind by God. But this in turn gives rise to
a major problem for the Cartesian system, which was first underlined by some of
Descartes’s contemporaries notably Mersenne and Arnauld, and which has come to
be known as the Cartesian circle. If the reliability of the clear and distinct
perceptions of the intellect depends on our knowledge of God, then how can that
knowledge be established in the first place? If the answer is that we can prove
God’s existence from premises that we clearly and distinctly perceive, then
this seems circular; for how are we entitled, at this stage, to assume that our
clear and distinct perceptions are reliable? Descartes’s attempts to deal with
this problem are not entirely satisfactory, but his general answer seems to be
that there are some propositions that are so simple and transparent that, so
long as we focus on them, we can be sure of their truth even without a divine
guarantee. Cartesian science and dualism. The scientific system that Descartes
had worked on before he wrote the Meditations and that he elaborated in his
later work, the Principles of Philosophy, attempts wherever possible to reduce
natural phenomena to the quantitative descriptions of arithmetic and geometry:
“my consideration of matter in corporeal things,” he says in the Principles,
“involves absolutely nothing apart from divisions, shapes and motions.” This
connects with his metaphysical commitment to relying only on clear and distinct
ideas. In place of the elaborate apparatus of the Scholastics, with its
plethora of “substantial forms” and “real qualities,” Descartes proposes to
mathematicize science. The material world is simply an indefinite series of
variations in the shape, size, and motion of the single, simple, homogeneous
matter that he terms res extensa “extended substance”. Under this category he
includes all physical and biological events, even complex animal behavior,
which he regards as simply the result of purely mechanical processes for
non-human animals as mechanical automata, see Discourse, Part V. But there is
one class of phenomena that cannot, on Descartes’s view, be handled in this
way, namely conscious experience. Thought, he frequently asserts, is completely
alien to, and incompatible with, extension: it occupies no space, is unextended
and indivisible. Hence Descartes puts forward a dualistic theory of substance:
in addition to the res extensa that makes up the material universe, there is
res cogitans, or thinking substance, which is entirely independent of matter.
And each conscious individual is a unique thinking substance: “This ‘I’ that is, the soul, by which I am what I am,
is entirely distinct from the body, and would not fail to be what it is even if
the body did not exist.” Descartes’s arguments for the incorporeality of the
soul were challenged by his contemporaries and have been heavily criticized by
subsequent commentators. In the Discourse and the Second Meditation, he lays
great stress on his ability to form a conception of himself as an existing
subject, while at the same time doubting the existence of any physical thing;
but this, as the critics pointed out, seems inadequate to establish the
conclusion that he is a res cogitans a
being whose whole essence consists simply in thought. I may be able to imagine
myself without a body, but this hardly proves that I could in reality exist
without one see further the Synopsis to the Meditations. A further problem is
that our everyday experience testifies to the fact that we are not incorporeal
beings, but very much creatures of flesh and blood. “Nature teaches me by the
sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on,” Descartes admits in the Sixth
Meditation, “that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in
a ship, but that I am very closely Descartes, René Descartes, René 226 226 joined and as it were intermingled with
it.” Yet how can an incorporeal soul interact with the body in this way? In his
later writings, Descartes speaks of the “union of soul and body” as a
“primitive notion” see letters to Elizabeth of May 21 and June 28, 1643; by
this he seems to have meant that, just as there are properties such as length
that belong to body alone, and properties such as understanding that belong to mind alone, so there are items
such as sensations that are irreducibly psychophysical, and that belong to me
insofar as I am an embodied consciousness. The explanation of such
psychophysical events was the task Descartes set himself in his last work, The
Passions of the Soul; here he developed his theory that the pineal gland in the
brain was the “seat of the soul,” where data from the senses were received via
the nervous system, and where bodily movements were initiated. But despite the
wealth of physiological detail Descartes provides, the central philosophical
problems associated with his dualistic account of humans as hybrid entities
made up of physical body and immaterial soul are, by common consent, not
properly sorted out. Influence. Despite the philosophical difficulties that
beset the Cartesian system, Descartes’s vision of a unified understanding of
reality has retained a powerful hold on scientists and philosophers ever since.
His insistence that the path to progress in science lay in the direction of quantitative
explanations has been substantially vindicated. His attempt to construct a
system of knowledge by starting from the subjective awareness of the conscious
self has been equally important, if only because so much of the epistemology of
our own time has been a reaction against the autocentric perspective from which
Descartes starts out. As for the Cartesian theory of the mind, it is probably
fair to say that the dualistic approach is now widely regarded as raising more
problems than it solves. But Descartes’s insistence that the phenomena of
conscious experience are recalcitrant to explanation in purely physical terms
remains deeply influential, and the cluster of profound problems that he raised
about the nature of the human mind and its relation to the material world are
still very far from being adequately resolved.
Cartesianism -- Elizabeth of Bohemia 160, G. Princess whose
philosophical reputation rests on her correspondence with Descartes. The most
heavily discussed portion of this correspondence focuses on the relationship
between the mind and the body and on Descartes’s claim that the mind-body union
is a simple notion. Her discussions of free will and of the nature of the
sovereign good also have philosophical interest.
cassirer: philosopher and
intellectual historian. He was born in the G. city of Breslau now Wroclaw,
Poland and educated at various G. universities. He completed his studies iat
Marburg under Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism.
Cassirer lectured at Berlin before accepting a professorship at the newly
founded of Hamburg. With the rise of
Nazism he left Germany, going first to a visiting appointment at (of all
places), All Souls, Oxford and then to a professorship at Göteborg, Sweden.
Seeing that Oxford didn’t care for him nor he for Oxford, he went to the New
World; he taught first at Yale in New Haven, on the Long Island Sound, and then
at Columbia. Cassirer’s oeuvre may be divided into those in the history of
philosophy and culture and those that present his own systematic thought. The
former include major editions of Leibniz and Kant; “The Problem of Knowledge,” which
traces the subject from Nicholas of Cusa to the twentieth century; and
individual works on Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Goethe, the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and English Platonism, of all movements. The
latter, systematic, oeuvre, include his masterpiece, “Symbolic Form,” which
presents culture based on types of symbolism and individual oeuvre concerned
with problems in philosophy. Two of his best-known essays are “An Essay on Man”
and “The Myth of the State.” Cassirer did not consider his systematic
philosophy and his historical studies as separate endeavors; each grounded the
other. Because of his involvement with the Marburg School, his philosophical
position is frequently but mistakenly typed as neo-Kantian. Kant is an
important influence on him, but so are Hegel, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt,
Goethe, Leibniz, and Vico. Cassirer derives his principal philosophical concept,
that of “symbolic form,” most directly from Heinrich Hertz’s conception of
notation in mechanics and the conception of the “symbol” in art of the Hegelian
aesthetician, Friedrich Theodor Vischer. In a wider sense his conception of a “symbolic
form” is a transformation of “idea” and “form” within the whole tradition of
philosophical idealism. Cassirer’s conception of the “symbolic form” is NOT
based, as Grice’s and Peirce’s isn’t, on a distinction between the symbolic form
and the literal form. In Cassirer’s view all human knowledge depends on the
power to form experience through some type of “symbol.”. The forms of human
knowledge are coextensive with forms of human culture. The form Cassirer most
often analyzes is language. Language as a symbolic form yields to a total
system of human knowledge and culture that is the subject matter of philosophy.
conception of the “symbol form” has influenced a few Griceian with continental
tendendies. His studies of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment still stand as
groundbreaking works in intellectual history.
griceian casuistry: the case-analysis
approach to the interpretation of general moral rules. Casuistry starts with
paradigm cases of how and when a given general moral rule should be applied,
and then reasons by analogy to cases in which the proper application of the
rule is less obvious e.g., a case in
which lying is the only way for a priest not to betray a secret revealed in
confession. The point of considering the series of cases is to ascertain the
morally relevant similarities and differences between cases. Casuistry’s heyday
was the first half of the seventeenth century. Reacting against casuistry’s
popularity with the Jesuits and against its tendency to qualify general moral
rules, Pascal penned a polemic against casuistry from which the term never
recovered see his Provincial Letters, 1656. But the kind of reasoning to which
the term refers is flourishing in contemporary practical ethics.
categorical theory: H. P. Grice
lectured at Oxford on Aristotle’s Categories in joint seminars with J. L.
Austin and P. F. Strawson, a theory all
of whose models are isomorphic. Because of its weak expressive power, in
first-order logic with identity only theories with a finite model can be
categorical; without identity no theories are categorical. A more interesting
property, therefore, is being categorical in power: a theory is categorical in
power a when the theory has, up to isomorphism, only one model with a domain of
cardinality a. Categoricity in power shows the capacity to characterize a
structure completely, only limited by cardinality. For example, the first-order
theory of dense order without endpoints is categorical in power w the
cardinality of the natural numbers. The first-order theory of simple discrete
orderings with initial element, the ordering of the natural numbers, is not
categorical in power w. There are countable discrete orders, not isomorphic to
the natural numbers, that are elementary equivalent to it, i.e., have the same
elementary, first-order theory. In first-order logic categorical theories are
complete. This is not necessarily true for extensions of first-order logic for
which no completeness theorem holds. In such a logic a set of axioms may be
categorical without providing an informative characterization of the theory of
its unique model. The term ‘elementary equivalence’ was introduced around 6 by
Tarski for the property of being indistinguishable by elementary means.
According to Oswald Veblen, who first used the term ‘categorical’ in 4, in a
discussion of the foundations of geometry, that term was suggested to him by
the pragmatist John Dewey.
categoricity: Grice
distinguishes a meta-category, as categoricity, from category itself. He gave
seminars on Aristotle’s categories at Oxford in joint seminars with J. L.
Austin and P. F. Strawson. the semantic property belonging to a set of
sentences, a “postulate set,” that implicitly defines completely describes, or
characterizes up to isomorphism the structure of its intended interpretation or
standard model. The best-known categorical set of sentences is the postulate
set for number theory attributed to Peano, which completely characterizes the
structure of an arithmetic progression. This structure is exemplified by the
system of natural numbers with zero as distinguished element and successor
addition of one as distinguished function. Other exemplifications of this
structure are obtained by taking as distinguished element an arbitrary integer,
taking as distinguished function the process of adding an arbitrary positive or
negative integer and taking as universe of discourse or domain the result of
repeated application of the distinguished function to the distinguished
element. See, e.g., Russell’s Introduction to the Mathematical Philosophy, 8.
More precisely, a postulate set is defined to be categorical if every two of
its models satisfying interpretations or realizations are isomorphic to each
other, where, of course, two interpretations are isomorphic if between their
respective universes of discourse there exists a one-to-one correspondence by
which the distinguished elements, functions, relations, etc., of the one are
mapped exactly onto those of the other. The importance of the analytic geometry
of Descartes involves the fact that the system of points of a geometrical line
with the “left-of relation” distinguished is isomorphic to the system of real
numbers with the “less-than” relation distinguished. Categoricity, the ideal
limit of success for the axiomatic method considered as a method for
characterizing subject matter rather than for reorganizing a science, is known
to be impossible with respect to certain subject matters using certain formal
languages. The concept of categoricity can be traced back at least as far as
Dedekind; the word is due to Dewey.
category: H. P. Grice and
J. L. Austin, “Categories.” H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, “Categories.” an
ultimate class. Categories are the highest genera of entities in the world.
They may contain species but are not themselves species of any higher genera.
Aristotle, the first philosopher to discuss categories systematically, listed
ten, including substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, and time. If a
set of categories is complete, then each entity in the world will belong to a
category and no entity will belong to more than one category. A prominent
example of a set of categories is Descartes’s dualistic classification of mind
and matter. This example brings out clearly another feature of categories: an
attribute that can belong to entities in one category cannot be an attribute of
entities in any other category. Thus, entities in the category of matter have
extension and color while no entity in the category of mind can have extension
or color.
category mistake. Grice’s example:
You’re the cream in my coffee. Usually a metaphor is a conversational implicaturum
due to a category mistake – But since obviously the mistake is intentional it
is not really a mistake! Grice prefers to speak of ‘categorial falsity.’ What
Ryle has in mind is different and he does mean ‘mistake.’ the placing of an
entity in the wrong category. In one of Ryle’s examples, to place the activity
of exhibiting team spirit in the same class with the activities of pitching,
batting, and catching is to make a category mistake; exhibiting team spirit is
not a special function like pitching or batting but instead a way those special
functions are performed. A second use of ‘category mistake’ is to refer to the
attribution to an entity of a property which that entity cannot have not merely
does not happen to have, as in ‘This memory is violet’ or, to use an example
from Carnap, ‘Caesar is a prime number’. These two kinds of category mistake
may seem different, but both involve misunderstandings of the natures of the
things being talked about. It is thought that they go beyond simple error or
ordinary mistakes, as when one attributes a property to a thing which that
thing could have but does not have, since category mistakes involve
attributions of properties e.g., being a special function to things e.g., team
spirit that those things cannot have. According to Ryle, the test for category
differences depends on whether replacement of one expression for another in the
same sentence results in a type of unintelligibility that he calls “absurdity.”
category theory, H. P. Grice
lectured on Aristotle’s categories in joint seminars at Oxford with J. L.
Austin and P. F. Strawson, a mathematical theory that studies the universal
properties of structures via their relationships with one another. A category C
consists of two collections Obc and Morc , the objects and the morphisms of C,
satisfying the following conditions: i for each pair a, b of objects there is
associated a collection Morc a, b of morphisms such that each member of Morc
belongs to one of these collections; ii for each object a of Obc , there is a
morphism ida , called the identity on a; iii a composition law associating with
each morphism f: a P b and each morphism g: b P c a morphism gf:a P c, called
the composite of f and g; iv for morphisms f: a P b, g: b P c, and h: c P d,
the equation hgf % hgf holds; v for any morphism f: a P b, we have idbf % f and
fida % f. Sets with specific structures together with a collection of mappings
preserving these structures are categories. Examples: 1 sets with functions
between them; 2 groups with group homomorphisms; 3 topological spaces with
continuous functions; 4 sets with surjections instead of arbitrary maps
constitute a different category. But a category need not be composed of sets
and set-theoretical maps. Examples: 5 a collection of propositions linked by
the relation of logical entailment is a category and so is any preordered set;
6 a monoid taken as the unique object and its elements as the morphisms is a
category. The properties of an object of a category are determined by the
morphisms that are coming out of and going in this object. Objects with a
universal property occupy a key position. Thus, a terminal object a is
characterized by the following universal property: for any object b there is a
unique morphism from b to a. A singleton set is a terminal object in the
category of sets. The Cartesian product of sets, the product of groups, and the
conjunction of propositions are all terminal objects in appropriate categories.
Thus category theory unifies concepts and sheds a new light on the notion of
universality.
Grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational mode: While Grice could
be jocular, in an English way, about the number of maxims within each category
– he surely would not like to joke as far as to be cavalier about the NUMBER of
categories: Four was the number of functions from which the twelve categories
rramify, Kant, or “Ariskant,” but Grice takes the function for the category -- four
is for Ariskantian Grice. This is Aristotle’s hexis. This category posed a
special conceptual problem to Grice. Recall that his categories are invoked
only by their power to generate conversational implciata. But a conversational implicaturum
is non-detachable. That is, being based on universalistic principles of general
rationality, it cannot attach to an EXPRESSION, less so to the ‘meaning’ of an
EXPRESSION: “if” and “provided” are REALISATIONS of the concept of the
conditionality. Now, the conversational supra-maxim, ‘be perspicuous’ [sic], is
supposed to apply NOT to the content, or matter, but to the FORM. (Strictly,
quantitas and qualitas applies to matter, RELATIO applies to the link between
at least two matters). Grice tweaks things in such a way that he is happy, and
so am I. This is a pun on Aristkant’s Kategorie (Ammonius, tropos, Boëthius, modus, Kant Modalitat). Gesichtspuncte
der Modalität in assertorische, apodiktische und problematische hat sich aus
der Aristotelischen Eintheilung hervorgebildet (Anal. Dr. 1, 2): 7@ợc gócois
atv n 100 incozy h kỹ kvayxns Úndozav û toù {VJÉZEo fai Úndozev: Doch geht
diese Aristotelische Stelle vielmehr auf die analogen objectiven Verhältnisse,
als auf den subjectiven Gewissheitsgrad. Der Zusatz Svvatóv, įvsezóuevov, és
åviyans, jedoch auch eine adverbiale Bestimmung wie taméws in dem Satze ý
σελήνη ταχέως αποκαθίσταται, heisst bei Ammonius τρόπος (zu περί ερμ. Cap. 12)
und bei Boëthius modus. Kant (Kritik der r. Vern. § 9-11; Prolegom. $ 21, Log.
§ 30) gründet die Eintheilung nach der Modalität auf die modalen Kategorien:
Möglichkeit und Unmöglichkeit, Dasein und Nichtsein, Nothwendigkeit und
Zufälligkeit, wobei jedoch die Zusammenstellung der Unmöglichkeit, die eine
negative Nothwendigkeit ist, mit der Möglichkeit, und ebenso der Zufälligkeit,
die das nicht als nothwendig erkannte Dasein bezeichnet, mit der Nothwendigkeit
eine Ungenauigkeit enthält: die Erkenntniss der Unmöglichkeit ist nicht ein
problematisches, sondern ein (negativ-) apodiktisches Urtheil (was Kant in der
Anwendung selbst anerkennt, indem er z. B. Krit. der r. V. S. 191 die Formel:
es ist unmöglich etc. als Ausdruck einer apodiktischen Gewissheit betrachtet),
und die Erkenntniss des Zufälligen ist nicht ein apodiktisches, sondern ein
assertorisches Urtheil. Ausserdem aber hat Kant das subjective und objective
Element in den Kategorien der Qualität und Modalität nicht bestimmt genug
unterschieden.
Grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational quality: While Grice could
be cavalier about the number of maxims falling under the category of
conversational quality, he surely would not be cavalier about the number of
categories themselves. Four were the functions from which the twelve categories
ramify for Ariskant, and four were for Grice: he takes the function from Kant,
but the spirit from Aristotle. This is
Aristotle’s universal, poiotes. This was originally the desideratum of
conversational candour. At that point, there was no Kantian scheme of
categories in the horizon. Candour Grice arbitrarily contrasts with clarity –
and so the desideratum of conversational candour sometimes clashes with the
desideratum of conversational clarity. One may not be able to provide a less
convoluted utterance (“It is raining”) but use the less clear, but more candid,
“It might be raining, for all I know.” A pun on Aristkan’s Kategorie, poiotes,
qualitas, Qualitat. Expressions which
are in no way composite signify substance, quantity, quality, relation, place,
time, position, state, action, or affection. To sketch my meaning roughly,
examples of substance are 'man' or 'the horse', of quantity, such terms as 'two
cubits long' or 'three cubits long', of quality, such attributes as 'white',
'grammatical'.
Grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational quantity: While Grice could
be cavalier about the number of maxims falling under quantity, he was not about
the number of categories itself. Four was the number of functions out of which
the twelve categories spring for Ariskant, and four was for Grice. He takes the
function (the letter) from Kant, but the spirit from Aristotle. This is
Aristotle’s universal, posotes. Grice would often use ‘a fortiori,’ and then it
dawned on him. “All I need is a principle of conversational fortitude. This
will give the Oxonians the Graeco-Roman pedigree they deserve.’ a pun on Ariskant’s Kategorie, posotes,
quantitas, Quantitat. Grice expands this as ‘quantity of information,’ or
‘informative content’ – which then as he recognises overlaps with the category
of conversational quality, because ‘false information’ is a misnomer. Expressions
which are in no way composite signify substance, quantity, quality, relation,
place, time, position, state, action, or affection. To sketch my meaning
roughly, examples of substance are 'man' or 'the horse', of quantity, such
terms as 'two cubits long' or 'three cubits long'
Grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational relation: While Grice could
be cavalier about the number of maxims under the category of relation, he was
not about the number of categories: four were the number of functions out of
which the twelve categories spring for Ariskant and four were for Grice: he
takes the letter (function) from Kant, and the spirit from Aristotle. This is
Aristotle’s ‘pros ti.’ f there are categories of being, and categories of
thought, and categories of expression, surely there is room for the
‘conversational category.’ A pun on Ariskant’s Kategorie (pros ti, ad aliquid,
Relation). Surely a move has to relate to the previous move, and should include
a tag as to what move will relate. Expressions which are in no way composite
signify substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state,
action, or affection. To sketch my meaning roughly, examples of substance are
'man' or 'the horse', of quantity, such terms as 'two cubits long' or 'three
cubits long', of quality, such attributes as 'white', 'grammatical'. 'Double',
'half', 'greater', fall under the category of relation.
causatum: Is the causatum involved in the communicatum. Grice
relies on this only in Meaning Revisited, where he presents a transcendental
argument for the justification. This is what is referred in the literature as
“H. P. Grice’s Triangle.” Borrowing from Aristotle in De Interpretatione, Grice
speaks of three corners of the triangle and correspondences obtaining between
them. There’s a psychophysical correspondence between the soul of the emissor,
the soul of the emissee, and the shared experience of the denotata of the
communication device the emissor employs. Then there’s the psychosemiotic
correspondence between the communication device and the state of the soul in
the emissor that is transferred, in a soul-to-soul transfer to the emissee. And
finally, there is a semiophyiscal correspondence between the communication
device and the world. When it comes to the causation, the belief that there is
fire is caused by there being fire. The emissor wants to transfer his belief,
and utters. “Smoke!”. The soul-to-soul transfer is effected. The fire that
caused the smoke that caused the belief in the the emissor now causes a belief
in the emissee. If that’s not a causal account of communication, I don’t know
what it is. Grice is no expressionist in that a solipsistic telementational
model is of no use if there is no ‘hookup’ as he puts it with the world that
causes this ‘shared experience’ that is improved by the existence of a
communication device. Grice’s idea of
‘cause’ is his ‘bite’ on reality. He chooses ‘Phenomenalism’ as an enemy.
Causal realism is at the heart of Grice’s programme. As an Oxonian, he was well
aware that to trust a cause is to be anti-Cambridge, where they follow Hume’s
and Kant’s scepticism. Grice uses ‘cause’ rather casually. His most serious
joke is “Charles I’s decapitation willed his death” – but it is not easy to
trace a philosopher who explicitly claim that ‘to cause’ is ‘to will.’ For in God the means and the end preexist in
the cause as willed together.
Causation figures large in Grice, notably re: the perceptum. The agent
perceives that the pillar box is red. The cause is that the pillar box is red.
Out of that, Grice constructs a whole theory of conversation. Why would someone
just report what a THING SEEMS to him when he has no doubt that it was THE
THING that caused the thing to SEEM red to him? Applying some sort of
helpfulness, it works: the addressee is obviously more interested in what the
thing IS, not what it seems. A sense-datum is not something you can eat. An
apple is. So, the assumption is that a report of what a thing IS is more
relevant than a report about what a thing SEEMS. So, Grice needs to find a rationale that
justifies, ceteris paribus, the utterance of “The thing seems phi.” Following
helpfulness, U utters “The thing seems phi” when the U is not in a position to
say what the thing IS phi. The denial, “The thing is not phi” is in the air,
and also the doubt, “The thing may not be phi.” Most without a philosophical
background who do not take Grice’s joke of echoing Kant’s categories (Kant had
12, not 4!) play with quantitas, qualitas, relatio and modus. Grice in “Causal”
uses ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ but grants he won’t ‘determine’ in what way ‘the thing
seems phi’ is ‘weaker’ than ‘the thing is phi.’ It might well be argued that
it’s STRONGER: the thing SEEEMS TO BE phi.’ In the previous “Introduction to
Logical Theory,” Strawson just refers to Grice’s idea of a ‘pragmatic rule’ to
the effect that one utter the LOGICALLY stronger proposition. Let’s revise
dates. Whereas Grice says that his confidence in the success of “Causal,” he
ventured with Strawson’s “Intro,” Strawson is citing Grice already. Admittedly,
Strawson adds, “in a different context.” But Grice seems pretty sure that “The
thing seems phi” is WEAKER than “The thing is phi.” In 1961 he is VERY CLEAR
that while what he may have said to Strawson that Strawson reported in that
footnote was in terms of LOGICAL STRENGTH (in terms of entailment, for
extensional contexts). In “Causal,” Grice is clear that he does not think
LOGICAL STRENGTH applies to intensional contexts. In later revisions, it is not
altogether clear how he deals with the ‘doubt or denial.’ He seems to have been
more interested in refuting G. A. Paul (qua follower of Witters) than anything
else. In his latest reformulation of the principle, now a conversational
category, he is not specific about phenomenalist reports. A causal law is a
statement describing a regular and invariant connection between types of events
or states, where the connections involved are causal in some sense. When one
speaks of causal laws as distinguished from laws that are not 123 category
mistake causal law 123 causal, the
intended distinction may vary. Sometimes, a law is said to be causal if it
relates events or states occurring at successive times, also called a law of
succession: e.g., ‘Ingestion of strychnine leads to death.’ A causal law in
this sense contrasts with a law of coexistence, which connects events or states
occurring at the same time e.g., the Wiedemann-Franz law relating thermal and
electric conductivity in metals. One important kind of causal law is the
deterministic law. Causal laws of this kind state exceptionless connections
between events, while probabilistic or statistical laws specify probability
relationships between events. For any system governed by a set of deterministic
laws, given the state of a system at a time, as characterized by a set of state
variables, these laws will yield a unique state of the system for any later
time or, perhaps, at any time, earlier or later. Probabilistic laws will yield,
for a given antecedent state of a system, only a probability value for the
occurrence of a certain state at a later time. The laws of classical mechanics
are often thought to be paradigmatic examples of causal laws in this sense,
whereas the laws of quantum mechanics are claimed to be essentially
probabilistic. Causal laws are sometimes taken to be laws that explicitly
specify certain events as causes of certain other events. Simple laws of this kind
will have the form ‘Events of kind F cause events of kind G’; e.g., ‘Heating
causes metals to expand’. A weaker related concept is this: a causal law is one
that states a regularity between events which in fact are related as cause to
effect, although the statement of the law itself does not say so laws of motion
expressed by differential equations are perhaps causal laws in this sense.
These senses of ‘causal law’ presuppose a prior concept of causation. Finally,
causal laws may be contrasted with teleological laws, laws that supposedly
describe how certain systems, in particular biological organisms, behave so as
to achieve certain “goals” or “end states.” Such laws are sometimes claimed to
embody the idea that a future state that does not as yet exist can exert an
influence on the present behavior of a system. Just what form such laws take
and exactly how they differ from ordinary laws have not been made wholly clear,
however. Grice was not too happy with
the causal theory of proper names, the view that proper names designate what
they name by virtue of a kind of causal connection to it. Perhaps his antipathy
was due to the fact that he was Herbert Grice, and so was his father. This led
Grice to start using once at Clifton and Oxford, “H. P.” and eventually,
dropping the “Herbert” altogether and become “Paul Grice.” This view is a
special case, and in some instances an unwarranted interpretation, of a direct
reference view of names. On this approach, proper names, e.g., ‘Machiavelli’,
are, as J. S. Mill wrote, “purely denotative. . . . they denote the individuals
who are called by them; but they do not indicate or imply any attributes as
belonging to those individuals” A System of Logic, 1879. Proper names may
suggest certain properties to many competent speakers, but any such associated
information is no part of the definition of the name. Names, on this view, have
no definitions. What connects a name to what it names is not the latter’s
satisfying some condition specified in the name’s definition. Names, instead,
are simply attached to things, applied as labels, as it were. A proper name,
once attached, becomes a socially available device for making the relevant name
bearer a subject of discourse. On the other leading view, the descriptivist
view, a proper name is associated with something like a definition.
‘Aristotle’, on this view, applies by definition to whoever satisfies the
relevant properties e.g., is ‘the
teacher of Alexander the Great, who wrote the Nicomachean Ethics’. Russell,
e.g., maintained that ordinary proper names which he contrasted with logically
proper or genuine names have definitions, that they are abbreviated definite
descriptions. Frege held that names have sense, a view whose proper
interpretation remains in dispute, but is often supposed to be closely related
to Russell’s approach. Others, most notably Searle, have defended descendants
of the descriptivist view. An important variant, sometimes attributed to Frege,
denies that names have articulable definitions, but nevertheless associates
them with senses. And the bearer will still be, by definition as it were, the
unique thing to satisfy the relevant mode of presentation. causal
overdetermination causal theory of proper names 124 124 The direct reference approach is
sometimes misleadingly called the causal theory of names. But the key idea need
have nothing to do with causation: a proper name functions as a tag or label
for its bearer, not as a surrogate for a descriptive expression. Whence the
allegedly misleading term ‘causal theory of names’? Contemporary defenders of
Mill’s conception like Keith Donnellan and Kripke felt the need to expand upon
Mill’s brief remarks. What connects a present use of a name with a referent?
Here Donnellan and Kripke introduce the notion of a “historical chains of
communication.” As Kripke tells the story, a baby is baptized with a proper
name. The name is used, first by those present at the baptism, subsequently by
those who pick up the name in conversation, reading, and so on. The name is
thus propagated, spread by usage “from link to link as if by a chain” Naming
and Necessity, 0. There emerges a historical chain of uses of the name that,
according to Donnellan and Kripke, bridges the gap between a present use of the
name and the individual so named. This “historical chain of communication” is
occasionally referred to as a “casual chain of communication.” The idea is that
one’s use of the name can be thought of as a causal factor in one’s listener’s
ability to use the name to refer to the same individual. However, although
Kripke in Naming and Necessity does occasionally refer to the chain of
communication as causal, he more often simply speaks of the chain of
communication, or of the fact that the name has been passed “by tradition from
link to link” p. 106. The causal aspect is not one that Kripke underscores. In
more recent writings on the topic, as well as in lectures, Kripke never
mentions causation in this connection, and Donnellan questions whether the
chain of communication should be thought of as a causal chain. This is not to
suggest that there is no view properly called a “causal theory of names.” There
is such a view, but it is not the view of Kripke and Donnellan. The causal
theory of names is a view propounded by physicalistically minded philosophers
who desire to “reduce” the notion of “reference” to something more
physicalistically acceptable, such as the notion of a causal chain running from
“baptism” to later use. This is a view whose motivation is explicitly rejected
by Kripke, and should be sharply distinguished from the more popular anti-Fregean
approach sketched above. Causation is the relation between cause and effect, or
the act of bringing about an effect, which may be an event, a state, or an
object say, a statue. The concept of causation has long been recognized as one
of fundamental philosophical importance. Hume called it “the cement of the
universe”: causation is the relation that connects events and objects of this
world in significant relationships. The concept of causation seems pervasively
present in human discourse. It is expressed by not only ‘cause’ and its
cognates but by many other terms, such as ‘produce’, ‘bring about’, ‘issue’,
‘generate’, ‘result’, ‘effect’, ‘determine’, and countless others. Moreover,
many common transitive verbs “causatives”, such as ‘kill’, ‘break’, and ‘move’,
tacitly contain causal relations e.g., killing involves causing to die. The
concept of action, or doing, involves the idea that the agent intentionally
causes a change in some object or other; similarly, the concept of perception
involves the idea that the object perceived causes in the perceiver an
appropriate perceptual experience. The physical concept of force, too, appears
to involve causation as an essential ingredient: force is the causal agent of
changes in motion. Further, causation is intimately related to explanation: to
ask for an explanation of an event is, often, to ask for its cause. It is
sometimes thought that our ability to make predictions, and inductive inference
in general, depends on our knowledge of causal connections or the assumption
that such connections are present: the knowledge that water quenches thirst
warrants the predictive inference from ‘X is swallowing water’ to ‘X’s thirst
will be quenched’. More generally, the identification and systematic
description of causal relations that hold in the natural world have been
claimed to be the preeminent aim of science. Finally, causal concepts play a
crucial role in moral and legal reasoning, e.g., in the assessment of
responsibilities and liabilities. Event causation is the causation of one event
by another. A sequence of causally connected events is called a causal chain.
Agent causation refers to the act of an agent person, object in bringing about
a change; thus, my opening the window i.e., my causing the window to open is an
instance of agent causation. There is a controversy as to whether agent
causation is reducible to event causation. My opening the window seems
reducible to event causation since in reality a certain motion of my arms, an
event, causes the window to open. Some philosophers, however, have claimed that
not all cases of agent causation are so reducible. Substantival causation is
the creation of a genuinely new substance, or object, rather than causing
changes in preexisting substances, or merely rearranging them. The possibility
of substantival causation, at least in the natural world, has been disputed by
some philosophers. Event causation, however, has been the primary focus of
philosophical discussion in the modern and contemporary period. The analysis of
event causation has been controversial. The following four approaches have been
prominent: the regularity analysis, the counterfactual analysis, the
manipulation analysis, and the probabilistic analysis. The heart of the
regularity or nomological analysis, associated with Hume and J. S. Mill, is the
idea that causally connected events must instantiate a general regularity
between like kinds of events. More precisely: if c is a cause of e, there must
be types or kinds of events, F and G, such that c is of kind F, e is of kind G,
and events of kind F are regularly followed by events of kind G. Some take the
regularity involved to be merely de facto “constant conjunction” of the two
event types involved; a more popular view is that the regularity must hold as a
matter of “nomological necessity” i.e.,
it must be a “law.” An even stronger view is that the regularity must represent
a causal law. A law that does this job of subsuming causally connected events
is called a “covering” or “subsumptive” law, and versions of the regularity
analysis that call for such laws are often referred to as the “covering-law” or
“nomic-subsumptive” model of causality. The regularity analysis appears to give
a satisfactory account of some aspects of our causal concepts: for example,
causal claims are often tested by re-creating the event or situation claimed to
be a cause and then observing whether a similar effect occurs. In other
respects, however, the regularity account does not seem to fare so well: e.g.,
it has difficulty explaining the apparent fact that we can have knowledge of
causal relations without knowledge of general laws. It seems possible to know,
for instance, that someone’s contraction of the flu was caused by her exposure
to a patient with the disease, although we know of no regularity between such
exposures and contraction of the disease it may well be that only a very small
fraction of persons who have been exposed to flu patients contract the disease.
Do I need to know general regularities about itchings and scratchings to know
that the itchy sensation on my left elbow caused me to scratch it? Further, not
all regularities seem to represent causal connections e.g., Reid’s example of
the succession of day and night; two successive symptoms of a disease.
Distinguishing causal from non-causal regularities is one of the main problems
confronting the regularity theorist. According to the counterfactual analysis,
what makes an event a cause of another is the fact that if the cause event had
not occurred the effect event would not have. This accords with the idea that
cause is a condition that is sine qua non for the occurrence of the effect. The
view that a cause is a necessary condition for the effect is based on a similar
idea. The precise form of the counterfactual account depends on how
counterfactuals are understood e.g., if counterfactuals are explained in terms
of laws, the counterfactual analysis may turn into a form of the regularity
analysis. The counterfactual approach, too, seems to encounter various
difficulties. It is true that on the basis of the fact that if Larry had
watered my plants, as he had promised, my plants would not have died, I could
claim that Larry’s not watering my plants caused them to die. But it is also
true that if George Bush had watered my plants, they would not have died; but
does that license the claim that Bush’s not watering my plants caused them to
die? Also, there appear to be many cases of dependencies expressed by counterfactuals
that, however, are not cases of causal dependence: e.g., if Socrates had not
died, Xanthippe would not have become a widow; if I had not raised my hand, I
would not have signaled. The question, then, is whether these non-causal
counterfactuals can be distinguished from causal counterfactuals without the
use of causal concepts. There are also questions about how we could verify
counterfactuals in particular, whether
our knowledge of causal counterfactuals is ultimately dependent on knowledge of
causal laws and regularities. Some have attempted to explain causation in terms
of action, and this is the manipulation analysis: the cause is an event or
state that we can produce at will, or otherwise manipulate, to produce a
certain other event as an effect. Thus, an event is a cause of another provided
that by bringing about the first event we can bring about the second. This
account exploits the close connection noted earlier between the concepts of
action and cause, and highlights the important role that knowledge of causal
connections plays in our control of natural events. However, as an analysis of
the concept of cause, it may well have things backward: the concept of action
seems to be a richer and more complex concept that presupposes the concept of
cause, and an analysis of cause in terms of action could be accused of
circularity. The reason we think that someone’s exposure to a flu patient was
the cause of her catching the disease, notwithstanding the absence of an
appropriate regularity even one of high probability, may be this: exposure to
flu patients increases the probability of contracting the disease. Thus, an
event, X, may be said to be a probabilistic cause of an event, Y, provided that
the probability of the occurrence of Y, given that X has occurred, is greater
than the antecedent probability of Y. To meet certain obvious difficulties,
this rough definition must be further elaborated e.g., to eliminate the
possibility that X and Y are collateral effects of a common cause. There is
also the question whether probabilistic causation is to be taken as an analysis
of the general concept of causation, or as a special kind of causal relation,
or perhaps only as evidence indicating the presence of a causal relationship.
Probabilistic causation has of late been receiving increasing attention from
philosophers. When an effect is brought about by two independent causes either
of which alone would have sufficed, one speaks of causal overdetermination.
Thus, a house fire might have been caused by both a short circuit and a
simultaneous lightning strike; either event alone would have caused the fire,
and the fire, therefore, was causally overdetermined. Whether there are actual
instances of overdetermination has been questioned; one could argue that the
fire that would have been caused by the short circuit alone would not have been
the same fire, and similarly for the fire that would have been caused by the
lightning alone. The steady buildup of pressure in a boiler would have caused
it to explode but for the fact that a bomb was detonated seconds before,
leading to a similar effect. In such a case, one speaks of preemptive, or
superseding, cause. We are apt to speak of causes in regard to changes;
however, “unchanges,” e.g., this table’s standing here through some period of
time, can also have causes: the table continues to stand here because it is
supported by a rigid floor. The presence of the floor, therefore, can be called
a sustaining cause of the table’s continuing to stand. A cause is usually
thought to precede its effect in time; however, some have argued that we must
allow for the possibility of a cause that is temporally posterior to its
effect backward causation sometimes
called retrocausation. And there is no universal agreement as to whether a
cause can be simultaneous with its effect
concurrent causation. Nor is there a general agreement as to whether
cause and effect must, as a matter of conceptual necessity, be “contiguous” in
time and space, either directly or through a causal chain of contiguous events contiguous causation. The attempt to
“analyze” causation seems to have reached an impasse; the proposals on hand
seem so widely divergent that one wonders whether they are all analyses of one
and the same concept. But each of them seems to address some important aspect
of the variegated notion that we express by the term ‘cause’, and it may be
doubted whether there is a unitary concept of causation that can be captured in
an enlightening philosophical analysis. On the other hand, the centrality of the
concept, both to ordinary practical discourse and to the scientific description
of the world, is difficult to deny. This has encouraged some philosophers to
view causation as a primitive, one that cannot be further analyzed. There are
others who advocate the extreme view causal nihilism that causal concepts play
no role whatever in the advanced sciences, such as fundamental physical
theories of space-time and matter, and that the very notion of cause is an
anthropocentric projection deriving from our confused ideas of action and
power. Causatum -- Dretske, Fred b.2,
philosopher best known for his externalistic representational naturalism
about experience, belief, perception, and knowledge. Educated at Purdue and the
of Minnesota, he has taught at the
of Wisconsin 088 and Stanford
898. In Seeing and Knowing 9 Dretske develops an account of
non-epistemic seeing, denying that seeing is believing that for a subject S to see a dog, say, S
must apply a concept to it dog, animal, furry. The dog must look some way to S
S must visually differentiate the dog, but need not conceptually categorize it.
This contrasts with epistemic seeing, where for S to see that a dog is before
him, S would have to believe that it is a dog. In Knowledge and the Flow of
Information 1, a mind-independent objective sense of ‘information’ is applied
to propositional knowledge and belief content. “Information” replaced Dretske’s
earlier notion of a “conclusive reason” 1. Knowing that p requires having a
true belief caused or causally sustained by an event that carries the
information that p. Also, the semantic content of a belief is identified with
the most specific digitally encoded piece of information to which it becomes
selectively sensitive during a period of learning. In Explaining Behavior 8,
Dretske’s account of representation and misrepresentation takes on a
teleological flavor. The semantic meaning of a structure is now identified with
its indicator function. A structure recruited for a causal role of indicating
F’s, and sustained in that causal role by this ability, comes to mean F thereby providing a causal role for the
content of cognitive states, and avoiding epiphenomenalism about semantic
content. In Naturalizing the Mind 5, Dretske’s theory of meaning is applied to
the problems of consciousness and qualia. He argues that the empirically
significant features of conscious experience are exhausted by their functional
and hence representational roles of indicating external sensible properties. He
rejects the views that consciousness is composed of a higher-order hierarchy of
mental states and that qualia are due to intrinsic, non-representational
features of the underlying physical systems. Dretske is also known for his
contributions on the nature of contrastive statements, laws of nature,
causation, and epistemic non-closure, among other topics. CAUSATUM -- Ducasse, C. J., philosopher of
mind and aesthetician. He arrived in the United States in 0, received his Ph.D.
from Harvard 2, and taught at the of
Washington 226 and Brown 658. His most
important work is Nature, Mind and Death 1. The key to his general theory is a
non-Humean view of causation: the relation of causing is triadic, involving i
an initial event, ii the set of conditions under which it occurs, and iii a
resulting event; the initial event is the cause, the resulting event is the
effect. On the basis of this view he constructed a theory of categories an explication of such concepts as those of
substance, property, mind, matter, and body. Among the theses he defended were
that minds are substances, that they causally interact with bodies, and that
human beings are free despite every event’s having a cause. In A Critical
Examination of the Belief in a Life after Death 1, he concluded that “the
balance of the evidence so far obtained is on the side of . . . survival.” Like
Schopenhauer, whom he admired, Ducasse was receptive to the religious and
philosophical writings of the Far East. He wrote with remarkable objectivity on
the philosophical problems associated with so-called paranormal phenomena.
Ducasse’s epistemological views are developed in Truth, Knowledge and Causation
8. He sets forth a realistic theory of perception he says, about
sense-qualities, “Berkeley is right and the realists are wrong” and, of material
things, “the realists are right and Berkeley is wrong”. He provides the
classical formulation of the “adverbial theory” or sense-qualities, according
to which such qualities are not objects of experience or awareness but ways of
experiencing or of being aware. One does not perceive a red material object by
sensing a red sense-datum; for then perceiving would involve three
entities i the perceiving subject, ii
the red sense-datum, and iii the red material object. But one may perceive a
red material object by sensing redly; then the only entities involved are i the
perceiving subject and ii the material object. Ducasse observes that,
analogously, although it may be natural to say “dancing a waltz,” it would be
more accurate to speak of “dancing waltzily.”
causa sui: an expression used by Grice’s mother, a High Church,
as applied to God to mean in part that God owes his existence to nothing other
than himself. It does not mean that God somehow brought himself into existence.
The idea is that the very nature of God logically requires that he exists. What
accounts for the existence of a being that is causa sui is its own nature.
cavellian implicaturum: c. s.,
b.6, philosopher whose work has
explored skepticism and its consequences. He was Walter M. Cabot Professor of
Aesthetics and General Value Theory at Harvard from 3 until 7. Central to
Cavell’s thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to
be refuted by philosophical theory or dismissed as a mere misuse of ordinary
language; it is a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of
the self, of others, and of the external world, limits that must be
accepted in his term “acknowledged” because the refusal to do so results in
illusion and risks tragedy. Cavell’s work defends J. L. Austin from both
positivism and deconstructionism Must We Mean What We Say?, 9, and The Pitch of
Philosophy, 4, but not because Cavell is an “ordinary language” philosopher.
Rather, his defense of Austin has combined with his response to skepticism to
make him a philosopher of the ordinary: he explores the conditions of the
possibility and limits of ordinary language, ordinary knowledge, ordinary
action, and ordinary human relationships. He uses both the resources of
ordinary language and the discourse of philosophers, such as Vitters,
Heidegger, Thoreau, and Emerson, and of the arts. Cavell has explored the
ineliminability of skepticism in Must We Mean What We Say?, notably in its
essay on King Lear, and has developed his analysis in his 9 magnum opus, The
Claim of Reason. He has examined the benefits of acknowledging the limits of
human self-understanding, and the costs of refusing to do so, in a broad range
of contexts from film The World Viewed, 1; Pursuits of Happiness, 1; and
Contesting Tears, 6 to philosophy The
Senses of Walden, 2; and the chapters on Emerson in This New Yet Unapproachable
America, 9, and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 0. A central argument in
The Claim of Reason develops Cavell’s approach by looking at Vitters’s notion
of criteria. Criteria are not rules for the use of our words that can guarantee
the correctness of the claims we make by them; rather, criteria bring out what
we claim by using the words we do. More generally, in making claims to
knowledge, undertaking actions, and forming interpersonal relationships, we
always risk failure, but it is also precisely in that room for risk that we
find the possibility of freedom. This argument is indebted not only to Vitters
but also to Kant, especially in the Critique of Judgment. Cavell has used his
view as a key to understanding classics of the theater and film. Regarding such
tragic figures as Lear, he argues that their tragedies result from their
refusal to accept the limits of human knowledge and human love, and their insistence
on an illusory absolute and pure love. The World Viewed argues for a realistic
approach to film, meaning that we should acknowledge that our cognitive and
emotional responses to films are responses to the realities of the human
condition portrayed in them. This “ontology of film” prepared the way for
Cavell’s treatment of the genre of comedies of remarriage in Pursuits of
Happiness. It also grounds his treatment of melodrama in Contesting Tears,
which argues that human beings must remain tragically unknown to each other if
the limits to our knowledge of each other are not acknowledged. In The Claim of
Reason and later works Cavell has also contributed to moral philosophy by his
defense against Rawls’s critique of
“moral perfectionism” of “Emersonian
perfectionism”: the view that no general principles of conduct, no matter how
well established, can ever be employed in practice without the ongoing but
never completed perfection of knowledge of oneself and of the others on and
with whom one acts. Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionism is thus another
application of his Vittersian and Kantian recognition that rules must always be
supplemented by the capacity for judgment.
cavendish: m. duchess of Newcastle, English author of some dozen
works in a variety of forms. Her central philosophical interest was the
developments in natural science of her day. Her earliest works endorsed a kind
of atomism, but her settled view, in Philosophical Letters 1664, Observations
upon Experimental Philosophy 1666, and Grounds of Natural Philosophy 1668, was
a kind of organic materialism. Cavendish argues for a hierarchy of increasingly
fine matter, capable of self-motion. Philosophical Letters, among other
matters, raises problems for the notion of inert matter found in Descartes, and
Observations upon Experimental Philosophy criticizes microscopists such as
Hooke for committing a double error, first of preferring the distortions
introduced by instruments to unaided vision and second of preferring sense to
reason.
celsus: philosopher known only as the author of a work called
“Alethes logos,” which is quoted extensively by Origen of Alexandria in his
response, Against Celsus. “Alethes logos” is mainly important because it is the
first anti-Christian polemic of which we have significant knowledge. Origen
considers Celsus to be an Epicurean, but he is uncertain about this. There are
no traces of Epicureanism in Origen’s quotations from Celsus, which indicate
instead that he is a platonist, whose conception of an unnameable first deity
transcending being and knowable only by “synthesis, analysis, or analogy” is
based on Plato’s description of the Good in Rep. VI. In accordance with the
Timaeus, Celsus believes that God created “immortal things” and turned the
creation of “mortal things” over to them. According to him, the universe has a
providential organization in which humans hold no special place, and its
history is one of eternally repeating sequences of events separated by
catastrophes.
certum: While Grice plays with ‘certum,’ he is happier with
UNcertum. To be certain is to have dis-cerned. Oddly, Grice ‘evolved’ from an
interest in the certainty and incorrigibility that ‘ordinary’ and the
first-person gives to situations of ‘conversational improbability’ and
indeterminate implicatura under conditions of ceteris paribus risk and
uncertainty in survival. “To be certain that p” is for Grice one of those
‘diaphanous’ verbs. While it is best to improve Descartes’s fuzzy lexicon – and
apply ‘certus’ to the emissor, if Grice is asked, “What are you certain of?,”
“I have to answer, ‘p’”. certum:
certitude, from ecclesiastical medieval Roman “certitudo,” designating in
particular Christian conviction, is heir to two meanings of “certum,” one
objective and the other subjective: beyond doubt, fixed, positive, real,
regarding a thing or knowledge, or firm in his resolutions, decided, sure,
authentic, regarding an individual. Although certitudo has no Grecian
equivalent, the Roman verb “cernere,” (cf. discern), from which “certum” is derived,
has the concrete meaning of pass through a sieve, discern, like the Grecian
“ϰρίνειν,” select, sieve, judge, which comes from the same root. Thus begins
the relationship between certitude, judgment, and truth, which since Descartes
has been connected with the problematics of the subject and of self-certainty.
The whole terminological system of truth is thus involved, from unveiling and
adequation to certitude and obviousness. Then there’s Certainty, Objectivity,
Subjectivity, and Linguistic Systems The
objective aspect manifests itself first, “certitudo” translating e. g. the determined nature of objects or known
properties as the commentaries on Aristotle’s Met. translated into Roman, or
the incontestably true nature of principles. With the revolution of the subject
inaugurated by Cartesian Phil. , the second aspect comes to the fore: some
reasons, ideas, or propositions are true and certain, or true and evident, but
the most certain and the most evident of all, and thus in a sense the truest,
is the certitude of my own existence, a certainty that the subject attributes
to itself: The thematics of certainty precedes that of consciousness both
historically and logically, but it ends up being incorporated and subordinated
by it. Certainty thus becomes a quality or disposition of the subject that
reproduces, in the field of rational knowledge, the security or assurance that
the believer finds in religious faith, and that shields him from the wavering
of the soul. It will be noted that Fr.
retains the possibility of reversing the perspective by exploiting the
Roman etymology, as Descartes does in the Principles of Phil. when he transforms the certitudo probabilis
of the Scholastics Aquinas into moral certainty. On the other hand, Eng. tends
to objectify “certainty” to the maximum in opposition to belief v. BELIEF,
whereas G. hears in “Gewissheit” the
root “wissen,” to know, to have learned and situates it in a series with
Bewusstsein and Gewissen, clearly marking the constitutive relationship to the
subject in opposition to Glaube on the one hand, and to Wahrheit and
Wahrscheinlichkeit lit., appearance of truth, i.e., probability on the other.
Then there’s Knots of Problems On the
relations between certainty and belief, the modalities of subjective experience.
On the relation between individual certainty and the wise man’s constancy. On
the relations between certainty and truth, the confrontation between
subjectivity and objectivity in the development of knowledge. On the relations
between certainty and probability, the modalities of objective knowledge
insofar as it is related to a subject’s experience. uncertainty. This is Grice’s principle of
uncertainty. One of Grice’s problem is with ‘know’ and ‘certainty.’ He grants
that we only know that 2 + 2 = 4. He often identifies ‘knowledge’ with
‘certainty.’ He does not explore a cancellation like, “I am certain but I do
not know.” The reason being that he defends common sense against the sceptic,
and so his attitude towards certainty has to be very careful. The second
problem is that he wants ‘certainty’ to deal within the desiderative realm. To
do that, he divides an act of intending into two: an act of accepting and act
of willing. The ‘certainty’ is found otiose if the intender is seen as ‘willing
that p’ and accepting that the willing will be the cause for the desideratum to
obtain. n WoW:141, Grice proposes that
‘A is certain that p’ ENTAILS either ‘A is certain that he is certain that p,
OR AT LEAST that it is not the case that A is UNCERTAIN that A is certain that
p.” ‘Certainly,’ appears to apply to utterances in the credibility and the
desirability realm. Grice sometimes uses ‘to be sure.’ He notoriously wants to
distinguish it from ‘know.’ Grice explores the topic of incorrigibility and
ends up with corrigibility which almost makes a Popperian out of him. In the
end, its all about the converational implciata and conversation as rational
co-operation. Why does P2 should judge that P1 is being more or less certain
about what he is talking? Theres a rationale for that. Our conversation does
not consist of idle remarks. Grices example: "The Chairman of the British
Academy has a corkscrew in his pocket. Urmsons example: "The king is
visiting Oxford tomorrow. Why? Oh, for no reason at all. As a philosophical psychologist,
and an empiricist with realist tendencies, Grice was obsessed with what he
called (in a nod to the Kiparskys) the factivity of know. Surely, Grices
preferred collocation, unlike surely Ryles, is "Grice knows that p."
Grice has no problem in seeing this as involving three clauses: First, p.
Second, Grice believes that p, and third, p causes Grices belief. No mention of
certainty. This is the neo-Prichardian in Grice, from having been a
neo-Stoutian (Stout was obsessed, as a few Oxonians like Hampshire and Hart
were, with certainty). If the three-prong analysis of know applies to the
doxastic, Grices two-prong analysis of intending in ‘Intention and
UNcertainty,’ again purposively avoiding certainty, covers the buletic realm.
This does not mean that Grice, however proud he was of his ignorance of the
history of philosophy (He held it as a badge of honour, his tuteee Strawson
recalls), had read some of the philosophical classics to realise that certainty
had been an obsession of what Ryle abusively (as he himself puts it) called
Descartes and the Establishments "official doctrine"! While ps true
in Grices analysis of know is harmless enough, there obviously is no correlate
for ps truth in the buletic case. Grices example is Grice intending to scratch his
head, via his willing that Grice scratches his head in t2. In this case, as he
notes, the doxastic eleent involves the uniformity of nature, and ones more or
less relying that if Grice had a head to be scratched in t1, he will have a
head to be sratched in t2, when his intention actually GETS satisfied, or
fulfilled. Grice was never worried about buletic satisfaction. As the
intentionalist that Suppes showed us Grice was, Grice is very much happy to say
that if Smith intends to give Joness a job, the facct as to whether Jones
actually gets the job is totally irrelevant for most philosophical purposes. He
gets more serious when he is happier with privileged access than
incorrigibility in “Method.” But he is less strict than Austin. For Austin,
"That is a finch implies that the utterer KNOWS its a finch. While Grice
has a maxim, do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence (Gettiers
analysandum) and a super-maxim, try to make your contribution one that is
true, the very phrasing highlights Grices cavalier to this! Imagine Kant
turning on his grave. "Try!?". Grice is very clever in having try in
the super-maxim, and a prohibition as the maxim, involving falsehood avoidance,
"Do not say what you believe to be false." Even here he is cavalier.
"Cf. "Do not say what you KNOW to be false." If Gettier were
wrong, the combo of maxims yields, "Say what you KNOW," say what you
are certain about! Enough for Sextus Empiricus having one single maxim:
"Either utter a phenomenalist utterance, a question or an order, or keep
your mouth shut!." (cf. Grice, "My lips are sealed," as
cooperative or helfpul in ways -- "At least he is not
lying."). Hampshire, in the course of some recent remarks,l advances
the view that self-prediction is (logically) impossible. When I say I know that
I shall do X (as against, e.g., X will happen to me, or You will do X), I am
not contemplating myself, as I might someone else, and giving tongue to a
conjecture about myself and my future acts, as I might be doing about someone
else or about the behaviour ofan animal -for that would be tantamount (if I
understand him rightly) to looking upon myself from outside, as it were, and
treating my own acts as mere caused events. In saying that I know that I shall
do X, I am, on this view, saying that I have decided to do X: for to predict
that I shall in certain circumstances in fact do X or decide to do X, with no
reference to whether or not I have already decided to do it - to say I can tell
you now that I shall in fact act in manner X, although I am, as a matter of
fact, determined to do the very opposite - does not make sense. Any man who
says I know myself too well to believe that, whatever I now decide, I shall do
anything other than X when the circumstances actually arise is in fact, if I
interpret Hampshires views correctly, saying that he does not really, i.e.
seriously, propose to set himself against doing X, that he does not propose
even to try to act otherwise, that he has in fact decided to let events take
their course. For no man who has truly decided to try to avoid X can, in good
faith, predict his own failure to act as he has decided. He may fail to avoid
X, and he may predict this; but he cannot both decide to try to avoid X and
predict that he will not even try to do this; for he can always try; and he
knows this: he knows that this is what distinguishes him from non-human
creatures in nature. To say that he will fail even to try is tantamount to
saying that he has decided not to try. In this sense I know means I have
decided and (Murdoch, Hampshire, Gardiner and Pears, Freedom and Knowledge, in
Pears, Freedom and the Will) cannot in principle be predictive. That, if I have
understood it, is Hampshires position, and I have a good deal of sympathy with
it, for I can see that self-prediction is often an evasive way of disclaiming
responsibility for difficult decisions, while deciding in fact to let events
take their course, disguising this by attributing responsibility for what
occurs to my own allegedly unalterable nature. But I agree with Hampshires
critics in the debate, whom I take to be maintaining that, although the
situation he describes may often occur, yet circumstances may exist in which it
is possible for me both to say that I am, at this moment, resolved not to do X,
and at the same time to predict that I shall do X, because I am not hopeful
that, when the time comes, I shall in fact even so much as try to resist doing
X. I can, in effect, say I know myself well. When the crisis comes, do not rely
on me to help you. I may well run away; although I am at this moment genuinely
resolved not to be cowardly and to do all I can to stay at your side. My
prediction that my resolution will not in fact hold up is based on knowledge of
my own character, and not on my present state of mind; my prophecy is not a
symptom of bad faith (for I am not, at this moment, vacillating) but, on the
contrary, of good faith, of a wish to face the facts. I assure you in all
sincerity that my present intention is to be brave and resist. Yet you would
run a great risk if you relied too much on my present decision; it would not be
fair to conceal my past failures of nerve from you. I can say this about
others, despite the most sincere resolutions on their part, for I can foretell
how in fact they will behave; they can equally predict this about me. Despite
Hampshires plausible and tempting argument, I believe that such objective
self-knowledge is possible and occur. From Descartes to Stout and back.
Stout indeed uses both intention and certainty, and in the same paragraph.
Stout notes that, at the outset, performance falls far short of intention. Only
a certain s. of contractions of certain muscles, in proper proportions and in a
proper order, is capable of realising the end aimed at, with the maximum of
rapidity and certainty, and the minimum of obstruction and failure, and
corresponding effort. At the outset of the process of acquisition, muscles are
contracted which are superfluous, and which therefore operate as disturbing
conditions. Grices immediate trigger, however, is Ayer on sure that, and
having the right to be sure, as his immediate trigger later will be Hampshire
and Hart. Grice had high regard for Hampshires brilliant Thought and
action. He was also concerned with Stouts rather hasty UNphilosophical, but
more scientifically psychologically-oriented remarks about assurance in
practical concerns. He knew too that he was exploring an item of the
philosophers lexicon (certus) that had been brought to the forum when Anscombe
and von Wright translate Witters German expression Gewißheit in Über
Gewißheit as Certainty. The Grecians were never sure about being sure. But
the modernist turn brought by Descartes meant that Grice now had to deal with
incorrigibility and privileged access to this or that P, notably himself (When
I intend to go, I dont have to observe myself, Im on the stage, not in the
audience, or Only I can say I will to London, expressing my intention to do so.
If you say, you will go you are expressing yours! Grice found Descartes
very funny ‒ in a French way. Grice is interested in contesting Ayer and other
Oxford philosophers, on the topic of a criterion for certainty. In so
doing, Grice choses Descartess time-honoured criterion of clarity and
distinction, as applied to perception. Grice does NOT quote
Descartes in French! In the proceedings, Grice distinguishes between two
kinds of certainty apparently ignored by Descartes: (a) objective
certainty: Ordinary-language variant: It is certain that p, whatever
it refers to, cf. Grice, it is an illusion; what is it? (b) Subjective
certainty: Ordinary-language variant: I am certain that p. I
being, of course, Grice, in my bestest days, of course! There are further
items on Descartes in the Grice Collection, notably in the last s. of topics
arranged alphabetically. Grice never cared to publish his views on
Descartes until he found an opportunity to do so when compiling his WOW. Grice
is not interested in an exegesis of Descartess thought. He doesnt care to give
a reference to any edition of Descartess oeuvre. But he plays with certain. It
is certain that p is objective certainty, apparently. I am certain that p is
Subjectsive certainty, rather. Oddly, Grice will turn to UNcertainty as it
connects with intention in his BA lecture. Grices interest in Descartes
connects with Descartess search for a criterion of certainty in terms of
clarity and distinction of this or that perception. Having explored the
philosophy of perception with Warnock, its only natural he wanted to give
Descartess rambles a second and third look! Descartes on clear and distinct
perception, in WOW, II semantics and metaphysics, essay, Descartes on clear and
distinct perception and Malcom on dreaming, perception, Descartes, clear and
distinct perception, Malcolm, dreaming. Descartes meets Malcolm, and vice
versa. Descartes on clear and distinct perception, in WOW, Descartes
on clear and distinct perception, Descartes on clear and distinct perception,
in WOW, part II, semantics and metaphysics, essay. Grice gives a short overview
of Cartesian metaphysics for the BBC 3rd programme. The best example,
Grice thinks, of a metaphysical snob is provided by Descartes, about
whose idea of certainty Grice had philosophised quite a bit, since it is in
total contrast with Moore’s. Descartes is a very scientifically
minded philosopher, with very clear ideas about the proper direction for science. Descartes,
whose middle Names seems to have been Euclid, thinks that mathematics, and in
particular geometry, provides the model for a scientific procedure, or method. And
this determines all of Descartess thinking in two ways. First, Descartes thinks
that the fundamental method in science is the axiomatic deductive method of
geometry, and this Descartes conceives (as Spinoza morality more geometrico) of
as rigorous reasoning from a self-evident axiom (Cogito, ergo sum.). Second,
Descartes thinks that the Subjects matter of physical science, from mechanics
to medicine, must be fundamentally the same as the Subjects matter of geometry!
The only characteristics that the objects studied by geometry poses are spatial
characteristics. So from the point of view of science in general, the only
important features of things in the physical world were also their spatial
characteristics, what he called extensio, res extensa. Physical science in
general is a kind of dynamic, or kinetic, geometry. Here we have an
exclusive preference for a certain type of scientific method, and a certain
type of scientific explanation: the method is deductive, the type of explanation
mechanical. These beliefs about the right way to do science are exactly
reflected in Descartess ontology, one of the two branches of metaphysics; the
other is philosophical eschatology, or the study of categories), and it is
reflected in his doctrine, that is, about what really exists. Apart from
God, the divine substance, Descartes recognises just two kinds of substance,
two types of real entity. First, there is material substance, or matter; and
the belief that the only scientifically important characteristics of things in
the physical world are their spatial characteristics goes over, in the language
of metaphysics, into the doctrine that these are their only characteristics.
Second, and to Ryle’s horror, Descartes recognizes the mind or soul, or the
mental substance, of which the essential characteristic is thinking; and
thinking itself, in its pure form at least, is conceived of as simply the
intuitive grasping of this or that self-evident axiom and this or
that of its deductive consequence. These restrictive doctrines about reality
and knowledge naturally call for adjustments elsewhere in our ordinary scheme
of things. With the help of the divine substance, these are duly
provided. It is not always obvious that the metaphysicians scheme
involves this kind of ontological preference, or favoritism, or prejudice, or
snobbery this tendency, that is, to promote one or two categories of entity to
the rank of the real, or of the ultimately real, to the exclusion of others,
Descartess entia realissima. One is taught at Oxford that epistemology begins
with the Moderns such as Descartes, which is not true. Grice was concerned with
“certain,” which was applied in Old Roman times to this or that utterer: the
person who is made certain in reference to a thing, certain, sure. Lewis and
Short have a few quotes: “certi sumus periisse omnia;” “num quid nunc es
certior?,” “posteritatis, i. e. of posthumous fame,” “sententiæ,” “judicii,”
“certus de suā geniturā;” “damnationis;” “exitii,” “spei,” “matrimonii,” “certi
sumus;” in the phrase “certiorem facere aliquem;” “de aliquā re, alicujus rei,
with a foll, acc. and inf., with a rel.-clause or absol.;” “to inform, apprise
one of a thing: me certiorem face: “ut nos facias certiores,” “uti Cæsarem de
his rebus certiorem faciant;” “qui certiorem me sui consilii fecit;” “Cæsarem
certiorem faciunt, sese non facile ab oppidis vim hostium prohibere;” “faciam
te certiorem quid egerim;” with subj. only, “milites certiores facit, paulisper
intermitterent proelium,” pass., “quod crebro certior per me fias de omnibus
rebus,” “Cæsar certior factus est, tres jam copiarum partes Helvetios id flumen
transduxisse;” “factus certior, quæ res gererentur,” “non consulibus
certioribus factis,” also in posit., though rarely; “fac me certum quid tibi
est;” “lacrimæ suorum tam subitæ matrem certam fecere ruinæ,” uncertainty,
Grice loved the OED, and its entry for will was his favourite. But he
first had a look to shall. For Grice, "I shall climb Mt. Everest," is
surely a prediction. And then Grice turns to the auxiliary he prefers, will.
Davidson, Intending, R. Grandy and Warner, PGRICE. “Uncertainty,”
“Aspects.” “Conception,” Davidson on intending, intending and trying,
Brandeis.”Method,” in “Conception,” WOW . Hampshire and Hart. Decision,
intention, and certainty, Mind, Harman, Willing and intending in PGRICE.
Practical reasoning. Review of Met. 29.
Thought, Princeton, for functionalist approach alla Grice’s “Method.”
Principles of reasoning. Rational action and the extent of intention. Social
theory and practice. Jeffrey, Probability kinematics, in The logic of decision,
cited by Harman in PGRICE. Kahneman and Tversky, Judgement under uncertainty,
Science, cited by Harman in PGRICE. Nisbet and Ross, Human inference, cited by
Harman in PGRICE. Pears, Predicting and deciding. Prichard, Acting, willing,
and desiring, in Moral obligations, Oxford ed. by Urmson Speranza, The Grice Circle Wants You. Stout,
Voluntary action. Mind 5, repr in Studies in philosophy and psychology,
Macmillan, cited by Grice, “Uncertainty.” Urmson, ‘Introduction’ to Prichard’s
‘Moral obligations.’ I shant but Im not certain I wont – Grice. How
uncertain can Grice be? This is the Henriette Herz BA lecture, and as such
published in The Proceedings of the BA. Grice calls himself a neo-Prichardian
(after the Oxford philosopher) and cares to quote from a few other
philosophers ‒ some of whom he was not necessarily associated with:
such as Kenny and Anscombe, and some of whom he was, notably Pears. Grices
motto: Where there is a neo-Prichardian willing, there is a palæo-Griceian way!
Grice quotes Pears, of Christ Church, as the philosopher he found especially
congenial to explore areas in what both called philosophical psychology,
notably the tricky use of intending as displayed by a few philosophers even in
their own circle, such as Hampshire and Hart in Intention, decision, and
certainty. The title of Grices lecture is meant to provoke that pair of
Oxonian philosophers Grice knew so well and who were too ready to bring in
certainty in an area that requires deep philosophical exploration. This is
the Henriette Herz Trust annual lecture. It means its delivered
annually by different philosophers, not always Grice! Grice had been appointed
a FBA earlier, but he took his time to deliver his lecture. With your
lecture, you implicate, Hi! Grice, and indeed Pears, were motivated by
Hampshires and Harts essay on intention and certainty in Mind. Grice knew
Hampshire well, and had actually enjoyed his Thought and Action. He preferred
Hampshires Thought and action to Anscombes Intention. Trust Oxford being what
it is that TWO volumes on intending are published in the same year! Which one
shall I read first? Eventually, neither ‒ immediately. Rather, Grice managed to
unearth some sketchy notes by Prichard (he calls himself a neo-Prichardian)
that Urmson had made available for the Clarendon Press ‒ notably Prichards
essay on willing that. Only a Corpus-Christi genius like Prichard will
distinguish will to, almost unnecessary, from will that, so crucial. For Grice,
wills that , unlike wills to, is
properly generic, in that p, that follows the that-clause, need NOT refer to
the Subjects of the sentence. Surely I can will that Smith wins the match! But
Grice also quotes Anscombe (whom otherwise would not count, although they did
share a discussion panel at the American Philosophical Association) and Kenny,
besides Pears. Of Anscombe, Grice borrows (but never returns) the
direction-of-fit term of art, actually Austinian. From Kenny, Grice borrows
(and returns) the concept of voliting. His most congenial approach was
Pearss. Grice had of course occasion to explore disposition and intention
on earlier occasions. Grice is especially concerned with a dispositional
analysis to intending. He will later reject it in “Uncertainty.” But
that was Grice for you! Grice is especially interested in distinguishing his
views from Ryles over-estimated dispositional account of intention, which Grice
sees as reductionist, and indeed eliminationist, if not boringly behaviourist,
even in analytic key. The logic of dispositions is tricky, as Grice will later
explore in connection with rationality, rational propension or propensity, and
metaphysics, the as if operator). While Grice focuses on uncertainty, he is
trying to be funny. He knew that Oxonians like Hart and Hampshire were obsessed
with certainty. I was so surprised that Hampshire and Hart were claiming
decision and intention are psychological states about which the agent is
certain, that I decided on the spot that that could certainly be a nice
topic for my BA lecture! Grice granted that in some cases, a declaration of an
intention can be authorative in a certain certain way, i. e. as implicating
certainty. But Grice wants us to consider: Marmaduke Bloggs intends to climb
Mt. Everest. Surely he cant be certain hell succeed. Grice used the
same example at the APA, of all places. To amuse Grice, Davidson, who was
present, said: Surely thats just an implicaturum! Just?! Grice was
almost furious in his British guarded sort of way. Surely not
just! Pears, who was also present, tried to reconcile: If I may,
Davidson, I think Grice would take it that, if certainty is implicated, the
whole thing becomes too social to be true. They kept discussing implicaturum
versus entailment. Is certainty entailed then? Cf. Urmson on certainly vs.
knowingly, and believably. Davidson asked. No, disimplicated! is Grices
curt reply. The next day, he explained to Davidson that he had invented
the concept of disimplicaturum just to tease him, and just one night before,
while musing in the hotel room! Talk of uncertainty was thus for Grice
intimately associated with his concern about the misuse of know to mean
certain, especially in the exegeses that Malcolm made popular about, of all
people, Moore! V. Scepticism and common sense and Moore and philosophers
paradoxes above, and Causal theory and Prolegomena for a summary of Malcoms
misunderstanding Moore! Grice manages to quote from Stouts Voluntary action and
Brecht. And he notes that not all speakers are as sensitive as they should be
(e.g. distinguishing modes, as realised by shall vs. will). He emphasizes the
fact that Prichard has to be given great credit for seeing that the accurate
specification of willing should be willing that and not willing to. Grice is
especially interested in proving Stoutians (like Hampshire and Hart) wrong by
drawing from Aristotles prohairesis-doxa distinction, or in his parlance, the
buletic-doxastic distinction. Grice quotes from Aristotle. Prohairesis cannot
be opinion/doxa. For opinion is thought to relate to all kinds of things, no
less to eternal things and impossible things than to things in our own power;
and it is distinguished by its falsity or truth, not by its badness or
goodness, while choice is distinguished rather by these. Now with opinion in
general perhaps no one even says it is identical. But it is not identical even
with any kind of opinion; for by choosing or deciding, or prohairesis, what is
good or bad we are men of a certain character, which we are not by holding this
or that opinion or doxa. And we choose to get or avoid something good or bad,
but we have opinions about what a thing is or whom it is good for or how it is
good for him; we can hardly be said to opine to get or avoid anything. And
choice is praised for being related to the right object rather than for being
rightly related to it, opinion for being truly related to its object. And we
choose what we best know to be good, but we opine what we do not quite know;
and it is not the same people that are thought to make the best choices and to
have the best opinions, but some are thought to have fairly good opinions, but
by reason of vice to choose what they should not. If opinion precedes choice or
accompanies it, that makes no difference; for it is not this that we are
considering, but whether it is identical with some kind of opinion. What, then,
or what kind of thing is it, since it is none of the things we have mentioned?
It seems to be voluntary, but not all that is voluntary to be an object of
choice. Is it, then, what has been decided on by previous deliberation? At any
rate choice involves a rational principle and thought. Even the Names seems to
suggest that it is what is chosen before other things. His final analysis of G
intends that p is in terms of, B1, a buletic condition, to the effect that G
wills that p, and D2, an attending doxastic condition, to the effect that G
judges that B1 causes p. Grice ends this essay with a nod to Pears and an open
point about the justifiability (other than evidential) for the acceptability of
the agents deciding and intending versus the evidential justifiability of the
agents predicting that what he intends will be satisfied. It is important to
note that in his earlier Disposition and intention, Grice dedicates the first
part to counterfactual if general. This is a logical point. Then as an account
for a psychological souly concept ψ. If G does A, sensory input, G does B,
behavioural output. No ψ without the behavioural output that ψ is meant to
explain. His problem is with the first person. The functionalist I does not
need a black box. The here would be both
incorrigibility and privileged access. Pology only explains their evolutionary
import. Certum -- Certainty: cf. H. P. Grice, “Intention and uncertainty.” the
property of being certain, which is either a psychological property of persons
or an epistemic feature of proposition-like objects e.g., beliefs, utterances,
statements. We can say that a person, S, is psychologically certain that p
where ‘p’ stands for a proposition provided S has no doubt whatsoever that p is
true. Thus, a person can be certain regardless of the degree of epistemic
warrant for a proposition. In general, philosophers have not found this an
interesting property to explore. The exception is Peter Unger, who argued for
skepticism, claiming that 1 psychological certainty is required for knowledge
and 2 no person is ever certain of anything or hardly anything. As applied to
propositions, ‘certain’ has no univocal use. For example, some authors e.g., Chisholm
may hold that a proposition is epistemically certain provided no proposition is
more warranted than it. Given that account, it is possible that a proposition
is certain, yet there are legitimate reasons for doubting it just as long as
there are equally good grounds for doubting every equally warranted
proposition. Other philosophers have adopted a Cartesian account of certainty
in which a proposition is epistemically certain provided it is warranted and
there are no legitimate grounds whatsoever for doubting it. Both Chisholm’s and
the Cartesian characterizations of epistemic certainty can be employed to
provide a basis for skepticism. If knowledge entails certainty, then it can be
argued that very little, if anything, is known. For, the argument continues,
only tautologies or propositions like ‘I exist’ or ‘I have beliefs’ are such
that either nothing is more warranted or there are absolutely no grounds for
doubt. Thus, hardly anything is known. Most philosophers have responded either
by denying that ‘certainty’ is an absolute term, i.e., admitting of no degrees,
or by denying that knowledge requires certainty Dewey, Chisholm, Vitters, and
Lehrer. Others have agreed that knowledge does entail absolute certainty, but
have argued that absolute certainty is possible e.g., Moore. Sometimes
‘certain’ is modified by other expressions, as in ‘morally certain’ or
‘metaphysically certain’ or ‘logically certain’. Once again, there is no
universally accepted account of these terms. Typically, however, they are used
to indicate degrees of warrant for a proposition, and often that degree of
warrant is taken to be a function of the type of proposition under
consideration. For example, the proposition that smoking causes cancer is
morally certain provided its warrant is sufficient to justify acting as though
it were true. The evidence for such a proposition may, of necessity, depend
upon recognizing particular features of the world. On the other hand, in order
for a proposition, say that every event has a cause, to be metaphysically
certain, the evidence for it must not depend upon recognizing particular
features of the world but rather upon recognizing what must be true in order
for our world to be the kind of world it is
i.e., one having causal connections. Finally, a proposition, say that
every effect has a cause, may be logically certain if it is derivable from
“truths of logic” that do not depend in any way upon recognizing anything about
our world. Since other taxonomies for these terms are employed by philosophers,
it is crucial to examine the use of the terms in their contexts. Refs.: The main source is his BA lecture on
‘uncertainty,’ but using the keyword ‘certainty’ is useful too. His essay on
Descartes in WoW is important, and sources elsehere in the Grice Papers, such
as the predecessor to the “Uncertainty” lecture in “Disposition and intention,”
also his discussion of avowal (vide references above), incorrigibility and
privileged access in “Method,” repr. in “Conception,” BANC
character, mid-14c., carecter,
"symbol marked or branded on the body;" mid-15c., "symbol or
drawing used in sorcery;" late 15c., "alphabetic letter, graphic
symbol standing for a sound or syllable;" from Old French caratere
"feature, character" (13c., Modern French caractère), from Latin
character, from Greek kharaktēr "engraved mark," also "symbol or
imprint on the soul," properly "instrument for marking," from
kharassein "to engrave," from kharax "pointed stake," a
word of uncertain etymology which Beekes considers "most probably Pre-Greek."
The Latin ch- spelling was restored from 1500s. The meaning of Greek
kharaktēr was extended in Hellenistic times by metaphor to "a defining
quality, individual feature." In English, the meaning "sum of
qualities that define a person or thing and distinguish it from another"
is from 1640s. That of "moral qualities assigned to a person by
repute" is from 1712. You remember Eponina, who kept her husband
alive in an underground cavern so devotedly and heroically? The force of character
she showed in keeping up his spirits would have been used to hide a lover from
her husband if they had been living quietly in Rome. Strong characters need
strong nourishment. [Stendhal "de l'Amour," 1822] Sense of
"person in a play or novel" is first attested 1660s, in reference to
the "defining qualities" he or she is given by the author. Meaning
"a person" in the abstract is from 1749; especially "eccentric
person" (1773). Colloquial sense of "chap, fellow" is from 1931.
Character-actor, one who specializes in characters with marked peculiarities,
is attested from 1861; character-assassination is from 1888; character-building
(n.) from 1886. -- the comprehensive set of ethical and intellectual
dispositions of a person. Intellectual virtues
like carefulness in the evaluation of evidence promote, for one, the practice of seeking
truth. Moral or ethical virtues
including traits like courage and generosity dispose persons not only to choices and
actions but also to attitudes and emotions. Such dispositions are generally
considered relatively stable and responsive to reasons. Appraisal of character
transcends direct evaluation of particular actions in favor of examination of
some set of virtues or the admirable human life as a whole. On some views this
admirable life grounds the goodness of particular actions. This suggests
seeking guidance from role models, and their practices, rather than relying
exclusively on rules. Role models will, at times, simply perceive the salient
features of a situation and act accordingly. Being guided by role models
requires some recognition of just who should be a role model. One may act out
of character, since dispositions do not automatically produce particular
actions in specific cases. One may also have a conflicted character if the virtues
one’s character comprises contain internal tensions between, say, tendencies to
impartiality and to friendship. The importance of formative education to the
building of character introduces some good fortune into the acquisition of
character. One can have a good character with a disagreeable personality or
have a fine personality with a bad character because personality is not
typically a normative notion, whereas character is.
charron: p., H. P. Grice, “Do not multiply truths beyond
necessity.” theologian who became the principal expositor of Montaigne’s ideas,
presenting them in didactic form. His first work, The Three Truths 1595,
presented a negative argument for Catholicism by offering a skeptical challenge
to atheism, nonChristian religions, and Calvinism. He argued that we cannot
know or understand God because of His infinitude and the weakness of our
faculties. We can have no good reasons for rejecting Christianity or
Catholicism. Therefore, we should accept it on faith alone. His second work, On
Wisdom 1603, is a systematic presentation of Pyrrhonian skepticism coupled with
a fideistic defense of Catholicism. The skepticism of Montaigne and the Grecian
skeptics is used to show that we cannot know anything unless God reveals it to
us. This is followed by offering an ethics to live by, an undogmatic version of
Stoicism. This is the first modern presentation of a morality apart from any
religious considerations. Charron’s On Wisdom was extremely popular in France
and England. It was read and used by many philosophers and theologians during
the seventeenth century. Some claimed that his skepticism opened his defense of
Catholicism to question, and suggested that he was insincere in his fideism. He
was defended by important figures in the
Catholic church.
chiliagon: referred to by Grice in “Some remarks about the
senses.’ In geometry, a chiliagon, or 1000-gon is a polygon with 1,000 sides. Philosophers commonly refer to chiliagons
to illustrate ideas about the nature and workings of thought, meaning, and
mental representation. A chiliagon is a regular
chiliagon Polygon 1000.svg A regular chiliagon Type Regular polygon Edges and
vertices 1000 Schläfli symbol {1000}, t{500}, tt{250}, ttt{125} Coxeter diagram
CDel node 1.pngCDel 10.pngCDel 0x.pngCDel 0x.pngCDel node.png CDel node
1.pngCDel 5.pngCDel 0x.pngCDel 0x.pngCDel node 1.png Symmetry group Dihedral
(D1000), order 2×1000 Internal angle (degrees) 179.64° Dual polygon Self
Properties Convex, cyclic, equilateral, isogonal, isotoxal A whole
regular chiliagon is not visually discernible from a circle. The lower section
is a portion of a regular chiliagon, 200 times as large as the smaller one,
with the vertices highlighted. In geometry, a chiliagon (/ˈkɪliəɡɒn/) or
1000-gon is a polygon with 1,000 sides. Philosophers commonly refer to
chiliagons to illustrate ideas about the nature and workings of thought,
meaning, and mental representation. Contents 1 Regular chiliagon 2
Philosophical application 3 Symmetry 4 Chiliagram 5 See also 6 References
Regular chiliagon A regular chiliagon is represented by Schläfli symbol {1,000}
and can be constructed as a truncated 500-gon, t{500}, or a twice-truncated
250-gon, tt{250}, or a thrice-truncated 125-gon, ttt{125}. The measure of
each internal angle in a regular chiliagon is 179.64°. The area of a regular
chiliagon with sides of length a is given by {\displaystyle A=250a^{2}\cot
{\frac {\pi }{1000}}\simeq 79577.2\,a^{2}}A=250a^{2}\cot {\frac {\pi
}{1000}}\simeq 79577.2\,a^{2} This result differs from the area of its
circumscribed circle by less than 4 parts per million. Because 1,000 = 23
× 53, the number of sides is neither a product of distinct Fermat primes nor a
power of two. Thus the regular chiliagon is not a constructible polygon.
Indeed, it is not even constructible with the use of neusis or an angle
trisector, as the number of sides is neither a product of distinct Pierpont
primes, nor a product of powers of two and three. Philosophical
application René Descartes uses the chiliagon as an example in his Sixth
Meditation to demonstrate the difference between pure intellection and
imagination. He says that, when one thinks of a chiliagon, he "does not
imagine the thousand sides or see them as if they were present" before him
– as he does when one imagines a triangle, for example. The imagination
constructs a "confused representation," which is no different from
that which it constructs of a myriagon (a polygon with ten thousand sides).
However, he does clearly understand what a chiliagon is, just as he understands
what a triangle is, and he is able to distinguish it from a myriagon.
Therefore, the intellect is not dependent on imagination, Descartes claims, as
it is able to entertain clear and distinct ideas when imagination is unable to.
Philosopher Pierre Gassendi, a contemporary of Descartes, was critical of this
interpretation, believing that while Descartes could imagine a chiliagon, he
could not understand it: one could "perceive that the word 'chiliagon'
signifies a figure with a thousand angles [but] that is just the meaning of the
term, and it does not follow that you understand the thousand angles of the
figure any better than you imagine them." The example of a chiliagon is
also referenced by other philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant. David Hume points
out that it is "impossible for the eye to determine the angles of a
chiliagon to be equal to 1996 right angles, or make any conjecture, that
approaches this proportion."[4] Gottfried Leibniz comments on a use of the
chiliagon by John Locke, noting that one can have an idea of the polygon
without having an image of it, and thus distinguishing ideas from images. Henri
Poincaré uses the chiliagon as evidence that "intuition is not necessarily
founded on the evidence of the senses" because "we can not represent
to ourselves a chiliagon, and yet we reason by intuition on polygons in
general, which include the chiliagon as a particular case." Inspired by Descartes's chiliagon example,
Grice, R. M. Chisholm and other 20th-century philosophers have used similar
examples to make similar points. Chisholm's ‘speckled hen,’ which need not have
a determinate number of speckles to be successfully imagined, is perhaps the
most famous of these. Symmetry The symmetries of a regular chiliagon.
Light blue lines show subgroups of index 2. The 4 boxed subgraphs are
positionally related by index 5 subgroups. The regular chiliagon has Dih1000
dihedral symmetry, order 2000, represented by 1,000 lines of reflection. Dih100
has 15 dihedral subgroups: Dih500, Dih250, Dih125, Dih200, Dih100, Dih50,
Dih25, Dih40, Dih20, Dih10, Dih5, Dih8, Dih4, Dih2, and Dih1. It also has 16
more cyclic symmetries as subgroups: Z1000, Z500, Z250, Z125, Z200, Z100, Z50,
Z25, Z40, Z20, Z10, Z5, Z8, Z4, Z2, and Z1, with Zn representing π/n radian
rotational symmetry. John Conway labels these lower symmetries with a
letter and order of the symmetry follows the letter.[8] He gives d (diagonal)
with mirror lines through vertices, p with mirror lines through edges
(perpendicular), i with mirror lines through both vertices and edges, and g for
rotational symmetry. a1 labels no symmetry. These lower symmetries allow
degrees of freedom in defining irregular chiliagons. Only the g1000 subgroup
has no degrees of freedom but can be seen as directed edges. Chiliagram A
chiliagram is a 1,000-sided star polygon. There are 199 regular forms[9] given
by Schläfli symbols of the form {1000/n}, where n is an integer between 2 and
500 that is coprime to 1,000. There are also 300 regular star figures in the
remaining cases. For example, the regular {1000/499} star polygon is
constructed by 1000 nearly radial edges. Each star vertex has an internal angle
of 0.36 degrees.[10] {1000/499} Star polygon 1000-499.svg Star polygon
1000-499 center.png Central area with moiré patterns See also Myriagon Megagon
Philosophy of Mind Philosophy of Language References Meditation VI by
Descartes (English translation). Sepkoski, David (2005). "Nominalism
and constructivism in seventeenth-century mathematical philosophy".
Historia Mathematica. 32: 33–59. doi:10.1016/j.hm.2003.09.002. Immanuel
Kant, "On a Discovery," trans. Henry Allison, in Theoretical Philosophy
After 1791, ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath, Cambridge UP, 2002 [Akademie
8:121]. Kant does not actually use a chiliagon as his example, instead using a
96-sided figure, but he is responding to the same question raised by
Descartes. David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, Volume 1,
Black and Tait, 1826, p. 101. Jonathan Francis Bennett (2001), Learning
from Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume,
Volume 2, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198250924, p. 53. Henri Poincaré
(1900) "Intuition and Logic in Mathematics" in William Bragg Ewald
(ed) From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics,
Volume 2, Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 0198505361, p. 1015. Roderick
Chisholm, "The Problem of the Speckled Hen", Mind 51 (1942): pp.
368–373. "These problems are all descendants of Descartes's 'chiliagon'
argument in the sixth of his Meditations" (Joseph Heath, Following the
Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint, Oxford: OUP, 2008, p. 305,
note 15). The Symmetries of Things, Chapter 20 199 = 500 cases − 1
(convex) − 100 (multiples of 5) − 250 (multiples of 2) + 50 (multiples of 2 and
5) 0.36 = 180 (1 - 2 /(1000 / 499) ) = 180 ( 1 – 998 / 1000 ) = 180 ( 2 /
1000 ) = 180 / 500 chiliagon vte Polygons (List) Triangles Acute Equilateral Ideal
IsoscelesObtuseRight Quadrilaterals Antiparallelogram Bicentric CyclicEquidiagonalEx-tangentialHarmonic
Isosceles trapezoidKiteLambertOrthodiagonal Parallelogram Rectangle Right kite Rhombus
Saccheri SquareTangentialTangential trapezoidTrapezoid By number of
sides Monogon (1) Digon (2) Triangle (3) Quadrilateral (4) Pentagon (5) Hexagon
(6) Heptagon (7) Octagon (8) Nonagon (Enneagon, 9) Decagon (10) Hendecagon (11)
Dodecagon (12) Tridecagon (13) Tetradecagon (14) Pentadecagon (15) Hexadecagon
(16) Heptadecagon (17) Octadecagon (18) Enneadecagon (19)Icosagon
(20)Icosihenagon [de] (21)Icosidigon (22) Icositetragon (24) Icosihexagon (26) Icosioctagon
(28) Triacontagon (30) Triacontadigon (32) Triacontatetragon (34) Tetracontagon
(40) Tetracontadigon (42)Tetracontaoctagon (48)Pentacontagon (50) Pentacontahenagon
[de] (51) Hexacontagon (60) Hexacontatetragon (64) Heptacontagon
(70)Octacontagon (80) Enneacontagon (90) Enneacontahexagon (96) Hectogon (100) 120-gon257-gon360-gonChiliagon
(1000) Myriagon (10000) 65537-gonMegagon (1000000) 4294967295-gon [ru;
de]Apeirogon (∞) Star polygons Pentagram Hexagram Heptagram Octagram Enneagram Decagram
Hendecagram Dodecagram Classes Concave Convex Cyclic Equiangular Equilateral Isogonal
Isotoxal Pseudotriangle Regular Simple SkewStar-shaped Tangential Categories:
Polygons1000 (number).
choice, v. rational choice. choice sequence, a variety of
infinite sequence introduced by L. E. J. Brouwer to express the non-classical
properties of the continuum the set of real numbers within intuitionism. A
choice sequence is determined by a finite initial segment together with a
“rule” for continuing the sequence. The rule, however, may allow some freedom
in choosing each subsequent element. Thus the sequence might start with the
rational numbers 0 and then ½, and the rule might require the n ! 1st element
to be some rational number within ½n of the nth choice, without any further
restriction. The sequence of rationals thus generated must converge to a real
number, r. But r’s definition leaves open its exact location in the continuum.
Speaking intuitionistically, r violates the classical law of trichotomy: given
any pair of real numbers e.g., r and ½, the first is either less than, equal
to, or greater than the second. From the 0s Brouwer got this non-classical
effect without appealing to the apparently nonmathematical notion of free
choice. Instead he used sequences generated by the activity of an idealized
mathematician the creating subject, together with propositions that he took to
be undecided. Given such a proposition, P
e.g. Fermat’s last theorem that for n
2 there is no general method of finding triplets of numbers with the
property that the sum of each of the first two raised to the nth power is equal
to the result of raising the third to the nth power or Goldbach’s conjecture
that every even number is the sum of two prime numbers we can modify the definition of r: The n !
1st element is ½ if at the nth stage of research P remains undecided. That
element and all its successors are ½ ! ½n if by that stage P is proved; they
are ½ † ½n if P is refuted. Since he held that there is an endless supply of
such propositions, Brouwer believed that we can always use this method to refute
classical laws. In the early 0s Stephen Kleene and Richard Vesley reproduced
some main parts of Brouwer’s theory of the continuum in a formal system based
on Kleene’s earlier recursion-theoretic interpretation of intuitionism and of
choice sequences. At about the same time
but in a different and occasionally incompatible vein Saul Kripke formally captured the power of
Brouwer’s counterexamples without recourse to recursive functions and without
invoking either the creating subject or the notion of free choice. Subsequently
Georg Kreisel, A. N. Troelstra, Dirk Van Dalen, and others produced formal
systems that analyze Brouwer’s basic assumptions about open-futured objects
like choice sequences.
Church’s
thesis, thesis, proposed by A. Church
at a meeting of the Mathematical Society
“that the notion of an effectively calculable function of positive integers
should be identified with that of a recursive function. . . .” This proposal
has been called Church’s thesis since Kleene uses that name in his Introduction
to Metamathematics. The informal notion of an effectively calculable function
effective procedure, or algorithm had been used in mathematics and logic to
indicate that a class of problems is solvable in a “mechanical fashion” by
following fixed elementary rules. Underlying epistemological concerns came to
the fore when modern logic moved in the late nineteenth century from axiomatic
to formal presentations of theories. Hilbert suggested in 4 that such formally
presented theories be taken as objects of mathematical study, and
metamathematics has been pursued vigorously and systematically since the 0s. In
its pursuit, concrete issues arose that required for their resolution a
delimitation of the class of effective procedures. Hilbert’s important Entscheidungsproblem,
the decision problem for predicate logic, was one such issue. It was solved
negatively by Church and Turing relative
to the precise notion of recursiveness; the result was obtained independently
by Church and Turing, but is usually called Church’s theorem. A second
significant issue was the general formulation of the incompleteness theorems as
applying to all formal theories satisfying the usual representability and
derivability conditions, not just to specific formal systems like that of Principia
Mathematica. According to Kleene, Church proposed in 3 the identification of
effective calculability with l-definability. That proposal was not published at
the time, but in 4 Church mentioned it in conversation to Gödel, who judged it
to be “thoroughly unsatisfactory.” In his Princeton Lectures of 4, Gödel
defined the concept of a recursive function, but he was not convinced that all
effectively calculable functions would fall under it. The proof of the
equivalence between l-definability and recursiveness by Church and Kleene led
to Church’s first published formulation of the thesis as quoted above. The
thesis was reiterated in Church’s “An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number
Theory” 6. Turing introduced, in “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to
the Entscheidungsproblem” 6, a notion of computability by machines and
maintained that it captures effective calculability exactly. Post’s paper
“Finite Combinatory Processes, Formulation 1” 6 contains a model of computation
that is strikingly similar to Turing’s. However, Post did not provide any
analysis; he suggested considering the identification of effective
calculability with his concept as a working hypothesis that should be verified
by investigating ever wider formulations and reducing them to his basic
formulation. The classic papers of Gödel, Church, Turing, Post, and Kleene are
all reprinted in Davis, ed., The Undecidable, 5. In his 6 paper Church gave one
central reason for the proposed identification, namely that other plausible explications
of the informal notion lead to mathematical concepts weaker than or equivalent
to recursiveness. Two paradigmatic explications, calculability of a function
via algorithms or in a logic, were considered by Church. In either case, the
steps taken in determining function values have to be effective; and if the
effectiveness of steps is, as Church put it, interpreted to mean recursiveness,
then the function is recursive. The fundamental interpretative difficulty in
Church’s “step-by-step argument” which was turned into one of the
“recursiveness conditions” Hilbert and Bernays used in their 9 characterization
of functions that can be evaluated according to rules was bypassed by Turing.
Analyzing human mechanical computations, Turing was led to finiteness
conditions that are motivated by the human computer’s sensory limitations, but
are ultimately based on memory limitations. Then he showed that any function
calculable by a human computer satisfying these conditions is also computable
by one of his machines. Both Church and Gödel found Turing’s analysis
convincing; indeed, Church wrote in a 7 review of Turing’s paper that Turing’s
notion makes “the identification with effectiveness in the ordinary not
explicitly defined sense evident immediately.” This reflective work of partly
philosophical and partly mathematical character provides one of the fundamental
notions in mathematical logic. Indeed, its proper understanding is crucial for
judging the philosophical significance of central metamathematical results like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems or
Church’s theorem. The work is also crucial for computer science, artificial
intelligence, and cognitive psychology, providing in these fields a basic
theoretical notion. For example, Church’s thesis is the cornerstone for Newell
and Simon’s delimitation of the class of physical symbol systems, i.e.
universal machines with a particular architecture; see Newell’s Physical Symbol
Systems 0. Newell views the delimitation “as the most fundamental contribution
of artificial intelligence and computer science to the joint enterprise of
cognitive science.” In a turn that had been taken by Turing in “Intelligent
Machinery” 8 and “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” 0, Newell points out
the basic role physical symbol systems take on in the study of the human mind:
“the hypothesis is that humans are instances of physical symbol systems, and,
by virtue of this, mind enters into the physical universe. . . . this
hypothesis sets the terms on which we search for a scientific theory of
mind.”
Ciceronian implicaturum: Marcus Tullius, Roman statesman, orator, essayist,
and letter writer. He was important not so much for formulating individual
philosophical arguments as for expositions of the doctrines of the major
schools of Hellenistic philosophy, and for, as he put it, “teaching philosophy
to speak Latin.” The significance of the latter can hardly be overestimated.
Cicero’s coinages helped shape the philosophical vocabulary of the
Latin-speaking West well into the early modern period. The most characteristic
feature of Cicero’s thought is his attempt to unify philosophy and rhetoric.
His first major trilogy, On the Orator, On the Republic, and On the Laws,
presents a vision of wise statesmen-philosophers whose greatest achievement is
guiding political affairs through rhetorical persuasion rather than violence.
Philosophy, Cicero argues, needs rhetoric to effect its most important
practical goals, while rhetoric is useless without the psychological, moral,
and logical justification provided by philosophy. This combination of eloquence
and philosophy constitutes what he calls humanitas a coinage whose enduring influence is
attested in later revivals of humanism
and it alone provides the foundation for constitutional governments; it
is acquired, moreover, only through broad training in those subjects worthy of
free citizens artes liberales. In philosophy of education, this Ciceronian
conception of a humane education encompassing poetry, rhetoric, history,
morals, and politics endured as an ideal, especially for those convinced that
instruction in the liberal disciplines is essential for citizens if their
rational autonomy is to be expressed in ways that are culturally and
politically beneficial. A major aim of Cicero’s earlier works is to appropriate
for Roman high culture one of Greece’s most distinctive products, philosophical
theory, and to demonstrate Roman superiority. He thus insists that Rome’s laws
and political institutions successfully embody the best in Grecian political
theory, whereas the Grecians themselves were inadequate to the crucial task of
putting their theories into practice. Taking over the Stoic conception of the
universe as a rational whole, governed by divine reason, he argues that human
societies must be grounded in natural law. For Cicero, nature’s law possesses
the characteristics of a legal code; in particular, it is formulable in a
comparatively extended set of rules against which existing societal
institutions can be measured. Indeed, since they so closely mirror the
requirements of nature, Roman laws and institutions furnish a nearly perfect
paradigm for human societies. Cicero’s overall theory, if not its particular
details, established a lasting framework for anti-positivist theories of law
and morality, including those of Aquinas, Grotius, Suárez, and Locke. The final
two years of his life saw the creation of a series of dialogue-treatises that
provide an encyclopedic survey of Hellenistic philosophy. Cicero himself
follows the moderate fallibilism of Philo of Larissa and the New Academy.
Holding that philosophy is a method and not a set of dogmas, he endorses an
attitude of systematic doubt. However, unlike Cartesian doubt, Cicero’s does
not extend to the real world behind phenomena, since he does not envision the
possibility of strict phenomenalism. Nor does he believe that systematic doubt
leads to radical skepticism about knowledge. Although no infallible criterion
for distinguishing true from false impressions is available, some impressions,
he argues, are more “persuasive” probabile and can be relied on to guide
action. In Academics he offers detailed accounts of Hellenistic epistemological
debates, steering a middle course between dogmatism and radical skepticism. A
similar strategy governs the rest of his later writings. Cicero presents the
views of the major schools, submits them to criticism, and tentatively supports
any positions he finds “persuasive.” Three connected works, On Divination, On
Fate, and On the Nature of the Gods, survey Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic
arguments about theology and natural philosophy. Much of the treatment of
religious thought and practice is cool, witty, and skeptically detached much in the manner of eighteenth-century
philosophes who, along with Hume, found much in Cicero to emulate. However, he
concedes that Stoic arguments for providence are “persuasive.” So too in
ethics, he criticizes Epicurean, Stoic, and Peripatetic doctrines in On Ends 45
and their views on death, pain, irrational emotions, and happiChurch-Turing thesis
Cicero, Marcus Tullius 143 143 ness in
Tusculan Disputations 45. Yet, a final work, On Duties, offers a practical
ethical system based on Stoic principles. Although sometimes dismissed as the
eclecticism of an amateur, Cicero’s method of selectively choosing from what
had become authoritative professional systems often displays considerable
reflectiveness and originality.
circulus – Grice: “I prefer ‘kreis,’ which I learned from Ayer
– its etymology is so obscure!” -- Grice’s circle -- Grice’s circle -- circular
reasoning, reasoning that, when traced backward from its conclusion, returns to
that starting point, as one returns to a starting point when tracing a circle.
The discussion of this topic by Richard Whatley in his Logic sets a high standard
of clarity and penetration. Logic textbooks often quote the following example
from Whatley: To allow every man an unbounded freedom of speech must always be,
on the whole, advantageous to the State; for it is highly conducive to the
interests of the Community, that each individual should enjoy a liberty
perfectly unlimited, of expressing his sentiments. This passage illustrates how
circular reasoning is less obvious in a language, such as English, that, in
Whatley’s words, is “abounding in synonymous expressions, which have no
resemblance in sound, and no connection in etymology.” The premise and
conclusion do not consist of just the same words in the same order, nor can
logical or grammatical principles transform one into the other. Rather, they
have the same propositional content: they say the same thing in different
words. That is why appealing to one of them to provide reason for believing the
other amounts to giving something as a reason for itself. Circular reasoning is
often said to beg the question. ‘Begging the question’ and petitio principii
are translations of a phrase in Aristotle connected with a game of formal
disputation played in antiquity but not in recent times. The meanings of
‘question’ and ‘begging’ do not in any clear way determine the meaning of
‘question begging’. There is no simple argument form that all and only circular
arguments have. It is not logic, in Whatley’s example above, that determines
the identity of content between the premise and the conclusion. Some theorists
propose rather more complicated formal or syntactic accounts of circularity.
Others believe that any account of circular reasoning must refer to the beliefs
of those who reason. Whether or not the following argument about articles in
this dictionary is circular depends on why the first premise should be
accepted: 1 The article on inference contains no split infinitives. 2 The other
articles contain no split infinitives. Therefore, 3 No article contains split
infinitives. Consider two cases. Case I: Although 2 supports 1 inductively,
both 1 and 2 have solid outside support independent of any prior acceptance of
3. This reasoning is not circular. Case II: Someone who advances the argument
accepts 1 or 2 or both, only because he believes 3. Such reasoning is circular,
even though neither premise expresses just the same proposition as the
conclusion. The question remains controversial whether, in explaining
circularity, we should refer to the beliefs of individual reasoners or only to
the surrounding circumstances. One purpose of reasoning is to increase the
degree of reasonable confidence that one has in the truth of a conclusion.
Presuming the truth of a conclusion in support of a premise thwarts this
purpose, because the initial degree of reasonable confidence in the premise
cannot then exceed the initial degree of reasonable confidence in the
conclusion. Circulus -- diallelon from ancient Grecian di allelon, ‘through one
another’, a circular definition. A definition is circular provided either the
definiendum occurs in the definiens, as in ‘Law is a lawful command’, or a
first term is defined by means of a second term, which in turn is defined by
the first term, as in ‘Law is the expressed wish of a ruler, and a ruler is one
who establishes laws.’ A diallelus is a circular argument: an attempt to
establish a conclusion by a premise that cannot be known unless the conclusion
is known in the first place. Descartes, e.g., argued: I clearly and distinctly
perceive that God exists, and what I clearly and distinctly perceive is true.
Therefore, God exists. To justify the premise that clear and distinct
perceptions are true, however, he appealed to his knowledge of God’s existence.
civil
disobedience: explored by H. P. Grice
in his analysis of moral vs. legal right -- a deliberate violation of the law,
committed in order to draw attention to or rectify perceived injustices in the
law or policies of a state. Illustrative questions raised by the topic include:
how are such acts justified, how should the legal system respond to such acts
when justified, and must such acts be done publicly, nonviolently, and/or with
a willingness to accept attendant legal sanctions?
clarke: s. Grice
analyses Clark’s proof of the existence of God in “Aspects of reasoning” --
English philosopher, preacher, and theologian. Born in Norwich, he was educated
at Cambridge, where he came under the influence of Newton. Upon graduation
Clarke entered the established church, serving for a time as chaplain to Queen
Anne. He spent the last twenty years of his life as rector of St. James,
Westminster. Clarke wrote extensively on controversial theological and
philosophical issues the nature of space
and time, proofs of the existence of God, the doctrine of the Trinity, the
incorporeality and natural immortality of the soul, freedom of the will, the
nature of morality, etc. His most philosophical works are his Boyle lectures of
1704 and 1705, in which he developed a forceful version of the cosmological
argument for the existence and nature of God and attacked the views of Hobbes,
Spinoza, and some proponents of deism; his correspondence with Leibniz 171516,
in which he defended Newton’s views of space and time and charged Leibniz with
holding views inconsistent with free will; and his writings against Anthony Collins,
in which he defended a libertarian view of the agent as the undetermined cause
of free actions and attacked Collins’s arguments for a materialistic view of
the mind. In these works Clarke maintains a position of extreme rationalism,
contending that the existence and nature of God can be conclusively
demonstrated, that the basic principles of morality are necessarily true and
immediately knowable, and that the existence of a future state of rewards and
punishments is assured by our knowledge that God will reward the morally just
and punish the morally wicked.
class: the class for those philosophers whose class have no
members -- a term sometimes used as a synonym for ‘set’. When the two are
distinguished, a class is understood as a collection in the logical sense,
i.e., as the extension of a concept e.g. the class of red objects. By contrast,
sets, i.e., collections in the mathematical sense, are understood as occurring
in stages, where each stage consists of the sets that can be formed from the
non-sets and the sets already formed at previous stages. When a set is formed
at a given stage, only the non-sets and the previously formed sets are even
candidates for membership, but absolutely anything can gain membership in a
class simply by falling under the appropriate concept. Thus, it is classes, not
sets, that figure in the inconsistent principle of unlimited comprehension. In
set theory, proper classes are collections of sets that are never formed at any
stage, e.g., the class of all sets since new sets are formed at each stage,
there is no stage at which all sets are available to be collected into a set.
clemens: formative teacher in the early Christian church who,
as a “Christian gnostic,” combined enthusiasm for Grecian philosophy with a
defense of the church’s faith. He espoused spiritual and intellectual ascent
toward that complete but hidden knowledge or gnosis reserved for the truly
enlightened. Clement’s school did not practice strict fidelity to the
authorities, and possibly the teachings, of the institutional church, drawing
upon the Hellenistic traditions of Alexandria, including Philo and Middle
Platonism. As with the law among the Jews, so, for Clement, philosophy among
the pagans was a pedagogical preparation for Christ, in whom logos, reason, had
become enfleshed. Philosophers now should rise above their inferior
understanding to the perfect knowledge revealed in Christ. Though hostile to
gnosticism and its speculations, Clement was thoroughly Hellenized in outlook
and sometimes guilty of Docetism, not least in his reluctance to concede the
utter humanness of Jesus.
clifford: W. K., -- H. P. Grice was attracted to Clifford’s
idea of the ‘ethics of belief,’ -- philosopher. Educated at King’s , London,
and Trinity , Cambridge, he began giving public lectures in 1868, when he was
appointed a fellow of Trinity, and in 1870 became professor of applied
mathematics at , London. His academic
career ended prematurely when he died of tuberculosis. Clifford is best known
for his rigorous view on the relation between belief and evidence, which, in
“The Ethics of Belief,” he summarized thus: “It is wrong always, everywhere,
and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” He gives this
example. Imagine a shipowner who sends to sea an emigrant ship, although the
evidence raises strong suspicions as to the vessel’s seaworthiness. Ignoring
this evidence, he convinces himself that the ship’s condition is good enough
and, after it sinks and all the passengers die, collects his insurance money without
a trace of guilt. Clifford maintains that the owner had no right to believe in
the soundness of the ship. “He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning
it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.” The right Clifford is
alluding to is moral, for what one believes is not a private but a public
affair and may have grave consequences for others. He regards us as morally
obliged to investigate the evidence thoroughly on any occasion, and to withhold
belief if evidential support is lacking. This obligation must be fulfilled
however trivial and insignificant a belief may seem, for a violation of it may
“leave its stamp upon our character forever.” Clifford thus rejected
Catholicism, to which he had subscribed originally, and became an agnostic.
James’s famous essay “The Will to Believe” criticizes Clifford’s view.
According to James, insufficient evidence need not stand in the way of
religious belief, for we have a right to hold beliefs that go beyond the
evidence provided they serve the pursuit of a legitimate goal.
closure -- Griceian
anti-sneak closure: a set of objects,
O, is said to exhibit closure or to be closed under a given operation, R,
provided that for every object, x, if x is a member of O and x is R-related to
any object, y, then y is a member of O. For example, the set of propositions is
closed under deduction, for if p is a proposition and p entails q, i.e., q is
deducible from p, then q is a proposition simply because only propositions can
be entailed by propositions. In addition, many subsets of the set of
propositions are also closed under deduction. For example, the set of true
propositions is closed under deduction or entailment. Others are not. Under
most accounts of belief, we may fail to believe what is entailed by what we do,
in fact, believe. Thus, if knowledge is some form of true, justified belief,
knowledge is not closed under deduction, for we may fail to believe a
proposition entailed by a known proposition. Nevertheless, there is a related
issue that has been the subject of much debate, namely: Is the set of justified
propositions closed under deduction? Aside from the obvious importance of the
answer to that question in developing an account of justification, there are
two important issues in epistemology that also depend on the answer. Subtleties
aside, the so-called Gettier problem depends in large part upon an affirmative
answer to that question. For, assuming that a proposition can be justified and
false, it is possible to construct cases in which a proposition, say p, is
justified, false, but believed. Now, consider a true proposition, q, which is
believed and entailed by p. If justification is closed under deduction, then q
is justified, true, and believed. But if the only basis for believing q is p,
it is clear that q is not known. Thus, true, justified belief is not sufficient
for knowledge. What response is appropriate to this problem has been a central
issue in epistemology since E. Gettier’s publication of “Is Justified True
Belief Knowledge?” Analysis, 3. Whether justification is closed under deduction
is also crucial when evaluating a common, traditional argument for skepticism.
Consider any person, S, and let p be any proposition ordinarily thought to be
knowable, e.g., that there is a table before S. The argument for skepticism
goes like this: 1 If p is justified for S, then, since p entails q, where q is
‘there is no evil genius making S falsely believe that p’, q is justified for
S. 2 S is not justified in believing q. Therefore, S is not justified in
believing p. The first premise depends upon justification being closed under
deduction.
cockburn: c. English philosopher and playwright who made a
significant contribution to the debates on ethical rationalism sparked by
Clarke’s Boyle lectures 170405. The major theme of her writings is the nature
of moral obligation. Cockburn displays a consistent, non-doctrinaire
philosophical position, arguing that moral duty is to be rationally deduced
from the “nature and fitness of things” Remarks, 1747 and is not founded
primarily in externally imposed sanctions. Her writings, published anonymously,
take the form of philosophical debates with others, including Samuel
Rutherforth, William Warburton, Isaac Watts, Francis Hutcheson, and Lord
Shaftesbury. Her best-known intervention in contemporary philosophical debate
was her able defense of Locke’s Essay in 1702.
cogito ergo
sum – Example given by Grice of
Descartes’s conventional implicaturum. “What Descartes said was, “je pense;
donc, j’existe.” The ‘donc’ implicaturum is an interesting one to analyse. cited
by Grice in “Descartes on clear and distinct perception.” ‘I think, therefore I
am’, the starting point of Descartes’s system of knowledge. In his Discourse on
the Method 1637, he observes that the proposition ‘I am thinking, therefore I
exist’ je pense, donc je suis is “so firm and sure that the most extravagant
suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it.” The celebrated
phrase, in its better-known Latin version, also occurs in the Principles of
Philosophy 1644, but is not to be found in the Meditations 1641, though the
latter contains the fullest statement of the reasoning behind Descartes’s
certainty of his own existence.
cognitum –
incognitum --
potching and
cotching: Grice coined ‘cotching’
because he was irritated to hear that Chomsky couldn’t stand ‘know’ and how to
coin ‘cognise’ to do duty for it! cognition -- cognitive dissonance, mental
discomfort arising from conflicting beliefs or attitudes held simultaneously.
Leon Festinger, who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance in a book of
that title 7, suggested that cognitive dissonance has motivational
characteristics. Suppose a person is contemplating moving to a new city. She is
considering both Birmingham and Boston. She cannot move to both, so she must
choose. Dissonance is experienced by the person if in choosing, say,
Birmingham, she acquires knowledge of bad or unwelcome features of Birmingham
and of good or welcome aspects of Boston. The amount of dissonance depends on the
relative intensities of dissonant elements. Hence, if the only dissonant factor
is her learning that Boston is cooler than Birmingham, and she does not regard
climate as important, she will experience little dissonance. Dissonance may
occur in several sorts of psychological states or processes, although the bulk
of research in cognitive dissonance theory has been on dissonance in choice and
on the justification and psychological aftereffects of choice. Cognitive
dissonance may be involved in two phenomena of interest to philosophers,
namely, self-deception and weakness of will. Why do self-deceivers try to get
themselves to believe something that, in some sense, they know to be false? One
may resort to self-deception when knowledge causes dissonance. Why do the
weak-willed perform actions they know to be wrong? One may become weak-willed
when dissonance arises from the expected consequences of doing the right thing.
-- cognitive psychotherapy, an expression introduced by Brandt in A Theory of
the Good and the Right to refer to a process of assessing and adjusting one’s
desires, aversions, or pleasures henceforth, “attitudes”. This process is
central to Brandt’s analysis of rationality, and ultimately, to his view on the
justification of morality. Cognitive psychotherapy consists of the agent’s
criticizing his attitudes by repeatedly representing to himself, in an ideally
vivid way and at appropriate times, all relevant available information. Brandt
characterizes the key definiens as follows: 1 available information is
“propositions accepted by the science of the agent’s day, plus factual
propositions justified by publicly accessible evidence including testimony of
others about themselves and the principles of logic”; 2 information is relevant
provided, if the agent were to reflect repeatedly on it, “it would make a
difference,” i.e., would affect the attitude in question, and the effect would
be a function of its content, not an accidental byproduct; 3 relevant
information is represented in an ideally vivid way when the agent focuses on it
with maximal clarity and detail and with no hesitation or doubt about its
truth; and 4 repeatedly and at appropriate times refer, respectively, to the
frequency and occasions that would result in the information’s having the maximal
attitudinal impact. Suppose Mary’s desire to smoke were extinguished by her
bringing to the focus of her attention, whenever she was about to inhale smoke,
some justified beliefs, say that smoking is hazardous to one’s health and may
cause lung cancer; Mary’s desire would have been removed by cognitive
psychotherapy. According to Brandt, an attitude is rational for a person
provided it is one that would survive, or be produced by, cognitive
psychotherapy; otherwise it is irrational. Rational attitudes, in this sense,
provide a basis for moral norms. Roughly, the correct moral norms are those of
a moral code that persons would opt for if i they were motivated by attitudes
that survive the process of cognitive psychotherapy; and ii at the time of opting
for a moral code, they were fully aware of, and vividly attentive to, all
available information relevant to choosing a moral code for a society in which
they are to live for the rest of their lives. In this way, Brandt seeks a
value-free justification for moral norms
one that avoids the problems of other theories such as those that make
an appeal to intuitions. -- cognitive
science, an interdisciplinary research cluster that seeks to account for
intelligent activity, whether exhibited by living organisms especially adult
humans or machines. Hence, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence
constitute its core. A number of other disciplines, including neuroscience,
linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, as well as other fields of
psychology e.g., developmental psychology, are more peripheral contributors.
The quintessential cognitive scientist is someone who employs computer modeling
techniques developing computer programs for the purpose of simulating
particular human cognitive activities, but the broad range of disciplines that
are at least peripherally constitutive of cognitive science have lent a variety
of research strategies to the enterprise. While there are a few common
institutions that seek to unify cognitive science e.g., departments, journals,
and societies, the problems investigated and the methods of investigation often
are limited to a single contributing discipline. Thus, it is more appropriate
to view cognitive science as a cross-disciplinary enterprise than as itself a
new discipline. While interest in cognitive phenomena has historically played a
central role in the various disciplines contributing to cognitive science, the
term properly applies to cross-disciplinary activities that emerged in the 0s.
During the preceding two decades each of the disciplines that became part of
cogntive science gradually broke free of positivistic and behavioristic
proscriptions that barred systematic inquiry into the operation of the mind.
One of the primary factors that catalyzed new investigations of cognitive
activities was Chomsky’s generative grammar, which he advanced not only as an
abstract theory of the structure of language, but also as an account of
language users’ mental knowledge of language their linguistic competence. A
more fundamental factor was the development of approaches for theorizing about
information in an abstract manner, and the introduction of machines computers
that could manipulate information. This gave rise to the idea that one might
program a computer to process information so as to exhibit behavior that would,
if performed by a human, require intelligence. If one tried to formulate a
unifying question guiding cognitive science research, it would probably be: How
does the cognitive system work? But even this common question is interpreted
quite differently in different disciplines. We can appreciate these differences
by looking just at language. While psycholinguists generally psychologists seek
to identify the processing activities in the mind that underlie language use,
most linguists focus on the products of this internal processing, seeking to
articulate the abstract structure of language. A frequent goal of computer
scientists, in contrast, has been to develop computer programs to parse natural
language input and produce appropriate syntactic and semantic representations.
These differences in objectives among the cognitive science disciplines
correlate with different methodologies. The following represent some of the
major methodological approaches of the contributing disciplines and some of the
problems each encounters. Artificial intelligence. If the human cognition
system is viewed as computational, a natural goal is to simulate its
performance. This typically requires formats for representing information as
well as procedures for searching and manipulating it. Some of the earliest
AIprograms drew heavily on the resources of first-order predicate calculus,
representing information in propositional formats and manipulating it according
to logical principles. For many modeling endeavors, however, it proved
important to represent information in larger-scale structures, such as frames
Marvin Minsky, schemata David Rumelhart, or scripts Roger Schank, in which
different pieces of information associated with an object or activity would be
stored together. Such structures generally employed default values for specific
slots specifying, e.g., that deer live in forests that would be part of the
representation unless overridden by new information e.g., that a particular
deer lives in the San Diego Zoo. A very influential alternative approach,
developed by Allen Newell, replaces declarative representations of information
with procedural representations, known as productions. These productions take
the form of conditionals that specify actions to be performed e.g., copying an
expression into working memory if certain conditions are satisfied e.g., the
expression matches another expression. Psychology. While some psychologists
develop computer simulations, a more characteristic activity is to acquire
detailed data from human subjects that can reveal the cognitive system’s actual
operation. This is a challenging endeavor. While cognitive activities transpire
within us, they frequently do so in such a smooth and rapid fashion that we are
unaware of them. For example, we have little awareness of what occurs when we
recognize an object as a chair or remember the name of a client. Some cognitive
functions, though, seem to be transparent to consciousness. For example, we
might approach a logic problem systematically, enumerating possible solutions
and evaluating them serially. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon have refined
methods for exploiting verbal protocols obtained from subjects as they solve
such problems. These methods have been quite fruitful, but their limitations
must be respected. In many cases in which we think we know how we performed a
cognitive task, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson have argued that we are
misled, relying on folk theories to describe how our minds work rather than
reporting directly on their operation. In most cases cognitive psychologists
cannot rely on conscious awareness of cognitive processes, but must proceed as
do physiologists trying to understand metabolism: they must devise experiments
that reveal the underlying processes operative in cognition. One approach is to
seek clues in the errors to which the cognitive system cognitive science
cognitive science is prone. Such errors might be more easily accounted for by
one kind of underlying process than by another. Speech errors, such as
substituting ‘bat cad’ for ‘bad cat’, may be diagnostic of the mechanisms used
to construct speech. This approach is often combined with strategies that seek
to overload or disrupt the system’s normal operation. A common technique is to
have a subject perform two tasks at once
e.g., read a passage while watching for a colored spot. Cognitive
psychologists may also rely on the ability to dissociate two phenomena e.g.,
obliterate one while maintaining the other to establish their independence.
Other types of data widely used to make inferences about the cognitive system
include patterns of reaction times, error rates, and priming effects in which
activation of one item facilitates access to related items. Finally,
developmental psychologists have brought a variety of kinds of data to bear on
cognitive science issues. For example, patterns of acquisition times have been
used in a manner similar to reaction time patterns, and accounts of the origin
and development of systems constrain and elucidate mature systems. Linguistics.
Since linguists focus on a product of cognition rather than the processes that
produce the product, they tend to test their analyses directly against our
shared knowledge of that product. Generative linguists in the tradition of
Chomsky, for instance, develop grammars that they test by probing whether they
generate the sentences of the language and no others. While grammars are
certainly G.e to developing processing models, they do not directly determine
the structure of processing models. Hence, the central task of linguistics is
not central to cognitive science. However, Chomsky has augmented his work on
grammatical description with a number of controversial claims that are
psycholinguistic in nature e.g., his nativism and his notion of linguistic
competence. Further, an alternative approach to incorporating psycholinguistic
concerns, the cognitive linguistics of Lakoff and Langacker, has achieved
prominence as a contributor to cognitive science. Neuroscience. Cognitive
scientists have generally assumed that the processes they study are carried
out, in humans, by the brain. Until recently, however, neuroscience has been
relatively peripheral to cognitive science. In part this is because
neuroscientists have been chiefly concerned with the implementation of
processes, rather than the processes themselves, and in part because the
techniques available to neuroscientists such as single-cell recording have been
most suitable for studying the neural implementation of lower-order processes
such as sensation. A prominent exception was the classical studies of brain
lesions initiated by Broca and Wernicke, which seemed to show that the location
of lesions correlated with deficits in production versus comprehension of
speech. More recent data suggest that lesions in Broca’s area impair certain
kinds of syntactic processing. However, other developments in neuroscience
promise to make its data more relevant to cognitive modeling in the future.
These include studies of simple nervous systems, such as that of the aplysia a
genus of marine mollusk by Eric Kandel, and the development of a variety of
techniques for determining the brain activities involved in the performance of
cognitive tasks e.g., recording of evoked response potentials over larger brain
structures, and imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography. While
in the future neuroscience is likely to offer much richer information that will
guide the development and constrain the character of cognitive models, neuroscience
will probably not become central to cognitive science. It is itself a rich,
multidisciplinary research cluster whose contributing disciplines employ a host
of complicated research tools. Moreover, the focus of cognitive science can be
expected to remain on cognition, not on its implementation. So far cognitive
science has been characterized in terms of its modes of inquiry. One can also
focus on the domains of cognitive phenomena that have been explored. Language
represents one such domain. Syntax was one of the first domains to attract wide
attention in cognitive science. For example, shortly after Chomsky introduced
his transformational grammar, psychologists such as George Miller sought
evidence that transformations figured directly in human language processing.
From this beginning, a more complex but enduring relationship among linguists,
psychologists, and computer scientists has formed a leading edge for much
cognitive science research. Psycholinguistics has matured; sophisticated
computer models of natural language processing have been developed; and
cognitive linguists have offered a particular synthesis that emphasizes
semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive foundations of language. Thinking and
reasoning. These constitute an important domain of cognitive science that is
closely linked to philosophical interests. Problem cognitive science cognitive
science solving, such as that which figures in solving puzzles, playing games,
or serving as an expert in a domain, has provided a prototype for thinking.
Newell and Simon’s influential work construed problem solving as a search
through a problem space and introduced the idea of heuristics generally reliable but fallible simplifying
devices to facilitate the search. One arena for problem solving, scientific
reasoning and discovery, has particularly interested philosophers. Artificial
intelligence researchers such as Simon and Patrick Langley, as well as
philosophers such as Paul Thagard and Lindley Darden, have developed computer
programs that can utilize the same data as that available to historical
scientists to develop and evaluate theories and plan future experiments.
Cognitive scientists have also sought to study the cognitive processes
underlying the sorts of logical reasoning both deductive and inductive whose
normative dimensions have been a concern of philosophers. Philip JohnsonLaird,
for example, has sought to account for human performance in dealing with
syllogistic reasoning by describing a processing of constructing and
manipulating mental models. Finally, the process of constructing and using
analogies is another aspect of reasoning that has been extensively studied by
traditional philosophers as well as cognitive scientists. Memory, attention,
and learning. Cognitive scientists have differentiated a variety of types of
memory. The distinction between long- and short-term memory was very
influential in the information-processing models of the 0s. Short-term memory
was characterized by limited capacity, such as that exhibited by the ability to
retain a seven-digit telephone number for a short period. In much cognitive
science work, the notion of working memory has superseded short-term memory,
but many theorists are reluctant to construe this as a separate memory system
as opposed to a part of long-term memory that is activated at a given time.
Endel Tulving introduced a distinction between semantic memory general
knowledge that is not specific to a time or place and episodic memory memory
for particular episodes or occurrences. More recently, Daniel Schacter proposed
a related distinction that emphasizes consciousness: implicit memory access
without awareness versus explicit memory which does involve awareness and is
similar to episodic memory. One of the interesting results of cognitive research
is the dissociation between different kinds of memory: a person might have
severely impaired memory of recent events while having largely unimpaired
implicit memory. More generally, memory research has shown that human memory
does not simply store away information as in a file cabinet. Rather,
information is organized according to preexisting structures such as scripts,
and can be influenced by events subsequent to the initial storage. Exactly what
gets stored and retrieved is partly determined by attention, and psychologists
in the information-processing tradition have sought to construct general
cognitive models that emphasize memory and attention. Finally, the topic of
learning has once again become prominent. Extensively studied by the
behaviorists of the precognitive era, learning was superseded by memory and
attention as a research focus in the 0s. In the 0s, artificial intelligence
researchers developed a growing interest in designing systems that can learn;
machine learning is now a major problem area in AI. During the same period,
connectionism arose to offer an alternative kind of learning model. Perception
and motor control. Perceptual and motor systems provide the inputs and outputs
to cognitive systems. An important aspect of perception is the recognition of
something as a particular kind of object or event; this requires accessing
knowledge of objects and events. One of the central issues concerning
perception questions the extent to which perceptual processes are influenced by
higher-level cognitive information top-down processing versus how much they are
driven purely by incoming sensory information bottom-up processing. A related
issue concerns the claim that visual imagery is a distinct cognitive process
and is closely related to visual perception, perhaps relying on the same brain
processes. A number of cognitive science inquiries e.g., by Roger Shepard and
Stephen Kosslyn have focused on how people use images in problem solving and
have sought evidence that people solve problems by rotating images or scanning
them. This research has been extremely controversial, as other investigators
have argued against the use of images and have tried to account for the
performance data that have been generated in terms of the use of
propositionally represented information. Finally, a distinction recently has
been proposed between the What and Where systems. All of the foregoing issues
concern the What system which recognizes and represents objects as exemplars of
categories. The Where system, in contrast, concerns objects in their
environment, and is particularly adapted to the dynamics of movement. Gibson’s
ecological psychology is a long-standing inquiry into this aspect of
perception, and work on the neural substrates is now attracting the interest of
cognitive scientists as well. Recent developments. The breadth of cognitive
science has been expanding in recent years. In the 0s, cognitive science
inquiries tended to focus on processing activities of adult humans or on
computer models of intelligent performance; the best work often combined these
approaches. Subsequently, investigators examined in much greater detail how
cognitive systems develop, and developmental psychologists have increasingly
contributed to cognitive science. One of the surprising findings has been that,
contrary to the claims of William James, infants do not seem to confront the
world as a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” but rather recognize objects and
events quite early in life. Cognitive science has also expanded along a
different dimension. Until recently many cognitive studies focused on what
humans could accomplish in laboratory settings in which they performed tasks
isolated from reallife contexts. The motivation for this was the assumption
that cognitive processes were generic and not limited to specific contexts.
However, a variety of influences, including Gibsonian ecological psychology
especially as interpreted and developed by Ulric Neisser and Soviet activity
theory, have advanced the view that cognition is much more dynamic and situated
in real-world tasks and environmental contexts; hence, it is necessary to study
cognitive activities in an ecologically valid manner. Another form of expansion
has resulted from a challenge to what has been the dominant architecture for
modeling cognition. An architecture defines the basic processing capacities of
the cognitive system. The dominant cognitive architecture has assumed that the
mind possesses a capacity for storing and manipulating symbols. These symbols
can be composed into larger structures according to syntactic rules that can
then be operated upon by formal rules that recognize that structure. Jerry
Fodor has referred to this view of the cognitive system as the “language of
thought hypothesis” and clearly construes it as a modern heir of rationalism.
One of the basic arguments for it, due to Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, is that
thoughts, like language, exhibit productivity the unlimited capacity to
generate new thoughts and systematicity exhibited by the inherent relation
between thoughts such as ‘Joan loves the florist’ and ‘The florist loves Joan’.
They argue that only if the architecture of cognition has languagelike
compositional structure would productivity and systematicity be generic
properties and hence not require special case-by-case accounts. The challenge
to this architecture has arisen with the development of an alternative
architecture, known as connectionism, parallel distributed processing, or
neural network modeling, which proposes that the cognitive system consists of vast
numbers of neuronlike units that excite or inhibit each other. Knowledge is
stored in these systems by the adjustment of connection strengths between
processing units; consequently, connectionism is a modern descendant of
associationism. Connectionist networks provide a natural account of certain
cognitive phenomena that have proven challenging for the symbolic architecture,
including pattern recognition, reasoning with soft constraints, and learning.
Whether they also can account for productivity and systematicity has been the
subject of debate. Philosophical theorizing about the mind has often provided a
starting point for the modeling and empirical investigations of modern
cognitive science. The ascent of cognitive science has not meant that philosophers
have ceased to play a role in examining cognition. Indeed, a number of
philosophers have pursued their inquiries as contributors to cognitive science,
focusing on such issues as the possible reduction of cognitive theories to
those of neuroscience, the status of folk psychology relative to emerging
scientific theories of mind, the merits of rationalism versus empiricism, and
strategies for accounting for the intentionality of mental states. The
interaction between philosophers and other cognitive scientists, however, is
bidirectional, and a number of developments in cognitive science promise to
challenge or modify traditional philosophical views of cognition. For example,
studies by cognitive and social psychologists have challenged the assumption
that human thinking tends to accord with the norms of logic and decision
theory. On a variety of tasks humans seem to follow procedures heuristics that
violate normative canons, raising questions about how philosophers should
characterize rationality. Another area of empirical study that has challenged
philosophical assumptions has been the study of concepts and categorization.
Philosophers since Plato have widely assumed that concepts of ordinary
language, such as red, bird, and justice, should be definable by necessary and
sufficient conditions. But celebrated studies by Eleanor Rosch and her
colleagues indicated that many ordinary-language concepts had a prototype
structure instead. On this view, the categories employed in human thinking are
characterized by prototypes the clearest exemplars and a metric that grades
exemplars according to their degree of typicality. Recent investigations have
also pointed to significant instability in conceptual structure and to the role
of theoretical beliefs in organizing categories. This alternative conception of
concepts has profound implications for philosophical methodologies that portray
philosophy’s task to be the analysis of concepts.
palæo-Kantian: Kantian, neo-Kantian. Cohen, Hermann – Grice liked to
think of himself as a neo-Kantian (“rather than a palaeo-Kantian, you see”)
-- philosopher who originated and led,
with Paul Natorp, the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. He taught at Marburg.
Cohen wrote commentaries on Kant’s Critiques prior to publishing System der Philosophie
212, which consisted of parts on logic, ethics, and aesthetics. He developed a
Kantian idealism of the natural sciences, arguing that a transcendental
analysis of these sciences shows that “pure thought” his system of Kantian a
priori principles “constructs” their “reality.” He also developed Kant’s ethics
as a democratic socialist ethics. He ended his career at a rabbinical seminary
in Berlin, writing his influential Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des
Judentums “Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism,” 9, which
explicated Judaism on the basis of his own Kantian ethical idealism. Cohen’s
ethical-political views were adopted by Kurt Eisner 18679, leader of the Munich
revolution of 8, and also had an impact on the revisionism of orthodox Marxism
of the G. Social Democratic Party, while his philosophical writings greatly
influenced Cassirer.
coherence – since H. P. Grice was a correspondentist, he hated
Bradley. -- theory of truth, the view
that either the nature of truth or the sole criterion for determining truth is
constituted by a relation of coherence between the belief or judgment being
assessed and other beliefs or judgments. As a view of the nature of truth, the
coherence theory represents an alternative to the correspondence theory of
truth. Whereas the correspondence theory holds that a belief is true provided
it corresponds to independent reality, the coherence theory holds that it is
true provided it stands in a suitably strong relation of coherence to other
beliefs, so that the believer’s total system of beliefs forms a highly or
perhaps perfectly coherent system. Since, on such a characterization, truth
depends entirely on the internal relations within the system of beliefs, such a
conception of truth seems to lead at once to idealism as regards the nature of
reality, and its main advocates have been proponents of absolute idealism
mainly Bradley, Bosanquet, and Brand Blanshard. A less explicitly metaphysical
version of the coherence theory was also held by certain members of the school
of logical positivism mainly Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel. The nature of the
intended relation of coherence, often characterized metaphorically in terms of
the beliefs in question fitting together or dovetailing with each other, has
been and continues to be a matter of uncertainty and controversy. Despite
occasional misconceptions to the contrary, it is clear that coherence is
intended to be a substantially more demanding relation than mere consistency,
involving such things as inferential and explanatory relations within the
system of beliefs. Perfect or ideal coherence is sometimes described as
requiring that every belief in the system of beliefs entails all the others
though it must be remembered that those offering such a characterization do not
restrict entailments to those that are formal or analytic in character. Since
actual human systems of belief seem inevitably to fall short of perfect
coherence, however that is understood, their truth is usually held to be only
approximate at best, thus leading to the absolute idealist view that truth
admits of degrees. As a view of the criterion of truth, the coherence theory of
truth holds that the sole criterion or standard for determining whether a
belief is true is its coherence with other beliefs or judgments, with the
degree of justification varying with the degree of coherence. Such a view
amounts to a coherence theory of epistemic justification. It was held by most
of the proponents of the coherence theory of the nature of truth, though usually
without distinguishing the two views very clearly. For philosophers who hold
both of these views, the thesis that coherence is the sole criterion of truth
is usually logically prior, and the coherence theory of the nature of truth is
adopted as a consequence, the clearest argument being that only the view that
perfect or ideal coherence is the nature of truth can make sense of the appeal
to degrees of coherence as a criterion of truth. -- coherentism, in epistemology, a theory of
the structure of knowledge or justified beliefs according to which all beliefs
representing knowledge are known or justified in virtue of their relations to
other beliefs, specifically, in virtue of belonging to a coherent system of
beliefs. Assuming that the orthodox account of knowledge is correct at least in
maintaining that justified true belief is necessary for knowledge, we can
identify two kinds of coherence theories of knowledge: those that are
coherentist merely in virtue of incorporating a coherence theory of justification,
and those that are doubly coherentist because they account for both
justification and truth in terms of coherence. What follows will focus on
coherence theories of justification. Historically, coherentism is the most
significant alternative to foundationalism. The latter holds that some beliefs,
basic or foundational beliefs, are justified apart from their relations to
other beliefs, while all other beliefs derive their justification from that of
foundational beliefs. Foundationalism portrays justification as having a
structure like that of a building, with certain beliefs serving as the
foundations and all other beliefs supported by them. Coherentism rejects this
image and pictures justification as having the structure of a raft. Justified
beliefs, like the planks that make up a raft, mutually support one another.
This picture of the coherence theory is due to the positivist Otto Neurath.
Among the positivists, Hempel shared Neurath’s sympathy for coherentism. Other
defenders of coherentism from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
were idealists, e.g., Bradley, Bosanquet, and Brand Blanshard. Idealists often
held the sort of double coherence theory mentioned above. The contrast between
foundationalism and coherentism is commonly developed in terms of the regress
argument. If we are asked what justifies one of our beliefs, we
characteristically answer by citing some other belief that supports it, e.g.,
logically or probabilistically. If we are asked about this second belief, we
are likely to cite a third belief, and so on. There are three shapes such an
evidential chain might have: it could go on forever, if could eventually end in
some belief, or it could loop back upon itself, i.e., eventually contain again
a belief that had occurred “higher up” on the chain. Assuming that infinite
chains are not really possible, we are left with a choice between chains that
end and circular chains. According to foundationalists, evidential chains must
eventually end with a foundational belief that is justified, if the belief at
the beginning of the chain is to be justified. Coherentists are then portrayed
as holding that circular chains can yield justified beliefs. This portrayal is,
in a way, correct. But it is also misleading since it suggests that the disagreement
between coherentism and foundationalism is best understood as concerning only
the structure of evidential chains. Talk of evidential chains in which beliefs
that are further down on the chain are responsible for beliefs that are higher
up naturally suggests the idea that just as real chains transfer forces,
evidential chains transfer justification. Foundationalism then sounds like a
real possibility. Foundational beliefs already have justification, and
evidential chains serve to pass the justification along to other beliefs. But
coherentism seems to be a nonstarter, for if no belief in the chain is
justified to begin with, there is nothing to pass along. Altering the metaphor,
we might say that coherentism seems about as likely to succeed as a bucket
brigade that does not end at a well, but simply moves around in a circle. The
coherentist seeks to dispel this appearance by pointing out that the primary
function of evidential chains is not to transfer epistemic status, such as
justification, from belief to belief. Indeed, beliefs are not the primary locus
of justification. Rather, it is whole systems of belief that are justified or
not in the primary sense; individual beliefs are justified in virtue of their
membership in an appropriately structured system of beliefs. Accordingly, what
the coherentist claims is that the appropriate sorts of evidential chains,
which will be circular indeed, will
likely contain numerous circles
constitute justified systems of belief. The individual beliefs within
such a system are themselves justified in virtue of their place in the entire
system and not because this status is passed on to them from beliefs further
down some evidential chain in which they figure. One can, therefore, view
coherentism with considerable accuracy as a version of foundationalism that
holds all beliefs to be foundational. From this perspective, the difference
between coherentism and traditional foundationalism has to do with what
accounts for the epistemic status of foundational beliefs, with traditional
foundationalism holding that such beliefs can be justified in various ways,
e.g., by perception or reason, while coherentism insists that the only way such
beliefs can be justified is by being a member of an appropriately structured
system of beliefs. One outstanding problem the coherentist faces is to specify
exactly what constitutes a coherent system of beliefs. Coherence clearly must
involve much more than mere absence of mutually contradictory beliefs. One way
in which beliefs can be logically consistent is by concerning completely
unrelated matters, but such a consistent system of beliefs would not embody the
sort of mutual support that constitutes the core idea of coherentism. Moreover,
one might question whether logical consistency is even necessary for coherence,
e.g., on the basis of the preface paradox. Similar points can be made regarding
efforts to begin an account of coherence with the idea that beliefs and degrees
of belief must correspond to the probability calculus. So although it is
difficult to avoid thinking that such formal features as logical and
probabilistic consistency are significantly involved in coherence, it is not
clear exactly how they are involved. An account of coherence can be drawn more
directly from the following intuitive idea: a coherent system of belief is one
in which each belief is epistemically supported by the others, where various
types of epistemic support are recognized, e.g., deductive or inductive
arguments, or inferences to the best explanation. There are, however, at least
two problems this suggestion does not address. First, since very small sets of
beliefs can be mutually supporting, the coherentist needs to say something
about the scope a system of beliefs must have to exhibit the sort of coherence
required for justification. Second, given the possibility of small sets of
mutually supportive beliefs, it is apparently possible to build a system of
very broad scope out of such small sets of mutually supportive beliefs by mere
conjunction, i.e., without forging any significant support relations among
them. Yet, since the interrelatedness of all truths does not seem discoverable
by analyzing the concept of justification, the coherentist cannot rule out
epistemically isolated subsystems of belief entirely. So the coherentist must
say what sorts of isolated subsystems of belief are compatible with coherence.
The difficulties involved in specifying a more precise concept of coherence
should not be pressed too vigorously against the coherentist. For one thing,
most foundationalists have been forced to grant coherence a significant role
within their accounts of justification, so no dialectical advantage can be
gained by pressing them. Moreover, only a little reflection is needed to see
that nearly all the difficulties involved in specifying coherence are
manifestations within a specific context of quite general philosophical
problems concerning such matters as induction, explanation, theory choice, the
nature of epistemic support, etc. They are, then, problems that are faced by
logicians, philosophers of science, and epistemologists quite generally,
regardless of whether they are sympathetic to coherentism. Coherentism faces a
number of serious objections. Since according to coherentism justification is
determined solely by the relations among beliefs, it does not seem to be
capable of taking us outside the circle of our beliefs. This fact gives rise to
complaints that coherentism cannot allow for any input from external reality,
e.g., via perception, and that it can neither guarantee nor even claim that it
is likely that coherent systems of belief will make contact with such reality
or contain true beliefs. And while it is widely granted that justified false
beliefs are possible, it is just as widely accepted that there is an important
connection between justification and truth, a connection that rules out
accounts according to which justification is not truth-conducive. These
abstractly formulated complaints can be made more vivid, in the case of the
former, by imagining a person with a coherent system of beliefs that becomes
frozen, and fails to change in the face of ongoing sensory experience; and in
the case of the latter, by pointing out that, barring an unexpected account of
coherence, it seems that a wide variety of coherent systems of belief are
possible, systems that are largely disjoint or even incompatible.
collier: a., Grice
found the Clavis Universalis quite fun (“to read”). -- English philosopher, a
Wiltshire parish priest whose Clavis Universalis 1713 defends a version of
immaterialism closely akin to Berkeley’s. Matter, Collier contends, “exists in,
or in dependence on mind.” He emphatically affirms the existence of bodies,
and, like Berkeley, defends immaterialCoimbra commentaries Collier, Arthur
155 155 ism as the only alternative to
skepticism. Collier grants that bodies seem to be external, but their
“quasi-externeity” is only the effect of God’s will. In Part I of the Clavis
Collier argues as Berkeley had in his New Theory of Vision, 1709 that the
visible world is not external. In Part II he argues as Berkeley had in the
Principles, 1710, and Three Dialogues, 1713 that the external world “is a being
utterly impossible.” Two of Collier’s arguments for the “intrinsic repugnancy”
of the external world resemble Kant’s first and second antinomies. Collier
argues, e.g., that the material world is both finite and infinite; the
contradiction can be avoided, he suggests, only by denying its external
existence. Some scholars suspect that Collier deliberately concealed his debt
to Berkeley; most accept his report that he arrived at his views ten years
before he published them. Collier first refers to Berkeley in letters written
in 171415. In A Specimen of True Philosophy 1730, where he offers an immaterialist
interpretation of the opening verse of Genesis, Collier writes that “except a
single passage or two” in Berkeley’s Dialogues, there is no other book “which I
ever heard of” on the same subject as the Clavis. This is a puzzling remark on
several counts, one being that in the Preface to the Dialogues, Berkeley
describes his earlier books. Collier’s biographer reports seeing among his
papers now lost an outline, dated 1708, on “the question of the visible world
being without us or not,” but he says no more about it. The biographer
concludes that Collier’s independence cannot reasonably be doubted; perhaps the
outline would, if unearthed, establish this.
collingwood: r. g.—cited by H. P. Grice in “Metaphysics,” in D. F.
Pears, “The nature of metaphysics.” – Like Grice, Collingwood was influenced by
J. C. Wilson’s subordinate interrogation. English philosopher and historian.
His father, W. G. Collingwood, John Ruskin’s friend, secretary, and biographer,
at first educated him at home in Coniston and later sent him to Rugby School
and then Oxford. Immediately upon graduating in 2, he was elected to a
fellowship at Pembroke ; except for service with admiralty intelligence during
World War I, he remained at Oxford until 1, when illness compelled him to
retire. Although his Autobiography expresses strong disapproval of the lines on
which, during his lifetime, philosophy at Oxford developed, he was a varsity
“insider.” He was elected to the Waynflete Professorship, the first to become
vacant after he had done enough work to be a serious candidate. He was also a
leading archaeologist of Roman Britain. Although as a student Collingwood was
deeply influenced by the “realist” teaching of John Cook Wilson, he studied not
only the British idealists, but also Hegel and the contemporary post-Hegelians. At twenty-three, he published
a translation of Croce’s book on Vico’s philosophy. Religion and Philosophy 6,
the first of his attempts to present orthodox Christianity as philosophically
acceptable, has both idealist and Cook Wilsonian elements. Thereafter the Cook
Wilsonian element steadily diminished. In Speculum Mentis4, he investigated the
nature and ultimate unity of the four special ‘forms of experience’ art, religion, natural science, and
history and their relation to a fifth
comprehensive form philosophy. While all
four, he contended, are necessary to a full human life now, each is a form of
error that is corrected by its less erroneous successor. Philosophy is
error-free but has no content of its own: “The truth is not some perfect system
of philosophy: it is simply the way in which all systems, however perfect,
collapse into nothingness on the discovery that they are only systems.” Some
critics dismissed this enterprise as idealist a description Collingwood accepted
when he wrote, but even those who favored it were disturbed by the apparent
skepticism of its result. A year later, he amplified his views about art in
Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. Since much of what Collingwood went on to
write about philosophy has never been published, and some of it has been
negligently destroyed, his thought after Speculum Mentis is hard to trace. It
will not be definitively established until the more than 3,000 s of his
surviving unpublished manuscripts deposited in the Bodleian Library in 8 have
been thoroughly studied. They were not available to the scholars who published
studies of his philosophy as a whole up to 0. Three trends in how his
philosophy developed, however, are discernible. The first is that as he
continued to investigate the four special forms of experience, he came to
consider each valid in its own right, and not a form of error. As early as 8,
he abandoned the conception of the historical past in Speculum Mentis as simply
a spectacle, alien to the historian’s mind; he now proposed a theory of it as
thoughts explaining past actions that, although occurring in the past, can be
rethought in the present. Not only can the identical thought “enacted” at a
definite time in the past be “reenacted” any number of times after, but it can
be known to be so reenacted if colligation physical evidence survives that can
be shown to be incompatible with other proposed reenactments. In 334 he wrote a
series of lectures posthumously published as The Idea of Nature in which he
renounced his skepticism about whether the quantitative material world can be
known, and inquired why the three constructive periods he recognized in
European scientific thought, the Grecian, the Renaissance, and the modern,
could each advance our knowledge of it as they did. Finally, in 7, returning to
the philosophy of art and taking full account of Croce’s later work, he showed
that imagination expresses emotion and becomes false when it counterfeits
emotion that is not felt; thus he transformed his earlier theory of art as
purely imaginative. His later theories of art and of history remain alive; and
his theory of nature, although corrected by research since his death, was an
advance when published. The second trend was that his conception of philosophy
changed as his treatment of the special forms of experience became less
skeptical. In his beautifully written Essay on Philosophical Method 3, he
argued that philosophy has an object the
ens realissimum as the one, the true, and the good of which the objects of the special forms of
experience are appearances; but that implies what he had ceased to believe,
that the special forms of experience are forms of error. In his Principles of
Art 8 and New Leviathan 2 he denounced the idealist principle of Speculum Mentis
that to abstract is to falsify. Then, in his Essay on Metaphysics 0, he denied
that metaphysics is the science of being qua being, and identified it with the
investigation of the “absolute presuppositions” of the special forms of
experience at definite historical periods. A third trend, which came to
dominate his thought as World War II approached, was to see serious philosophy
as practical, and so as having political implications. He had been, like
Ruskin, a radical Tory, opposed less to liberal or even some socialist measures
than to the bourgeois ethos from which they sprang. Recognizing European
fascism as the barbarism it was, and detesting anti-Semitism, he advocated an
antifascist foreign policy and intervention in the civil war in support of the republic. His
last major publication, The New Leviathan, impressively defends what he called
civilization against what he called barbarism; and although it was neglected by
political theorists after the war was won, the collapse of Communism and the
rise of Islamic states are winning it new readers.
Grice’s
combinatory logic, a branch of logic
that deals with formal systems designed for the study of certain basic
operations for constructing and manipulating functions as rules, i.e. as rules
of calculation expressed by definitions. The notion of a function was
fundamental in the development of modern formal or mathematical logic that was
initiated by Frege, Peano, Russell, Hilbert, and others. Frege was the first to
introduce a generalization of the mathematical notion of a function to include
propositional functions, and he used the general notion for formally
representing logical notions such as those of a concept, object, relation,
generality, and judgment. Frege’s proposal to replace the traditional logical
notions of subject and predicate by argument and function, and thus to conceive
predication as functional application, marks a turning point in the history of
formal logic. In most modern logical systems, the notation used to express
functions, including propositional functions, is essentially that used in
ordinary mathematics. As in ordinary mathematics, certain basic notions are
taken for granted, such as the use of variables to indicate processes of
substitution. Like the original systems for modern formal logic, the systems of
combinatory logic were designed to give a foundation for mathematics. But
combinatory logic arose as an effort to carry the foundational aims further and
deeper. It undertook an analysis of notions taken for granted in the original
systems, in particular of the notions of substitution and of the use of
variables. In this respect combinatory logic was conceived by one of its
founders, H. B. Curry, to be concerned with the ultimate foundations and with
notions that constitute a “prelogic.” It was hoped that an analysis of this
prelogic would disclose the true source of the difficulties connected with the
logical paradoxes. The operation of applying a function to one of its
arguments, called application, is a primitive operation in all systems of
combinatory logic. If f is a function and x a possible argument, then the
result of the application operation is denoted fx. In mathematics this is
usually written fx, but the notation fx is more convenient in combinatory
logic. The G. logician M. Schönfinkel, who started combinatory logic in 4,
observed that it is not necessary to introduce color realism combinatory logic
functions of more than one variable, provided that the idea of a function is
enlarged so that functions can be arguments as well as values of other
functions. A function Fx,y is represented with the function f, which when
applied to the argument x has, as a value, the function fx, which, when applied
to y, yields Fx,y, i.e. fxy % Fx,y. It is therefore convenient to omit parentheses
with association to the left so that fx1 . . . xn is used for . . . fx1 . . . xn. Schönfinkel’s main result
was to show how to make the class of functions studied closed under explicit
definition by introducing two specific primitive functions, the combinators S
and K, with the rules Kxy % x, and Sxyz % xzyz. To illustrate the effect of S
in ordinary mathematical notation, let f and g be functions of two and one
arguments, respectively; then Sfg is the function such that Sfgx % fx,gx.
Generally, if ax1, . . . ,xn is an expression built up from constants and the
variables shown by means of the application operation, then there is a function
F constructed out of constants including the combinators S and K, such that Fx1
. . . xn % ax1, . . . , xn. This is essentially the meaning of the combinatory
completeness of the theory of combinators in the terminology of H. B. Curry and
R. Feys, Combinatory Logic 8; and H. B. Curry, J. R. Hindley, and J. P. Seldin,
Combinatory Logic, vol. II 2. The system of combinatory logic with S and K as
the only primitive functions is the simplest equation calculus that is
essentially undecidable. It is a type-free theory that allows the formation of
the term ff, i.e. self-application, which has given rise to problems of interpretation.
There are also type theories based on combinatory logic. The systems obtained
by extending the theory of combinators with functions representing more
familiar logical notions such as negation, implication, and generality, or by
adding a device for expressing inclusion in logical categories, are studied in
illative combinatory logic. The theory of combinators exists in another,
equivalent form, namely as the type-free l-calculus created by Church in 2.
Like the theory of combinators, it was designed as a formalism for representing
functions as rules of calculation, and it was originally part of a more general
system of functions intended as a foundation for mathematics. The l-calculus
has application as a primitive operation, but instead of building up new
functions from some primitive ones by application, new functions are here
obtained by functional abstraction. If ax is an expression built up by means of
application from constants and the variable x, then ax is considered to define
a function denoted lx.a x, whose value for the argument b is ab, i.e. lx.a xb %
ab. The function lx.ax is obtained from ax by functional abstraction. The
property of combinatory completeness or closure under explicit definition is
postulated in the form of functional abstraction. The combinators can be
defined using functional abstraction i.e., K % lx.ly.x and S % lx.ly.lz.xzyz,
and conversely, in the theory of combinators, functional abstraction can be
defined. A detailed presentation of the l-calculus is found in H. Barendregt,
The Lambda Calculus, Its Syntax and Semantics 1. It is possible to represent
the series of natural numbers by a sequence of closed terms in the lcalculus.
Certain expressions in the l-calculus will then represent functions on the
natural numbers, and these l-definable functions are exactly the general
recursive functions or the Turing computable functions. The equivalence of
l-definability and general recursiveness was one of the arguments used by
Church for what is known as Church’s thesis, i.e., the identification of the
effectively computable functions and the recursive functions. The first problem
about recursive undecidability was expressed by Church as a problem about
expressions in the l calculus. The l-calculus thus played a historically important
role in the original development of recursion theory. Due to the emphasis in
combinatory logic on the computational aspect of functions, it is natural that
its method has been found useful in proof theory and in the development of
systems of constructive mathematics. For the same reason it has found several
applications in computer science in the construction and analysis of
programming languages. The techniques of combinatory logic have also been
applied in theoretical linguistics, e.g. in so-called Montague grammar. In
recent decades combinatory logic, like other domains of mathematical logic, has
developed into a specialized branch of mathematics, in which the original
philosophical and foundational aims and motives are of little and often no importance.
One reason for this is the discovery of the new technical applications, which
were not intended originally, and which have turned the interest toward several
new mathematical problems. Thus, the original motives are often felt to be less
urgent and only of historical significance. Another reason for the decline of
the original philosophical and foundational aims may be a growing awareness in
the philosophy of mathematics of the limitations of formal and mathematical
methods as tools for conceptual combinatory logic combinatory logic
clarification, as tools for reaching “ultimate foundations.”
commitment: Grice’s commitment to the 39 Articles. An utterer is committed to those and only those
entities to which the bound variables of his utterance must be capable of
referring in order that the utterance made be true.” Cf. Grice on
substitutional quantification for his feeling Byzantine, and ‘gap’ sign in the
analysis.
common-ground status assignment: While Grice was invited to a symposium on ‘mutual knowledge,’
he never was for ‘regressive accounts’ of ‘know,’ perhaps because he had to be
different, and the idea of the mutual or common knowledge was the obvious way
to deal with his account of communication. He rejects it and opts for an
anti-sneak clause. In the common-ground he uses the phrase, “What the eye no
longer sees, the heart no longer grieves for.” What does he mean? He means that
in the case of some recognizable divergence between the function of a
communication device in a rational calculus and in the vernacular, one may have
to assign ‘common ground status’ to certain features, e. g. [The king of France
is] bald. By using the square brackets, or subscripts, in “Vacuous names and
descriptions,” the material within their scope is ‘immune’ to refutation. It
has some sort of conversational ‘inertia.’ So the divergence, for which Grice’s
heart grieved, is no more to be seen by Grice’s eye. Strwson and Wiggins view
that this is only tentative for Grice. the regulations for common-ground
assignment have to do with general rational constraints on conversation. Grice
is clear in “Causal,” and as Strawson lets us know, he was already clear in
“Introduction” when talking of a ‘pragmatic rule.’ Strawson states the rule in
terms of making your conversational contribution the logically strongest
possible. If we abide by an imperative of
conversational helpfulness, enjoining the maximally giving and receiving of
information and the influencing and being influenced by others in the
institution of a decisions, the sub-imperative follows to the effect, ‘Thou
shalt NOT make a weak move compared to the stronger one that thou canst
truthfully make, and with equal or greater economy of means.’“Causal” provides a more difficult version, because it
deals with non-extensional contexts where ‘strong’ need not be interpreted as
‘logical strength’ in terms of entailment. Common ground status assignment
springs from the principle of conversational helpfulness or conversational
benevolence. What would be the benevolent point of ‘informing’ your addressee
what you KNOW your addressee already knows? It is not even CONCEPTUALLY
possible. You are not ‘informing’ him if you are aware that he knows it. So,
what Strawson later calls the principle of presumption of ignorance and the principle
of the presumption of knowledge are relevant. There is a balance between the
two. If Strawson asks Grice, “Is the king of France bald?” Grice is entitled to
assume that Strawson thinks two things Grice will perceive as having been
assigned a ‘common-ground’ status as uncontroversial topic not worth conversing
about. First, Strawson thinks that there is one king. (∃x)Fx. Second, Strawson thinks that there is
at most one king. (x)(y)((Fx.Fy)⊃ x=y). That the king is bald is NOT assigned common-ground
status, because Grice cannot expect that Strawson thinks that Grice KNOWS that.
Grice symbolises the common-ground status by means of subscripts. He also uses
square-bracekts, so that anything within the scope of the square brackets is
immune to controversy, or as Grice also puts it, conversationally _inert_:
things we don’t talk about.
communication device: Grice always has ‘or communication devices’ at the tip of his tongue.
“Language or communication devices” (WoW: 284). A device is produced. A device
can be misunderstood.
communicatum: With the linguistic turn, as Grice notes, it was all
about ‘language.’ But at Oxford they took a cavalier attitude to language, that
Grice felt like slightly rectifying, while keeping it cavalier as we like it at
Oxford. The colloquialism of ‘mean’ does not translate well in the Graeco-Roman
tradition Grice was educated via his Lit. Hum. (Philos.) and at Clifton.
‘Communicate’ might do. On top, Grice does use ‘communicate’ on various
occasions in WoW. By psi-transmission,
something that belonged in the emissor becomes ‘common property,’ ‘communion’
has been achived. Now the recipient KNOWS that it is raining (shares the belief
with the emissor) and IS GOING to bring that umbrella (has formed a desire). “Communication”
is cognate with ‘communion,’ while conversation is cognate with ‘sex’! When
Grice hightlights the ‘common ground’ in ‘communication’ he is being slightly
rhetorical, so it is good when he weakens the claim from ‘common ground’ to
‘non-trivial.’ A: I’m going to the concert. My uncle’s brother went to that
concert. The emissor cannot presume that his addressee KNEW that he had an
unlce let alone that his uncle had a brother (the emissor’s father). But any
expansion would trigger the wrong implicaturum. One who likes ‘communication’
is refined Strawson (I’m using refined as J. Barnes does it, “turn Plato into
refined Strawson”). Both in his rat-infested example and at the inaugural
lecture at Oxford. Grice, for one, has given us reason to think that, with
sufficient care, and far greater refinement than I have indicated, it is
possible to expound such a concept of communication-intention or, as he calls
it, utterer's meaning, which is proof against objection. it is a commonplace that Grice belongs, as
most philosophers of the twentieth century, to the movement of the linguistic
turn. Short and Lewis have “commūnĭcare,” earlier “conmunicare,” f. communis,
and thus sharing the prefix with “conversare.” Now “communis” is an interesting
lexeme that Grice uses quite centrally in his idea of the ‘common ground’ –
when a feature of discourse is deemed to have been assigned ‘common-ground
status.’ “Communis” features the “cum-” prefix, commūnis (comoinis); f. “con” and
root “mu-,” to bind; Sanscr. mav-; cf.: immunis, munus, moenia. The
‘communicatum’ (as used by Tammelo in
social philosophy) may well cover what Grice would call the total
‘significatio,’ or ‘significatum.’ Grice takes this seriously. Let us start
then by examining what we mean by ‘linguistic,’ or ‘communication.’ It is
curious that while most Griceians overuse ‘communicative’ as applied to
‘intention,’ Grice does not. Communicator’s intention, at most. This is the
Peirce in Grice’s soul. Meaning provides an excellent springboard for Grice to
centre his analysis on psychological or soul-y verbs as involving the agent and
the first person: smoke only figuratively means fire, and the expression smoke
only figuratively (or metabolically) means that there is fire. It is this or
that utterer (say, Grice) who means, say, by uttering Where theres smoke theres
fire, or ubi fumus, ibi ignis, that where theres smoke theres fire. A
means something by uttering x, an utterance-token is roughly equivalent to
utterer U intends the utterance of x to produce some effect in his addressee A
by means of the recognition of this intention; and we may add that to ask what
U means is to ask for a specification of the intended effect - though, of
course, it may not always be possible to get a straight answer involving a
that-clause, for example, a belief that
He does provide a more specific example involving the that-clause at a
later stage. By uttering x, U means that-ψb-dp ≡ (Ǝφ)(Ǝf)(Ǝc) U
utters x intending x to be such that anyone who
has φ think that x has f, f is correlated in way c
with ψ-ing that p, and (Ǝφ') U intends x to be such
that anyone who has φ' think, via thinking that x has
f and that f is correlated in way c with ψ-ing that p, that U ψ-s that
p, and in view of (Ǝφ') U intending x to be such
that anyone who has φ' think, via thinking that x has
f, and f is correlated in way c with ψ-ing that p, that U ψ-s that
p, U ψ-s that p, and, for some
substituends of ψb-d, U utters x
intending that, should there actually be anyone who
has φ, he will, via thinking in view of (Ǝφ') U
intending x to be such that anyone who has φ' think, via
thinking that x has f, and f is correlated in way c
with ψ-ing that p, that U ψ-s that p, U ψ-s that
p himself ψ that p, and it is not
the case that, for some inference element E, U intends x to be such
that anyone who has φ both rely on E in coming to ψ, or think that U ψ-s, that p and think that (Ǝφ) U intends x to be
such that anyone who has φ come to ψ (or think that U ψ-s) that
p without relying on E. Besides St. John The Baptist, and Salome, Grice
cites few Namess in Meaning. But he makes a point about Stevenson! For
Stevenson, smoke means fire. Meaning develops out of an interest by Grice on
the philosophy of Peirce. In his essays on Peirce, Grice quotes from many other
authors, including, besides Peirce himself (!), Ogden, Richards, and Ewing, or
A. C. Virtue is not a fire-shovel Ewing, as Grice calls him, and this or that
cricketer. In the characteristic Oxonian fashion of a Lit. Hum., Grice has no
intention to submit Meaning to publication. Publishing is vulgar. Bennett,
however, guesses that Grice decides to publish it just a year after his Defence
of a dogma. Bennett’s argument is that Defence of a dogma pre-supposes some
notion of meaning. However, a different story may be told, not necessarily
contradicting Bennetts. It is Strawson who submits the essay by Grice to The
Philosophical Review (henceforth, PR) Strawson attends Grices talk on Meaning
for The Oxford Philosophical Society, and likes it. Since In defence of a dogma
was co-written with Strawson, the intention Bennett ascribes to Grice is
Strawsons. Oddly, Strawson later provides a famous alleged counter-example to
Grice on meaning in Intention and convention in speech acts, following J. O.
Urmson’s earlier attack to the sufficiency of Grices analysans -- which has
Grice dedicating a full James lecture (No. 5) to it. there is Strawsons
rat-infested house for which it is insufficient. An interesting fact,
that confused a few, is that Hart quotes from Grices Meaning in his critical
review of Holloway for The Philosophical Quarterly. Hart quotes Grice
pre-dating the publication of Meaning. Harts point is that Holloway should have
gone to Oxford! In Meaning, Grice may be seen as a practitioner of
ordinary-language philosophy: witness his explorations of the factivity (alla
know, remember, or see) or lack thereof of various uses of to mean. The second
part of the essay, for which he became philosophically especially popular,
takes up an intention-based approach to semantic notions. The only authority
Grice cites, in typical Oxonian fashion, is, via Ogden and Barnes, Stevenson,
who, from The New World (and via Yale, too!) defends an emotivist theory of
ethics, and making a few remarks on how to mean is used, with scare quotes, in
something like a causal account (Smoke means fire.). After its publication
Grices account received almost as many alleged counterexamples as rule-utilitarianism
(Harrison), but mostly outside Oxford, and in The New World. New-World
philosophers seem to have seen Grices attempt as reductionist and as
oversimplifying. At Oxford, the sort of counterexample Grice received, before
Strawson, was of the Urmson-type: refined, and subtle. I think your account
leaves bribery behind. On the other hand, in the New World ‒ in what Grice
calls the Latter-Day School of Nominalism, Quine is having troubles with
empiricism. Meaning was repr. in various collections, notably in Philosophical
Logic, ed. by Strawson. It should be remembered that it is Strawson who has the
thing typed and submitted for publication. Why Meaning should be repr. in a
collection on Philosophical Logic only Strawson knows. But Grice does say that
his account may help clarify the meaning of entails! It may be Strawsons implicaturum
that Parkinson should have repr. (and not merely credited) Meaning by Grice in
his series for Oxford on The theory of meaning. The preferred quotation for Griceians
is of course The Oxford Philosophical Society quote, seeing that Grice recalled
the exact year when he gave the talk for the Philosophical Society at Oxford!
It is however, the publication in The Philosophi, rather than the quieter
evening at the Oxford Philosophical Society, that occasioned a tirade of
alleged counter-examples by New-World philosophers. Granted, one or two
Oxonians ‒ Urmson and Strawson ‒ fell in! Urmson criticises the sufficiency of
Grices account, by introducing an alleged counter-example involving bribery.
Grice will consider a way out of Urmsons alleged counter-example in his fifth
Wiliam James Lecture, rightly crediting and thanking Urmson for this! Strawsons
alleged counter-example was perhaps slightly more serious, if regressive. It also
involves the sufficiency of Grices analysis. Strawsons rat-infested house
alleged counter-example started a chain which required Grice to avoid,
ultimately, any sneaky intention by way of a recursive clause to the effect
that, for utterer U to have meant that p, all meaning-constitutive intentions
should be above board. But why this obsession by Grice with mean? He is being
funny. Spots surely dont mean, only mean.They dont have a mind. Yet Grice opens
with a specific sample. Those spots mean, to the doctor, that you, dear, have
measles. Mean? Yes, dear, mean, doctors orders. Those spots mean measles. But
how does the doctor know? Cannot he be in the wrong? Not really, mean is
factive, dear! Or so Peirce thought. Grice is amazed that Peirce thought that some
meaning is factive. The hole in this piece of cloth means that a bullet went
through is is one of Peirce’s examples. Surely, as Grice notes, this is an
unhappy example. The hole in the cloth may well have caused by something else,
or fabricated. (Or the postmark means that the letter went through the post.)
Yet, Grice was having Oxonian tutees aware that Peirce was krypto-technical.
Grice chose for one of his pre-Meaning seminars on Peirce’s general theory of
signs, with emphasis on general, and the correspondence of Peirce and Welby.
Peirce, rather than the Vienna circle, becomes, in vein with Grices dissenting
irreverent rationalism, important as a source for Grices attempt to English
Peirce. Grices implicaturum seems to be that Peirce, rather than Ayer, cared
for the subtleties of meaning and sign, never mind a verificationist theory
about them! Peirce ultra-Latinate-cum-Greek taxonomies have Grice very nervous,
though. He knew that his students were proficient in the classics, but still. Grice
thus proposes to reduce all of Peirceian divisions and sub-divisions (one
sub-division too many) to mean. In the proceedings, he quotes from Ogden,
Richards, and Ewing. In particular, Grice was fascinated by the correspondence of
Peirce with Lady Viola Welby, as repr. by Ogden/Richards in, well, their study
on the meaning of meaning. Grice thought the science of symbolism pretentious,
but then he almost thought Lady Viola Welby slightly pretentious, too, if youve
seen her; beautiful lady. It is via Peirce that Grice explores examples such as
those spots meaning measles. Peirce’s obsession is with weathercocks almost as
Ockham was with circles on wine-barrels. Old-World Grices use of New-World
Peirce is illustrative, thus, of the Oxonian linguistic turn focused on ordinary
language. While Peirce’s background was not philosophical, Grice thought it
comical enough. He would say that Peirce is an amateur, but then he said the
same thing about Mill, whom Grice had to study by heart to get his B. A. Lit.
Hum.! Plus, as Watson commented, what is wrong with amateur? Give me an amateur
philosopher ANY day, if I have to choose from professional Hegel! In finding
Peirce krypo-technical, Grice is ensuing that his tutees, and indeed any
Oxonian philosophy student (he was university lecturer) be aware that to mean
should be more of a priority than this or that jargon by this or that (New
World?) philosopher!? Partly! Grice wanted his students to think on their own,
and draw their own conclusions! Grice cites Ewing, Ogden/Richards, and many
others. Ewing, while Oxford-educated, had ended up at Cambridge (Scruton almost
had him as his tutor) and written some points on Meaninglessness! Those spots
mean measles. Grice finds Peirce krypto-technical and proposes to English him
into an ordinary-language philosopher. Surely it is not important whether we
consider a measles spot a sign, a symbol, or an icon. One might just as well
find a doctor in London who thinks those spots symbolic. If Grice feels like
Englishing Peirce, he does not altogether fail! meaning, reprints, of
Meaning and other essays, a collection of reprints and offprints of Grices
essays. Meaning becomes a central topic of at least two strands in
Retrospective epilogue. The first strand concerns the idea of the centrality of
the utterer. What Grice there calls meaning BY (versus meaning TO), i.e. as he
also puts it, active or agents meaning. Surely he is right in defending an
agent-based account to meaning. Peirce need not, but Grice must, because he is
working with an English root, mean, that is only figurative applicable to
non-agentive items (Smoke means rain). On top, Grice wants to conclude that
only a rational creature (a person) can meanNN properly. Non-human animals may
have a correlate. This is a truly important point for Grice since he surely is
seen as promoting a NON-convention-based approach to meaning, and also
defending from the charge of circularity in the non-semantic account of
propositional attitudes. His final picture is a rationalist one. P1 G
wants to communicate about a danger to P2. This presupposes there IS
a danger (item of reality). Then P1 G believes there is a
danger, and communicates to P2 G2 that there is a danger. This
simple view of conversation as rational co-operation underlies Grices account
of meaning too, now seen as an offshoot of philosophical psychology, and indeed
biology, as he puts it. Meaning as yet another survival mechanism. While he
would never use a cognate like significance in his Oxford Philosophical Society
talk, Grice eventually starts to use such Latinate cognates at a later stage of
his development. In Meaning, Grice does not explain his goal. By sticking with
a root that the Oxford curriculum did not necessarily recognised as
philosophical (amateur Peirce did!), Grice is implicating that he is starting
an ordinary-language botanising on his own repertoire! Grice was amused by the
reliance by Ewing on very Oxonian examples contra Ayer: Surely Virtue aint a
fire-shovel is perfectly meaningful, and if fact true, if, Ill admit, somewhat
misleading and practically purposeless at Cambridge. Again, the dismissal by
Grice of natural meaning is due to the fact that natural meaning prohibits its
use in the first person and followed by a that-clause. ‘I mean-n that p’ sounds
absurd, no communication-function seems in the offing, there is no ‘sign for,’
as Woozley would have it. Grice found, with Suppes, all types of primacy
(ontological, axiological, psychological) in utterers meaning. In Retrospective
epilogue, he goes back to the topic, as he reminisces that it is his
suggestion that there are two allegedly distinguishable meaning concepts, even
if one is meta-bolical, which may be called natural meaning and non-natural
meaning. There is this or that test (notably factivity-entailment vs. cancelation,
but also scare quotes) which may be brought to bear to distinguish one concept
from the other. We may, for example, inquire whether a particular occurrence of
the predicate mean is factive or non-factive, i. e., whether for it to be true
that [so and so] means that p, it does or does not have to be the case that it
is true that p. Again, one may ask whether the use of quotation marks to
enclose the specification of what is meant would be inappropriate or
appropriate. If factivity, as in know, remember, and see, is present and
quotation marks, oratio recta, are be inappropriate, we have a case of natural
meaning. Otherwise the meaning involved is non-natural meaning. We may now ask
whether there is a single overarching idea which lies behind both members of
this dichotomy of uses to which the predicate meaning that seems to be
Subjects. If there is such a central idea it might help to indicate to us which
of the two concepts is in greater need of further analysis and elucidation and
in what direction such elucidation should proceed. Grice confesses that he has
only fairly recently come to believe that there is such an overarching idea and
that it is indeed of some service in the proposed inquiry. The idea behind both
uses of mean is that of consequence, or consequentia, as Hobbes has it. If x
means that p, something which includes p or the idea of p, is a consequence of
x. In the metabolic natural use of meaning that p, p, this or that consequence,
is this or that state of affairs. In the literal, non-metabolic, basic,
non-natural use of meaning that p, (as in Smith means that his neighbour’s
three-year child is an adult), p, this or that consequence is this or that
conception or complexus which involves some other conception. This perhaps
suggests that of the two concepts it is, as it should, non-natural meaning
which is more in need of further elucidation. It seems to be the more
specialised of the pair, and it also seems to be the less determinate. We may,
e. g., ask how this or that conception enters the picture. Or we may ask
whether what enters the picture is the conception itself or its justifiability.
On these counts Grice should look favorably on the idea that, if further
analysis should be required for one of the pair, the notion of non-natural
meaning would be first in line. There are factors which support the suitability
of further analysis for the concept of non-natural meaning. MeaningNN that
p (non-natural meaning) does not look as if it Namess an original feature of
items in the world, for two reasons which are possibly not mutually
independent. One reason is that, given suitable background conditions, meaning,
can be changed by fiat. The second reason is that the presence of meaningNN is
dependent on a framework provided by communication, if that is not too
circular. Communication is in the philosophical lexicon. Lewis and
Short have “commūnĭcātĭo,” f. communicare,"(several times in Cicero,
elsewhere rare), and as they did with negatio and they will with significatio,
Short and Lewis render, unhelpfully, as a making common, imparting,
communicating. largitio et communicatio civitatis;” “quaedam societas et
communicatio utilitatum,” “consilii communicatio, “communicatio sermonis,” criminis
cum pluribus; “communicatio nominum, i. e. the like appellation of several objects;
“juris; “damni; In rhetorics, communicatio, trading on the communis, a figure,
translating Grecian ἀνακοίνωσις, in accordance with which the utterer turns to
his addressee, and, as it were, allows him to take part in the inquiry. It
seems to Grice, then, at least reasonable and possibly even emphatically
mandatory, to treat the claim that a communication vehicle, such as this and
that expression means that p, in this transferred, metaphoric, or meta-bolic
use of means that as being reductively analysable in terms of this or that
feature of this or that utterer, communicator, or user of this or that expression.
The use of meaning that as applied to this or that expression is posterior
to and explicable through the utterer-oriented, or utterer-relativised use,
i.e. involving a reference to this or that communicator or user of this or that
expression. More specifically, one should license a metaphorical use of mean,
where one allows the claim that this or that expression means that p, provided
that this or that utterer, in this or that standard fashion, means that p, i.e.
in terms of this or that souly statee toward this or that propositional
complexus this or that utterer ntends, in a standardly fashion, to produce by
his uttering this or that utterance. That this or that expression means (in
this metaphorical use) that p is thus explicable either in terms of this
or that souly state which is standardly intended to produce in this or that
addressee A by this or that utterer of this or that expression, or in this or
that souly staken up by this or that utterer toward this or that activity or
action of this or that utterer of this or that expression. Meaning was in
the air in Oxfords linguistic turn. Everybody was talking meaning. Grice
manages to quote from Hares early “Mind” essay on the difference between
imperatives and indicatives, also Duncan-Jones on the fugitive
proposition, and of course his beloved Strawson. Grice was also concerned
by the fact that in the manoeuvre of the typical ordinary-language philosopher,
there is a constant abuse of mean. Surely Grice wants to stick with the
utterers meaning as the primary use. Expressions mean only derivatively. To do
that, he chose Peirce to see if he could clarify it with meaning that. Grice
knew that the polemic was even stronger in London, with Ogden and Lady Viola
Welby. In the more academic Oxford milieu, Grice knew that a proper examination
of meaning, would lead him, via Kneale and his researches on the history of
semantics, to the topic of signification that obsessed the modistae (and their
modus significandi). For what does L and S say about about this? This is
Grice’s reply to popular Ogden. They want to know what the meaning of meaning
is? Here is the Oxononian response by Grice, with a vengeance. Grice is not an
animist nor a mentalist, even modest. While he allows for natural
phenomena to mean (smoke means fire), meaning is best ascribed to some utterer,
where this meaning is nothing but the intentions behind his
utterance. This is the fifth James lecture. Grice was careful enough to
submit it to PR, since it is a strictly philosophical development of the views
expressed in Meaning which Strawson had submitted on Grice’s behalf to the same
Review and which had had a series of responses by various philosophers. Among
these philosophers is Strawson himself in Intention and convention in the the
theory of speech acts, also in PR. Grice quotes from very many other
philosophers in this essay, including: Urmson, Stampe,
Strawson, Schiffer, and Searle. Strawson is especially relevant since
he started a series of alleged counter-examples with his infamous example of
the rat-infested house. Grice particularly treasured Stampes alleged
counter-example involving his beloved bridge! Avramides earns a D. Phil Oxon.
on that, under Strawson! This is Grices occasion to address some of the
criticisms ‒ in the form of alleged counter-examples, typically, as his
later reflections on epagoge versus diagoge note ‒ by Urmson,
Strawson, and other philosophers associated with Oxford, such as Searle,
Stampe, and Schiffer. The final analysandum is pretty complex (of the type that
he did find his analysis of I am hearing a sound complex in Personal
identity ‒ hardly an obstacle for adopting it), it became yet
another target of attack by especially New-World philosophers in the pages of
Mind, Nous, and other journals, This is officially the fifth James lecture.
Grice takes up the analysis of meaning he had presented way back at the Oxford
Philosophical Society. Motivated mainly by the attack by Urmson and by Strawson
in Intention and convention in speech acts, that offered an alleged
counter-example to the sufficiency of Grices analysis, Grice ends up
introducing so many intention that he almost trembled. He ends up seeing
meaning as a value-paradeigmatic concept, perhaps never realisable in a
sublunary way. But it is the analysis in this particular essay where he is at
his formal best. He distinguishes between protreptic and exhibitive utterances,
and also modes of correlation (iconic, conventional). He symbolises the utterer
and the addressee, and generalises over the type of psychological state,
attitude, or stance, meaning seems to range (notably indicative vs.
imperative). He formalises the reflexive intention, and more importantly, the
overtness of communication in terms of a self-referential recursive intention
that disallows any sneaky intention to be brought into the picture of
meaning-constitutive intentions. Grice thought he had dealt with Logic and
conversation enough! So he feels of revising his Meaning. After all, Strawson
had had the cheek to publish Meaning by Grice and then go on to criticize it in
Intention and convention in speech acts. So this is Grices revenge, and he
wins! He ends with the most elaborate theory of mean that an Oxonian could ever
hope for. And to provoke the informalists such as Strawson (and his disciples
at Oxford – led by Strawson) he pours existential quantifiers like the plague!
He manages to quote from Urmson, whom he loved! No word on Peirce, though, who
had originated all this! His implicaturum: Im not going to be reprimanted in
informal discussion about my misreading Peirce at Harvard! The concluding note
is about artificial substitutes for iconic representation, and meaning as a
human institution. Very grand. This is Grices metabolical projection of
utterers meaning to apply to anything OTHER than utterers meaning, notably a
token of the utterers expression and a TYPE of the utterers expression, wholly
or in part. Its not like he WANTS to do it, he NEEDS it to give an account of implicaturum.
The phrase utterer is meant to provoke. Grice thinks that speaker is too
narrow. Surely you can mean by just uttering stuff! This is the sixth James
lecture, as published in “Foundations of Language” (henceforth, “FL”), or “The
foundations of language,” as he preferred. As it happens, it became a popular
lecture, seeing that Searle selected this from the whole set for his Oxford
reading in philosophy on the philosophy of language. It is also the essay cited
by Chomsky in his influential Locke lectures. Chomsky takes Grice to be a
behaviourist, even along Skinners lines, which provoked a reply by Suppes, repr.
in PGRICE. In The New World, the H. P. is often given in a more simplified
form. Grice wants to keep on playing. In Meaning, he had said x means that p is
surely reducible to utterer U means that p. In this lecture, he lectures us as
to how to proceed. In so doing he invents this or that procedure: some basic,
some resultant. When Chomsky reads the reprint in Searles Philosophy of
Language, he cries: Behaviourist! Skinnerian! It was Suppes who comes to Grices
defence. Surely the way Grice uses expressions like resultant procedure are
never meant in the strict behaviourist way. Suppes concludes that it is much
fairer to characterise Grice as an intentionalist. Published in FL, ed. by
Staal, Repr.in Searle, The Philosophy of Language, Oxford, the sixth James
Lecture, FL, resultant procedure, basic procedure. Staal asked Grice to
publish the sixth James lecture for a newish periodical publication of whose
editorial board he was a member. The fun thing is Grice complied! This is
Grices shaggy-dog story. He does not seem too concerned about resultant
procedures. As he will ll later say, surely I can create Deutero-Esperanto and
become its master! For Grice, the primacy is the idiosyncratic, particularized
utterer in this or that occasion. He knows a philosopher craves for generality,
so he provokes the generality-searcher with divisions and sub-divisions of
mean. But his heart does not seem to be there, and he is just being
overformalistic and technical for the sake of it. I am glad that Putnam, of all
people, told me in an aside, you are being too formal, Grice. I stopped with
symbolism since! Communication. This is Grice’s clearest anti-animist attack by
Grice. He had joins Hume in mocking causing and willing: The decapitation of
Charles I as willing Charles Is death. Language semantics alla Tarski. Grice
know sees his former self. If he was obsessed, after Ayer, with mean, he now wants
to see if his explanation of it (then based on his pre-theoretic intuition) is
theoretically advisable in terms other than dealing with those pre-theoretical
facts, i.e. how he deals with a lexeme like mean. This is a bit like Grice: implicaturum,
revisited. An axiological approach to meaning. Strictly a reprint of Grice, which
should be the preferred citation. The date is given by Grice himself, and he
knew! Grice also composed some notes on Remnants on meaning, by Schiffer. This
is a bit like Grices meaning re-revisited. Schiffer had been Strawsons tutee at
Oxford as a Rhode Scholar in the completion of his D. Phil. on Meaning,
Clarendon. Eventually, Schiffer grew sceptic, and let Grice know about it!
Grice did not find Schiffers arguments totally destructive, but saw the
positive side to them. Schiffers arguments should remind any philosopher that
the issues he is dealing are profound and bound to involve much elucidation
before they are solved. This is a bit like Grice: implicaturum, revisited. Meaning
revisited (an ovious nod to Evelyn Waughs Yorkshire-set novel) is the title
Grice chose for a contribution to a symposium at Brighton organised by Smith.
Meaning revisited (although Grice has earlier drafts entitled Meaning and
philosophical psychology) comprises three sections. In the first section, Grice
is concerned with the application of his modified Occam’s razor now to the very
lexeme, mean. Cf. How many senses does sense have? Cohen: The Senses of Senses.
In the second part, Grice explores an evolutionary model of creature
construction reaching a stage of non-iconic representation. Finally, in the
third section, motivated to solve what he calls a major problem ‒ versus
the minor problem concerning the transition from the meaning by the
utterer to the meaning by the expression. Grice attempts to construct meaning
as a value-paradeigmatic notion. A version was indeed published in the
proceedings of the Brighton symposium, by Croom Helm, London. Grice has a
couple of other drafts with variants on this title: philosophical psychology
and meaning, psychology and meaning. He keeps, meaningfully, changing the order.
It is not arbitrary that the fascinating exploration by Grice is in three
parts. In the first, where he applies his Modified Occams razor to mean, he is
revisiting Stevenson. Smoke means fire and I mean love, dont need different senses
of mean. Stevenson is right when using scare quotes for smoke ‘meaning’ fire
utterance. Grice is very much aware that that, the rather obtuse terminology of
senses, was exactly the terminology he had adopted in both Meaning and the
relevant James lectures (V and VI) at Harvard! Now, its time to revisit and to
echo Graves, say, goodbye to all that! In the second part he applies Pology.
While he knows his audience is not philosophical ‒ it is not Oxford ‒ he
thinks they still may get some entertainment! We have a P feeling pain,
simulating it, and finally uttering, I am in pain. In the concluding section,
Grice becomes Plato. He sees meaning as an optimum, i.e. a value-paradeigmatic
notion introducing value in its guise of optimality. Much like Plato thought
circle works in his idiolect. Grice played with various titles, in the Grice
Collection. Theres philosophical psychology and meaning. The reason is obvious.
The lecture is strictly divided in sections, and it is only natural that Grice
kept drafts of this or that section in his collection. In WOW Grice notes that
he re-visited his Meaning re-visited at a later stage, too! And he meant it!
Surely, there is no way to understand the stages of Grice’s development of his
ideas about meaning without Peirce! It is obvious here that Grice thought that
mean two figurative or metabolical extensions of use. Smoke means fire and Smoke
means smoke. The latter is a transferred use in that impenetrability means lets
change the topic if Humpty-Dumpty m-intends that it and Alice are to change the
topic. Why did Grice feel the need to add a retrospective epilogue? He loved to
say that what the “way of words” contains is neither his first, nor his last
word. So trust him to have some intermediate words to drop. He is at his most
casual in the very last section of the epilogue. The first section is more of a
very systematic justification for any mistake the reader may identify in the
offer. The words in the epilogue are thus very guarded and qualificatory. Just
one example about our focus: conversational implicate and conversation as
rational co-operation. He goes back to Essay 2, but as he notes, this was
hardly the first word on the principle of conversational helpfulness, nor
indeed the first occasion where he actually used implicaturum. As regards
co-operation, the retrospective epilogue allows him to expand on a causal
phrasing in Essay 2, “purposive, indeed rational.” Seeing in retrospect how the
idea of rationality was the one that appealed philosophers most – since it
provides a rationale and justification for what is otherwise an arbitrary
semantic proliferation. Grice then distinguishes between the thesis that
conversation is purposive, and the thesis that conversation is rational. And,
whats more, and in excellent Griceian phrasing, there are two theses here, too.
One thing is to see conversation as rational, and another, to use his very
phrasing, as rational co-operation! Therefore, when one discusses the secondary
literature, one should be attentive to whether the author is referring to
Grices qualifications in the Retrospective epilogue. Grice is careful to date
some items. However, since he kept rewriting, one has to be careful. These
seven folder contain the material for the compilation. Grice takes the
opportunity of the compilation by Harvard of his WOW, representative of the
mid-60s, i. e. past the heyday of ordinary-language philosophy, to review the
idea of philosophical progress in terms of eight different strands which
display, however, a consistent and distinctive unity. Grice keeps playing with
valediction, valedictory, prospective and retrospective, and the different
drafts are all kept in The Grice Papers. The Retrospective epilogue, is divided
into two sections. In the first section, he provides input for his eight
strands, which cover not just meaning, and the assertion-implication
distinction to which he alludes to in the preface, but for more substantial
philosophical issues like the philosophy of perception, and the defense of
common sense realism versus the sceptial idealist. The concluding section
tackles more directly a second theme he had idenfitied in the preface, which is
a methodological one, and his long-standing defence of ordinary-language
philosophy. The section involves a fine distinction between the Athenian
dialectic and the Oxonian dialectic, and tells the tale about his fairy
godmother, G*. As he notes, Grice had dropped a few words in the preface explaining
the ordering of essays in the compilation. He mentions that he hesitated to
follow a suggestion by Bennett that the ordering of the essays be
thematic and chronological. Rather, Grice chooses to publish the whole set
of seven James lectures, what he calls the centerpiece, as part I. II, the
explorations in semantics and metaphysics, is organised more or less
thematically, though. In the Retrospective epilogue, Grice takes up this
observation in the preface that two ideas or themes underlie his Studies: that
of meaning, and assertion vs. implication, and philosophical methodology. The
Retrospective epilogue is thus an exploration on eight strands he identifies in
his own philosophy. Grices choice of strand is careful. For Grice, philosophy,
like virtue, is entire. All the strands belong to the same knit, and therefore
display some latitudinal, and, he hopes, longitudinal unity, the latter made
evidence by his drawing on the Athenian dialectic as a foreshadow of the
Oxonian dialectic to come, in the heyday of the Oxford school of analysis, when
an interest in the serious study of ordinary language had never been since and
will never be seen again. By these two types of unity, Grice means the obvious
fact that all branches of philosophy (philosophy of language, or semantics,
philosophy of perception, philosophical psychology, metaphysics, axiology,
etc.) interact and overlap, and that a historical regard for ones philosophical
predecessors is a must, especially at Oxford. Why is Grice obsessed with
asserting? He is more interested, technically, in the phrastic, or dictor.
Grice sees a unity, indeed, equi-vocality, in the buletic-doxastic continuum.
Asserting is usually associated with the doxastic. Since Grice is always ready
to generalise his points to cover the buletic (recall his Meaning, “theres by
now no reason to stick to informative cases,”), it is best to re-define his
asserting in terms of the phrastic. This is enough of a strong point. As Hare
would agree, for emotivists like Barnes, say, an utterance of buletic force may
not have any content whatsoever. For Grice, there is always a content, the
proposition which becomes true when the action is done and the desire is
fulfilled or satisfied. Grice quotes from Bennett. Importantly, Grice focuses
on the assertion/non-assertion distinction. He overlooks the fact that for this
or that of his beloved imperative utterance, asserting is out of the question,
but explicitly conveying that p is not. He needs a dummy to stand for a
psychological or souly state, stance, or attitude of either boule or doxa, to
cover the field of the utterer mode-neutrally conveying explicitly that his
addressee A is to entertain that p. The explicatum or explicitum sometimes does
the trick, but sometimes it does not. It is interesting to review the Names
index to the volume, as well as the Subjects index. This is a huge collection,
comprising 14 folders. By contract, Grice was engaged with Harvard, since it is
the President of the College that holds the copyrights for the James lectures.
The title Grice eventually chooses for his compilation of essays, which goes
far beyond the James, although keeping them as the centerpiece, is a tribute to
Locke, who, although obsessed with his idealist and empiricist new way of
ideas, leaves room for both the laymans and scientists realist way of things,
and, more to the point, for this or that philosophical semiotician to offer
this or that study in the way of words. Early in the linguistic turn minor
revolution, the expression the new way of words, had been used derogatorily.
WOW is organised in two parts: Logic and conversation and the somewhat
pretentiously titled Explorations in semantics and metaphysics, which offers
commentary around the centerpiece. It also includes a Preface and a very rich
and inspired Retrospective epilogue. From part I, the James lectures, only
three had not been previously published. The first unpublished lecture is
Prolegomena, which really sets the scene, and makes one wonder what the few
philosophers who quote from The logic of grammar could have made from the
second James lecture taken in isolation. Grice explores Aristotle’s “to
alethes”: “For the true and the false exist with respect to synthesis and
division (peri gar synthesin kai diaireisin esti to pseudos kai to alethes).”
Aristotle insists upon the com-positional form of truth in several texts: cf.
De anima, 430b3 ff.: “in truth and falsity, there is a certain composition (en
hois de kai to pseudos kai to alethes, synthesis tis)”; cf. also Met. 1027b19
ff.: the true and the false are with respect to (peri) composition and
decomposition (synthesis kai diaresis).” It also shows that Grices style is
meant for public delivery, rather than reading. The second unpublished lecture
is Indicative conditionals. This had been used by a few philosophers, such as
Gazdar, noting that there were many mistakes in the typescript, for which Grice
is not to be blamed. The third is on some models for implicaturum. Since this
Grice acknowledges is revised, a comparison with the original handwritten
version of the final James lecture retrieves a few differences From Part II, a
few essays had not been published before, but Grice, nodding to the
longitudinal unity of philosophy, is very careful and proud to date
them. Commentary on the individual essays is made under the appropriate
dates. Philosophical correspondence is quite a genre. Hare would express in a
letter to the Librarian for the Oxford Union, “Wiggins does not want to be
understood,” or in a letter to Bennett that Williams is the worse offender of
Kantianism! It was different with Grice. He did not type. And he wrote only
very occasionally! These are four folders with general correspondence, mainly
of the academic kind. At Oxford, Grice would hardly keep a correspondence, but
it was different with the New World, where academia turns towards the
bureaucracy. Grice is not precisely a good, or reliable, as The BA puts it,
correspondent. In the Oxford manner, Grice prefers a face-to-face interaction,
any day. He treasures his Saturday mornings under Austins guidance, and he
himself leads the Play Group after Austins demise, which, as Owen reminisced,
attained a kind of cult status. Oxford is different. As a tutorial fellow in
philosophy, Grice was meant to tutor his students; as a University Lecturer he
was supposed to lecture sometimes other fellowss tutees! Nothing about this
reads: publish or perish! This is just one f. containing Grices own favourite
Griceian references. To the historian of analytic philosophy, it is of
particular interest. It shows which philosophers Grice respected the most, and
which ones the least. As one might expect, even on the cold shores of Oxford,
as one of Grices tutees put it, Grice is cited by various Oxford philosophers.
Perhaps the first to cite Grice in print is his tutee Strawson, in “Logical
Theory.” Early on, Hart quotes Grice on meaning in his review in The
Philosophical Quarterly of Holloways Language and Intelligence before Meaning
had been published. Obviously, once Grice and Strawson, In defense of a dogma
and Grice, Meaning are published by The Philosophical Review, Grice is
discussed profusely. References to the implicaturum start to appear in the
literature at Oxford in the mid-1960s, within the playgroup, as in Hare and
Pears. It is particularly intriguing to explore those philosophers Grice picks
up for dialogue, too, and perhaps arrange them alphabetically, from Austin to
Warnock, say. And Griceian philosophical references, Oxonian or other, as they
should, keep counting! The way to search the Grice Papers here is using
alternate keywords, notably “meaning.” “Meaning” s. II, “Utterer’s meaning and
intentions,” s. II, “Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word meaning,” s.
II, “Meaning revisited,” s. II. – but also “Meaning and psychology,” s. V,
c.7-ff. 24-25. While Grice uses
“signification,” and lectured on Peirce’s “signs,” “Peirce’s general theory of
signs,” (s. V, c. 8-f. 29), he would avoid such pretentiously sounding
expressions. Searching under ‘semantic’ and ‘semantics’ (“Grammar and
semantics,” c. 7-f. 5; “Language semantics,” c. 7-f.20, “Basic Pirotese,
sentence semantics and syntax,” c. 8-f. 30, “Semantics of children’s language,”
c. 9-f. 10, “Sentence semantics” (c. 9-f. 11); “Sentence semantics and
propositional complexes,” c. 9-f.12, “Syntax and semantics,” c. 9-ff. 17-18) may
help, too. Folder on Schiffer (“Schiffer,” c. 9-f. 9), too.
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