Kuhn: Grice: “I would hardly look for
inspiration in ‘philosophical minor revolutions’ in Kuhn, who wasn’t really a
philosopher – MA physics, PhD philosophy of science” -- philosopher, studied at
Harvard, where he received degrees in physics and a doctorate in the history of
science. He then taught history of science or philosophy of science at Harvard
(1951–56), Berkeley (1956–64), Princeton (1964–79), and M.I.T. (1979–91). Kuhn
traced his shift from physics to the history and philosophy of science to a
moment in 1947 when he was Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich Kuhn, Thomas S(amuel)
478 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 478 asked to teach some science to
humanities majors. Searching for a case study to illuminate the development of
Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle’s Physics and was astonished at how
“simply wrong” it was. After a while, Kuhn came to “think like an Aristotelian
physicist” and to realize that Aristotle’s basic concepts were totally unlike
Newton’s, and that, understood on its own terms, Aristotle’s Physics was not
bad Newtonian mechanics. This new perspective resulted in The Copernican
Revolution (1957), a study of the transformation of the Aristotelian geocentric
image of the world to the modern heliocentric one. Pondering the structure of
these changes, Kuhn produced his immensely influential second book, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He argued that scientific thought
is defined by “paradigms,” variously describing these as disciplinary matrixes
or exemplars, i.e., conceptual world-views consisting of beliefs, values, and
techniques shared by members of a given community, or an element in that
constellation: concrete achievements used as models for research. According to
Kuhn, scientists accept a prevailing paradigm in “normal science” and attempt
to articulate it by refining its theories and laws, solving various puzzles,
and establishing more accurate measurements of constants. Eventually, however,
their efforts may generate anomalies; these emerge only with difficulty,
against a background of expectations provided by the paradigm. The accumulation
of anomalies triggers a crisis that is sometimes resolved by a revolution that
replaces the old paradigm with a new one. One need only look to the
displacement of Aristotelian physics and geocentric astronomy by Newtonian
mechanics and heliocentrism for instances of such paradigm shifts. In this way,
Kuhn challenged the traditional conception of scientific progress as gradual,
cumulative acquisition of knowledge. He elaborated upon these themes and
extended his historical inquiries in his later works, The Essential Tension
(1977) and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978). H. P. Grice,
“A minor revolution in philosophy.”
Labriola: born in Genova, Liguria, Italia,
philosopher who studied Hegel and corresponded with Engels for years (Lettere a
Engels, 1949). Labriola’s essays on Marxism appeared first in French in the
collection Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire. Another
influential work, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia collects ten letters
to Georges Sorel on Marxism. Labriola did not intend to develop an original
Marxist theory but only to give an accurate exposition of Marx’s thought. He
believed that socialism would inevitably ensue from the inner contradictions of
capitalist society and defended Marx’s views as objective scientific truths. He
criticized revisionism and defended the need to maintain the orthodoxy of
Marxist thought. His views and works were publicized by two of his students,
Sorel in France and Croce in Italy. Gramsci brought new attention to Labriola
as an example of pure and independent Marxism.
labours: the twelve labours of Grice. They
are twelve. The first is Extensionalism. The second is Nominalism. The third is
Positivism. The fourth is Naturalism. The fifth is Mechanism. The sixth is
Phenomenalism. The seventh is Reductionism. The eighth is physicalism. The
ninth is materialism. The tenth is Empiricism. The eleventh is Scepticism, and
the twelfth is functionalism. “As I thread
my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead,
in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a
multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism,
Nominalism, Positivism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism,
Physicalism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces
which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller
called Christian on another well-publicized journey.”“The items named in this
catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another;
and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of
them while viewing others with hostility.” “There
are many persons, for example, who view Naturalism with favour while firmly
rejecting Nominalism.”“And it is not easy to see how anyone could couple
support for Phenomenalism with support for Physicalism.”“After a more tolerant
(permissive) middle age, I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of
them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of
them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal
more than they do now.“But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?” “The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of
items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelve-fold
antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies.” “To this question my answer is that all the items are forms
of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which seeks to keep to a minimum
(which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertised
philosophical commodity, such as abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value,
and so forth.”“In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high
a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately
enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character; in
particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.”“In favour of
Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty
of ‘desert landscapes.’”“But such an appeal I would regard as
inappropriate.”“We are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a
special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape.”“We are being asked to
express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean
time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or
summer.”“To change the image somewhat, what bothers me about whatI am being
offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly
undressed.”“I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive
feature which some, or perhaps even all of these betes noires seem to
possess.”“Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps,
ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission.”“They limit
in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.”“They limit
its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for
explanation.”“Some prima-facie candidates are watered down, others are washed
away.”“And they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting
apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally
intensional, verbs.”“My own instincts operate in a reverse direction from
this.”“I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory
ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into
their certificates of legitimacy.”“I am conscious that all I have so far said
against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a
little tinged with rhetoric.”“This is not surprising in view of the generality
of the topic.”“But all the same I should like to try to make some provision for
those in search of harder tack.”“I can hardly, in the present context, attempt
to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of
the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism.’”“The best I can do is
to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against
just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which I should
regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject.”“My
selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism,
and dear both to those who feel that 'Because it is red' is no more informative
as an answer to the question 'Why is a pillar-box called ‘red’?' than would be
'Because he is Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that
distinguished-looking person called "Grice"?', and also to those who
are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory.”“The picture which, I
suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of
particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally
indistinguishable from one another, butdistinguished by the groups within which
they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are
distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which
nothing belongs.”“As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to
trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a
system.”“Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a
particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be
the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject,
regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject,
or indeed in any subject.”“On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist
view-point, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be
re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set.”“But if
we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential
consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be
invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to
specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be.”“This is certainly not
a conclusion which one would care to accept.”“I can think of two ways of trying
to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious
drawbacks.” H. P. Grice, “Grice’s seven labours.”
Lacan: he developed and transformed
Freudian theory and practice on the basis of the structuralist semiotics
originated by Saussure. According to Lacan, the unconscious is not a congeries
of biological instincts and drives, but rather a system of signifiers. Lacan
construes, e.g., the fundamental Freudian processes of condensation and
displacement as instances of metaphor and metonymy. Lacan proposea a
Freudianism in which any traces of the substantial Cartesian self are replaced
by a system of this or that symbolic function. Contrary to standard views, the
ego is an imaginary projection, not our access to the real (which, for Lacan,
is the unattainable and inexpressible limit of language). In accord with his
theoretical position, Lacan develops a new form of psychoanalytic practice that
tries to avoid rather than achieve the “transference” whereby the analysand
identifies with the ego of the analyst. Lacan’s writings (e.g., Écrits and the
numerous volumes of his Séminaires) are of legendary difficulty, offering
idiosyncratic networks of allusion, word play, and paradox, which Grice finds
rich and stimulating and Strawson irresponsibly obscure. Beyond psychoanalysis,
Lacan has been particularly influential on literary theorists and on
poststructuralist philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze.
Laffitte: positivist philosopher, a disciple
of Comte and founder of the Revue Occidentale. Laffitte spread positivism by
adopting Comte’s format of “popular” courses. He faithfully acknowledged
Comte’s objective method and religion of humanity. Laffitte wrote Great Types
of Humanity. In Positive Ethics, he distinguishes between theoretical and
practical ethics. His Lectures on First Philosophy sets forth a metaphysics, or
a body of general and abstract laws, that attempts to complete positivism, to
resolve the conflict between the subjective and the objective, and to avert materialism.
La Forge: philosopher, a member of the
Cartesian school. La Forge seems to have become passionately interested in
Descartes’s philosophy and grew to become one of its most visible and energetic
advocates. La Forge (together with Gérard van Gutschoven) illustrated an edition
of Descartes’s L’homme and provided an extensive commentary; both illustrations
and commentary were often reprinted with the text. His main work, though, is the
Traité de l’esprit de l’homme: though not a commentary on Descartes, it is “in
accordance with the principles of René Descartes,” according to its subtitle.
It attempts to continue Descartes’s program in L’homme, left incomplete at his
death, by discussing the mind and its union with the body. In many ways La Forge’s
work is quite orthodox; he carefully follows Descartes’s opinions on the nature
of body, the nature of soul, etc., as they appear in the extant writings to
which he had access. But with others in the Cartesian school, La Forge’s work
contributed to the establishment of the doctrine of occasionalism as Cartesian
orthodoxy, a doctrine not explicitly found in Descartes’s writings.
Future and general duty: I think it is clear that whatever I imply,
suggest, mean, etc., is distinct from what I explicitly convey. I wish to introduce, as terms of art, one verb
"implicate" and two related nouns, "implicature" (cf.
"implying") and "implicatum" (cf. "what is
implied").
The point of my maneuvre
is to free you from having to choose (a) between this or that member of
the family of verbs (imply, etc.) for which the verb "implicate" is
to do general duty. (b) between this or that member of the family of nouns
(the implying, etc.) for which the noun "implicature" is to do
general duty.(c) between this or that member of the the family of nouns or
nominal consstructions ('what is implied,' etc.) for which 'implicatum' is to
do general duty.
I will add: implicaturum – implicatura.
"Implicaturum"
(sing.) becomes, of course, "implicatura." So, strictly, while the verb to use do do
general duty is 'implicate,' the NOUN is 'implicaturum' (plural: implicatura). I think it is clear that whatever I imply or
keep implicit (suggest, mean, etc.)is distinct from what I explicitly convey,
or make explicit. I wish to introduce, as a term of art the Latinate verb
'implicate,' from the Latin 'implicare' -- with its derivative, 'implicaturum.' The point of my maneuvre is for my tutee's
delight: he won't have to choose between this or that member of the family of
verbs ('suggest,' 'mean') for which the Latinate verb 'implicate' (from
'implicaare' with its derivative form, 'implicaturum,') is to do general
duty. If we compare it with ‘amare’: Grice: “As Cicero knows, there is a
world of difference between ‘amatum’ and ‘amaturum’ – so with ‘implicatum’ and
‘implicaturum’!” – IMPLICATURUM: about to imply, about to be under obligation
to imply, about to be obliged to imply. Refs. H. P. Grice, “Implicaturum.”
lambda
implicaturum
-- Church: a., philosopher, known in pure logic for his discovery and application
of the Church lambda operator, one of the central ideas of the Church lambda
calculus, and for his rigorous formalizations of the theory of types, a
higher-order underlying logic originally formulated in a flawed form by
Whitehead and Russell. The lambda operator enables direct, unambiguous,
symbolic representation of a range of philosophically and mathematically
important expressions previously representable only ambiguously or after
elaborate paraphrasing. In philosophy, Church advocated rigorous analytic
methods based on symbolic logic. His philosophy was characterized by his own
version of logicism, the view that mathematics is reducible to logic, and by
his unhesitating acceptance of higherorder logics. Higher-order logics,
including second-order, are ontologically rich systems that involve
quantification of higher-order variables, variables that range over properties,
relations, and so on. Higher-order logics were routinely used in foundational
work by Frege, Peano, Hilbert, Gödel, Tarski, and others until around World War
II, when they suddenly lost favor. In regard to both his logicism and his
acceptance of higher-order logics, Church countered trends, increasingly
dominant in the third quarter of the twentieth century, against reduction of
mathematics to logic and against the so-called “ontological excesses” of
higher-order logic. In the 0s, although admired for his high standards of rigor
and for his achievements, Church was regarded as conservative or perhaps even
reactionary. Opinions have softened in recent years. On the computational and
epistemological sides of logic Church made two major contributions. He was the
first to articulate the now widely accepted principle known as Church’s thesis,
that every effectively calculable arithmetic function is recursive. At first
highly controversial, this principle connects intuitive, epistemic, extrinsic,
and operational aspects of arithmetic with its formal, ontic, intrinsic, and
abstract aspects. Church’s thesis sets a purely arithmetic outer limit on what
is computationally achievable. Church’s further work on Hilbert’s “decision
problem” led to the discovery and proof of Church’s theorem basically that there is no computational
procedure for determining, of a finite-premised first-order argument, whether
it is valid or invalid. This result contrasts sharply with the previously known
result that the computational truth-table method suffices to determine the
validity of a finite-premised truthfunctional argument. Church’s thesis at once
highlights the vast difference between propositional logic and first-order
logic and sets an outer limit on what is achievable by “automated reasoning.”
Church’s mathematical and philosophical writings are influenced by Frege,
especially by Frege’s semantic distinction between sense and reference, his
emphasis on purely syntactical treatment of proof, and his doctrine that
sentences denote are names of their truth-values. lambda-calculus, also
l-calculus, a theory of mathematical functions that is (a) “logic-free,” i.e.
contains no logical constants (formula-connectives or quantifier-expressions),
and (b) equational, i.e. ‘%’ is its sole predicate (though its metatheory
refers to relations of reducibility between terms). There are two species,
untyped and typed, each with various subspecies. Termhood is always inductively
defined (as is being a type-expression, if the calculus is typed). A definition
of being a term will contain at least these clauses: take infinitely many
variables (of each type if the calculus is typed) to be terms; for any terms t
and s (of appropriate type if the calculus is typed), (ts) is a term (of type
determined by that of t and s if the calculus is typed); for any term t and a
variable u (perhaps meeting certain conditions), (lut) is a term (“of” type
determined by that of t and u if the calculus is typed). (ts) is an
application-term; (lut) is a l-term, the labstraction of t, and its l-prefix
binds all free occurrences of u in t. Relative to any assignment a of values
(of appropriate type if the calculus is typed) to its free variables, each term
denotes a unique entity. Given a term (ts), t denotes a function and (ts)
denotes the output of that function when it is applied to the denotatum of s,
all relative to a. (lut) denotes relative to a that function which when applied
to any entity x (of appropriate type if the calculus is typed) outputs the
denotatum of t relative to the variant of a obtained by assigning u to the
given x. Alonzo Church introduced the untyped l-calculus around 1932 as the
basis for a foundation for mathematics that took all mathematical objects to be
functions. It characterizes a universe of functions, each with that universe as
its domain and each yielding values in that universe. It turned out to be
almost a notational variant of combinatory logic, first presented by Moses
Schonfinkel (1920, written up and published by Behmann in 1924). Church
presented the simplest typed l calculus in 1940. Such a calculus characterizes
a domain of objects and functions, each “of” a unique type, so that the type of
any given function determines two further types, one being the type of all and
only those entities in the domain of that function, the other being the type of
all those entities output by that function. In 1972 Jean-Yves Girard presented
the first second-order (or polymorphic) typed l-calculus. It uses additional
type-expressions themselves constructed by second-order l-abstraction, and also
more complicated terms constructed by labstracting with respect to certain
type-variables, and by applying such terms to type-expressions. The study of
l-calculi has deepened our understanding of constructivity in mathematics. They
are of interest in proof theory, in category theory, and in computer science.
Lambert: German natural philosopher,
logician, mathematician, and astronomer. Born in Mulhouse (Alsace), he was an
autodidact who became a prominent member of the Munich Academy (1759) and the
Berlin Academy (1764). He made significant discoveries in physics and
mathematics. His most important philosophical works were Neues Organon, or
Thoughts on the Investigation and Induction of Truth and the Distinction
Between Error and Appearances,” 1764) and Anlage zur Architectonic, or Theory
of the Simple and Primary Elements in Philosophical and Mathematical
Knowledge.” Lambert attempted to revise metaphysics. Arguing against both
German rationalism and British empiricism, he opted for a form of phenomenalism
similar to that of Kant and Tetens. Like his two contemporaries, he believed
that the mind contains a number of basic concepts and principles that make
knowledge possible. The philosopher’s task is twofold: first, these fundamental
concepts and principles have to be analyzed; second, the truths of science have
to be derived from them. In his own attempt at accomplishing this, Lambert
tended more toward Leibniz than Locke.
mettrie, Julien Offroy de la:
philosopher who was his generation’s most notorious materialist, atheist, and
hedonist. Raised in Brittany, he was trained at Leiden by Hermann Boerhaave, an
iatromechanist, whose works he translated into French. As a Lockean
sensationalist who read Gassendi and followed the Swiss physiologist Haller, La
Mettrie took nature to be life’s dynamic and ultimate principle. He published
Natural History of the Soul, which attacked Cartesian dualism and dispensed
with God. Drawing from Descartes’s animal-machine, his masterpiece, Man the
Machine(1747), argued that the organization of matter alone explains man’s
physical and intellectual faculties. Assimilating psychology to mechanistic physiology,
La Mettrie integrates man into nature and proposed a materialistic monism. An
Epicurean and a libertine, he denies any religious or rational morality in
Anti-Seneca and instead accommodated human behavior to natural laws.
Anticipating Sade’s nihilism, his Art of Enjoying Pleasures and Metaphysical
Venus eulogized physical passions. Helvétius, d’Holbach, Marx, Plekhanov, and
Lenin all acknowledged a debt to his belief that “to write as a philosopher is
to teach materialism.”
Lange, philosopher, born at Wald near
Solingen, he became a university instructor at Bonn, professor of inductive
logic at Zürich in 1870, and professor at Marburg in 1873, establishing
neo-Kantian studies there. He published three books in 1865: Die Arbeiterfrage
(The Problem of the Worker), Die Grundlegung der mathematischen Psychologie
(The Foundation of Mathematical Psychology), and J. S. Mills Ansichten über die
sociale Frage und die angebliche Umwälzung der Socialwissenschaftlichen durch
Carey (J. S. Mill’s Views of the Social Question and Carey’s Supposed
Social-Scientific Revolution). Lange’s most important work, however, Geschichte
des Materialismus (History of Materialism), was published in 1866. An expanded
second edition in two volumes appeared in 1873–75 and in three later editions.
The History of Materialism is a rich, detailed study not only of the
development of materialism but of then-recent work in physical theory,
biological theory, and political economy; it includes a commentary on Kant’s
analysis of knowledge. Lange adopts a restricted positivistic approach to
scientific interpretations of man and the natural world and a conventionalism
in regard to scientific theory, and also encourages the projection of aesthetic
interpretations of “the All” from “the standpoint of the ideal.” Rejecting
reductive materialism, Lange argues that a strict analysis of materialism leads
to ineliminable idealist theoretical issues, and he adopts a form of
materio-idealism. In his Geschichte are anticipations of instrumental
fictionalism, pragmatism, conventionalism, and psychological egoism. Following
the skepticism of the scientists he discusses, Lange adopts an agnosticism
about the ultimate constituents of actuality and a radical phenomenalism. His
major work was much admired by Russell and significantly influenced the thought
of Nietzsche. History of Materialism predicted coming sociopolitical
“earthquakes” because of the rise of science, the decline of religion, and the
increasing tensions of “the social problem.” Die Arbeiterfrage explores the
impact of industrialization and technology on the “social problem” and predicts
a coming social “struggle for survival” in terms already recognizable as Social
Darwinism. Both theoretically and practically, Lange was a champion of workers
and favored a form of democratic socialism. His study of J. S. Mill and the
economist Henry Carey was a valuable contribution to social science and
political economic theory.
Peyrère, Isaac La: a Calvinist of probable
Marrano extraction and a Catholic convert whose messianic and anthropological
work (Men Before Adam, 1656) scandalized Jews, Catholics, and Protestants
alike. Anticipating both ecumenism and Zionism, The Recall of the Jews (1643)
claims that, together, converted Jews and Christians will usher in universal
redemption. A threefold “salvation history” undergirds La Peyrère’s “Marrano
theology”: (1) election of the Jews; (2) their rejection and the election of
the Christians; (3) the recall of the Jews.
laplace: he produced the definitive
formulation of the classical theory of probability. He taught at various
schools in Paris, including the École Militaire; one of his students was
Napoleon, to whom he dedicated his work on probability. According to Laplace, probabilities
arise from our ignorance. The world is deterministic, so the probability of a
possible event depends on our limited information about it rather than on the
causal forces that determine whether it shall occur. Our chief means of
calculating probabilities is the principle of insufficient reason, or the
principle of indifference. It says that if there is no reason to believe that
one of n mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive possible cases will obtain
rather than some other, so that the cases are equally possible, then the
probability of each case is 1/n. In addition, the probability of a possible
event equivalent to a disjunction of cases is the number of cases favorable to
the event divided by the total number of cases. For instance, the probability
that the top card of a well-shuffled deck is a diamond is 13/52.Laplace’s chief
work on probability is Théorie analytique des probabilités(Analytic Theory of
Probabilities, 1812).
law -- H. P. Grice was obsessed with
‘laws’ to introduce ‘psychological concepts.’ covering law model, the view of
scientific explanation as a deductive argument which contains non-vacuously at
least one universal law among its premises. The names of this view include
‘Hempel’s model’, ‘Hempel-Oppenheim HO model’, ‘Popper-Hempel model’,
‘deductivenomological D-N model’, and the ‘subsumption theory’ of explanation.
The term ‘covering law model of explanation’ was proposed by William Dray. The
theory of scientific explanation was first developed by Aristotle. He suggested
that science proceeds from mere knowing that to deeper knowing why by giving
understanding of different things by the four types of causes. Answers to
why-questions are given by scientific syllogisms, i.e., by deductive arguments
with premises that are necessarily true and causes of their consequences.
Typical examples are the “subsumptive” arguments that can be expressed by the
Barbara syllogism: All ravens are black. Jack is a raven. Therefore, Jack is
black. Plants containing chlorophyll are green. Grass contains chlorophyll.
Therefore, grass is green. In modern logical notation, An explanatory argument
was later called in Grecian synthesis, in Latin compositio or demonstratio
propter quid. After the seventeenth century, the terms ‘explication’ and ‘explanation’
became commonly used. The nineteenth-century empiricists accepted Hume’s
criticism of Aristotelian essences and necessities: a law of nature is an
extensional statement that expresses a uniformity, i.e., a constant conjunction
between properties ‘All swans are white’ or types of events ‘Lightning is
always followed by thunder’. Still, they accepted the subsumption theory of
explanation: “An individual fact is said to be explained by pointing out its
cause, that is, by stating the law or laws of causation, of which its
production is an instance,” and “a law or uniformity in nature is said to be
explained when another law or laws are pointed out, of which that law itself is
but a case, and from which it could be deduced” J. S. Mill. A general model of
probabilistic explanation, with deductive explanation as a specific case, was
given by Peirce in 3. A modern formulation of the subsumption theory was given
by Hempel and Paul Oppenheim in 8 by the following schema of D-N explanation:
Explanandum E is here a sentence that describes a known particular event or
fact singular explanation or uniformity explanation of laws. Explanation is an
argument that answers an explanation-seeking why-question ‘Why E?’ by showing
that E is nomically expectable on the basis of general laws r M 1 and
antecedent conditions. The relation between the explanans and the explanandum
is logical deduction. Explanation is distinguished from other kinds of
scientific systematization prediction, postdiction that share its logical characteristics a view often called the symmetry thesis
regarding explanation and prediction by
the presupposition that the phenomenon E is already known. This also separates
explanations from reason-seeking arguments that answer questions of the form
‘What reasons are there for believing that E?’ Hempel and Oppenheim required
that the explanans have empirical content, i.e., be testable by experiment or
observation, and it must be true. If the strong condition of truth is dropped,
we speak of potential explanation. Dispositional explanations, for
non-probabilistic dispositions, can be formulated in the D-N model. For
example, let Hx % ‘x is hit by hammer’, Bx % ‘x breaks’, and Dx % ‘x is
fragile’. Then the explanation why a piece of glass was broken may refer to its
fragility and its being hit: It is easy to find examples of HO explanations
that are not satisfactory: self-explanations ‘Grass is green, because grass is
green’, explanations with too weak premises ‘John died, because he had a heart
attack or his plane crashed’, and explanations with irrelevant information
‘This stuff dissolves in water, because it is sugar produced in Finland’.
Attempts at finding necessary and sufficient conditions in syntactic and
semantic terms for acceptable explanations have not led to any agreement. The
HO model also needs the additional Aristotelian condition that causal
explanation is directed from causes to effects. This is shown by Sylvain
Bromberger’s flagpole example: the length of a flagpole explains the length of
its shadow, but not vice versa. Michael Scriven has argued against Hempel that
eaplanations of particular events should be given by singular causal statements
‘E because C’. However, a regularity theory Humean or stronger than Humean of
causality implies that the truth of such a singular causal statement
presupposes a universal law of the form ‘Events of type C are universally
followed by events of type E’. The HO version of the covering law model can be
generalized in several directions. The explanans may contain probabilistic or
statistical laws. The explanans-explanandum relation may be inductive in this
case the explanation itself is inductive. This gives us four types of
explanations: deductive-universal i.e., D-N, deductiveprobabilistic,
inductive-universal, and inductiveprobabilistic I-P. Hempel’s 2 model for I-P
explanation contains a probabilistic covering law PG/F % r, where r is the
statistical probability of G given F, and r in brackets is the inductive
probability of the explanandum given the explanans: The explanation-seeking
question may be weakened from ‘Why necessarily E?’ to ‘How possibly E?’. In a
corrective explanation, the explanatory answer points out that the explanandum
sentence E is not strictly true. This is the case in approximate explanation
e.g., Newton’s theory entails a corrected form of Galileo’s and Kepler’s
laws.
law-like generalisation, also called
nomological (or nomic), a generalization that, unlike an accidental
generalization, possesses nomic necessity or counterfactual force. Compare (1)
‘All specimens of gold have a melting point of 1,063o C’ with (2) ‘All the
rocks in my garden are sedimentary’. (2) may be true, but its generality is
restricted to rocks in my garden. Its truth is accidental; it does not state
what must be the case. (1) is true without restriction. If we write (1) as the
conditional ‘For any x and for any time t, if x is a specimen of gold subjected
to a temperature of 1,063o C, then x will melt’, we see that the generalization
states what must be the case. (1) supports the hypothetical counterfactual
assertion ‘For any specimen of gold x and for any time t, if x were subjected
to a temperature of 1,063o C, then x would melt’, which means that we accept
(1) as nomically necessary: it remains true even if no further specimens of
gold are subjected to the required temperature. This is not true of (2), for we
know that at some future time an igneous rock might appear in my garden.
Statements like (2) are not lawlike; they do not possess the unrestricted
necessity we require of lawlike statements. Ernest Nagel has claimed that a
nomological statement must satisfy two other conditions: it must deductively
entail or be deductively entailed by other laws, and its scope of prediction
must exceed the known evidence for it.
law of thought: a law by which or in
accordance with which valid thought proceeds, or that justify valid inference,
or to which all valid deduction is reducible. Laws of thought are rules that
apply without exception to any subject matter of thought, etc.; sometimes they
are said to be the object of logic. The term, rarely used in exactly the same
sense by different authors, has long been associated with three equally
ambiguous expressions: the law of identity (ID), the law of contradiction (or
non-contradiction; NC), and the law of excluded middle (EM). Sometimes these
three expressions are taken as propositions of formal ontology having the
widest possible subject matter, propositions that apply to entities per se:
(ID) every thing is (i.e., is identical to) itself; (NC) no thing having a
given quality also has the negative of that quality (e.g., no even number is
non-even); (EM) every thing either has a given quality or has the negative of
that quality (e.g., every number is either even or non-even). Equally common in
older works is use of these expressions for principles of metalogic about
propositions: (ID) every proposition implies itself; (NC) no proposition is
both true and false; (EM) every proposition is either true or false. Beginning
in the middle to late 1800s these expressions have been used to denote
propositions of Boolean Algebra about classes: (ID) every class includes
itself; (NC) every class is such that its intersection (“product”) with its own
complement is the null class; (EM) every class is such that its union (“sum”)
with its own complement is the universal class. More recently the last two of
the three expressions have been used in connection with the classical
propositional logic and with the socalled protothetic or quantified propositional
logic; in both cases the law of non-contradiction involves the negation of the
conjunction (‘and’) of something with its own negation and the law of excluded
middle involves the disjunction (‘or’) of something with its own negation. In
the case of propositional logic the “something” is a schematic letter serving
as a place-holder, whereas in the case of protothetic logic the “something” is
a genuine variable. The expressions ‘law of non-contradiction’ and ‘law of
excluded middle’ are also used for semantic principles of model theory
concerning sentences and interpretations: (NC) under no interpretation is a
given sentence both true and false; (EM) under any interpretation, a given
sentence is either true or false. The expressions mentioned above all have been
used in many other ways. Many other propositions have also been mentioned as
laws of thought, including the dictum de omni et nullo attributed to Aristotle,
the substitutivity of identicals (or equals) attributed to Euclid, the socalled
identity of indiscernibles attributed to Leibniz, and other “logical truths.”
The expression “law of thought” gains added prominence through its use by Boole
to denote theorems of his “algebra of logic”; in fact, he named his second
logic book An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Modern logicians, in almost
unanimous disagreement with Boole, take this expression to be a misnomer; none
of the above propositions classed under ‘laws of thought’ are explicitly about
thought per se, a mental phenomenon studied by psychology, nor do they involve
explicit reference to a thinker or knower as would be the case in pragmatics or
in epistemology. The distinction between psychology (as a study of mental
phenomena) and semantics (as a study of valid inference) is widely accepted.
Lebensphilosophie, German term, translated
as ‘philosophy of life’, that became current in a variety of popular and
philosophical inflections during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Such philosophers as Dilthey and Eucken frequently applied it to a general
philosophical approach or attitude that distinguished itself, on the one hand,
from the construction of comprehensive systems by Hegel and his followers and,
on the other, from the tendency of empiricism and early positivism to reduce human
experience to epistemological questions about sensations or impressions.
Rather, a Lebensphilosophie should begin from a recognition of the variety and
complexity of concrete and already meaningful human experience as it is
“lived”; it should acknowledge that all human beings, including the
philosopher, are always immersed in historical processes and forms of
organization; and it should seek to understand, describe, and sometimes even
alter these and their various patterns of interrelation without abstraction or
reduction. Such “philosophies of life” as those of Dilthey and Eucken provided
much of the philosophical background for the conception of the social sciences
as interpretive rather than explanatory disciplines. They also anticipated some
central ideas of phenomenology, in particular the notion of the Life-World in
Husserl, and certain closely related themes in Heidegger’s version of
existentialism.
legalese: Grice: “Many things are called
‘legal’ in philosophy. There is legal moralism,
the view (defended in this century by, e.g., Lord Patrick Devlin) that law may
properly be used to enforce morality, including notably “sexual morality.”
Contemporary critics of the view (e.g., Hart) expand on the argument of Mill
that law should only be used to prevent harm to others. There is Hart’s legal positivism, a theory about the nature of
law, commonly thought to be characterized by two major tenets: (1) that there
is no necessary connection between law and morality; and (2) that legal
validity is determined ultimately by reference to certain basic social facts,
e.g., the command of the sovereign (John Austin), the Grundnorm (Hans Kelsen),
or the rule of recognition (Hart). These different descriptions of the basic
law-determining facts lead to different claims about the normative character of
law, with classical positivists (e.g., John Austin) insisting that law is
essentially coercive, and modern positivists (e.g., Hans Kelsen) maintaining
that it is normative. The traditional opponent of the legal positivist is the
natural law theorist, who holds that no sharp distinction can be drawn between
law and morality, thus challenging positivism’s first tenet. Whether that tenet
follows from positivism’s second tenet is a question of current interest and
leads inevitably to the classical question of political theory: Under what
conditions might legal obligations, even if determined by social facts, create
genuine political obligations (e.g., the obligation to obey the law)? There is legal realism, a theory in philosophy
of law or jurisprudence broadly characterized by the claim that the nature of
law is better understood by observing what courts and citizens actually do than
by analyzing stated legal rules and legal concepts. The theory is also
associated with the thoughts that legal rules are disguised predictions of what
courts will do, and that only the actual decisions of courts constitute law.
There are two important traditions of legal realism, in Scandinavia and in the
United States. Both began in the early part of the century, and both focus on
the reality (hence the name ‘legal realism’) of the actual legal system, rather
than on law’s official image of itself. The Scandinavian tradition is more
theoretical and presents its views as philosophical accounts of the normativity
of law based on skeptical methodology – the normative force of law consists in
nothing but the feelings of citizens or officials or both about or their
beliefs in that normative force. The older, U.S. tradition is more empirical or
sociological or instrumentalist, focusing on how legislation is actually
enacted, how rules are actually applied, how courts’ decisions are actually
taken, and so forth. U.S. legal realism in its contemporary form is known as
critical legal studies. Its argumentation is both empirical (law as experienced
to be and as being oppressive by gender) and theoretical (law as essentially
indeterminate, or interpretative – properties that prime law for its role in
political manipulation).
Leibniz: German rationalist philosopher
who made seminal contributions in geology, linguistics, historiography,
mathematics, and physics, as well as philosophy. He was born in Leipzig and
died in Hanover. Trained in the law, he earned a living as a councilor,
diplomat, librarian, and historian, primarily in the court of Hanover. His
contributions in mathematics, physics, and philosophy were known and
appreciated among his educated contemporaries in virtue of his publication in
Europe’s leading scholarly journals and his vast correspondence with
intellectuals in a variety of fields. He was best known in his lifetime for his
contributions to mathematics, especially to the development of the calculus,
where a debate raged over whether Newton or Leibniz should be credited with
priority for its discovery. Current scholarly opinion seems to have settled on
this: each discovered the basic foundations of the calculus independently;
Newton’s discovery preceded that of Leibniz; Leibniz’s publication of the basic
theory of the calculus preceded that of Newton. Leibniz’s contributions to
philosophy were known to his contemporaries through articles published in
learned journals, correspondence, and one book published in his lifetime, the
Theodicy (1710). He wrote a book-length study of Locke’s philosophy, New Essays
on Human Understanding, but decided not to publish it when he learned of
Locke’s death. Examination of Leibniz’s papers after his own death revealed
that what he published during his lifetime was but the tip of the iceberg.
Perhaps the most complete formulation of Leibniz’s mature metaphysics occurs in
his correspondence (1698–1706) with Burcher De Volder, a professor of
philosophy at the University of Leyden. Leibniz therein formulated his basic
ontological thesis: Considering matters accurately, it must be said that there
is nothing in things except simple substances, and, in them, nothing but
perception and appetite. Moreover, matter and motion are not so much substances
or things as they are the phenomena of percipient beings, the reality of which
is located in the harmony of each percipient with itself (with respect to
different times) and with other percipients. In this passage Leibniz asserts
that the basic individuals of an acceptable ontology are all monads, i.e.,
immaterial entities lacking spatial parts, whose basic properties are a
function of their perceptions and appetites. He held that each monad perceives
all the other monads with varying degrees of clarity, except for God, who
perceives all monads with utter clarity. Leibniz’s main theses concerning
causality among the created monads are these: God creates, conserves, and
concurs in the actions of each created monad. Each state of a created monad is
a causal consequence of its preceding state, except for its state at creation
and any of its states due to miraculous divine causality. Intrasubstantial
causality is the rule with respect to created monads, which are precluded from
intersubstantial causality, a mode of operation of which God alone is capable.
Leibniz was aware that elements of this monadology may seem counterintuitive,
that, e.g., there appear to be extended entities composed of parts, existing in
space and time, causally interacting with each other. In the second sentence of
the quoted passage Leibniz set out some of the ingredients of his theory of the
preestablished harmony, one point of which is to save those appearances that
are sufficiently well-founded to deserve saving. In the case of material
objects, Leibniz formulated a version of phenomenalism, based on harmony among
the perceptions of the monads. In the case of apparent intersubstantial causal
relations among created monads, Leibniz proposed an analysis according to which
the underlying reality is an increase in the clarity of relevant perceptions of
the apparent causal agent, combined with a corresponding decrease in the
clarity of the relevant perceptions of the apparent patient. Leibniz treated
material objects and intersubstantial causal relations among created entities
as well-founded phenomena. By contrast, he treated space and time as ideal
entities. Leibniz’s mature metaphysics includes a threefold classification of
entities that must be accorded some degree of reality: ideal entities,
well-founded phenomena, and actual existents, i.e., the monads with their
perceptions and appetites. In the passage quoted above Leibniz set out to
distinguish the actual entities, the monads, from material entities, which he
regarded as well-founded phenomena. In the following passage from another
letter to De Volder he formulated the distinction between actual and ideal
entities: In actual entities there is nothing but discrete quantity, namely,
the multitude of monads, i.e., simple substances. . . . But continuous quantity
is something ideal, which pertains to possibles, and to actuals, insofar as
they are possible. Indeed, a continuum involves indeterminate parts, whereas,
by contrast, there is nothing indefinite in actual entities, in which every
division that can be made, is made. Actual things are composed in the manner that
a number is composed of unities, ideal things are composed in the manner that a
number is composed of fractions. The parts are actual in the real whole, but
not in the ideal. By confusing ideal things with real substances when we seek
actual parts in the order of possibles and indeterminate parts in the aggregate
of actual things, we entangle ourselves in the labyrinth of the continuum and
in inexplicable contradictions. The labyrinth of the continuum was one of two
labyrinths that, according to Leibniz, vex the philosophical mind. His views
about the proper course to take in unraveling the labyrinth of the continuum
are one source of his monadology. Ultimately, he concluded that whatever may be
infinitely divided without reaching indivisible entities is not something that
belongs in the basic ontological category. His investigations of the nature of
individuation and identity over time provided premises from which he concluded
that only indivisible entities are ultimately real, and that an individual persists
over time only if its subsequent states are causal consequences of its
preceding states. In refining the metaphysical insights that yielded the
monadology, Leibniz formulated and defended various important metaphysical
theses, e.g.: the identity of indiscernibles – that individual substances
differ with respect to their intrinsic, non-relational properties; and the
doctrine of minute perceptions – that each created substance has some
perceptions of which it lacks awareness. In the process of providing what he
took to be an acceptable account of well-founded phenomena, Leibniz formulated
various theses counter to the then prevailing Cartesian orthodoxy, concerning
the nature of material objects. In particular, Leibniz argued that a correct
application of Galileo’s discoveries concerning acceleration of freely falling
bodies of the phenomena of impact indicates that force is not to be identified
with quantity of motion, i.e., mass times velocity, as Descartes held, but is
to be measured by mass times the square of the velocity. Moreover, Leibniz
argued that it is force, measured as mass times the square of the velocity,
that is conserved in nature, not quantity of motion. From these results Leibniz
drew some important metaphysical conclusions. He argued that force, unlike
quantity of motion, cannot be reduced to a conjunction of modifications of
extension. But force is a central property of material objects. Hence, he
concluded that Descartes was mistaken in attempting to reduce matter to
extension and its modifications. Leibniz concluded that each material substance
must have a substantial form that accounts for its active force. These
conclusions have to do with entities that Leibniz viewed as phenomenal. He drew
analogous conclusions concerning the entities he regarded as ultimately real,
i.e., the monads. Thus, although Leibniz held that each monad is absolutely
simple, i.e., without parts, he also held that the matter–form distinction has
an application to each created monad. In a letter to De Volder he wrote:
Therefore, I distinguish (1) the primitive entelechy or soul, (2) primary
matter, i.e., primitive passive power, (3) monads completed from these two, (4)
mass, i.e., second matter . . . in which innumerable subordinate monads come
together, (5) the animal, i.e., corporeal substance, which a dominating monad
makes into one machine. The second labyrinth vexing the philosophical mind,
according to Leibniz, is the labyrinth of freedom. It is fair to say that for
Leibniz the labyrinth of freedom is fundamentally a matter of how it is
possible that some states of affairs obtain contingently, i.e., how it is
possible that some propositions are true that might have been false. There are
two distinct sources of the problem of contingency in Leibniz’s philosophy, one
theological, and the other metaphysical. Each source may be grasped by
considering an argument that appears to have premises to which Leibniz was
predisposed and the conclusion that every state of affairs that obtains,
obtains necessarily, and hence that there are no contingent propositions. The
metaphysical argument is centered on some of Leibniz’s theses about the nature
of truth. He held that the truth-value of all propositions is settled once
truth-values have been assigned to the elementary propositions, i.e., those
expressed by sentences in subject-predicate form. And he held that a sentence
in subject-predicate form expresses a true proposition if and only if the
concept of its predicate is included in the concept of its subject. But this
makes it sound as if Leibniz were committed to the view that an elementary
proposition is true if and only if it is conceptually true, from which it seems
to follow that an elementary proposition is true if and only if it is
necessarily true. Leibniz’s views concerning the relation of the truthvalue of
non-elementary propositions to the truth-value of elementary propositions,
then, seem to entail that there are no contingent propositions. He rejected
this conclusion in virtue of rejecting the thesis that if an elementary
proposition is conceptually true then it is necessarily true. The materials for
his rejection of this thesis are located in theses connected with his program
for a universal science (scientia universalis). This program had two parts: a
universal notation (characteristica universalis), whose purpose was to provide
a method for recording scientific facts as perspicuous as algebraic notation,
and a formal system of reasoning (calculus ratiocinator) for reasoning about
the facts recorded. Supporting Leibniz’s belief in the possibility and utility
of the characteristica universalis and the calculus ratiocinator is his thesis
that all concepts arise from simple primitive concepts via concept conjunction
and concept complementation. In virtue of this thesis, he held that all
concepts may be analyzed into their simple, primitive components, with this
proviso: in some cases there is no finite analysis of a concept into its
primitive components; but there is an analysis that converges on the primitive
components without ever reaching them. This is the doctrine of infinite
analysis, which Leibniz applied to ward off the threat to contingency
apparently posed by his account of truth. He held that an elementary
proposition is necessarily true if and only if there is a finite analysis that
reveals that its predicate concept is included in its subject concept. By
contrast, an elementary proposition is contingently true if and only if there
is no such finite analysis, but there is an analysis of its predicate concept
that converges on a component of its subject concept. The theological argument
may be put this way. There would be no world were God not to choose to create a
world. As with every choice, as, indeed, with every state of affairs that
obtains, there must be a sufficient reason for that choice, for the obtaining
of that state of affairs – this is what the principle of sufficient reason
amounts to, according to Leibniz. The reason for God’s choice of a world to
create must be located in God’s power and his moral character. But God is
allpowerful and morally perfect, both of which attributes he has of necessity.
Hence, of necessity, God chose to create the best possible world. Whatever
possible world is the best possible world, is so of necessity. Hence, whatever
possible world is actual, is so of necessity. A possible world is defined with
respect to the states of affairs that obtain in it. Hence, whatever states of
affairs obtain, do so of necessity. Therefore, there are no contingent
propositions. Leibniz’s options here were limited. He was committed to the
thesis that the principle of sufficient reason, when applied to God’s choice of
a world to create, given God’s attributes, yields the conclusion that this is
the best possible world – a fundamental component of his solution to the
problem of evil. He considered two ways of avoiding the conclusion of the
argument noted above. The first consists in claiming that although God is
metaphysically perfect of necessity, i.e., has every simple, positive
perfection of necessity, and although God is morally perfect, nonetheless he is
not morally perfect of necessity, but rather by choice. The second consists in
denying that whatever possible world is the best, is so of necessity, relying
on the idea that the claim that a given possible world is the best involves a
comparison with infinitely many other possible worlds, and hence, if true, is
only contingently true. Once again the doctrine of infinite analysis served as
the centerpiece of Leibniz’s efforts to establish that, contrary to
appearances, his views do not lead to necessitarianism, i.e., to the thesis
that there is no genuine contingency. Much of Leibniz’s work in philosophical
theology had as a central motivation an effort to formulate a sound
philosophical and theological basis for various church reunion projects –
especially reunion between Lutherans and Calvinists on the Protestant side, and
ultimately, reunion between Protestants and Catholics. He thought that most of
the classical arguments for the existence of God, if formulated with care,
i.e., in the way in which Leibniz formulated them, succeeded in proving what
they set out to prove. For example, Leibniz thought that Descartes’s version of
the ontological argument established the existence of a perfect being, with one
crucial proviso: that an absolutely perfect being is possible. Leibniz believed
that none of his predecessors had established this premise, so he set out to do
so. The basic idea of his purported proof is this. A perfection is a simple,
positive property. Hence, there can be no demonstration that there is a formal
inconsistency in asserting that various collections of them are instantiated by
the same being. But if there is no such demonstration, then it is possible that
something has them all. Hence, a perfect being is possible. Leibniz did not
consider in detail many of the fundamental epistemological issues that so moved
Descartes and the British empiricists. Nonetheless, Leibniz made significant
contributions to the theory of knowledge. His account of our knowledge of
contingent truths is much like what we would expect of an empiricist’s
epistemology. He claimed that our knowledge of particular contingent truths has
its basis in sense perception. He argued that simple enumerative induction cannot
account for all our knowledge of universal contingent truths; it must be
supplemented by what he called the a priori conjectural method, a precursor of
the hypothetico-deductive method. He made contributions to developing a formal
theory of probability, which he regarded as essential for an adequate account
of our knowledge of contingent truths. Leibniz’s rationalism is evident in his
account of our a priori knowledge, which for him amounted to our knowledge of
necessary truths. Leibniz thought that Locke’s empiricism did not provide an
acceptable account of a priori knowledge, because it attempted to locate all
the materials of justification as deriving from sensory experience, thus
overlooking what Leibniz took to be the primary source of our a priori
knowledge, i.e., what is innate in the mind. He summarized his debate with
Locke on these matters thus: Our differences are on matters of some importance.
It is a matter of knowing if the soul in itself is entirely empty like a
writing tablet on which nothing has as yet been written (tabula rasa), . . .
and if everything inscribed there comes solely from the senses and experience,
or if the soul contains originally the sources of various concepts and
doctrines that external objects merely reveal on occasion. The idea that some
concepts and doctrines are innate in the mind is central not only to Leibniz’s
theory of knowledge, but also to his metaphysics, because he held that the most
basic metaphysical concepts, e.g., the concepts of the self, substance, and
causation, are innate. Leibniz utilized the ideas behind the characteristica
universalis in order to formulate a system of formal logic that is a genuine
alternative to Aristotelian syllogistic logic and to contemporary
quantification theory. Assuming that propositions are, in some fashion,
composed of concepts and that all composite concepts are, in some fashion,
composed of primitive simple concepts, Leibniz formulated a logic based on the
idea of assigning numbers to concepts according to certain rules. The entire
program turns on his concept containment account of truth previously mentioned.
In connection with the metatheory of this logic Leibniz formulated the
principle: “eadem sunt quorum unum alteri substitui potest salva veritate”
(“Those things are the same of which one may be substituted for the other
preserving truth-value”). The proper interpretation of this principle turns in
part on exactly what “things” he had in mind. It is likely that he intended to
formulate a criterion of concept identity. Hence, it is likely that this
principle is distinct from the identity of indiscernibles, previously
mentioned, and also from what has come to be called Leibniz’s law, i.e., the
thesis that if x and y are the same individual then whatever is true of x is true
of y and vice versa. The account outlined above concentrates on Leibniz’s
mature views in metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. The evolution of his
thought in these areas is worthy of close study, which cannot be brought to a
definitive state until all of his philosophical work has been published in the
edition of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin.
lekton (Grecian, ‘what
can be said’), a Stoic term sometimes translated as ‘the meaning of an
utterance’. A lekton differs from an utterance in being what the utterance (or
its emisor) signifies: A lekton is said to be what the Grecian grasps and the
non-Grecian does not when Gricese is spoken. Moreover, a lekton is incorporeal,
which for the Stoics means it does not, strictly speaking, exist, but only “sub-sists,”
and so cannot act or be acted upon. A lekton constitutes the content of a state
of Grice’s soul:. A lekton is what we assent to and endeavor toward and they
“correspond” to the presentations given to rational animals. The Stoics acknowledged
a lekton for a predicate as well as for a sentence (including questions, oaths,
and imperatives). An axioma or a propositions is a lekton that can be assented
to and may be true or false (although being essentially tensed, its truth-value
may change). The Stoics’ theory of reference suggests that they also
acknowledged singular propositions, which “perish” when the referent ceases to
exist. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Benson Mates and the stoics.”
lenin: a Marxist philosopher, principal
creator of Soviet dialectical materialism. In Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism, he attacked his contemporaries who sought to interpret
Marx’s philosophy in the spirit of the phenomenalistic positivism of Avenarius
and Mach. Rejecting their position as idealist, Lenin argues that matter is not
a construct from sensations but an objective reality independent of consciousness;
because a sensation directly copies this reality, objective truth is possible.
The dialectical dimension of Lenin’s outlook is best elaborated in his posthumous
Philosophical Notebooks (written 1914–16), a collection of reading notes and
fragments in which he gives close attention to the Hegelian dialectic and
displays warm sympathy toward it, though he argues that the dialectic should be
interpreted materialistically rather than idealistically. Some of Lenin’s most
original theorizing, presented in Imperialism as the Highest Stage of
Capitalism (1916) and State and Revolution (1918), is devoted to analyzing the
connection between monopoly capitalism and imperialism and to describing the
coming violent replacement of bourgeois rule by, first, the “dictatorship of
the proletariat” and, later, stateless communism. Lenin regarded all philosophy
as a partisan weapon in the class struggle, and he wielded his own philosophy
polemically in the interests of Communist revolution. As a result of the
victory of the Bolsheviks in November 1917, Lenin’s ideas were enshrined as the
cornerstone of Soviet intellectual culture and were considered above criticism until
the advent of glasnost.
lequier: philosopher, educated in Paris. He
influenced Renouvier, who regarded Lequier as his “master in philosophy.”
Through Renouvier, he came to the attention of James, who called Lequier a
“philosopher of genius.” Central to Lequier’s philosophy is the idea of freedom
understood as the power to “create,” or add novelty to the world. Such freedom
involves an element of arbitrariness and is incompatible with determinism.
Anticipating James, Lequier argued that determinism, consistently affirmed,
leads to skepticism about truth and values. Though a devout Roman Catholic, his
theological views were unorthodox for his time. God cannot know future free
actions until they occur and therefore cannot be wholly immutable and eternal.
Lequier’s views anticipate in striking ways some views of James, Bergson,
Alexander, and Peirce, and the process philosophies and process theologies of
Whitehead and Hartshorne.
leroux: philosopher reputed to have
introduced “socialism” in France – “the word, not the doctrine!” – Grice). He
claimed to be the first to use solidarité (conversational solidarity) as a
sociological concept (in his memoirs, La Grève de Samarez. The son of a
Parisian café owner, Leroux centered his life work on journalism, both as a
printer (patenting an advanced procedure for typesetting) and as founder of a
number of significant serial publications. The Encyclopédie Nouvelle, which he
launched with Jean Reynaud is conceived and written in the spirit of Diderot’s
magnum opus. It aspired to be the platform for republican and democratic
thought during the July Monarchy. The reformer’s influence on contemporaries
such as Hugo, Belinsky, J. Michelet, and Heine was considerable. Leroux
fervently believed in Progress, unlimited and divinely inspired. This doctrine
he took to be eighteenth-century France’s particular contribution to the
Enlightenment. Progress must make its way between twin perils: the “follies of
illuminism” or “foolish spiritualism” and the “abject orgies of materialism.”
Accordingly, Leroux blamed Condillac for having “drawn up the code of
materialism” by excluding an innate Subject from his sensationalism
(“Condillac,” Encyclopédie Nouvelle). Cousin’s eclecticism, state doctrine
under the July Monarchy and synonym for immobility (“Philosophy requires no
further development; it is complete as is,” Leroux wrote sarcastically in 1838,
echoing Cousin), was a constant target of his polemics. Having abandoned
traditional Christian beliefs, Leroux viewed immortality as an infinite
succession of rebirths on earth, our sense of personal identity being preserved
throughout by Platonic “reminiscences” (De l’Humanité).
lesniewski: philosopher-logician, co-founder,
with Lukasiewicz and Kotarbigski, of the Warsaw Center of Logical Research. He
perfected the logical reconstruction of classical mathematics by Frege,
Schröder, Whitehead, and Russell in his synthesis of mathematical with
modernized Aristotelian logic. A pioneer in scientific semantics whose insights
inspired Tarski, Les’niewski distinguished genuine antinomies of belief, in
theories intended as true mathematical sciences, from mere formal
inconsistencies in uninterpreted calculi. Like Frege an acute critic of
formalism, he sought to perfect one comprehensive, logically true instrument of
scientific investigation. Demonstrably consistent, relative to classical
elementary logic, and distinguished by its philosophical motivation and logical
economy, his system integrates his central achievements. Other contributions
include his ideographic notation, his method of natural deduction from
suppositions and his demonstrations of inconsistency of other systems, even
Frege’s revised foundations of arithmetic. Fundamental were (1) his 1913
refutation of Twardowski’s Platonistic theory of abstraction, which motivated
his “constructive nominalism”; and (2) his deep analyses of Russell’s paradox,
which led him to distinguish distributive from collective predication and (as
generalized to subsume Grelling and Nelson’s paradox of self-reference) logical
from semantic paradoxes, and so (years before Ramsey and Gödel) to
differentiate, not just the correlatives object language and metalanguage, but
any such correlative linguistic stages, and thus to relativize semantic
concepts to successive hierarchical strata in metalinguistic stratification.
His system of logic and foundations of mathematics comprise a hierarchy of
three axiomatic deductive theories: protothetic, ontology, and mereology. Each
can be variously based on just one axiom introducing a single undefined term.
His prototheses are basic to any further theory. Ontology, applying them,
complements protothetic to form his logic. Les’niewski’s ontology develops his
logic of predication, beginning (e.g.) with singular predication characterizing
the individual so-and-so as being one (of the one or more) such-and-such,
without needing classabstraction operators, dispensable here as in Russell’s
“no-class theory of classes.” But this, his logic of nouns, nominal or
predicational functions, etc., synthesizing formulations by Aristotle, Leibniz,
Boole, Schröder, and Whitehead, also represents a universal theory of being and
beings, beginning with related individuals and their characteristics, kinds, or
classes distributively understood to include individuals as singletons or
“one-member classes.” Les’niewski’s directives of definition and logical
grammar for his systems of protothetic and ontology provide for the unbounded
hierarchies of “open,” functional expressions. Systematic conventions of
contextual determinacy, exploiting dependence of meaning on context, permit
unequivocal use of the same forms of expression to bring out systematic
analogies between homonyms as analogues in Aristotle’s and Russell’s sense,
systematically ambiguous, differing in semantic category and hence
significance. Simple distinctions of semantic category within the object
language of the system itself, together with the metalinguistic stratification
to relativize semantic concepts, prevent logical and semantic paradoxes as
effectively as Russell’s ramified theory of types. Lesniewski’s system of
logic, though expressively rich enough to permit Platonist interpretation in
terms of universals, is yet “metaphysically neutral” in being free from ontic
commitments. It neither postulates, presupposes, nor implies existence of
either individuals or abstractions, but relies instead on equivalences without
existential import that merely introduce and explicate new terms. In his
“nominalist” construction of the endless Platonic ladder of abstraction,
logical principles can be elevated step by step, from any level to the next, by
definitions making abstractions eliminable, translatable by definition into
generalizations characterizing related individuals. In this sense it is
“constructively nominalist,” as a developing language always open to
introduction of new terms and categories, without appeal to “convenient
fictions.” Les’niewski’s system, completely designed by 1922, was logically and
chronologically in advance of Russell’s 1925 revision of Principia Mathematica
to accommodate Ramsey’s simplification of Russell’s theory of types. Yet
Les’niewski’s premature death, the ensuing disruption of war, which destroyed
his manuscripts and dispersed survivors such as Sobocigski and Lejewski, and
the relative inaccessibility of publications delayed by Les’niewski’s own
perfectionism have retarded understanding of his work.
Lessing: philosopher whose oeuvre aimed to
replace the so-called possession of truth by a search for truth through public
debate. The son of a Protestant minister, he studied theology but gave it up to
take part in the literary debate between Gottsched and the Swiss Bodmer and
Breitinger, which dealt with French classicism (Boileau) and English influences
(Shakespeare for theater and Milton for poetry). His literary criticism
(Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend), his own dramatic works, and his
theological-philosophical reflections were united in his conception of a
practical Aufklärung, which opposed all philosophical or religious dogmatism.
Lessing’s creation and direction of the National German Theater of Hamburg
(1767–70) helped to form a sense of German national identity. In 1750 Lessing
published Thoughts on the Moravian Brothers, which contrasted religion as lived
by this pietist community with the ecclesiastical institution. In 1753–54 he
wrote a series of “rehabilitations” (Rettugen) to show that the opposition
between dogmas and heresies, between “truth” and “error,” was incompatible with
living religious thought. This position had the seeds of a historical
conception of religion that Lessing developed during his last years. In 1754 he
again attempted a deductive formulation, inspired by Spinoza, of the
fundamental truths of Christianity. Lessing rejected this rationalism, as
substituting a dogma of reason for one of religion. To provoke public debate on
the issue, be published H. S. Reimarus’s Fragments of an Anonymous Author
(1774–78), which the Protestant hierarchy considered atheistic. The relativism
and soft deism to which his arguments seemed to lead were transformed in his
Education of Mankind (1780) into a historical theory of truth. In Lessing’s
view, all religions have an equal dignity, for none possesses “the” truth; they
represent only ethical and practical moments in the history of mankind.
Revelation is assimilated into an education of mankind and God is compared to a
teacher who reveals to man only what he is able to assimilate. This
secularization of the history of salvation, in which God becomes immanent in the
world, is called pantheism (“the quarrel of pantheism”). For Lessing, Judaism
and Christianity are the preliminary stages of a third gospel, the “Gospel of
Reason.” The Masonic Dialogues (1778) introduced this historical and practical
conception of truth as a progress from “thinking by oneself” to dialogue
(“thinking aloud with a friend”). In the literary domain Lessing broke with the
culture of the baroque: against the giants and martyrs of baroque tragedy, he
offered the tragedy of the bourgeois, with whom any spectator must be able to
identify. After a poor first play in 1755 – Miss Sara Sampson – which only
reflected the sentimentalism of the time, Lessing produced a model of the genre
with Emilia Galotti (1781). The Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767– 68) was supposed to
be influenced by Aristotle, but its union of fear and pity was greatly
influenced by Moses Mendelssohn’s theory of “mixed sensations.” Lessing’s
entire aesthetics was based not on permanent ontological, religious, or moral
rules, but on the spectator’s interest. In Laokoon (1766) he associated this
aesthetics of reception with one of artistic production, i.e., a reflection on
the means through which poetry and the plastic arts create this interest: the
plastic arts by natural signs and poetry through the arbitrary signs that
overcome their artificiality through the imitation not of nature but of action.
Much like Winckelmann’s aesthetics, which influenced German classicism for a
considerable time, Lessing’s aesthetics opposed the baroque, but for a theory
of ideal beauty inspired by Plato it substituted a foundation of the beautiful
in the agreement between producer and receptor.
Leucippus: Grecian pre-Socratic
philosopher credited with founding atomism, expounded in a work titled The
Great World-system. Positing the existence of atoms and the void, he answered
Eleatic arguments against change by allowing change of place. The arrangements
and rearrangements of groups of atoms could account for macroscopic changes in
the world, and indeed for the world itself. Little else is known of Leucippus.
It is difficult to distinguish his contributions from those of his prolific
follower Democritus.
Levinas: philosopher. Educated as an
orthodox Jew and a Russian citizen, he studied philosophy at Strasbourg and
Freiburg, introduced the work of Husserl and Heidegger in France, taught
philosophy at Paris, spent years in a German labor camp and was a professor at
the universities of Poitiers, Nanterre, and the Sorbonne. To the impersonal
totality of being reduced to “the same” by the Western tradition (including
Hegel’s and Husserl’s idealism and Heidegger’s ontology), Levinas opposes the
irreducible otherness of the human other, death, time, God, etc. In Totalité et
Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (1961), he shows how the other’s facing and
speaking urge philosophy to transcend the horizons of comprehension, while
Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974) concentrates on the self of
“me” as one-for-the-other. Appealing to Plato’s form of the Good and Descartes’s
idea of the infinite, Levinas describes the asymmetrical relation between the
other’s “highness” or “infinity” and me, whose self-enjoyment is thus
interrupted by a basic imperative: Do not kill me, but help me to live! The
fact of the other’s existence immediately reveals the basic “ought” of ethics;
it awakens me to a responsibility that I have never been able to choose or to
refuse. My radical “passivity,” thus revealed, shows the anachronic character
of human temporality. It also refers to the immemorial past of “Him” whose
“illeity” is still otherwise other than the human other: God, or the Good
itself, who is neither an object nor a you. Religion and ethics coincide
because the only way to meet with God is to practice one’s responsibility for
the human other, who is “in the trace of God.” Comprehensive thematization and
systematic objectification, though always in danger of reducing all otherness,
have their own relative and subordinate truth, especially with regard to the
economic and political conditions of universal justice toward all individuals
whom I cannot encounter personally. With and through the other I meet all
humans. In this experience lies the origin of equality and human rights.
Similarly, theoretical thematization has a positive role if it remains aware of
its ancillary or angelic role with regard to concern for the other. What is
said in philosophy betrays the saying by which it is communicated. It must
therefore be unsaid in a return to the saying. More than desire for theoretical
wisdom, philosophy is the wisdom of love.
Lewin: German philosophical psychologist,
perhaps the most influential of the Gestalt psychologists. Believing
traditional psychology was stuck in an “Aristotelian” class-logic stage of
theorizing, Lewin proposed advancing to a “Galilean” stage of field theory. His
central field concept was the “life space, containing the person and his
psychological environment.” Primarily concerned with motivation (or
goal-oriented behaviour), he explained locomotion as caused by life-space
objects’ valences, psychological vectors of force acting on people as physical
vectors of force act on physical objects. A thing with positive valence exert
attractive force; A thing with negative valence exert repulsive force; an
ambivalent thing exerts both. To attain theoretical rigor, Lewin borrows from
mathematical topology, mapping life spaces as diagrams. One represented the
motivational conflict involved in choosing between pizza and hamburger: Life
spaces frequently contain psychological barriers (e.g., no money) blocking
movement toward or away from a valenced object. Lewin also created the
important field of group dynamics in 1939, carrying out innovative studies on
children and adults, focusing on group cohesion and effects of leadership
style. His main works are A Dynamic Theory of Personality (1935), Principles of
Topological Psychology (1936), and Field Theory in Social Science (1951). H. P.
Grice, “Lewin and aspects of reason.”
Lewis: philosopher who advocated a version
of pragmatism and empiricism, but was nonetheless strongly influenced by Kant.
Lewis was born in Massachusetts, New England (his ancestors were from
Lincolnshire), educated at Harvard, and taught at the University of California and
Harvard. He wrote in logic (A Survey of Symbolic Logic; Symbolic Logic,
coauthored with C. H. Langford), in epistemology (Mind and the World Order; An
Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation), and in ethical theory (The Ground and
Nature of the Right, 1965; Our Social Inheritance, 1957). General views. Use of
the senses involves “presentations” of sense experiences that signalize
external objects. Reflection upon the relations of sense experiences to
psychological “intensions” permits our thoughts to refer to aspects of
objective reality. Consequently, we can experience those non-presented
objective conditions. Intensions, which include the mind’s categories, are
meanings in one ordinary sense, and concepts in a philosophical sense. When
judging counts as knowing, it has the future-oriented function and sole value
of guiding action in pursuit of what one evaluates as good. Intensions do not
fundamentally depend upon being formulated in those linguistic phrases that may
express them and thereby acquire meaning. Pace Kant, our categories are replaceable
when pragmatically unsuccessful, and are sometimes invented, although typically
socially instilled. Kant also failed to realize that any a priori knowledge
concerns only what is expressed by an “analytic truth,” i.e., what is knowable
with certainty via reflection upon intensions and permits reference to the
necessary inclusion (and exclusion) relations between objective properties.
Such inclusion/exclusion relationships are “entailments” expressible by a use of
“if” different from material implication. The degree of justification of an
empirical judgment about objective reality (e.g., that there is a doorknob
before one) and of any beliefs in consequences that are probable given the
judgment, approximates to certainty when the judgment stands in a relationship
of “congruence” to a collection of justified judgments (e.g., a collection
including the judgments that one remembers seeing a doorknob a moment before,
and that one has not just turned around). Lewis’s empiricism involves one type
of phenomenalism. Although he treats external conditions as metaphysically
distinct from passages of sense experience, he maintains that the process of
learning about the former does not involve more than learning about the latter.
Accordingly, he speaks of the “sense meaning” of an intension, referring to an
objective condition. It concerns what one intends to count as a process that
verifies that the particular intension applies to the objective world. Sense
meanings of a statement may be conceived as additional “entailments” of it, and
are expressible by conjunctions of an infinite number of statements each of
which is “the general form of a specific terminating judgment” (as defined
below). Lewis wants his treatment of sense meaning to rule out Berkeley’s view
that objects exist only when perceived. Verification of an objective judgment,
as Kant realized, is largely specified by a non-social process expressed by a
rule to act in imaginable ways in response to imaginable present sense
experiences (e.g. seeing a doorknob) and thereupon to have imaginable future
sense experiences (e.g. feeling a doorknob). Actual instances of such passages
of sense experience raise the probability of an objective judgment, whose
verification is always partial. Apprehensions of sense experiences are
judgments that are not reached by basing them on grounds in a way that might
conceivably produce errors. Such apprehensions are “certain.” The latter term
may be employed by Lewis in more than one sense, but here it at least implies
that the judgment is rationally credible and in the above sense not capable of
being in error. So such an apprehension is “datal,” i.e., rationally employed
in judging other matters, and “immediate,” i.e., formed noninferentially in
response to a presentation. These presentations make up “the (sensory) given.”
Sense experience is what remains after everything that is less than certain in
one’s experience of an objective condition is set aside. Lewis thought some
version of the epistemic regress argument to be correct, and defended the
Cartesian view that without something certain as a foundation no judgment has
any degree of justification. Technical terminology. Presentation: something
involved in experience, e.g. a visual impression, in virtue of which one
possesses a non-inferential judgment that it is involved. The given: those
presentations that have the content that they do independently of one’s
intending or deciding that they have it. Terminating: decisively and completely
verifiable or falsifiable in principle. (E.g., where S affirms a present sense
experience, A affirms an experience of seeming to initiate an action, and E
affirms a future instance of sense experience, the judgment ‘S and if A then E’
is terminating.) The general form of the terminating judgment that S and if A
then E: the conditional that if S then (in all probability) E, if A. (An actual
judgment expressed by this conditional is based on remembering passages of
sense experience of type S/A/E and is justified thanks to the principle of
induction and the principle that seeming to remember an event makes the
judgment that the event occurred justified at least to some degree. These
statements concern a connection that holds independently of whether anyone is
thinking and underlies the rationality of relying to any degree upon what is
not part of one’s self.) Congruence: the relationship among statements in a
collection when the following conditional is true: If each had some degree of
justification independently of the remaining ones, then each would be made more
justified by the conjoint truth of the remaining ones. (When the antecedent of
this conditional is true, and a statement in the collection is such that it is
highly improbable that the remaining ones all be true unless it is true, then
it is made very highly justified.) Pragmatic a priori: those judgments that are
not based on the use of the senses but on employing a set of intensions, and
yet are susceptible of being reasonably set aside because of a shift to a
different set of intensions whose employment is pragmatically more useful
(roughly, more useful for the attainment of what has intrinsic value).
Valuation: the appraising of something as having value or being morally right.
(What has some value that is not due to its consequences is what has intrinsic
value, e.g., enjoyable experiences of self-realization in living rationally.
Other evaluations of what is good are empirical judgments concerning what may
be involved in actions leading to what is intrinsically good. Rational
reflection permits awareness of various moral principles.)
Lewis: very Irish literary critic, novelist,
and Christian apologist, whom Grice would occasionally see at the Bird and
Baby. (“I don’t like him” – Grice). Born in Belfast, Lewis took three
first-class degrees at Oxford, became a tutor at Magdalen, and assumed the
chair of medieval and Renaissance studies at Cambridge. While his tremendous
output includes important works on medieval literature and literary criticism,
he is best known for his fiction and Christian apologetics. Lewis combined a
poetic sense and appreciation of argument that allowed him to communicate
complex philosophical and theological material to lay audiences. His popular
writings in the philosophy of religion range over a variety of topics, including
the nature and existence of God (Mere Christianity, 1952), miracles (Miracles,
1947), hell (The Great Divorce, 1945), and the problem of evil (The Problem of
Pain, 1940). His own conversion to Christianity as an adult is chronicled in
his autobiography (Surprised by Joy, 1955). In defending theism Lewis employed
arguments from natural theology (most notably versions of the moral and
teleological arguments) and arguments from religious experience. Also of
philosophical interest is his defense of moral absolutism in The Abolition of
Man.
Lewis: philosopher influential in many
areas. Lewis received the B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore and the Ph.D. in
philosophy from Harvard when Grice was giving the William James lectures on the
implicaturum He has been a member of the philosophy department at U.C.L.A. and
Princeton . In philosophy of mind, Lewis is known principally for “An Argument
for the Identity Theory” (1966), “Psychophysical and Theoretical
Identifications” (1972), and “Mad Pain and Martian Pain” (1980). He argues for
the functionalist thesis that mental states are defined by their typical causal
roles, and the materialist thesis that the causal roles definitive of mental
states are occupied by physical states. Lewis develops the view that theoretical
definitions in general are functionally defined, applying the formal concept of
a Ramsey sentence. And he suggests that the platitudes of commonsense or folk
psychology constitute the theory implicitly defining psychological concepts. In
philosophy of language and linguistics, Lewis is known principally for
Convention (1969), “General Semantics” (1970), and “Languages and Language”
(1975). His theory of convention had its source in the theory of games of pure
coordination developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. Roughly, conventions are
arbitrary solutions to coordination problems that perpetuate themselves once a
precedent is set because they serve a common interest. Lewis requires it to be
common knowledge that people prefer to conform to a conventional regularity
given that others do. He treats linguistic meanings as compositional
intensions. The basic intensions for lexical constituents are functions
assigning extensions to indices, which include contextual factors and a
possible world. An analytic sentence is one true at every index. Languages are
functions from sentences to meanings, and the language of a population is the
one in which they have a convention of truthfulness and trust. In metaphysics
and modal logic, Lewis is known principally for “Counterpart Theory and
Quantified Modal Logic” (1968) and On the Plurality of Worlds (1986). Based on
its theoretical benefits, Lewis argues for modal realism: other possible worlds
and the objects in them are just as real as the actual world and its inhabitants.
Lewis develops a non-standard form of modal logic in which objects exist in at
most one possible world, and for which the necessity of identity fails.
Properties are identified with the set of objects that have them in any
possible world, and propositions as the set of worlds in which they are true.
He also develops a finergrained concept of structured properties and
propositions. In philosophical logic and philosophy of science, Lewis is best
known for Counterfactuals (1973), “Causation” (1973), and “Probabilities of
Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities” (1976). He developed a formal
semantics for counterfactual conditionals that matches their truth conditions
and logic much more adequately than the previously available material or strict
conditional analyses. Roughly, a counterfactual is true if its consequent is
true in every possible world in which its antecedent is true that is as similar
overall to the actual world as the truth of the antecedent will allow. Lewis
then defended an analysis of causation in terms of counterfactuals: c caused e
if e would not have occurred if c had not occurred or if there is a chain of
events leading from e to c each member of which is counterfactually dependent
on the next. He presents a reductio ad absurdum argument to show that
conditional probabilities could not be identified with the probabilities of any
sort of conditional. Lewis has also written on visual experience, events,
holes, parts of classes, time travel, survival and identity, subjective and objective
probability, desire as belief, attitudes de se, deontic logic, decision theory,
the prisoner’s dilemma and the Newcomb problem, utilitarianism, dispositional
theories of value, nuclear deterrence, punishment, and academic ethics. H. P.
Grice, “Lewis at Harvard.”
lexical ordering, also called
lexicographic ordering, a method, given a finite ordered set of symbols, such
as the letters of the alphabet, of ordering all finite sequences of those
symbols. All finite sequences of letters, e.g., can be ordered as follows:
first list all single letters in alphabetical order; then list all pairs of
letters in the order aa, ab, . . . az; ba . . . bz; . . . ; za . . . zz. Here
pairs are first grouped and alphabetized according to the first letter of the
pair, and then within these groups are alphabetized according to the second
letter of the pair. All sequences of three letters, four letters, etc., are
then listed in order by an analogous process. In this way every sequence of n
letters, for any n, is listed. Lexical ordering differs from alphabetical
ordering, although it makes use of it, because all sequences with n letters
come before any sequence with n ! 1 letters; thus, zzt will come before aaab.
One use of lexical ordering is to show that the set of all finite sequences of
symbols, and thus the set of all words, is at most denumerably infinite.
Liber vitae -- Arbitrium – liber vitae --
book of life, expression found in Hebrew and Christian scriptures signifying a
record kept by the Lord of those destined for eternal happiness Exodus 32:32;
Psalms 68; Malachi 3:16; Daniel 12:1; Philippians 4:3; Revelation 3:5, 17:8,
20:12, 21:27. Medieval philosophers often referred to the book of life when
discussing issues of predestination, divine omniscience, foreknowledge, and
free will. Figures like Augustine and Aquinas asked whether it represented
God’s unerring foreknowledge or predestination, or whether some names could be
added or deleted from it. The term is used by some contemporary philosophers to
mean a record of all the events in a person’s life.
liberalism – alla Locke – “meaning
liberalism” – “Every man has the liberty to make his words for any idea he
pleases.” “every Man has so
inviolable a Liberty, to make Words stand for what Ideas
he pleases.” Bennett on Locke: An utterer has all the freedom he has to
make any of his expressions for any idea he pleases. Constant, Benjamin – Grice
was a sort of a liberal – at least he was familiar with “pinko Oxford” -- in full, Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque,
defender of liberalism and passionate analyst of and European politics. He welcomed the Revolution but not the Reign of Terror, the
violence of which he avoided by accepting a lowly diplomatic post in
Braunschweig 1787 94. In 1795 he returned to Paris with Madame de Staël and
intervened in parliamentary debates. His pamphlets opposed both extremes, the
Jacobin and the Bonapartist. Impressed by Rousseau’s Social Contract, he came
to fear that like Napoleon’s dictatorship, the “general will” could threaten civil
rights. He had first welcomed Napoleon, but turned against his autocracy. He
favored parliamentary democracy, separation of church and state, and a bill of
rights. The high point of his political career came with membership in the
Tribunat 180002, a consultative chamber appointed by the Senate. His centrist
position is evident in the Principes de politique 180610. Had not republican
terror been as destructive as the Empire? In chapters 1617, Constant opposes
the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns. He assumes that the
Grecian world was given to war, and therefore strengthened “political liberty”
that favors the state over the individual the liberty of the ancients.
Fundamentally optimistic, he believed that war was a thing of the past, and that
the modern world needs to protect “civil liberty,” i.e. the liberty of the
individual the liberty of the moderns. The great merit of Constant’s comparison
is the analysis of historical forces, the theory that governments must support
current needs and do not depend on deterministic factors such as the size of
the state, its form of government, geography, climate, and race. Here he
contradicts Montesquieu. The opposition between ancient and modern liberty
expresses a radical liberalism that did not seem to fit politics. However, it was the beginning of
the liberal tradition, contrasting political liberty in the service of the
state with the civil liberty of the citizen cf. Mill’s On Liberty, 1859, and
Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty, 8. Principes remained in manuscript until
1861; the scholarly editions of Étienne Hofmann 0 are far more recent. Hofmann
calls Principes the essential text between Montesquieu and Tocqueville. It was
tr. into English as Constant, Political Writings ed. Biancamaria Fontana, 8 and
7. Forced into retirement by Napoleon, Constant wrote his literary
masterpieces, Adolphe and the diaries. He completed the Principes, then turned
to De la religion 6 vols., which he considered his supreme achievement. liberalism, a political philosophy first
formulated during the Enlightenment in response to the growth of modern
nation-states, which centralize governmental functions and claim sole authority
to exercise coercive power within their boundaries. One of its central theses
has long been that a government’s claim to this authority is justified only if
the government can show those who live under it that it secures their liberty.
A central thesis of contemporary liberalism is that government must be neutral
in debates about the good human life. John Locke, one of the founders of
liberalism, tried to show that constitutional monarchy secures liberty by
arguing that free and equal persons in a state of nature, concerned to protect
their freedom and property, would agree with one another to live under such a
regime. Classical liberalism, which attaches great value to economic liberty,
traces its ancestry to Locke’s argument that government must safeguard
property. Locke’s use of an agreement or social contract laid the basis for the
form of liberalism championed by Rousseau and most deeply indebted to Kant.
According to Kant, the sort of liberty that should be most highly valued is
autonomy. Agents enjoy autonomy, Kant said, when they live according to laws
they would give to themselves. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) set the main
themes of the chapter of liberal thought now being written. Rawls asked what
principles of justice citizens would agree to in a contract situation he called
“the original position.” He argued that they would agree to principles
guaranteeing adequate basic liberties and fair equality of opportunity, and
requiring that economic inequalities benefit the least advantaged. A government
that respects these principles secures the autonomy of its citizens by
operating in accord with principles citizens would give themselves in the
original position. Because of the conditions of the original position, citizens
would not choose principles based on a controversial conception of the good
life. Neutrality among such conceptions is therefore built into the foundations
of Rawls’s theory. Some critics argue that liberalism’s emphasis on autonomy
and neutrality leaves it unable to account for the values of tradition,
community, or political participation, and unable to limit individual liberty
when limits are needed. Others argue that autonomy is not the notion of freedom
needed to explain why common forms of oppression like sexism are wrong. Still
others argue that liberalism’s focus on Western democracies leaves it unable to
address the most pressing problems of contemporary politics. Recent work in
liberal theory has therefore asked whether liberalism can accommodate the
political demands of religious and ethnic communities, ground an adequate
conception of democracy, capture feminist critiques of extant power structures,
or guide nation-building in the face of secessionist, nationalist, and
fundamentalist claims. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Impenetrability: Humpty-Dumpty’s
meaning-liberalism,” H. P. Grice, “Davidson and Humpty Dumpty’s glory.”
liberum arbitrium, Latin expression
meaning ‘free judgment’, often used to refer to medieval doctrines of free
choice or free will. It appears in the title of Augustine’s seminal work De
libero arbitrio voluntatis (usually translated ‘On the Free Choice of the
Will’) and in many other medieval writings (e.g., Aquinas, in Summa theologiae
I, asks “whether man has free choice [liberum arbitrium]”). For medieval
thinkers, a judgment (arbitrium) “of the will” was a conclusion of practical
reasoning – “I will do this” (hence, a choice or decision) – in contrast to a
judgment “of the intellect” (“This is the case”), which concludes theoretical
reasoning.
delimitatum: limiting case, an individual
or subclass of a given background class that is maximally remote from “typical”
or “paradigm” members of the class with respect to some ordering that is not
always explicitly mentioned. The number zero is a limiting case of cardinal
number. A triangle is a limiting case of polygon. A square is a limiting case
of rectangle when rectangles are ordered by the ratio of length to width.
Certainty is a limiting case of belief when beliefs are ordered according to
“strength of subjective conviction.” Knowledge is a limiting case of belief
when beliefs are ordered according “adequacy of objective grounds.” A limiting
case is necessarily a case (member) of the background class; in contrast a
li-ch’i limiting case 504 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 504 borderline
case need not be a case and a degenerate case may clearly fail to be a case at
all.
linguistic botany: Ryle preferred to call himself a ‘geographer,’ or
cartographer – cf. Grice on conceptual latitude and conceptual longitude. But
then there are plants. Pretentious Austin, mocking continental philosophy
called this ‘linguistic phenomenology,’ meaning literally, the ‘language
phenomena’ out there. Feeling Byzanthine. Possibly the only occasion when Grice
engaged in systematic botany. Like Hare, he would just rather ramble around. It
was said of Hare that he was ‘of a different world.’ In the West Country, he
would go with his mother to identify wild flowers, and they identied “more than
a hundred.” Austin is not clear about ‘botanising.’ Grice helps. Grice was a
meta-linguistic botanist. His point was to criticise ordinary-language
philosophers criticising philosophers. Say: Plato and Ayer say that episteme is
a kind of doxa. The contemporary, if dated, ordinary-language philosopher
detects a nuance, and embarks risking collision with the conversational facts
or data: rushes ahead to exploit the nuance without clarifying it, with wrong
dicta like: What I known to be the case I dont believe to be the case. Surely,
a cancellable implicaturum generated by the rational principle of
conversational helpfulness is all there is to the nuance. Grice knew that
unlike the ordinary-language philosopher, he was not providing a taxonomy or
description, but a theoretical explanation. To not all philosophers analysis
fits them to a T. It did to Grice. It did not even fit Strawson. Grice had a
natural talent for analysis. He could not see philosophy as other than
conceptual analysis. “No more, no less.” Obviously, there is an evaluative side
to the claim that the province of philosophy is to be identified with
conceptual analysis. Listen to a theoretical physicist, and hell keep talking
about concepts, and even analysing them! The man in the street may not! So
Grice finds himself fighting with at least three enemies: the man in the street
(and trying to reconcile with him: What
I do is to help you), the scientists (My conceptual analysis is
meta-conceptual), and synthetic philosophers who disagree with Grice that
analysis plays a key role in philosophical methodology. Grice sees this as an
update to his post-war Oxford philosophy. But we have to remember that back
when he read that paper, post-war Oxford philosophy, was just around the corner
and very fashionable. By the time he composed the piece on conceptual analysis
as overlapping with the province of philosophy, he was aware that, in The New
World, anaytic had become, thanks to Quine, a bit of an abusive term, and that
Grices natural talent for linguistic botanising (at which post-war Oxford
philosophy excelled) was not something he could trust to encounter outside
Oxford, and his Play Group! Since his Negation and Personal identity Grice is
concerned with reductive analysis. How many angels can dance on a needles
point? A needless point? This is Grices update to his Post-war Oxford
philosophy. More generally concerned with the province of philosophy in general
and conceptual analysis beyond ordinary language. It can become pretty
technical. Note the Roman overtone of province. Grice is implicating that the
other province is perhaps science, even folk science, and the claims and ta
legomena of the man in the street. He also likes to play with the idea that a
conceptual enquiry need not be philosophical. Witness the very opening to Logic
and conversation, Prolegomena. Surely not all inquiries need be philosophical.
In fact, a claim to infame of Grice at the Play Group is having once raised the
infamous, most subtle, question: what is it that makes a conceptual enquiry
philosophically interesting or important? As a result, Austin and his
kindergarten spend three weeks analysing the distinct inappropriate implicatura
of adverbial collocations of intensifiers like highly depressed, versus very
depressed, or very red, but not highly red, to no avail. Actually the logical
form of very is pretty complicated, and Grice seems to minimise the point. Grices
moralising implicaturum, by retelling the story, is that he has since realised
(as he hoped Austin knew) that there is no way he or any philosopher can
dictate to any other philosopher, or himself, what is it that makes a
conceptual enquiry philosophically interesting or important. Whether it is fun
is all that matters. Refs.: The main references are meta-philosophical, i. e.
Grice talking about linguistic botany, rather than practicing it. “Reply to
Richards,” and the references under “Oxonianism” below are helpful. For actual
practice, under ‘rationality.’ There is a specific essay on linguistic
botanising, too. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
semantic relativity, the thesis that at
least some distinctions found in one language are found in no other language (a
version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, by Benjamin Lee Whorf, of New England,
from the river Wharf, in Yorkshire – he died in Hartford, Conn., New England);
more generally, the thesis that different languages utilize different
representational systems that are at least in some degree informationally
incommensurable and hence non-equivalent. The differences arise from the
arbitrary features of languages resulting in each language encoding lexically
or grammatically some distinctions not found in other languages. The thesis of
linguistic determinism holds that the ways people perceive or think about the
world, especially with respect to their classificatory systems, are causally
determined or influenced by their linguistic systems or by the structures common
to all human languages. Specifically, implicit or explicit linguistic
categorization determines or influences aspects of nonlinguistic
categorization, memory, perception, or cognition in general. Its strongest form
(probably a straw-man position) holds that linguistically unencoded concepts
are unthinkable. Weaker forms hold that concepts that are linguistically
encoded are more accessible to thought and easier to remember than those that
are not. This thesis is independent of that of linguistic relativity.
Linguistic determinism plus linguistic relativity as defined here implies the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
literary theory, a reasoned account of the
nature of the literary artifact, its causes, effects, and distinguishing
features. So understood, literary theory is part of the systematic study of
literature covered by the term ‘criticism’, which also includes interpretation
of literary works, philology, literary history, and the evaluation of
particular works or bodies of work. Because it attempts to provide the
conceptual foundations for practical criticism, literary theory has also been
called “critical theory.” However, since the latter term has been appropriated
by neo-Marxists affiliated with the Frankfurt School to designate their own
kind of social critique, ‘literary theory’ is less open to misunderstanding.
Because of its concern with the ways in which literary productions differ from
other verbal artifacts and from other works of art, literary theory overlaps
extensively with philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and the other human
sciences. The first ex professo theory of literature in the West, for centuries
taken as normative, was Aristotle’s Poetics. On Aristotle’s view, poetry is a
verbal imitation of the forms of human life and action in language made vivid
by metaphor. It stimulates its audience to reflect on the human condition,
enriches their understanding, and thereby occasions the pleasure that comes
from the exercise of the cognitive faculty. The first real paradigm shift in
literary theory was introduced by the Romantics of the nineteenth century. The
Biographia Literaria of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recounting the author’s
conversion from Humean empiricism to a form of German idealism, defines poetry
not as a representation of objective structures, but as the imaginative
self-expression of the creative subject. Its emphasis is not on the poem as a
source of pleasure but on poetry as a heightened form of spiritual activity.
The standard work on the transition from classical (imitation) theory to
Romantic (expression) theory is M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. In the
present century theory has assumed a place of prominence in literary studies.
In the first half of the century the works of I. A. Richards – from his early
positivist account of linear order poetry in books like Science and Poetry to
his later idealist views in books like The Philosophy of Rhetoric – sponsored
the practice of the American New Critics. The most influential theorist of the
period is Northrop Frye, whose formalist manifesto, Anatomy of Criticism,
proposed to make criticism the “science of literature.” The introduction of
Continental thought to the English-speaking critical establishment in the 1960s
and after spawned a bewildering variety of competing theories of literature:
e.g., Russian formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, new historicism,
Marxism, Freudianism, feminism, and even the anti-theoretical movement called
the “new pragmatism.” The best summary account of these developments is Frank
Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism (1980). Given the present near-chaos in
criticism, the future of literary theory is unpredictable. But the chaos itself
offers ample opportunities for philosophical analysis and calls for the kind of
conceptual discrimination such analysis can offer. Conversely, the study of
literary theory can provide philosophers with a better understanding of the
textuality of philosophy and of the ways in which philosophical content is
determined by the literary form of philosophical texts.
lit. hum. (philos.): While Grice would take tutees under different curricula, he
preferred Lit. Hum. So how much philosophy did this include. Plato, Aristotle,
Locke, Kant, and Mill. And that was mainly it. We are referring to the
‘philosophy’ component. Ayer used to say that he would rather have been a
judge. But at Oxford of that generation, having a Lit. Hum. perfectly qualified
you as a philosopher. And people like Ayer, who would rather be a juddge, end
up being a philosopher after going through the Lit. Hum. Grice himself comes as
a “Midlands scholarship boy” straight from Clifton on a classics scholarship,
and being from the Midlands, straight to Corpus. The fact that he got on so
well with Hardie helped. The fact that his interim at Merton worked was good.
The fact that the thing at Rossall did NOT work was good. The fact that he
becamse a fellow at St. John’s OBVIOUSLY helped. The fact that he had Strawson
as a tutee ALSO helped helped. H. P. Grice, Literae Humaniores (Philosophy),
Oxon.
locke.
Grice cites Locke in “Personal identity,” and many more places. He has a
premium for Locke. Acceptance, acceptance and
certeris paribus condition, acceptance and modals, j-acceptance, moral
acceptance, prudential acceptance, v-acceptance, ackrill,
Aristotle, Austin, botvinnik ,
categorical imperative, chicken soul, immortality of,
Davidson, descriptivism, descriptivism and
ends, aequi-vocality thesis, final cause, frege, happiness, happiness and H-desirables, happiness and I-desirables,
happiness as a system of ends, happiness as an end, hardie, hypothetical imperative , hypothetical imperative -- see technical imperatives,
isaacson, incontinence,
inferential principles, judging, judging and acceptance, Kant, logical theory, meaning,
meaning and speech procedures, sentence meaning, what a speaker means, modes,
modes and moods, moods, modes and embedding of mode-markers , judicative operator, volitive operator, mood operators,
moods morality, myro, nagel, necessity, necessity and provability, necessity and relativized
and absolute modalities, principle of total evidence, principles of inference,
principles of inference, reasons, and necessity, provability, radical,
rationality : as faculty manifested in reasoning, flat and variable,
proto-rationality, rational being, and value
as value-paradigmatic concept, rationality operator, reasonable, reasoning,
reasoning and defeasibility, reasoning defined, rasoning and explanation,
reasoning -- first account of, reasoning and good reasoning, reasoning, special
status of, reasoning the hard way of, reasoning and incomplete reasoning,
reasoning and indeterminacy of, reasoning and intention, reasoning and
misreasoning, reasoning, practical, reasoning, probabilistic, reasoning as
purposive activity, reasoning, the quick way of , reasoning -- too good to be reasoning, reasons, reasons
altheic, reasons: division into practical and alethic, reasons: explanatory,
reasons justificatory, reasons: justificatory-explanatory, reasoning and
modals, reasoning and necessity, personal, practical and non-practical
(alethic) reasons compared, systematizing hypothesis: types of, Russell,
satisfactoriness, technical imperatives, value, value paradigmatic concepts,
Wright, willing and acceptance, Vitters.
Index acceptance 71-2 , 80-7 and certeris paribus condition 77 and modals 91-2
J-acceptance 51 moral 61 , 63 , 87 prudential 97-111 V-acceptance 51 Ackrill,
J. L. 119-20 Aristotle 4-5 , 19 , 24-5 , 31 , 32 , 43 , 98-9 , 112-15 , 120 ,
125 Austin, J. L. 99 Botvinnik 11 , 12 , 18 Categorical Imperative 4 , 70
chicken soul, immortality of 11-12 Davidson, Donald 45-8 , 68 descriptivism 92
ends 100-10 Equivocality thesis x-xv , 58 , 62 , 66 , 70 , 71 , 80 , 90 final
cause 43-4 , 66 , 111 Frege, Gottlob 50 happiness 97-134 and H-desirables
114-18 , 120 and I-desirables 114-18 , 120 , 122 , 128 as a system of ends
131-4 as an end 97 , 113-15 , 119-20 , 123-8 Hardie, W. F. R. 119 hypothetical
imperative 97 , see technical imperatives Isaacson, Dan 30n. incontinence 25 ,
47 inferential principles 35 judging 51 , see acceptance Kant 4 , 21 , 25 , 31
, 43 , 44-5 , 70 , 77-8 , 86-7 , 90-8 logical theory 61 meaning ix-x and speech
procedures 57-8 sentence meaning 68-9 what a speaker means 57-8 , 68 modes 68 ,
see moods moods xxii-xxiii , 50-6 , 59 , 69 , 71-2 embedding of mode-markers
87-9 judicative operator 50 , 72-3 , 90 volative operator 50 , 73 , 90 mood
operators , see moods morality 63 , 98 Myro, George 40 Nagel, Thomas 64n.
necessity xii-xiii , xvii-xxiii , 45 , 58-9 and provability 59 , 60-2 and relativized
and absolute modalities 56-66 principle of total evidence 47 , 80-7 principles
of inference 5 , 7 , 9 , 22-3 , 26 , 35 see also reasons, and necessity provability 59 , 60-2 radical 50-3 , 58-9 ,
72 , 88 rationality : as faculty manifested in reasoning 5 flat and variable
28-36 proto-rationality 33 rational being 4 , 25 , 28-30 and value as
value-paradigmatic concept 35 rationality operator xiv-xv , 50-1 reasonable
23-5 reasoning 4-28 and defeasibility 47 , 79 , 92 defined 13-14 , 87-8 and
explanation xxix-xxxv , 8 first account of 5-6 , 13-14 , 26-8 good reasoning 6
, 14-16 , 26-7 special status of 35 the hard way of 17 end p.135 incomplete
reasoning 8-14 indeterminacy of 12-13 and intention 7 , 16 , 18-25 , 35-6 ,
48-9 misreasoning 6-8 , 26 practical 46-50 probabilistic 46-50 as purposive
activity 16-19 , 27-8 , 35 the quick way of 17 too good to be reasoning 14-18
reasons 37-66 altheic 44-5 , 49 division into practical and alethic 44 , 68
explanatory 37-9 justificatory 39-40 , 67-8 justificatory-explanatory 40-1 , 67
and modals 45 and necessity 44-5 personal 67 practical and non-practical
(alethic) reasons compared xiixiii , 44-50 , 65 , 68 , 73-80 systematizing
hypothesis 41-4 types of 37-44 Russell, Bertrand 50 satisfactoriness 60 , 87-9
, 95 technical imperatives 70 , 78 , 90 , 93-6 , 97 value 20 , 35 , 83 , 87-8
value paradigmatic concepts 35-6 von Wright 44 willing 50 , see acceptance
Wittengenstein, Ludwig 50 -- English philosopher and proponent of empiricism,
famous especially for his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) and for
his Second Treatise of Government, also published in 1689, though anonymously.
He came from a middle-class Puritan family in Somerset, and became acquainted
with Scholastic philosophy in his studies at Oxford. Not finding a career in
church or university attractive, he trained for a while as a physician, and
developed contacts with many members of the newly formed Royal Society; the
chemist Robert Boyle and the physicist Isaac Newton were close acquaintances.
In 1667 he joined the London households of the then Lord Ashley, later first
Earl of Shaftesbury; there he became intimately involved in discussions
surrounding the politics of resistance to the Catholic king, Charles II. In
1683 he fled England for the Netherlands, where he wrote out the final draft of
his Essay. He returned to England in 1689, a year after the accession to the
English throne of the Protestant William of Orange. In his last years he was
the most famous intellectual in England, perhaps in Europe generally. Locke was
not a university professor immersed in the discussions of the philosophy of
“the schools” but was instead intensely engaged in the social and cultural
issues of his day; his writings were addressed not to professional philosophers
but to the educated public in general. The Essay. The initial impulse for the
line of thought that culminated in the Essay occurred early in 1671, in a
discussion Locke had with some friends in Lord Shaftesbury’s apartments in
London on matters of morality and revealed religion. In his Epistle to the
Reader at the beginning of the Essay Locke says that the discussants found
themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side.
After we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution
of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a
wrong course, and that before we set ourselves upon enquiries of that nature it
was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our
understandings were or were not fitted to deal with. Locke was well aware that
for a thousand years European humanity had consulted its textual inheritance
for the resolution of its moral and religious quandaries; elaborate strategies
of interpretation, distinction, etc., had been developed for extracting from
those disparate sources a unified, highly complex, body of truth. He was
equally well aware that by his time, more than a hundred years after the
beginning of the Reformation, the moral and religious tradition of Europe had
broken up into warring and contradictory fragments. Accordingly he warns his
readers over and over against basing their convictions merely on say-so, on
unexamined tradition. As he puts it in a short late book of his, The Conduct of
the Understanding, “We should not judge of things by men’s opinions, but of
opinions by things.” We should look to “the things themselves,” as he sometimes
puts it. But to know how to get at the things themselves it is necessary, so
Locke thought, “to examine our own abilities.” Hence the project of the Essay.
The Essay comes in four books, Book IV being the culmination. Fundamental to
understanding Locke’s thought in Book IV is the realization that knowledge, as
he thinks of it, is a fundamentally different phenomenon from belief. Locke
holds, indeed, that knowledge is typically accompanied by belief; it is not,
though, to be identified with it. Knowledge, as he thinks of it, is direct
awareness of some fact – in his own words, perception of some agreement or
disagreement among things. Belief, by contrast, consists of taking some
proposition to be true – whether or not one is directly aware of the
corresponding fact. The question then arises: Of what sorts of facts do we
human beings have direct awareness? Locke’s answer is: Only of facts that
consist of relationships among our “ideas.” Exactly what Locke had in mind when
he spoke of ideas is a vexed topic; the traditional view, for which there is a
great deal to be said, is that he regarded ideas as mental objects. Furthermore,
he clearly regarded some ideas as being representations of other entities; his
own view was that we can think about nonmental entities only by being aware of
mental entities that represent those non-mental realities. Locke argued that
knowledge, thus understood, is “short and scanty” – much too short and scanty
for the living of life. Life requires the formation of beliefs on matters where
knowledge is not available. Now what strikes anyone who surveys human beliefs
is that many of them are false. What also strikes any perceptive observer of
the scene is that often we can – or could have – done something about this. We
can, to use Locke’s language, “regulate” and “govern” our belief-forming
capacities with the goal in mind of getting things right. Locke was persuaded
that not only can we thus regulate and govern our belief-forming capacities; we
ought to do so. It is a God-given obligation that rests upon all of us.
Specifically, for each human being there are some matters of such
“concernment,” as Locke calls it, as to place the person under obligation to
try his or her best to get things right. For all of us there will be many
issues that are not of such concernment; for those cases, it will be acceptable
to form our beliefs in whatever way nature or custom has taught us to form
them. But for each of us there will be certain practical matters concerning
which we are obligated to try our best – these differing from person to person.
And certain matters of ethics and religion are of such concern to everybody
that we are all obligated to try our best, on these matters, to get in touch
with reality. What does trying our best consist of, when knowledge –
perception, awareness, insight – is not available? One can think of the
practice Locke recommends as having three steps. First one collects whatever
evidence one can find for and against the proposition in question. This
evidence must consist of things that one knows; otherwise we are just wandering
in darkness. And the totality of the evidence must be a reliable indicator of
the probability of the proposition that one is considering. Second, one
analyzes the evidence to determine the probability of the proposition in
question, on that evidence. And last, one places a level of confidence in the
proposition that is proportioned to its probability on that satisfactory
evidence. If the proposition is highly probable on that evidence, one believes
it very firmly; if it only is quite probable, one believes it rather weakly;
etc. The main thrust of the latter half of Book IV of the Essay is Locke’s
exhortation to his readers to adopt this practice in the forming of beliefs on
matters of high concernment – and in particular, on matters of morality and
religion. It was his view that the new science being developed by his friends
Boyle and Newton and others was using exactly this method. Though Book IV was
clearly seen by Locke as the culmination of the Essay, it by no means
constitutes the bulk of it. Book I launches a famous attack on innate ideas and
innate knowledge; he argues that all our ideas and knowledge can be accounted
for by tracing the way in which the mind uses its innate capacities to work on
material presented to it by sensation and reflection (i.e., self-awareness).
Book II then undertakes to account for all our ideas, on the assumption that
the only “input” is ideas of sensation and reflection, and that the mind, which
at birth is a tabula rasa (or blank tablet), works on these by such operations
as combination, division, generalization, and abstraction. And then in Book III
Locke discusses the various ways in which words hinder us in our attempt to get
to the things themselves. Along with many other thinkers of the time, Locke
distinguished between what he called natural theology and what he called revealed
theology. It was his view that a compelling, demonstrative argument could be
given for the existence of God, and thus that we could have knowledge of God’s
existence; the existence of God is a condition of our own existence. In
addition, he believed firmly that God had revealed things to human beings. As
he saw the situation, however, we can at most have beliefs, not knowledge,
concerning what God has revealed. For we can never just “see” that a certain
episode in human affairs is a case of divine revelation. Accordingly, we must
apply the practice outlined above, beginning by assembling satisfactory
evidence for the conclusion that a certain episode really is a case of divine
revelation. In Locke’s view, the occurrence of miracles provides the required evidence.
An implication of these theses concerning natural and revealed religion is that
it is never right for a human being to believe something about God without
having evidence for its truth, with the evidence consisting ultimately of
things that one “sees” immediately to be true. Locke held to a divine command
theory of moral obligation; to be morally obligated to do something is for God
to require of one that one do that. And since a great deal of what Jesus
taught, as Locke saw it, was a code of moral obligation, it follows that once
we have evidence for the revelatory status of what Jesus said, we automatically
have evidence that what Jesus taught as our moral obligation really is that.
Locke was firmly persuaded, however, that revelation is not our only mode of
access to moral obligation. Most if not all of our moral obligations can also
be arrived at by the use of our natural capacities, unaided by revelation. To
that part of our moral obligations which can in principle be arrived at by the
use of our natural capacities, Locke (in traditional fashion) gave the title of
natural law. Locke’s own view was that morality could in principle be
established as a deductive science, on analogy to mathematics: one would first
argue for God’s existence and for our status as creatures of God; one would
then argue that God was good, and cared for the happiness of God’s creatures.
Then one would argue that such a good God would lay down commands to his
creatures, aimed at their overall happiness. From there, one would proceed to
reflect on what does in fact conduce to human happiness. And so forth. Locke
never worked out the details of such a deductive system of ethics; late in his
life he concluded that it was beyond his capacities. But he never gave up on
the ideal. The Second Treatise and other writings. Locke’s theory of natural
law entered intimately into the theory of civil obedience that he developed in
the Second Treatise of Government. Imagine, he said, a group of human beings
living in what he called a state of nature – i.e., a condition in which there
is no governmental authority and no private property. They would still be under
divine obligation; and much (if not all) of that obligation would be accessible
to them by the use of their natural capacities. There would be for them a
natural law. In this state of nature they would have title to their own persons
and labor; natural law tells us that these are inherently our “possessions.”
But there would be no possessions beyond that. The physical world would be like
a gigantic English commons, given by God to humanity as a whole. Locke then
addresses himself to two questions: How can we account for the emergence of
political obligation from such a situation, and how can we account for the
emergence of private property? As to the former, his answer is that we in
effect make a contract with one another to institute a government for the
Locke, John Locke, John 508 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 508 elimination
of certain deficiencies in the state of nature, and then to obey that
government, provided it does what we have contracted with one another it should
do and does not exceed that. Among the deficiencies of the state of nature that
a government can be expected to correct is the sinful tendency of human beings
to transgress on other persons’ properties, and the equally sinful tendency to
punish such transgressions more severely than the law of nature allows. As to
the emergence of private property, something from the world at large becomes a
given person’s property when that person “mixes” his or her labor with it. For
though God gave the world as a whole to all of us together, natural law tells
us that each person’s labor belongs to that person himself or herself – unless
he or she freely contracts it to someone else. Locke’s Second Treatise is thus
an articulate statement of the so-called liberal theory of the state; it
remains one of the greatest of such, and proved enormously influential. It
should be seen as supplemented by the Letters concerning Toleration (1689,
1690, 1692) that Locke wrote on religious toleration, in which he argued that
all theists who have not pledged civil allegiance to some foreign power should
be granted equal toleration. Some letters that Locke wrote to a friend
concerning the education of the friend’s son should also be seen as
supplementing the grand vision. If we survey the way in which beliefs are
actually formed in human beings, we see that passion, the partisanship of
distinct traditions, early training, etc., play important obstructive roles. It
is impossible to weed out entirely from one’s life the influence of such
factors. When it comes to matters of high “concernment,” however, it is our
obligation to do so; it is our obligation to implement the three-step practice
outlined above, which Locke defends as doing one’s best. But Locke did not
think that the cultural reform he had in mind, represented by the appropriate
use of this new practice, could be expected to come about as the result just of
writing books and delivering exhortations. Training in the new practice was
required; in particular, training of small children, before bad habits had been
ingrained. Accordingly, Locke proposes in Some Thoughts concerning Education
(1693) an educational program aimed at training children in when and how to
collect satisfactory evidence, appraise the probabilities of propositions on
such evidence, and place levels of confidence in those propositions
proportioned to their probability on that evidence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “To
Locke,” C. McGinn, “Grice and Locke as telementationalists.”
implicaturum: logical
consequence, a proposition, sentence, or other piece of information that
follows logically from one or more other propositions, sentences, or pieces of
information. A proposition C is said to follow logically from, or to be a
logical consequence of, propositions P1, P2, . . . , if it must be the case
that, on the assumption that P1, P2, . . . , Pn are all true, the proposition C
is true as well. For example, the proposition ‘Smith is corrupt’ is a logical
consequence of the two propositions ‘All politicians are corrupt’ and ‘Smith is
a politician’, since it must be the case that on the assumption that ‘All
politicians are corrupt’ and ‘Smith is a politician’ are both true, ‘Smith is
corrupt’ is also true. Notice that proposition C can be a logical consequence
of propositions P1, P2, . . . , Pn, even if P1, P2, . . . , Pn are not actually
all true. Indeed this is the case in our example. ‘All politicians are corrupt’
is not, in fact, true: there are some honest politicians. But if it were true,
and if Smith were a politician, then ‘Smith is corrupt’ would have to be true.
Because of this, it is said to be a logical consequence of those two
propositions. The logical consequence relation is often written using the
symbol X, called the double turnstile. Thus to indicate that C is a logical
consequence of P1, P2, . . . , Pn, we would write: P1, P2, . . . , Pn X C or: P
X C where P stands for the set containing the propositions p1, P2, . . . , Pn. The
term ‘logical consequence’ is sometimes reserved for cases in which C follows
from P1, P2, . . . , Pn solely in virtue of the meanings of the socalled
logical expressions (e.g., ‘some’, ‘all’, ‘or’, ‘and’, ‘not’) contained by
these propositions. In this more restricted sense, ‘Smith is not a politician’
is not a logical consequence of the proposition ‘All politicians are corrupt’
and ‘Smith is honest’, since to recognize the consequence relation here we must
also understand the specific meanings of the non-logical expressions ‘corrupt’
and ‘honest’.
constant – in system
G -- a symbol, such as the connectives -, 8, /, or S or the quantifiers D or E
of elementary quantification theory, that represents logical form. The contrast
here is with expressions such as terms, predicates, and function symbols, which
are supposed to represent the “content” of a sentence or proposition. Beyond
this, there is little consensus on how to understand logical constancy. It is
sometimes said, e.g., that a symbol is a logical constant if its interpretation
is fixed across admissible valuations, though there is disagreement over
exactly how to construe this “fixity” constraint. This account seems to make
logical form a mere artifact of one’s choice of a model theory. More generally,
it has been questioned whether there are any objective grounds for classifying
some expressions as logical and others not, or whether such a distinction is
(wholly or in part) conventional. Other philosophers have suggested that
logical constancy is less a semantic notion than an epistemic one: roughly,
that a is a logical constant if the semantic behavior of certain other
expressions together with the semantic contribution of a determine a priori (or
in some other epistemically privileged fashion) the extensions of complex
expressions in which a occurs. There is also considerable debate over whether
particular symbols, such as the identity sign, modal operators, and quantifiers
other than D and E, are, or should be treated as, logical constants.
Grice’s “logical construction” – a phrase
he borrowed from Broad via Russell -- something built by logical operations
from certain elements. Suppose that any sentence, S, containing terms
apparently referring to objects of type F can be paraphrased without any
essential loss of content into some (possibly much more complicated) sentence,
Sp, containing only terms referring to objects of type G (distinct from F): in
this case, objects of type F may be said to be logical constructions out of
objects of type G. The notion originates with Russell’s concept of an
“incomplete symbol,” which he introduced in connection with his theory of
descriptions. According to Russell, a definite description – i.e., a
descriptive phrase, such as ‘the present king of France’, apparently picking
out a unique object – cannot be taken at face value as a genuinely referential
term. One reason for this is that the existence of the objects seemingly
referred to by such phrases can be meaningfully denied. We can say, “The
present king of France does not exist,” and it is hard to see how this could be
if ‘the present king of France’, to be meaningful, has to refer to the present
king of France. One solution, advocated by Meinong, is to claim that the
referents required by what ordinary grammar suggests are singular terms must
have some kind of “being,” even though this need not amount to actual
existence; but this solution offended Russell’s “robust sense of reality.”
According to Peano, Whitehead and Russell, then, ‘The F is G’ is to be understood
as equivalent to (something like) ‘One and only one thing Fs and that thing is
G’. (The phrase ‘one and only one’ can itself be paraphrased away in terms of
quantifiers and identity.) The crucial feature of this analysis is that it does
not define the problematic phrases by providing synonyms: rather, it provides a
rule, which Russell called “a definition in use,” for paraphrasing whole
sentences in which they occur into whole sentences in which they do not. This
is why definite descriptions are “incomplete symbols”: we do not specify
objects that are their meanings; we lay down a rule that explains the meaning
of whole sentences in which they occur. Thus definite descriptions disappear
under analysis, and with them the shadowy occupants of Meinong’s realm of
being. Russell thought that the kind of analysis represented by the theory of
descriptions gives the clue to the proper method for philosophy: solve
metaphysical and epistemological problems by reducing ontological commitments.
The task of philosophy is to substitute, wherever possible, logical
constructions for inferred entities. Thus in the philosophy of mathematics,
Russell attempted to eliminate numbers, as a distinct category of objects, by
showing how mathematical statements can be translated into (what he took to be)
purely logical statements. But what really gave Russell’s program its bite was
his thought that we can refer only to objects with which we are directly
acquainted. This committed him to holding that all terms apparently referring to
objects that cannot be regarded as objects of acquaintance should be given
contextual definitions along the lines of the theory of descriptions: i.e., to
treating everything beyond the scope of acquaintance as a logical construction
(or a “logical fiction”). Most notably, Russell regarded physical objects as
logical constructions out of sense-data, taking this to resolve the skeptical
problem about our knowledge of the external world. The project of showing how
physical objects can be treated as logical constructions out of sense-data was
a major concern of analytical philosophers in the interwar period, Carnap’s Der
Logische Aufbau der Welt, standing as perhaps its major monument. However, the
project was not a success. Even Carnap’s construction involves a system of
space-time coordinates that is not analyzed in sense-datum terms and today few,
if any, philosophers believe that such ambitious projects can be carried
through..
informatum -- forma: “To inform was
originally to mould, to shape,” and so quite different from Grecian ‘eidos.’
But the ‘forma-materia’ distinction stuck. Whhat is obtained from a
proposition, a set of propositions, or an argument by abstracting from the
matter of its content terms or by regarding the content terms as mere place-holders
or blanks in a form. In what Grice (after Bergmann) calls an ideal (versus an
ordinary) language the form of a proposition, a set of propositions, or an
argument is determined by the ‘matter’ of the sentence, the set of sentences,
or the argument-text expressing it. Two sentences, sets of sentences, or
argument-texts are said to have the same form, in this way, if a uniform
one-toone substitution of content words transforms the one exactly into the other.
‘Abe properly respects every agent who respects himself’ may be regarded as
having the same form as the sentence ‘Ben generously assists every patient who
assists himself’. Substitutions used to determine sameness of form
(isomorphism) cannot involve change of form words such as ‘every’, ‘no’, ‘some’,
‘is’, etc., and they must be category-preserving, i.e., they must put a proper
name for a proper name, an adverb for an adverb, a transitive verb for a
transitive verb, and so on. Two sentences having the same grammatical form have
exactly the same form words distributed in exactly the same pattern; and
although they of course need not, and usually do not, have the same content
words, they do have logical dependence logical form exactly the same number of
content words. The most distinctive feature of form words, which are also
called syncategorematic terms or logical terms, is their topic neutrality; the
form words in a sentence are entirely independent of and are in no way
indicative of its content or topic. Modern formal languages used in formal
axiomatizations of mathematical sciences are often taken as examples of
logically perfect languages. Pioneering work on logically perfect languages was
done by George Boole, Frege, Giuseppe Peano, Russell, and Church. According to
the principle of form, an argument is valid or invalid in virtue of form. More
explicitly, every two arguments in the same form are both valid or both
invalid. Thus, every argument in the same form as a valid argument is valid and
every argument in the same form as an invalid argument is invalid. The argument
form that a given argument fits (or has) is not determined solely by the
logical forms of its constituent propositions; the arrangement of those
propositions is critical because the process of interchanging a premise with
the conclusion of a valid argument can result in an invalid argument. The
principle of logical form, from which formal logic gets its name, is commonly
used in establishing invalidity of arguments and consistency of sets of
propositions. In order to show that a given argument is invalid it is
sufficient to exhibit another argument as being in the same logical form and as
having all true premises and a false conclusion. In order to show that a given
set of propositions is consistent it is sufficient to exhibit another set of
propositions as being in the same logical form and as being composed
exclusively of true propositions. The history of these methods traces back
through non-Cantorian set theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and medieval
logicians (especially Anselm) to Aristotle. These methods must be used with
extreme caution in an ordinary languages that fails to be logically perfect as
a result of ellipsis, amphiboly, ambiguity, etc. E.g. ‘This is a male dog’
implies ‘This is a dog.’ But ‘This is a brass monkey’ does not strictly imply –
but implicate -- ‘This is a monkey’, as would be required in a what Bergmann
calls an ideal (or perfect, rather than ordinary or imperfect) language.
Likewise, of two propositions commonly expressed by the ambiguous sentence ‘Ann
and Ben are married’ one does and one does not imply (but at most ‘implicate’) the
proposition that Ann is married to Ben. (cf. We are married, but not to each
other – a New-World ditty.). Grice, Quine and other philosophers – not
Strawson! -- are careful to distinguish, in effect, the unique form of a
proposition from this or that ‘schematic’ form it may display. The proposition
(A) ‘If Abe is Ben, if Ben is wise Abe is wise’ has exactly one form, which it
shares with ‘If Carl is Dan, if Dan is kind Carl is kind’, whereas it has all
of the following schematic forms: ‘If P, if Q then R;’ ‘If P, Q;’ and ‘P.’ The
principle of form for propositions is that every two propositions in the same form
are both tautological (logically necessary) or both non-tautological. Thus,
although the propositions above are tautological, there are non-tautological propositions
that fit this or that the schematic form just mentioned. Failure to distinguish
form proper from ‘schematic form’ has led to fallacies. According to the
principle of logical form quoted above every argument in the same logical form
as an invalid argument is invalid, but it is not the case that every argument
sharing a schematic form with an invalid argument is invalid. Contrary to what
would be fallaciously thought, the conclusion ‘Abe is Ben’ is logically implied
by the following two propositions taken together, ‘If Abe is Ben, Ben is Abe’
and ‘Ben is Abe’, even though the argument shares a schematic form with invalid
arguments “committing” the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Refs.: Grice,
“Leibniz on ‘lingua perfecta.’”
indicatum -- indicator: an expression that provides some
help in identifying the conclusion of an argument or the premises offered in
support of a conclusion. Common premise indicators include ‘for’, ‘because’,
and ‘since’. Common conclusion indicators include ‘so’, ‘it follows that’,
‘hence’, ‘thus’, and ‘therefore’. Since Tom sat in the back of the room, he
could not hear the performance clearly. Therefore, he could not write a proper
review. ’Since’ makes clear that Tom’s seat location is offered as a reason to
explain his inability to hear the performance. ‘Therefore’ indicates that the proposition
that Tom could not write a proper review is the conclusion of the argument.
notatum: symbol or
communication device designed to achieve unambiguous formulation of principles
and inferences in deductive logic. A notation involves some regimentation of
words, word order, etc., of language. Some schematization was attempted even in
ancient times by Aristotle, the Megarians, the Stoics, Boethius, and the
medievals. But Leibniz’s vision of a universal logical language began to be
realized only in the past 150 years. The notation is not yet standardized, but
the following varieties of logical operators in propositional and predicate
calculus may be noted. Given that ‘p’, ‘q’, ‘r’, etc., are propositional
variables, or propositions, we find, in the contexts of their application, the
following variety of operators (called truth-functional connectives). Negation:
‘-p’, ‘Ýp’, ‘p - ’, ‘p’ ’. Conjunction: ‘p • q’, ‘p & q’, ‘p 8 q’. Weak or
inclusive disjunction: ‘p 7 q’. Strong or exclusive disjunction: ‘p V q’, ‘p !
q’, ‘p W q’. Material conditional (sometimes called material implication): ‘p /
q’, ‘p P q’. Material biconditional (sometimes called material equivalence): ‘p
S q’, ‘p Q q’. And, given that ‘x’, ‘y’, ‘z’, etc., are individual variables
and ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, etc., are predicate letters, we find in the predicate
calculus two quantifiers, a universal and an existential quantifier: Universal
quantification: ‘(x)Fx’, ‘(Ex)Fx’, ‘8xFx’. Existential quantification:
‘(Ex)Fx’, ‘(Dx)Fx’, ‘7xFx’. The formation principle in all the schemata
involving dyadic or binary operators (connectives) is that the logical operator
is placed between the propositional variables (or propositional constants)
connected by it. But there exists a notation, the so-called Polish notation,
based on the formation rule stipulating that all operators, and not only
negation and quantifiers, be placed in front of the schemata over which they
are ranging. The following representations are the result of application of
that rule: Negation: ‘Np’. Conjunction: ‘Kpq’. Weak or inclusive disjunction:
‘Apq’. Strong or exclusive disjunction: ‘Jpq’. Conditional: ‘Cpq’.
Biconditional: ‘Epq’. Sheffer stroke: ‘Dpq’. Universal quantification: ‘PxFx’.
Existential quantifications: ‘9xFx’. Remembering that ‘K’, ‘A’, ‘J’, ‘C’, ‘E’,
and ‘D’ are dyadic functors, we expect them to be followed by two propositional
signs, each of which may itself be simple or compound, but no parentheses are
needed to prevent ambiguity. Moreover, this notation makes it very perspicuous
as to what kind of proposition a given compound proposition is: all we need to
do is to look at the leftmost operator. To illustrate, ‘p7 (q & r) is a
disjunction of ‘p’ with the conjunction ‘Kqr’, i.e., ‘ApKqr’, while ‘(p 7 q)
& r’ is a conjunction of a disjunction ‘Apq’ with ‘r’, i.e., ‘KApqr’. ‘- p
P q’ is written as ‘CNpq’, i.e., ‘if Np, then q’, while negation of the whole
conditional, ‘-(p P q)’, becomes ‘NCpq’. A logical thesis such as ‘((p & q)
P r) P ((s P p) P (s & q) P r))’ is written concisely as ‘CCKpqrCCspCKsqr’.
The general proposition ‘(Ex) (Fx P Gx)’ is written as ‘PxCFxGx’, while a truth-function
of quantified propositions ‘(Ex)Fx P (Dy)Gy’ is written as ‘CPxFx9yGy’. An
equivalence such as ‘(Ex) Fx Q - (Dx) - Fx’ becomes ‘EPxFxN9xNFx’, etc. Dot
notation is way of using dots to construct well-formed formulas that is more
thrifty with punctuation marks than the use of parentheses with their
progressive strengths of scope. But dot notation is less thrifty than the
parenthesis-free Polish notation, which secures well-formed expressions
entirely on the basis of the order of logical operators relative to
truth-functional compounds. Various dot notations have been devised. The
convention most commonly adopted is that punctuation dots always operate away
from the connective symbol that they flank. It is best to explain dot
punctuation by examples: (1) ‘p 7 (q - r)’ becomes ‘p 7 .q P - r’; (2) ‘(p 7 q)
P - r’ becomes ‘p 7 q. P - r’; (3) ‘(p P (q Q r)) 7 (p 7 r)’ becomes ‘p P. q Q
r: 7. p 7r’; (4) ‘(- pQq)•(rPs)’ becomes ‘-p Q q . r Q s’. logically perfect
language logical notation 513 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 513 Note that
here the dot is used as conjunction dot and is not flanked by punctuation dots,
although in some contexts additional punctuation dots may have to be added,
e.g., ‘p.((q . r) P s), which is rewritten as ‘p : q.r. P s’. The scope of a
group of n dots extends to the group of n or more dots. (5) ‘- p Q (q.(r P s))’
becomes ‘- p. Q : q.r P s’; (6)‘- pQ((q . r) Ps)’ becomes ‘~p. Q: q.r.Ps’; (7)
‘(- p Q (q . r)) P s’ becomes ‘- p Q. q.r: P s’. The notation for modal
propositions made popular by C. I. Lewis consisted of the use of ‘B’ to express
the idea of possibility, in terms of which other alethic modal notions were
defined. Thus, starting with ‘B p’ for ‘It is possiblethat p’ we get ‘- B p’
for ‘It is not possible that p’ (i.e., ‘It is impossible that p’), ‘- B - p’
for ‘It is not possible that not p’ (i.e., ‘It is necessary that p’), and ‘B -
p’ for ‘It is possible that not p’ (i.e., ‘It is contingent that p’ in the
sense of ‘It is not necessary that p’, i.e., ‘It is possible that not p’).
Given this primitive or undefined notion of possibility, Lewis proceeded to
introduce the notion of strict implication, represented by ‘ ’ and defined as
follows: ‘p q .% . - B (p. -q)’. More recent tradition finds it convenient to
use ‘A’, either as a defined or as a primitive symbol of necessity. In the
parenthesis-free Polish notation the letter ‘M’ is usually added as the sign of
possibility and sometimes the letter ‘L’ is used as the sign of necessity. No
inconvenience results from adopting these letters, as long as they do not
coincide with any of the existing truthfunctional operators ‘N’, ‘K’, ‘A’, ‘J’,
‘C’, ‘E’, ‘D’. Thus we can express symbolically the sentences ‘If p is
necessary, then p is possible’ as ‘CNMNpMp’ or as ‘CLpMp’; ‘It is necessary
that whatever is F is G’ as ‘NMNPxCFxGx’ or as ‘LPxCFxGx’; and ‘Whatever is F
is necessarily G’ as ‘PxCFxNMNGx’ or as PxCFxLGx; etc.
logical positivism, also called
positivism, a philosophical movement inspired by empiricism and verificationism.
While there are still philosophers who would identify themselves with some of
the logical positivists’ theses, many of the central docrines of the theory
have come under considerable attack in the last half of this century. In some
ways logical positivism can be seen as a natural outgrowth of radical or
British empiricism and logical atomism. The driving force of positivism may
well have been adherence to the verifiability criterion for the meaningfulness
of cognitive statements. Acceptance of this principle led positivists to reject
as problematic many assertions of religion, morality, and the kind of
philosophy they described as metaphysics. The verifiability criterion of
meaning. The radical empiricists took genuine ideas to be composed of simple ideas
traceable to elements in experience. If this is true and if thoughts about the
empirical world are “made up” out of ideas, it would seem to follow that all
genuine thoughts about the world must have as constituents thoughts that denote
items of experience. While not all positivists tied meaning so clearly to the
sort of experiences the empiricists had in mind, they were convinced that a
genuine contingent assertion about the world must be verifiable through
experience or observation. Questions immediately arose concerning the relevant
sense of ‘verify’. Extreme versions of the theory interpret verification in
terms of experiences or observations that entail the truth of the proposition
in question. Thus for my assertion that there is a table before me to be
meaningful, it must be in principle possible for me to accumulate evidence or
justification that would guarantee the existence of the table, which would make
it impossible for the table not to exist. Even this statement of the view is
ambiguous, however, for the impossibility of error could be interpreted as
logical or conceptual, or something much weaker, say, causal. Either way,
extreme verificationism seems vulnerable to objections. Universal statements,
such as ‘All metal expands when heated’, are meaningful, but it is doubtful
that any observations could ever conclusively verify them. One might modify the
criterion to include as meaningful only statements that can be either
conclusively confirmed or conclusively disconfirmed. It is doubtful, however, that
even ordinary statements about the physical world satisfy the extreme
positivist insistence that they admit of conclusive verification or
falsification. If the evidence we have for believing what we do about the
physical world consists of knowledge of fleeting and subjective sensation, the
possibility of hallucination or deception by a malevolent, powerful being seems
to preclude the possibility of any finite sequence of sensations conclusively
establishing the existence or absence of a physical object. Faced with these
difficulties, at least some positivists retreated to a more modest form of
verificationism which insisted only that if a proposition is to be meaningful
it must be possible to find evidence or justification that bears on the
likelihood of the proposition’s being true. It is, of course, much more
difficult to find counterexamples to this weaker form of verificationism, but
by the same token it is more difficult to see how the principle will do the
work the positivists hoped it would do of weeding out allegedly problematic
assertions. Necessary truth. Another central tenet of logical positivism is
that all meaningful statements fall into two categories: necessary truths that
are analytic and knowable a priori, and contingent truths that are synthetic
and knowable only a posteriori. If a meaningful statement is not a contingent,
empirical statement verifiable through experience, then it is either a formal
tautology or is analytic, i.e., reducible to a formal tautology through
substitution of synonymous expressions. According to the positivist,
tautologies and analytic truths that do not describe the world are made true
(if true) or false (if false) by some fact about the rules of language. ‘P or
not-P’ is made true by rules we have for the use of the connectives ‘or’ and
‘not’ and for the assignments of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’. Again there
are notorious problems for logical positivism. It is difficult to reduce the
following apparently necessary truths to formal tautologies through the
substitution of synonymous expressions: (1) Everything that is blue (all over)
is not red (all over). (2) All equilateral triangles are equiangular triangles.
(3) No proposition is both true and false. Ironically, the positivists had a
great deal of trouble categorizing the very theses that defined their view,
such as the claims about meaningfulness and verifiability and the claims about
the analytic–synthetic distinction. Reductionism. Most of the logical
positivists were committed to a foundationalist epistemology according to which
all justified belief rests ultimately on beliefs that are non-inferentially
justified. These non-inferentially justified beliefs were sometimes described
as basic, and the truths known in such manner were often referred to as self-evident,
or as protocol statements. Partly because the positivists disagreed as to how
to understand the notion of a basic belief or a protocol statement, and even
disagreed as to what would be good examples, positivism was by no means a
monolithic movement. Still, the verifiability criterion of meaning, together
with certain beliefs about where the foundations of justification lie and
beliefs about what constitutes legitimate reasoning, drove many positivists to
embrace extreme forms of reductionism. Briefly, most of them implicitly
recognized only deduction and (reluctantly) induction as legitimate modes of
reasoning. Given such a view, difficult epistemological gaps arise between
available evidence and the commonsense conclusions we want to reach about the
world around us. The problem was particularly acute for empiricists who
recognized as genuine empirical foundations only propositions describing
perceptions or subjective sensations. Such philosophers faced an enormous
difficulty explaining how what we know about sensations could confirm for us
assertions about an objective physical world. Clearly we cannot deduce any
truths about the physical world from what we know about sensations (remember
the possibility of hallucination). Nor does it seem that we could inductively
establish sensation as evidence for the existence of the physical world when
all we have to rely on ultimately is our awareness of sensations. Faced with
the possibility that all of our commonplace assertions about the physical world
might fail the verifiability test for meaningfulness, many of the positivists
took the bold step of arguing that statements about the physical world could
really be viewed as reducible to (equivalent in meaning to) very complicated
statements about sensations. Phenomenalists, as these philosophers were called,
thought that asserting that a given table exists is equivalent in meaning to a
complex assertion about what sensations or sequences of sensations a subject
would have were he to have certain other sensations. The gap between sensation
and the physical world is just one of the epistemic gaps threatening the
meaningfulness of commonplace assertions about the world. If all we know about
the mental states of others is inferred from their physical behavior, we must
still explain how such inference is justified. Thus logical positivists who
took protocol statements to include ordinary assertions about the physical
world were comfortable reducing talk about the mental states of others to talk
about their behavior; this is logical behaviorism. Even some of those
positivists who thought empirical propositions had to be reduced ultimately to
talk about sensations were prepared to translate talk about the mental states
of others into talk about their behavior, which, ironically, would in turn get
translated right back into talk about sensation. Many of the positivists were
primarily concerned with the hypotheses of theoretical physics, which seemed to
go far beyond anything that could be observed. In the context of philosophy of
science, some positivists seemed to take as unproblematic ordinary statements
about the macrophysical world but were still determined either to reduce
theoretical statements in science to complex statements about the observable
world, or to view theoretical entities as a kind of convenient fiction,
description of which lacks any literal truth-value. The limits of a
positivist’s willingness to embrace reductionism are tested, however, when he
comes to grips with knowledge of the past. It seems that propositions
describing memory experiences (if such “experiences” really exist) do not
entail any truths about the past, nor does it seem possible to establish memory
inductively as a reliable indicator of the past. (How could one establish the
past correlations without relying on memory?) The truly hard-core reductionists
actually toyed with the possibility of reducing talk about the past to talk
about the present and future, but it is perhaps an understatement to suggest
that at this point the plausibility of the reductionist program was severely
strained.
logical product, a conjunction of
propositions or predicates. The term ‘product’ derives from an analogy that
conjunction bears to arithmetic multiplication, and that appears very
explicitly in an algebraic logic such as a Boolean algebra. In the same way,
‘logical sum’ usually means the disjunction of propositions or predicates, and
the term ‘sum’ derives from an analogy that disjunction bears with arithmetic
addition. In the logical literature of the nineteenth century, e.g. in the
works of Peirce, ‘logical product’ and ‘logical sum’ often refer to the
relative product and relative sum, respectively. In the work of George Boole,
‘logical sum’ indicates an operation that corresponds not to disjunction but
rather to the exclusive ‘or’. The use of ‘logical sum’ in its contemporary
sense was introduced by John Venn and then adopted and promulgated by Peirce.
‘Relative product’ was introduced by Augustus De Morgan and also adopted and
promulgated by Peirce.
subjectum – The
subjectum-praedicatum distinction -- in Aristotelian and traditional (and what
Grice calls NEO-traditionalism of Strawson) logic, the common noun, or
sometimes the intension or the extension of the common noun, that follows the
initial quantifier word (‘every’, ‘some’, ‘no’, etc.) of a sentence, as opposed
to the material subject, which is the entire noun phrase including the
quantifier and the noun, and in some usages, any modifiers that may apply. The
material subject of ‘Every number exceeding zero is positive’ is ‘every
number’, or in some usages, ‘every number exceeding zero’, whereas the
conceptual or formal subject is ‘number’, or the intension or the extension of
‘number’. Similar distinctions are made between the logical predicate and the
grammatical predicate: in the above example, ‘is positive’ is the material
predicate, whereas the formal predicate is the adjective ‘positive’, or
sometimes the property of being positive or even the extension of ‘positive’.
In standard first-order predicate calculus with identity, the formal subject of
a sentence under a given interpretation is the entire universe of discourse of
the interpretation.
Grice on syntactics, semantics, and
pramatics – syntactics -- description of the forms of the expressions of a
language in virtue of which the expressions stand in logical relations to one
another. Implicit in the idea of logical syntax is the assumption that all – or
at least most – logical relations hold in virtue of form: e.g., that ‘If snow is
white, then snow has color’ and ‘Snow is white’ jointly entail ‘Snow has color’
in virtue of their respective forms, ‘If P, then Q’, ‘P’, and ‘Q’. The form
assigned to an expression in logical syntax is its logical form. Logical form
may not be immediately apparent from the surface form of an expression. Both
(1) ‘Every individual is physical’ and (2) ‘Some individual is physical’
apparently share the subjectpredicate form. But this surface form is not the
form in virtue of which these sentences (or the propositions they might be said
to express) stand in logical relations to other sentences (or propositions),
for if it were, (1) and (2) would have the same logical relations to all sentences
(or propositions), but they do not; (1) and (3) ‘Aristotle is an individual’
jointly entail (4) ‘Aristotle is physical’, whereas (2) and (3) do not jointly
entail (4). So (1) and (2) differ in logical form. The contemporary logical
syntax, devised largely by Frege, assigns very different logical forms to (1)
and (2), namely: ‘For every x, if x is an individual, then x is physical’ and
‘For some x, x is an individual and x is physical’, respectively. Another
example: (5) ‘The satellite of the moon has water’ seems to entail ‘There is at
least one thing that orbits the moon’ and ‘There is no more than one thing that
orbits the moon’. In view of this, Russell assigned to (5) the logical form
‘For some x, x orbits the moon, and for every y, if y orbits the moon, then y
is identical with x, and for every y, if y orbits the moon, then y has water’. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “Peirce, Mead, and Morris on the semiotic triad – and why we don’t
study them at Oxford.”
logicism, the thesis that mathematics, or
at least some significant portion thereof, is part of logic. Modifying Carnap’s
suggestion (in “The Logicist Foundation for Mathematics,” first published in
Erkenntnis), this thesis is the conjunction of two theses: expressibility
logicism: mathematical propositions are (or are alternative expressions of)
purely logical propositions; and derivational logicism: the axioms and theorems
of mathematics can be derived from pure logic. Here is a motivating example
from the arithmetic of the natural numbers. Let the cardinality-quantifiers be
those expressible in the form ‘there are exactly . . . many xs such that’,
which we abbreviate ¢(. . . x),Ü with ‘. . .’ replaced by an Arabic numeral.
These quantifiers are expressible with the resources of first-order logic with
identity; e.g. ‘(2x)Px’ is equivalent to ‘DxDy(x&y & Ez[Pz S (z%x 7 z%y)])’,
the latter involving no numerals or other specifically mathematical vocabulary.
Now 2 ! 3 % 5 is surely a mathematical truth. We might take it to express the
following: if we take two things and then another three things we have five
things, which is a validity of second-order logic involving no mathematical
vocabulary: EXEY ([(2x) Xx & (3x)Yx & ÝDx(Xx & Yx)] / (5x) (Xx 7
Yx)). Furthermore, this is provable in any formalized fragment of second-order
logic that includes all of first-order logic with identity and secondorder
‘E’-introduction. But what counts as logic? As a derivation? As a derivation
from pure logic? Such unclarities keep alive the issue of whether some version
or modification of logicism is true. The “classical” presentations of logicism
were Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik and Russell and Whitehead’s Principia
Mathematica. Frege took logic to be a formalized fragment of secondorder logic
supplemented by an operator forming singular terms from “incomplete”
expressions, such a term standing for an extension of the “incomplete”
expression standing for a concept of level 1 (i.e. type 1). Axiom 5 of
Grundgesetze served as a comprehension-axiom implying the existence of
extensions for arbitrary Fregean concepts of level 1. In his famous letter of
1901 Russell showed that axiom to be inconsistent, thus derailing Frege’s
original program. Russell and Whitehead took logic to be a formalized fragment
of a ramified full finite-order (i.e. type w) logic, with higher-order
variables ranging over appropriate propositional functions. The Principia and
their other writings left the latter notion somewhat obscure. As a defense of
expressibility logicism, Principia had this peculiarity: it postulated typical
ambiguity where naive mathematics seemed unambiguous; e.g., each type had its
own system of natural numbers two types up. As a defense of derivational
logicism, Principia was flawed by virtue of its reliance on three axioms, a
version of the Axiom of Choice, and the axioms of Reducibility and Infinity, whose
truth was controversial. Reducibility could be avoided by eliminating the
ramification of the logic (as suggested by Ramsey). But even then, even the
arithmetic of the natural numbers required use of Infinity, which in effect
asserted that there are infinitely many individuals (i.e., entities of type 0).
Though Infinity was “purely logical,” i.e., contained only logical expressions,
in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (p. 141) Russell admits that it
“cannot be asserted by logic to be true.” Russell then (pp. 194–95) forgets
this: “If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and
mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point in the successive
definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica they consider that logic
ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer is
arbitrary.” The answer, “Section 120, in which Infinity is first assumed!,” is
not arbitrary. In Principia Whitehead and Russell jocularly say of Infinity
that they “prefer to keep it as a hypothesis.” Perhaps then they did not really
take logicism to assert the above identity, but rather a correspondence: to
each sentence f of mathematics there corresponds a conditional sentence of
logic whose antecedent is the Axiom of Infinity and whose consequent is a
purely logical reformulation of f. In spite of the problems with the
“classical” versions of logicism, if we count so-called higherorder (at least
second-order) logic as logic, and if we reformulate the thesis to read ‘Each
area of mathematics is, or is part of, a logic’, logicism remains alive and
well.
logistic system, a formal language
together with a set of axioms and rules of inference, or what many today would
call a “logic.” The original idea behind the notion of a logistic system was
that the language, axioms, rules, and attendant concepts of proof and theorem
were to be specified in a mathematically precise fashion, thus enabling one to
make the study of deductive reasoning an exact science. One was to begin with
an effective specification of the primitive symbols of the language and of
which (finite) sequences of symbols were to count as sentences or wellformed
formulas. Next, certain sentences were to be singled out effectively as axioms.
The rules of inference were also to be given in such a manner that there would
be an effective procedure for telling which rules are rules of the system and
what inferences they license. A proof was then defined as any finite sequence
of sentences, each of which is either an axiom or follows from some earlier
line(s) by one of the rules, with a theorem being the last line of a proof.
With the subsequent development of logic, the requirement of effectiveness has
sometimes been dropped, as has the requirement that sentences and proofs be finite
in length.
logos (plural:
logoi) (Grecian, ‘word’, ‘speech’, ‘reason’), term with the following main
philosophical senses. (1) Rule, principle, law. E.g., in Stoicism the logos is
the divine order and in Neoplatonism the intelligible regulating forces
displayed in the sensible world. The term came thus to refer, in Christianity,
to the Word of God, to the instantiation of his agency in creation, and, in the
New Testament, to the person of Christ. (2) Proposition, account, explanation,
thesis, argument. E.g., Aristotle presents a logos from first principles. (3)
Reason, reasoning, the rational faculty, abstract theory (as opposed to
experience), discursive reasoning (as opposed to intuition). E.g., Plato’s
Republic uses the term to refer to the intellectual part of the soul. (4)
Measure, relation, proportion, ratio. E.g., Aristotle speaks of the logoi of
the musical scales. (5) Value, worth. E.g., Heraclitus speaks of the man whose
logos is greater than that of others.
longinus (late first
century A.D.), Greek literary critic, author of a treatise On the Sublime (Peri
hypsous). The work is ascribed to “Dionysius or Longinus” in the manuscript and
is now tentatively dated to the end of the first century A.D. The author argues
for five sources of sublimity in literature: (a) grandeur of thought and (b)
deep emotion, both products of the writer’s “nature”; (c) figures of speech,
(d) nobility and originality in word use, and (e) rhythm and euphony in
diction, products of technical artistry. The passage on emotion is missing from
the text. The treatise, with Aristotelian but enthusiastic spirit, throws light
on the emotional effect of many great passages of Greek literature; noteworthy
are its comments on Homer (ch. 9). Its nostalgic plea for an almost romantic
independence and greatness of character and imagination in the poet and orator
in an age of dictatorial government and somnolent peace is unique and
memorable.
lottery paradox, a paradox involving two
plausible assumptions about justification which yield the conclusion that a
fully rational thinker may justifiably believe a pair of contradictory
propositions. The unattractiveness of this conclusion has led philosophers to
deny one or the other of the assumptions in question. The paradox, which is due
to Henry Kyburg, is generated as follows. Suppose I am contemplating a fair lottery
involving n tickets (for some suitably large n), and I justifiably believe that
exactly one ticket will win. Assume that if the probability of p, relative to
one’s evidence, meets some given high threshold less than 1, then one has
justification for believing that p (and not merely justification for believing
that p is highly probable). This is sometimes called a rule of detachment for
inductive hypotheses. Then supposing that the number n of tickets is large
enough, the rule implies that I have justification for believing (T1) that the
first ticket will lose (since the probability of T1 (% (n † 1)/n) will exceed
the given high threshold if n is large enough). By similar reasoning, I will
also have justification for believing (T2) that the second ticket will lose,
and similarly for each remaining ticket. Assume that if one has justification
for believing that p and justification for believing that q, then one has
justification for believing that p and q. This is a consequence of what is
sometimes called “deductive closure for justification,” according to which one
has justification for believing the deductive consequences of what one
justifiably believes. Closure, then, implies that I have justification for
believing that T1 and T2 and . . . Tn. But this conjunctive proposition is
equivalent to the proposition that no ticket will win, and we began with the
assumption that I have justification for believing that exactly one ticket will
win.
lotze, philosopher
and influential representative of post-Hegelian German metaphysics. Lotze was
born in Bautzen and studied medicine, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at
Leipzig, where he became instructor, first in medicine and later in philosophy.
His early views, expressed in his Metaphysik and Logik, were influenced by C.
H. Weisse, a former student of Hegel’s. He succeeded Herbart as professor of
philosophy at Göttingen. His best-known work, Mikrocosmus. “Logik” and “Metaphysik”
were published as two parts of his “System der Philosophie. While Lotze shared
the metaphysical and systematic appetites of his German idealist predecessors,
he rejected their intellectualism, favoring an emphasis on the primacy of
feeling; believed that metaphysics must fully respect the methods, results, and
“mechanistic” assumptions of the empirical sciences; and saw philosophy as the
never completed attempt to raise and resolve questions arising from the
inevitable pluralism of methods and interests involved in science, ethics, and
the arts. A strong personalism is manifested in his assertion that feeling
discloses to us a relation to a personal deity and its teleological workings in
nature. His most enduring influences can be traced, in America, through Royce,
B. P. Bowne, and James, and, in England, through Bosanquet and Bradley.
löwenheim-Skolem theorem, the result that
for any set of sentences of standard predicate logic, if there is any
interpretation in which they are all true, there there is also an interpretation
whose domain consists of natural numbers and in which they are all true.
Leopold Löwenheim proved in 1915 that for finite sets of sentences of standard
predicate logic, if there is any interpretation in which they are true, there
is also an interpretation that makes them true and where the domain is a subset
of the domain of the first interpretation, and the new domain can be mapped
one-to-one onto a set of natural numbers. Löwenheim’s proof contained some gaps
and made essential but implicit use of the axiom of choice, a principle of set
theory whose truth was, and is, a matter of debate. In fact, the
Löwenheim-Skolem theorem is equivalent to the axiom of choice. Thoralf Skolem,
in 1920, gave a more detailed proof that made explicit the appeal to the axiom
of choice and that extended the scope of the theorem to include infinite sets
of sentences. In 1922 he gave an essentially different proof that did not
depend on the axiom of choice and in which the domain consisted of natural
numbers rather than being of the same size as a set of natural numbers. In most
contemporary texts, Skolem’s result is proved by methods later devised by
Gödel, Herbrand, or Henkin for proving other results. If the language does not
include an identity predicate, then Skolem’s result is that the second domain
consists of the entire set of natural numbers; if the language includes an
identity predicate, then the second domain may be a proper subset of the
natural numbers. (v. van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in
Mathematical Logic). The original results were of interest because they showed
that in many cases unexpected interpretations with smaller infinite domains
than those of the initially given interpretation could be constructed. It was
later shown – and this is the Upward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem – that
interpretations with larger domains could also be constructed that rendered
true the same set of sentences. Hence the theorem as stated initially is
sometimes referred to as the Downward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. The theorem was
surprising because it was believed that certain sets of axioms characterized
domains, such as the continuum of real numbers, that were larger than the set
of natural numbers. This surprise is called Skolem’s paradox, but it is to be
emphasized that this is a philosophical puzzle rather than a formal
contradiction. Two main lines of response to the paradox developed early. The
realist, who believes that the continuum exists independently of our knowledge
or description of it, takes the theorem to show either that the full truth
about the structure of the continuum is ineffable or at least that means other
than standard first-order predicate logic are required. The constructivist, who
believes that the continuum is in some sense our creation, takes the theorem to
show that size comparisons among infinite sets is not an absolute matter, but
relative to the particular descriptions given. Both positions have received
various more sophisticated formulations that differ in details, but they remain
the two main lines of development.
lucretius: Roman
poet, author of “De rerum natura,” an epic poem in six books. Lucretius’s
emphasis, as an orthodox Epicurean, is on the role of even the most technical
aspects of physics and philosophy in helping to attain emotional peace and
dismiss the terrors of popular religion. Each book studies some aspect of the
school’s theories, while purporting to offer elementary instruction to its
addressee, Memmius. Each begins with an ornamental proem and ends with a
passage of heightened emotional impact; the argumentation is adorned with
illustrations from personal observation, frequently of the contemporary Roman
and Italian scene. Book 1 demonstrates that nothing exists but an infinity of
atoms moving in an infinity of void. Opening with a proem on the love of Venus
and Mars (an allegory of the Roman peace), it ends with an image of Epicurus as
conqueror, throwing the javelin of war outside the finite universe of the
geocentric astronomers. Book 2 proves the mortality of all finite worlds; Book
3, after proving the mortality of the human soul, ends with a hymn on the theme
that there is nothing to feel or fear in death. The discussion of sensation and
thought in Book 4 leads to a diatribe against the torments of sexual desire.
The shape and contents of the visible world are discussed in Book 5, which ends
with an account of the origins of civilization. Book 6, about the forces that
govern meteorological, seismic, and related phenomena, ends with a frightening
picture of the plague of 429 B.C. at Athens. The unexpectedly gloomy end
suggests the poem is incomplete (also the absence of two great Epicurean
themes, friendship and the gods).
lukács: philosopher
best known for his History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist
Dialectics (1923). In 1918 he joined the Communist Party and for much of the
remainder of his career had a controversial relationship with it. For several
months in 1919 he was People’s Commissar for Education in Béla Kun’s
government, until he fled to Vienna and later moved to Berlin. In 1933 he fled
Hitler and moved to Moscow, remaining there until the end of World War II, when
he returned to Budapest as a university professor. In 1956 he was Minister of
Culture in Imre Nagy’s short-lived government. This led to a brief exile in
Rumania. In his later years he returned to teaching in Budapest and was much
celebrated by the Hungarian government. His Collected Works are forthcoming in
both German and Hungarian. He is equally celebrated for his literary criticism
and his reconstruction of the young Marx’s thought. For convenience his work is
often divided into three periods: the pre-Marxist, the Stalinist, and the
post-Stalinist. What unifies these periods and remains constant in his work are
the problems of dialectics and the concept of totality. He stressed the Marxist
claim of the possibility of a dialectical unity of subject and object. This was
to be obtained through the proletariat’s realization of itself and the
concomitant destruction of economic alienation in society, with the
understanding that truth was a still-to-be-realized totality. (In the
post–World War II period this theme was taken up by the Yugoslavian praxis
theorists.) The young neo-Kantian Lukács presented an aesthetics stressing the
subjectivity of human experience and the emptiness of social experience. This
led several French philosophers to claim that he was the first major
existentialist of the twentieth century; he strongly denied it. Later he
asserted that realism is the only correct way to understand literary criticism,
arguing that since humanity is at the core of any social discussion, form
depends on content and the content of politics is central to all historical
social interpretations of literature. Historically Lukács’s greatest claim to
fame within Marxist circles came from his realization that Marx’s materialist
theory of history and the resultant domination of the economic could be fully
understood only if it allowed for both necessity and species freedom. In History
and Class Consciousness he stressed Marx’s debt to Hegelian dialectics years
before the discovery of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
Lukács stresses his Hegelian Marxism as the correct orthodox version over and
against the established Engels-inspired Soviet version of a dialectics of
nature. His claim to be returning to Marx’s methodology emphasizes the primacy
of the concept of totality. It is through Marx’s use of the dialectic that
capitalist society can be seen as essentially reified and the proletariat
viewed as the true subject of history and the only possible salvation of
humanity. All truth is to be seen in relation to the proletariat’s historical
mission. Marx’s materialist conception of history itself must be examined in light
of proletarian knowledge. Truth is no longer given but must be understood in
terms of relative moments in the process of the unfolding of the real union of
theory and praxis: the totality of social relations. This union is not to be
realized as some statistical understanding, but rather grasped through
proletarian consciousness and directed party action in which subject and object
are one. (Karl Mannheim included a modified version of this theory of
social-historical relativism in his work on the sociology of knowledge.) In
Europe and America this led to Western Marxism. In Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union it led to condemnation. If both the known and the knower are
moments of the same thing, then there is a two-directional dialectical
relationship, and Marxism cannot be understood from Engels’s one-way movement
of the dialectic of nature. The Communist attack on Lukács was so extreme that
he felt it necessary to write an apologetic essay on Lenin’s established views.
In The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics
(1938), Lukács modified his views but still stressed the dialectical
commonality of Hegel and Marx. In Lukács’s last years he unsuccessfully tried
to develop a comprehensive ethical theory. The positive result was over two
thousand pages of a preliminary study on social ontology.
lukasiewicz: philosopher
and logician, the most renowned member of the Warsaw School. The work for which
he is best known is the discovery of many-valued logics, but he also invented
bracket-free Polish notation; obtained original consistency, completeness,
independence, and axiom-shortening results for sentential calculi; rescued
Stoic logic from the misinterpretation and incomprehension of earlier
historians and restored it to its rightful place as the first formulation of
the theory of deduction; and finally incorporated Aristotle’s syllogisms, both
assertoric and modal, into a deductive system in his work Aristotle’s
Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic. Reflection on
Aristotle’s discussion of future contingency in On Interpretation led
Lukasiewicz in 1918 to posit a third truth-value, possible, in addition to true
and false, and to construct a formal three-valued logic. Where in his notation
Cpq denotes ‘if p then q’, Np ‘not p’, Apq ‘either p or q’, and Kpq ‘both p and
q’, the system is defined by the following matrices (½ is the third
truthvalue): Apq is defined as CCpqq, and Kpq as NANpNq. The system was
axiomatized by Wajsberg in 1931. Lukasiewicz’s motivation in constructing a
formal system of three-valued logic was to break the grip of the idea of
universal determinism on the imagination of philosophers and scientists. For
him, there was causal determinism (shortly to be undermined by quantum theory),
but there was also logical determinism, which in accordance with the principle
of bivalence decreed that the statement that J.L. would be in Warsaw at noon on
December 21 next year was either true or false now, and indeed had been either
true or false for all time. In three-valued logic this statement would take the
value ½, thus avoiding any apparent threat to free will posed by the law of
bivalence.
lull, Raymond, also
spelled Raymond Lully, Ramon Llull, mystic and missionary. A polemicist against
Islam, a social novelist, and a constructor of schemes for international
unification, Lull is best known in the history of philosophy for his
quasialgebraic or combinatorial treatment of metaphysical principles. His logic
of divine and creaturely attributes is set forth first in an Ars compendiosa
inveniendi veritatem (1274), next in an Ars demonstrativa (1283–89), then in
reworkings of both of these and in the Tree of Knowledge, and finally in the
Ars brevis and the Ars generalis ultima (1309–16). Each of these contains tables
and diagrams that permit the reader to calculate the interactions of the
various principles. Although his dates place him in the period of mature
Scholasticism, the vernacular language and the Islamic or Judaic construction
of Lull’s works relegate him to the margin of Scholastic debates. His influence
is to be sought rather in late medieval and Renaissance cabalistic or hermetic
traditions.
luther: German
religious reformer and leader of the Protestant Reformation. He was an
Augustinian friar and unsystematic theologian from Saxony, schooled in
nominalism (Ockham, Biel, Staupitz) and trained in biblical languages. Luther
initially taught philosophy and subsequently Scripture (Romans, Galatians,
Hebrews) at Wittenberg University. His career as a church reformer began with
his public denunciation, in the 95 theses, of the sale of indulgences in
October 1517. Luther produced three incendiary tracts: Appeal to the Nobility,
The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian Man
(1520), which prompted his excommunication. At the 1521 Diet of Worms he
claimed: “I am bound by the Scripture I have quoted and my conscience is
captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything since it is
neither safe nor right to go against my conscience. Here I stand, may God help
me.” Despite his modernist stance on the primacy of conscience over tradition,
the reformer broke with Erasmus over free will (De servo Arbitrio, 1525),
championing an Augustinian, antihumanist position. His crowning achievement,
the translation of the Bible into German (1534/45), shaped the modern German
language. On the strength of a biblical-Christocentric, anti-philosophical
theology, he proclaimed justification by faith alone and the priesthood of all
believers. He unfolded a theologia crucis, reformed the Mass, acknowledged only
two sacraments (baptism and the Eucharist), advocated consubstantiation instead
of transubstantiation, and propounded the Two Kingdoms theory in church–state
relations.
lycæum: an extensive sanctuary of Apollo
just east off Athens (“so my “Athenian dialectic” has to be taken with a pinch
of salt!”) -- the site of public athletic (or gymnastic) facilities where
Aristotle teaches, a center for philosophy and systematic research in science
and history organized there by Aristotle and his associates; it begins as an
informal play group, lacking any legal status until Theophrastus, Aristotle’s
colleague and principal heir, acquires land and buildings there. By a principle
of metonymy common in philosophy (cf. ‘Academy’, ‘Oxford’, ‘Vienna’),‘Lycæum’
comes to refer collectively to members of the school and their methods and
ideas, although the school remained relatively non-doctrinaire. Another ancient
label for adherents of the school and their ideas, apparently derived from
Aristotle’s habit of lecturing in a portico (peripatos) at the Lycæum, is
‘Peripatetic’. The school had its heyday in its first decades, when members
include Eudemus, author of lost histories of mathematics; Aristoxenus, a prolific
writer, principally on music (large parts of two treatises survive);
Dicaearchus, a polymath who ranged from ethics and politics to psychology and
geography; Meno, who compiled a history of medicine; and Demetrius of Phaleron,
a dashing intellect who writes extensively and ruled Athens on behalf of
dynasts. Under Theophrastus and his successor Strato, the Lycæum produces original work, especially in natural
science. But by the midthird century B.C., the Lycæum had lost its initial
vigor. To judge from meager evidence, it offered sound education but few new
ideas. Some members enjoyed political influence, but for nearly two centuries,
rigorous theorizing is displaced by intellectual history and popular
moralizing. In the first century B.C., the school enjoyed a modest renaissance
when Andronicus oversaw the first methodical edition of Aristotle’s works and
began the exegetical tradition that culminated in the monumental commentaries
of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Oxonian dialectic and
Athenian dialectic.”
lyotard: philosopher,
a leading representative of post-structuralism. Among major post-structuralist
theorists (Gilles Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault), Lyotard is most closely
associated with post-modernism. With roots in phenomenology (a student of
Merleau-Ponty, his first book, Phenomenology [1954], engages phenomenology’s
history and engages phenomenology with history) and Marxism (in the 1960s
Lyotard was associated with the Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded
by Cornelius Castoriadis [1922–97] and Claude Lefort [b.1924]), Lyotard’s work
has centered on questions of art, language, and politics. His first major work,
Discours, figure (1971), expressed dissatisfaction with structuralism and, more
generally, any theoretical approach that sought to escape history through
appeal to a timeless, universal structure of language divorced from our
experiences. Libidinal Economy (1974) reflects the passion and enthusiasm of
the events of May 1968 along with a disappointment with the Marxist response to
those events. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), an
occasional text written at the request of the Quebec government, catapulted
Lyotard to the forefront of critical debate. Here he introduced his definition
of the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: the postmodern names
not a specific epoch but an antifoundationalist attitude that exceeds the
legitimating orthodoxy of the moment. Postmodernity, then, resides constantly
at the heart of the modern, challenging those totalizing and comprehensive
master narratives (e.g., the Enlightenment narrative of the emancipation of the
rational subject) that serve to legitimate its practices. Lyotard suggests we
replace these narratives by less ambitious, “little narratives” that refrain
from totalizing claims in favor of recognizing the specificity and singularity
of events. Many, including Lyotard, regard The Differend (1983) as his most
original and important work. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations and Kant’s Critique of Judgment, it reflects on how to make
judgments (political as well as aesthetic) where there is no rule of judgment
to which one can appeal. This is the différend, a dispute between (at least)
two parties in which the parties operate within radically heterogeneous
language games so incommensurate that no consensus can be reached on principles
or rules that could govern how their dispute might be settled. In contrast to
litigations, where disputing parties share a language with rules of judgment to
consult to resolve their dispute, différends defy resolution (an example might
be the conflicting claims to land rights by aboriginal peoples and current
residents). At best, we can express différends by posing the dispute in a way
that avoids delegitimating either party’s claim. In other words, our political
task, if we are to be just, is to phrase the dispute in a way that respects the
difference between the competing claims. In the years following The Differend,
Lyotard published several works on aesthetics, politics, and postmodernism; the
most important may well be his reading of Kant’s third Critique in Lessons on
the Analytic of the Sublime (1991).
Mach: philosopher, born in Turas, Moravia,
and studied at Vienna. Appointed professor of mathematics at Graz in 1864, he
moved in 1867 to the chair of physics at Prague, where he came to be recognized
as one of the leading scientists in Europe, contributing not only to a variety
of fields of physics (optics, electricity, mechanics, acoustics) but also to
the new field of psychophysics, particularly in the field of perception. He
returned to Vienna in 1895 to a chair in philosophy, designated for a new
academic discipline, the history and theory of inductive science. His writings
on the philosophy of science profoundly affected the founders of the Vienna
Circle, leading Mach to be regarded as a progenitor of logical positivism. His
best-known work, The Science of Mechanics (1883), epitomized the main themes of
his philosophy. He set out to extract the logical structure of mechanics from
an examination of its history and procedures. Mechanics fulfills the human need
to abridge the facts about motion in the most economical way. It rests on
“sensations” (akin to the “ideas” or “sense impressions” of classical
empiricism); indeed, the world may be said to consist of sensations (a thesis
that later led Lenin in a famous polemic to accuse Mach of idealism). Mechanics
is inductive, not demonstrative; it has no a priori element of any sort. The
divisions between the sciences must be recognized to be arbitrary, a matter of
convenience only. The sciences must be regarded as descriptive, not as
explanatory. Theories may appear to explain, but the underlying entities they
postulate, like atoms, for example, are no more than aids to prediction. To
suppose them to represent reality would be metaphysical and therefore idle.
Mach’s most enduring legacy to philosophy is his enduring suspicion of anything
“metaphysical.”
Machiavelli, Niccolò -- the Italian
political theorist commonly considered the most influential political thinker
of the Renaissance. Born in Florence, he was educated in the civic humanist
tradition. From 1498 to 1512, he was secretary to the second chancery of the
republic of Florence, with responsibilities for foreign affairs and the revival
of the domestic civic militia. His duties involved numerous diplomatic missions
both in and outside Italy. With the fall of the republic in 1512, he was
dismissed by the returning Medici regime. From 1513 to 1527 he lived in
enforced retirement, relieved by writing and occasional appointment to minor
posts. Machaivelli’s writings fall into two genetically connected categories:
chancery writings (reports, memoranda, diplomatic writings) and formal books,
the chief among them The Prince (1513), the Discourses (1517), the Art of War
(1520), Florentine Histories (1525), and the comic drama Mandragola (1518).
With Machiavelli a new vision emerges of politics as autonomous activity
leading to the creation of free and powerful states. This vision derives its
norms from what humans do rather than from what they ought to do. As a result,
the problem of evil arises as a central issue: the political actor reserves the
right “to enter into evil when necessitated.” The requirement of classical,
medieval, and civic humanist political philosophies that politics must be
practiced within the bounds of virtue is met by redefining the meaning of
virtue itself. Machiavellian virtù is the ability to achieve “effective truth”
regardless of moral, philosophical, and theological restraints. He recognizes
two limits on virtù: (1) fortuna, understood as either chance or as a goddess
symbolizing the alleged causal powers of the heavenly bodies; and (2) the
agent’s own temperament, bodily humors, and the quality of the times. Thus, a
premodern astrological cosmology and the anthropology and cyclical theory of
history derived from it underlie his political philosophy. History is seen as
the conjoint product of human activity and the alleged activity of the heavens,
understood as the “general cause” of all human motions in the sublunar world.
There is no room here for the sovereignty of the Good, nor the ruling Mind, nor
Providence. Kingdoms, republics, and religions follow a naturalistic pattern of
birth, growth, and decline. But, depending on the outcome of the struggle
between virtù and fortuna, there is the possibility of political renewal; and
Machiavelli saw himself as the philosopher of political renewal. Historically,
Machiavelli’s philosophy came to be identified with Machiavellianism (also
spelled Machiavellism), the doctrine that the reason of state recognizes no
moral superior and that, in its pursuit, everything is permitted. Although
Machiavelli himself does not use the phrase ‘reason of state’, his principles
have been and continue to be invoked in its defense.
macintyre: Like Kant, Scots philosopher
and eminent contemporary representative of Aristotelian ethics. He was born in
Scotland, educated in England, and has taught at universities in both England
and (mainly) the United States. His early work included perceptive critical
discussions of Marx and Freud as well as his influential A Short History of
Ethics. His most discussed work, however, has been After Virtue (1981), an analysis
and critique of modern ethical views from the standpoint of an Aristotelian
virtue ethics. MacIntyre begins with the striking unresolvability of modern
ethical disagreements, which he diagnoses as due to a lack of any shared
substantive conception of the ethical good. This lack is itself due to the
modern denial of a human nature that would provide a meaning and goal for human
life. In the wake of the Enlightenment, MacIntyre maintains, human beings are
regarded as merely atomistic individuals, employing a purely formal reason to
seek fulfillment of their contingent desires. Modern moral theory tries to
derive moral values from this conception of human reality. Utilitarians start
from desires, arguing that they must be fulfilled in such a way as to provide
the greatest happiness (utility). Kantians start from reason, arguing that our
commitment to rationality requires recognizing the rights of others to the same
goods that we desire for ourselves. MacIntyre, however, maintains that the
modern notions of utility and of rights are fictions: there is no way to argue
from individual desires to an interest in making others happy or to inviolable
rights of all persons. He concludes that Enlightenment liberalism cannot
construct a coherent ethics and that therefore our only alternatives are to
accept a Nietzschean reduction of morality to will-to-power or to return to an
Aristotelian ethics grounded in a substantive conception of human nature.
MacIntyre’s positive philosophical project is to formulate and defend an
Aristotelian ethics of the virtues (based particularly on the thought of
Aquinas), where virtues are understood as the moral qualities needed to fulfill
the potential of human nature. His aim is not the mere revival of Aristotelian
thought but a reformulation and, in some cases, revision of that thought in
light of its history over the last 2,500 years. MacIntyre pays particular
attention to formulating concepts of practice (communal action directed toward
a intrinsic good), virtue (a habit needed to engage successfully in a
practice), and tradition (a historically extended community in which practices
relevant to the fulfillment of human nature can be carried out). His conception
of tradition is particularly noteworthy. His an effort to provide Aristotelianism
with a historical orientation that Aristotle himself never countenanced; and,
in contrast to Burke, it makes tradition the locus of rational reflection on
and revision of past practices, rather than a merely emotional attachment to
them. MacIntyre has also devoted considerable attention to the problem of
rationally adjudicating the claims of rival traditions (especially in Whose
Justice? Which Rationality?, 1988) and to making the case for the Aristotelian
tradition as opposed to that of the Enlightenment and that of Nietzscheanism
(especially in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, 1990).
mctaggart: Irish philosopher, the leading
British personal idealist. Aside from his childhood and two extended visits to
New Zealand, McTaggart lived in Cambridge as a student and fellow of Trinity
College. His influence on others at Trinity, including Russell and Moore, was
at times great, but he had no permanent disciples. He began formulating and
defending his views by critically examining Hegel. In Studies in the Hegelian
Dialectic (1896) he argued that Hegel’s dialectic is valid but subjective,
since the Absolute Idea Hegel used it to derive contains nothing corresponding
to the dialectic. In Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901) he applied the
dialectic to such topics as sin, punishment, God, and immortality. In his
Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (1910) he concluded that the task of philosophy is
to rethink the nature of reality using a method resembling Hegel’s dialectic.
McTaggart attempted to do this in his major work, The Nature of Existence (two
volumes, 1921 and 1927). In the first volume he tried to deduce the nature of
reality from self-evident truths using only two empirical premises, that
something exists and that it has parts. He argued that substances exist, that
they are related to each other, that they have an infinite number of substances
as parts, and that each substance has a sufficient description, one that
applies only to it and not to any other substance. He then claimed that these
conclusions are inconsistent unless the sufficient descriptions of substances
entail the descriptions of their parts, a situation that requires substances to
stand to their parts in the relation he called determining correspondence. In
the second volume he applied these results to the empirical world, arguing that
matter is unreal, since its parts cannot be determined by determining
correspondence. In the most celebrated part of his philosophy, he argued that
time is unreal by claiming that time presupposes a series of positions, each
having the incompatible qualities of past, present, and future. He thought that
attempts to remove the incompatibility generate a vicious infinite regress.
From these and other considerations he concluded that selves are real, since
their parts can be determined by determining correspondence, and that reality
is a community of eternal, perceiving selves. He denied that there is an
inclusive self or God in this community, but he affirmed that love between the
selves unites the community producing a satisfaction beyond human
understanding.
magnitude, extent or size of a thing with
respect to some attribute; technically, a quantity or dimension. A quantity is
an attribute that admits of several or an infinite number of degrees, in
contrast to a quality (e.g., triangularity), which an object either has or does
not have. Measurement is assignment of numbers to objects in such a way that
these numbers correspond to the degree or amount of some quantity possessed by
their objects. The theory of measurement investigates the conditions for, and
uniqueness of, such numerical assignments. Let D be a domain of objects (e.g.,
a set of physical bodies) and L be a relation on this domain; i.e., Lab may
mean that if a and b are put on opposite pans of a balance, the pan with a does
not rest lower than the other pan. Let ; be the operation of weighing two
objects together in the same pan of a balance. We then have an empirical
relational system E % ‹ D, L, ; (. One can prove that, if E satisfies specified
conditions, then there exists a measurement function mapping D to a set Num of
real numbers, in such a way that the L and ; relations between objects in D
correspond to the m and ! relations between their numerical values. Such an
existence theorem for a measurement function from an empirical relational
system E to a numerical relational system, N % ‹ Num, m ! (, is called a
representation theorem. Measurement functions are not unique, but a uniqueness
theorem characterizes all such functions for a specified kind of empirical
relational system and specified type of numerical image. For example, suppose
that for any measurement functions f, g for E there exists real number a ( 0
such that for any x in D, f(x) % ag(x). Then it is said that the measurement is
on a ratio scale, and the function s(x) % ax, for x in the real numbers, is the
scale transformation. For some empirical systems, one can prove that any two
measurement functions are related by f % ag ! b, where a ( 0 and b are real
numbers. Then the measurement is on an interval scale, with the scale
transformation s(x) % ax ! b; e.g., measurement of temperature without an
absolute zero is on an interval scale. In addition to ratio and interval
scales, other scale types are defined in terms of various scale transformations;
many relational systems have been mathematically analyzed for possible
applications in the behavioral sciences. Measurement with weak scale types may
provide only an ordering of the objects, so quantitative measurement and
comparative orderings can be treated by the same general methods. The older
literature on measurement often distinguishes extensive from intensive
magnitudes. In the former case, there is supposed to be an empirical operation
(like ; above) that in some sense directly corresponds to addition on numbers.
An intensive magnitude supposedly has no such empirical operation. It is
sometimes claimed that genuine quantities must be extensive, whereas an
intensive magnitude is a quality. This extensive versus intensive distinction
(and its use in distinguishing quantities from qualities) is imprecise and has
been supplanted by the theory of scale types sketched above.
maimon: philosopher
who became the friend and protégé of Moses Mendelssohn and was an acute early
critic and follower of Kant. His most important works were the Versuch über die
Transzendentalphilosophie. Mit einem Anhang über die symbolische Erkenntnis, the
Philosophisches Wörterbuch and the Versuch einer neuen Logik oder Theorie des
Denkens. Maimon argued against the “thing-in-itself” as it was conceived by
Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Gottlieb Ernst Schulze. For Maimon, the
thing-in-itself was merely a limiting concept, not a real object “behind” the
phenomena. While he thought that Kant’s system was sufficient as a refutation
of rationalism or “dogmatism,” he did not think that it had – or could –
successfully dispose of skepticism. Indeed, he advanced what can be called a
skeptical interpretation of Kant. On the other hand, he also argued against
Kant’s sharp distinction between sensibility and understanding and for the
necessity of assuming the idea of an “infinite mind.” In this way, he prepared
the way for Fichte and Hegel. However, in many ways his own theory is more
similar to that of the neoKantian Hermann Cohen.
maimonides: philosopher,
physician, and jurist. Born in Córdova, Maimonides and his family fled the
forced conversions of the Almohad invasion in 1148, living anonymously in Fez
before finding refuge in 1165 in Cairo. There Maimonides served as physician to
the vizier of Saladin, who overthrew the Fatimid dynasty in 1171. He wrote ten
medical treatises, but three works secured his position among the greatest
rabbinic jurists: his Book of the Commandments, cataloguing the 613 biblical
laws; his Commentary on the Mishnah, expounding the rational purposes of the
ancient rabbinic code; and the fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah, a codification of
Talmudic law that retains almost canonical authority. His Arabic philosophic
masterpiece The Guide to the Perplexed mediates between the Scriptural and
philosophic idioms, deriving a sophisticated negative theology by subtly
decoding biblical anthropomorphisms. It defends divine creation against
al-Farabi’s and Avicenna’s eternalism, while rejecting efforts to demonstrate
creation apodictically. The radical occasionalism of Arabic dialectical
theology (kalam) that results from such attempts, Maimonides argues, renders
nature unintelligible and divine governance irrational: if God creates each
particular event, natural causes are otiose, and much of creation is in vain.
But Aristotle, who taught us the very principles of demonstration, well
understood, as his resort to persuasive language reveals, that his arguments
for eternity were not demonstrative. They project, metaphysically, an analysis
of time, matter, and potentiality as they are now and ignore the possibility
that at its origin a thing had a very different nature. We could allegorize
biblical creation if it were demonstrated to be false. But since it is not, we
argue that creation is more plausible conceptually and preferable theologically
to its alternative: more plausible, because a free creative act allows
differentiation of the world’s multiplicity from divine simplicity, as the
seemingly mechanical necessitation of emanation, strictly construed, cannot do;
preferable, because Avicennan claims that God is author of the world and
determiner of its contingency are undercut by the assertion that at no time was
nature other than it is now. Maimonides read the biblical commandments
thematically, as serving to inform human character and understanding. He
followed al-Farabi’s Platonizing reading of Scripture as a symbolic elaboration
of themes best known to the philosopher. Thus he argued that prophets learn
nothing new from revelation; the ignorant remain ignorant, but the gift of
imagination in the wise, if they are disciplined by the moral virtues,
especially courage and contentment, gives wing to ideas, rendering them
accessible to the masses and setting them into practice. In principle, any
philosopher of character and imagination might be a prophet; but in practice
the legislative, ethical, and mythopoeic imagination that serves philosophy
finds fullest articulation in one tradition. Its highest phase, where
imagination yields to pure intellectual communion, was unique to Moses,
elaborated in Judaism and its daughter religions. Maimonides’ philosophy was
pivotal for later Jewish thinkers, highly valued by Aquinas and other
Scholastics, studied by Spinoza in Hebrew translation, and annotated by Leibniz
in Buxtorf’s 1629 rendering, Doctor Perplexorum.
malcolm: cited by
Grice, profusely -- philosopher who was a prominent figure in post– World War
II analytic philosophy and perhaps the foremost American interpreter and
advocate of Wittgenstein. His association with Wittgenstein (vividly described
in his Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir) began when he was at Cambridge. Other
influences were Bouwsma, Malcolm’s tutor at Nebraska, and Moore, whom he knew
at Cambridge. Malcolm taught at Cornell, and was associated with King’s, London.
Malcolm’s earliest papers (e.g., “The Verification Argument,” and “Knowledge
and Belief”) dealt with issues of knowledge and skepticism, and two dealt with
Moore (The ones Grice is interested in). “Moore and Ordinary Language”
infamously interprets Moore’s defense of common sense as a defense of ordinary
(rather than ideal) language, but “Defending Common Sense” argued, -- “even
more infamously” – Grice -- that Moore’s “two hands” proof of the external
world involves a misuse of ‘know’ (“For surely it would be stupid of Moore to
doubt that he has two hands.”). Moore’s proof is the topic of extended
discussions between Malcolm and Vitters during the latter’s visit in Ithaca,
and these provided the stimulus for Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Malcolm’s
“Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” was a highly influential
discussion of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and especially of his “private
language argument.” Two other works of that period were Malcolm’s Dreaming
which argued that dreams do not have genuine duration or temporal location, and
do not entail having genuine experiences, and “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,”
which defended a version of the ontological argument. Malcolm, inspired by
Grice, wrote extensively on memory, first in his “Three Lectures on Memory,”
published in his Knowledge and Certainty, and then in his Memory and Mind. In the
latter he criticized both Grice’s philosophical and psychological theories of
memory, and argues that the notion of a memory trace “is not a scientific
discovery . . . [but] a product of philosophical thinking, of a sort that is
natural and enormously tempting, yet thoroughly muddled.” A recurrent theme in
Malcolm’s thought was that philosophical understanding requires getting to the
root of the temptations to advance some philosophical doctrine, and that once
we do so we will see the philosophical doctrines as confused or nonsensical.
Although he was convinced that dualism and other Cartesian views about the mind
were thoroughly confused, he thought no better of contemporary materialist and
Grice’s functionalist views – “One never knows what Malcolm thinks – he doesn’t
show, he doesn’t tell!” – Grice -- and of current theorizing in psychology and
linguistics (one essay is entitled “The Myth of Cognitive Processes and
Structures”). He shared with Wittgenstein both an antipathy to scientism and a
respect for religion. He shared with Moore an antipathy to obscurantism and a
respect for common sense. Malcolm’s “Nothing Is Hidden” (or implicit) examines
the relations between Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophies. His other
essays include Problems of Mind, Thought and Knowledge, and Consciousness and Causality,
the latter coauthored with Armstrong. “Malcolm’s writings are marked by an
exceptionally lucid, direct, and vivid style, if I may myself say so.” – Grice.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Malcolm on Moore: the implicaturum.”
malebranche:
philosopher, an important but unorthodox proponent of Cartesian philosophy.
Malebranche was a priest of the Oratory, a religious order founded in 1611 by
Cardinal Bérulle, who was favorably inclined toward Descartes. Malebranche
himself became a Cartesian after reading Descartes’s physiological Treatise on
Man in 1664, although he ultimately introduced crucial modifications into
Cartesian ontology, epistemology, and physics. Malebranche’s most important
philosophical work is The Search After Truth (1674), in which he presents his
two most famous doctrines: the vision in God and occasionalism. He agrees with
Descartes and other philosophers that ideas, or immaterial representations
present to the mind, play an essential role in knowledge and perception. But
whereas Descartes’s ideas are mental entities, or modifications of the soul,
Malebranche argues that the ideas that function in human cognition are in God –
they just are the essences and ideal archetypes that exist in the divine
understanding. As such, they are eternal and independent of finite minds, and
make possible the clear and distinct apprehension of objective, neccessary
truth. Malebranche presents the vision in God as the proper Augustinian view,
albeit modified in the light of Descartes’s epistemological distinction between
understanding and sensation. The theory explains both our apprehension of
universals and mathematical and moral principles, as well as the conceptual
element that, he argues, necessarily informs our perceptual acquaintance with
the world. Like Descartes’s theory of ideas, Malebranche’s doctrine is at least
partly motivated by an antiskepticism, since God’s ideas cannot fail to reveal
either eternal truths or the essences of things in the world created by God.
The vision in God, however, quickly became the object of criticism by Locke,
Arnauld, Foucher, and others, who thought it led to a visionary and skeptical
idealism, with the mind forever enclosed by a veil of divine ideas. Malebranche
is also the best-known proponent of occasionalism, the doctrine that finite
created beings have no causal efficacy and that God alone is a true causal
agent. Starting from Cartesian premises about matter, motion, and causation –
according to which the essence of body consists in extension alone, motion is a
mode of body, and a causal relation is a logically necessary relation between
cause and effect – Malebranche argues that bodies and minds cannot be genuine
causes of either physical events or mental states. Extended bodies, he claims,
are essentially inert and passive, and thus cannot possess any motive force or
power to cause and sustain motion. Moreover, there is no necessary connection
between any mental state (e.g. a volition) or physical event and the bodily
motions that usually follow it. Such necessity is found only between the will
of an omnipotent being and its effects. Thus, all phenomena are directly and
immediately brought about by God, although he always acts in a lawlike way and
on the proper occasion. Malebranche’s theory of ideas and his occasionalism, as
presented in the Search and the later Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688), were
influential in the development of Berkeley’s thought; and his arguments for the
causal theory foreshadow many of the considerations regarding causation and
induction later presented by Hume. In addition to these innovations in Cartesian
metaphysics and epistemology, Malebranche also modified elements of Descartes’s
physics, most notably in his account of the hardness of bodies and of the laws
of motion. In his other major work, the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680),
Malebranche presents a theodicy, an explanation of how God’s wisdom, goodness,
and power are to be reconciled with the apparent imperfections and evils in the
world. In his account, elements of which Leibniz borrows, Malebranche claims
that God could have created a more perfect world, one without the defects that
plague this world, but that this would have involved greater complexity in the
divine ways. God always acts in the simplest way possible, and only by means of
lawlike general volitions; God never acts by “particular” or ad hoc volitions.
But this means that while on any particular occasion God could intervene and
forestall an apparent evil that is about to occur by the ordinary courses of
the laws of nature (e.g. a drought), God would not do so, for this would compromise
the simplicity of God’s means. The perfection or goodness of the world per se
is thus relativized to the simplicity of the laws of that world (or, which is
the same thing, to the generality of the divine volitions that, on the
occasionalist view, govern it). Taken together, the laws and the phenomena of
the world form a whole that is most worthy of God’s nature – in fact, the best
combination possible. Malebranche then extends this analysis to explain the
apparent injustice in the distribution of grace among humankind. It is just
this extension that initiated Arnauld’s attack and drew Malebranche into a long
philosophical and theological debate that would last until the end of the
century.
manichaeanism, also
Manichaeism, a syncretistic religion founded by the Babylonian prophet Mani, who
claimed a revelation from God and saw himself as a member of a line that
included the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. In dramatic myths, Manichaeanism
posited the good kingdom of God, associated with light, and the evil kingdom of
Satan, associated with darkness. Awareness of light caused greed, hate, and
envy in the darkness; this provoked an attack of darkness on light. In response
the Father sent Primal Man, who lost the fight so that light and darkness were
mixed. The Primal Man appealed for help, and the Living Spirit came to win a
battle, making heaven and earth out of the corpses of darkness and freeing some
capured light. A Third Messenger was sent; in response the power of darkness
created Adam and Eve, who contained the light that still remained under his
sway. Then Jesus was sent to a still innocent Adam who nonetheless sinned,
setting in motion the reproductive series that yields humanity. This is the
mythological background to the Manichaean account of the basic religious
problem: the human soul is a bit of captured light, and the problem is to free
the soul from darkness through asceticism and esoteric knowledge. Manichaeanism
denies that Jesus was crucified, and Augustine, himself a sometime Manichaean,
viewed the religion as a Docetic heresy that denies the incarnation of the
second person of the Trinity in a real human body. The religion exhibits the
pattern of escape from embodiment as a condition of salvation, also seen in
Hinduism and Buddhism.
mannheim, Karl
(1893–1947), Hungarian-born German social scientist best known for his
sociology of knowledge. Born in Budapest, where he took a university degree in
philosophy, he settled in Heidelberg in 1919 as a private scholar until his
call to Frankfurt as professor of sociology in 1928. Suspended as a Jew and as
foreign-born by the Nazis in 1933, he accepted an invitation from the London
School of Economics, where he was a lecturer for a decade. In 1943, Mannheim
became the first professor of sociology of education at the University of
London, a position he held until his death. Trained in the Hegelian tradition,
Mannheim defies easy categorization: his mature politics became those of a
liberal committed to social planning; with his many studies in the sociology of
culture, of political ideologies, of social organization, of education, and of
knowledge, among others, he founded several subdisciplines in sociology and
political science. While his Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940)
expressed his own commitment to social planning, his most famous work, Ideology
and Utopia (original German edition, 1929; revised English edition, 1936),
established sociology of knowledge as a scientific enterprise and
simultaneously cast doubt on the possibility of the very scientific knowledge
on which social planning was to proceed. As developed by Mannheim, sociology of
knowledge attempts to find the social causes of beliefs as contrasted with the
reasons people have for them. Mannheim seemed to believe that this investigation
both presupposes and demonstrates the impossibility of “objective” knowledge of
society, a theme that relates sociology of knowledge to its roots in German
philosophy and social theory (especially Marxism) and earlier in the thought of
the idéologues of the immediate post–French Revolution decades.
mansel: philosopher,
a prominent defender of Scottish common sense philosophy. Mansel was the
Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy and ecclesiastical history at
Oxford, and the dean of St. Paul’s. Much of his philosophy was derived from
Kant as interpreted by Hamilton. In “Prolegomena Logica,” Mansel defines logic
as the science of the laws of thought, while in “Metaphysics,” he argues that
human faculties are not suited to know the ultimate nature of things. He drew
the religious implications of these views in his most influential work, The
Limits of Religious Thought, by arguing that God is rationally inconceivable
and that the only available conception of God is an analogical one derived from
revelation. From this he concluded that religious dogma is immune from rational
criticism. In the ensuing controversy Mansel was criticized by Spenser, Thomas
Henry Huxley, and J. S. Mill.
many-valued logic, a logic that rejects
the principle of bivalence: every proposition is true or false. However, there
are two forms of rejection: the truth-functional mode (many-valued logic
proper), where propositions may take many values beyond simple truth and
falsity, values functionally determined by the values of their components; and
the truth-value gap mode, in which the only values are truth and falsity, but
propositions may have neither. What value they do or do not have is not
determined by the values or lack of values of their constituents. Many-valued logic
has its origins in the work of Lukasiewicz and (independently) Post around
1920, in the first development of truth tables and semantic methods.
Lukasiewicz’s philosophical motivation for his three-valued calculus was to
deal with propositions whose truth-value was open or “possible” – e.g.,
propositions about the future. He proposed they might take a third value. Let 1
represent truth, 0 falsity, and the third value be, say, ½. We take Ý (not) and
P (implication) as primitive, letting v(ÝA) % 1 † v(A) and v(A P B) % min(1,1 †
v(A)!v(B)). These valuations may be displayed: Lukasiewicz generalized the idea
in 1922, to allow first any finite number of values, and finally infinitely,
even continuum-many values (between 0 and 1). One can then no longer represent
the functionality by a matrix; however, the formulas given above can still be
applied. Wajsberg axiomatized Lukasiewicz’s calculus in 1931. In 1953
Lukasiewicz published a four-valued extensional modal logic. In 1921, Post
presented an m-valued calculus, with values 0 (truth), . . . , m † 1 (falsity),
and matrices defined on Ý and v (or): v(ÝA) % 1 ! v(A) (modulo m) and v(AvB) %
min (v(A),v(B)). Translating this for comparison into the same framework as
above, we obtain the matrices (with 1 for truth and 0 for falsity): The strange
cyclic character of Ý makes Post’s system difficult to interpret – though he
did give one in terms of sequences of classical propositions. A different
motivation led to a system with three values developed by Bochvar in 1939, namely,
to find a solution to the logical paradoxes. (Lukasiewicz had noted that his
three-valued system was free of antinomies.) The third value is indeterminate
(so arguably Bochvar’s system is actually one of gaps), and any combination of
values one of which is indeterminate is indeterminate; otherwise, on the
determinate values, the matrices are classical. Thus we obtain for Ý and P,
using 1, ½, and 0 as above: In order to develop a logic of many values, one
needs to characterize the notion of a thesis, or logical truth. The standard
way to do this in manyvalued logic is to separate the values into designated
and undesignated. Effectively, this is to reintroduce bivalence, now in the
form: Every proposition is either designated or undesignated. Thus in Lukasiewicz’s
scheme, 1 (truth) is the only designated value; in Post’s, any initial segment
0, . . . , n † 1, where n‹m (0 as truth). In general, one can think of the
various designated values as types of truth, or ways a proposition may be true,
and the undesignated ones as ways it can be false. Then a proposition is a
thesis if and only if it takes only designated values. For example, p P p is,
but p 7 Ýp is not, a Lukasiewicz thesis. However, certain matrices may generate
no logical truths by this method, e.g., the Bochvar matrices give ½ for every
formula any of whose variables is indeterminate. If both 1 and ½ were
designated, all theses of classical logic would be theses; if only 1, no theses
result. So the distinction from classical logic is lost. Bochvar’s solution was
to add an external assertion and negation. But this in turn runs the risk of
undercutting the whole philosophical motivation, if the external negation is
used in a Russell-type paradox. One alternative is to concentrate on
consequence: A is a consequence of a set of formulas X if for every assignment
of values either no member of X is designated or A is. Bochvar’s consequence
relation (with only 1 designated) results from restricting classical
consequence so that every variable in A occurs in some member of X. There is
little technical difficulty in extending many-valued logic to the logic of
predicates and quantifiers. For example, in Lukasiewicz’s logic, v(E xA) % min
{v(A(a/x)): a 1. D}, where D is, say, some set of constants whose assignments
exhaust the domain. This interprets the universal quantifier as an “infinite”
conjunction. In 1965, Zadeh introduced the idea of fuzzy sets, whose membership
relation allows indeterminacies: it is a function into the unit interval [0,1],
where 1 means definitely in, 0 definitely out. One philosophical application is
to the sorites paradox, that of the heap. Instead of insisting that there be a
sharp cutoff in number of grains between a heap and a non-heap, or between red
and, say, yellow, one can introduce a spectrum of indeterminacy, as definite
applications of a concept shade off into less clear ones. Nonetheless, many
have found the idea of assigning further definite values, beyond truth and
falsity, unintuitive, and have instead looked to develop a scheme that
encompasses truthvalue gaps. One application of this idea is found in Kleene’s
strong and weak matrices of 1938. Kleene’s motivation was to develop a logic of
partial functions. For certain arguments, these give no definite value; but the
function may later be extended so that in such cases a definite value is given.
Kleene’s constraint, therefore, was that the matrices be regular: no
combination is given a definite value that might later be changed; moreover, on
the definite values the matrices must be classical. The weak matrices are as
for Bochvar. The strong matrices yield (1 for truth, 0 for falsity, and u for
indeterminacy): An alternative approach to truth-value gaps was presented by
Bas van Fraassen in the 1960s. Suppose v(A) is undefined if v(B) is undefined
for any subformula B of A. Let a classical extension of a truth-value
assignment v be any assignment that matches v on 0 and 1 and assigns either 0
or 1 whenever v assigns no value. Then we can define a supervaluation w over v:
w(A) % 1 if the value of A on all classical extensions of v is 1, 0 if it is 0
and undefined otherwise. A is valid if w(A) % 1 for all supervaluations w (over
arbitrary valuations). By this method, excluded middle, e.g., comes out valid,
since it takes 1 in all classical extensions of any partial valuation. Van
Fraassen presented several applications of the supervaluation technique. One is
to free logic, logic in which empty terms are admitted.
mao Tse-tung: Chinese
Communist leader, founder of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He
believed that Marxist ideas must be adapted to China. Contrary to the Marxist
orthodoxy, which emphasized workers, Mao organized peasants in the countryside.
His philosophical writings include On Practice (1937) and On Contradiction
(1937), synthesizing dialectical materialism and traditional Chinese
philosophy. In his later years he departed from the gradual strategy of his On
New Democracy (1940) and adopted increasingly radical means to change China.
Finally he started the Cultural Revolution in 1967 and plunged China into
disaster.
marcel, Gabriel
(1889–1973), French philosopher and playwright, a major representative of
French existential thought. He was a member of the Academy of Political and
Social Science of the Institute of France. Musician, drama critic, and lecturer
of international renown, he authored thirty plays and as many philosophic
essays. He considered his principal contribution to be that of a
philosopher-dramatist. Together, his dramatic and philosophic works cut a path
for Mao Tse-tung Marcel, Gabriel 534 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 534
the reasoned exercise of freedom to enhance the dignity of human life. The
conflicts and challenges of his own life he brought to the light of the
theater; his philosophic works followed as efforts to discern critically
through rigorous, reasoned analyses the alternative options life offers. His
dramatic masterpiece, The Broken World, compassionately portrayed the
devastating sense of emptiness, superficial activities, and fractured
relationships that plague the modern era. This play cleared a way for Marcel to
transcend nineteenth-century British and German idealism, articulate his
distinction between problem and mystery, and evolve an existential approach
that reflectively clarified mysteries that can provide depth and meaningfulness
to human life. In the essay “On the Ontological Mystery,” a philosophic sequel
to The Broken World, Marcel confronted the questions “Who am I? – Is Being
empty or full?” He explored the regions of body or incarnate being,
intersubjectivity, and transcendence. His research focused principally on
intersubjectivity clarifying the requisite attitudes and essential
characteristics of I-Thou encounters, interpersonal relations, commitment and creative
fidelity – notions he also developed in Homo Viator (1945) and Creative
Fidelity (1940). Marcel’s thought balanced despair and hope, infidelity and
fidelity, self-deception and a spirit of truth. He recognized both the role of
freedom and the role of fundamental attitudes or prephilosophic dispositions,
as these influence one’s way of being and the interpretation of life’s meaning.
Concern for the presence of loved ones who have died appears in both Marcel’s
dramatic and philosophic works, notably in Presence and Immortality. This
concern, coupled with his reflections on intersubjectivity, led him to explore
how a human subject can experience the presence of God or the presence of loved
ones from beyond death. Through personal experience, dramatic imagination, and
philosophic investigation, he discovered that such presence can be experienced
principally by way of inwardness and depth. “Presence” is a spiritual influx
that profoundly affects one’s being, uplifting it and enriching one’s personal
resources. While it does depend on a person’s being open and permeable,
presence is not something that the person can summon forth. A conferral or
presence is always a gratuitous gift, coauthored and marked by its signal
benefit, an incitement to create. So Marcel’s reflection on interpersonal
communion enabled him to conceive philosophically how God can be present to a
person as a life-giving and personalizing force whose benefit is always an
incitement to create.
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (from 161)
and philosopher. Author of twelve books of Meditations (Greek title, To
Himself), Marcus Aurelius is principally interesting in the history of Stoic
philosophy (of which he was a diligent student) for his ethical self-portrait.
Except for the first book, detailing his gratitude to his family, friends, and
teachers, the aphorisms are arranged in no order; many were written in camp
during military campaigns. They reflect both the Old Stoa and the more eclectic
views of Posidonius, with whom he holds that involvement in public affairs is a
moral duty. Marcus, in accord with Stoicism, considers immortality doubtful;
happiness lies in patient acceptance of the will of the panentheistic Stoic
God, the material soul of a material universe. Anger, like all emotions, is forbidden
the Stoic emperor: he exhorts himself to compassion for the weak and evil among
his subjects. “Do not be turned into ‘Caesar,’ or dyed by the purple: for that
happens” (6.30). “It is the privilege of a human being to love even those who
stumble” (7.22). Sayings like these, rather than technical arguments, give the
book its place in literary history.
Marcuse: philosopher who reinterpreted the
ideas of Marx and Freud. Marcuse’s work is among the most systematic and
philosophical of the Frankfurt School theorists. After an initial attempt to
unify Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger in an ontology of historicity in his
habilitation on Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932), Marcuse
was occupied during the 1930s with the problem of truth in a critical
historical social theory, defending a contextindependent notion of truth
against relativizing tendencies of the sociology of knowledge. Marcuse thought
Hegel’s “dialectics” provided an alternative to relativism, empiricism, and
positivism and even developed a revolutionary interpretation of the Hegelian
legacy in Reason and Revolution (1941) opposed to Popper’s totalitarian one.
After World War II, Marcuse appropriated Freud in the same way that he had
appropriated Hegel before the war, using his basic concepts for a critical
theory of the repressive character of civilization in Eros and Civilization
(1955). In many respects, this book comes closer to presenting a positive
conception of reason and Enlightenment than any other work of the Frankfurt School.
Marcuse argued that civilization has been antagonistic to happiness and freedom
through its constant struggle against basic human instincts. According to
Marcuse, human existence is grounded in Eros, but these impulses depend upon
and are shaped by labor. By synthesizing Marx and Freud, Marcuse holds out the
utopian possibility of happiness and freedom in the unity of Eros and labor,
which at the very least points toward the reduction of “surplus repression” as
the goal of a rational economy and emancipatory social criticism. This was also
the goal of his aesthetic theory as developed in The Aesthetic Dimension
(1978). In One Dimensional Man (1964) and other writings, Marcuse provides an
analysis of why the potential for a free and rational society has never been
realized: in the irrationality of the current social totality, its creation and
manipulation of false needs (or “repressive desublimation”), and hostility
toward nature. Perhaps no other Frankfurt School philosopher has had as much
popular influence as Marcuse, as evidenced by his reception in the student and
ecology movements.
Mariana: Jesuit historian and political
philosopher. Born in Talavera de la Reina, he studied at Alcalá de Henares and
taught at Rome, Sicily, and Paris. His political ideas are contained in De rege
et regis institutione and De monetae mutatione. Mariana held that political
power rests on the community of citizens, and the power of the monarch derives
from the people. The natural state of humanity did not include, as Vitoria
held, government and other political institutions. The state of nature was one
of justice in which all possessions were held in common, and cooperation
characterized human relations. Private property is the result of technological
advances that produced jealousy and strife. Antedating both Hobbes and
Rousseau, Mariana argued that humans made a contract and delegated their
political power to leaders in order to eliminate injustice and strife. However,
only the people have the right to change the law. A monarch who does not follow
the law and ceases to act for the citizens’ welfare may be forcibly removed.
Tyrannicide is thus justifiable under some circumstances.
Maritain: philosopher whose innovative
interpretation of Aquinas’s philosophy made him a central figure in
Neo-Thomism. Bergson’s teaching saved him from metaphysical despair and a
suicide pact with his fiancée. After his discovery of Aquinas, he rejected
Bergsonism for a realistic account of the concept and a unified theory of
knowledge, aligning the empirical sciences with the philosophy of nature,
metaphysics, theology, and mysticism in Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of
Knowledge (1932). Maritain opposed the skepticism and idealism that severed the
mind from sensibility, typified by the “angelism” of Descartes’s intuitionism.
Maritain traced the practical effects of angelism in art, politics, and
religion. His Art and Scholasticism (1920) employs ancient and medieval notions
of art as a virtue and beauty as a transcendental aspect of being. In politics,
especially Man and the State (1961), Maritain stressed the distinction between
the person and the individual, the ontological foundation of natural rights,
the religious origins of the democratic ideal, and the importance of the common
good. He also argued for the possibility of philosophy informed by the data of
revelation without compromising its integrity, and an Integral Humanism (1936)
that affirms the political order while upholding the eternal destiny of the
human person.
Marsilius of Inghen, philosopher, born
near Nijmegen, Marsilius studied under Buridan, taught at Paris, then moved to
the newly founded ‘studium generale’ at Heidelberg, where he and Albert of
Saxony established nominalism in Germany. In logic, he produced an Ockhamist
revision of the Tractatus of Peter of Spain, often published as Textus
dialectices in early sixteenthcentury Germany, and a commentary on Aristotle’s
Prior Analytics. He developed Buridan’s theory of impetus in his own way,
accepted Bradwardine’s account of the proportions of velocities, and adopted
Nicholas of Oresme’s doctrine of intension and remission of forms, applying the
new physics in his commentaries on Aristotle’s physical works. In theology he
followed Ockham’s skeptical emphasis on faith, allowing that one might prove
the existence of God along Scotistic lines, but insisting that, since natural
philosophy could not accommodate the creation of the universe ex nihilo, God’s
omnipotence was known only through faith.
Mainardini -- Marsilius of Padua, in
Italian, Marsilio dei Mainardini (1275/80–1342), Italian political theorist. He
served as rector of the University of Paris between 1312 and 1313; his
anti-papal views forced him to flee Paris (1326) for Nuremberg, where he was
political and ecclesiastic adviser of Louis of Bavaria. His major work,
Defensor pacis (“Defender of Peace,” 1324), attacks the doctrine of the
supremacy of the pope and argues that the authority of a secular ruler elected
to represent the people is superior to the authority of the papacy and
priesthood in both temporal and spiritual affairs. Three basic claims of
Marsilius’s theory are that reason, not instinct or God, allows us to know what
is just and conduces to the flourishing of human society; that governments need
to enforce obedience to the laws by coercive measures; and that political power
ultimately resides in the people. He was influenced by Aristotle’s ideal of the
state as necessary to foster human flourishing. His thought is regarded as a
major step in the history of political philosophy and one of the first defenses
of republicanism.
martineau: English
philosopher of religion and ethical intuitionist. As a minister and a
professor, Martineau defended Unitarianism and opposed pantheism. In A Study of
Religion (1888) Martineau agreed with Kant that reality as we experience it is
the work of the mind, but he saw no reason to doubt his intuitive conviction
that the phenomenal world corresponds to a real world of enduring, causally
related objects. He believed that the only intelligible notion of causation is
given by willing and concluded that reality is the expression of a divine will
that is also the source of moral authority. In Types of Ethical Theory he
claimed that the fundamental fact of ethics is the human tendency to approve
and disapprove of the motives leading to voluntary actions, actions in which
there are two motives present to consciousness. After freely choosing one of
the motives, the agent can determine which action best expresses it. Since
Martineau thought that agents intuitively know through conscience which motive
is higher, the core of his ethical theory is a ranking of the thirteen
principal motives, the highest of which is reverence.
Marx: cf. Grice, “Ontological marxism.” German
social philosopher, economic theorist, and revolutionary. He lived and worked
as a journalist in Cologne, Paris, and Brussels. After the unsuccessful 1848
revolutions in Europe, he settled in London, doing research and writing and
earning some money as correspondent for the New York Tribune. In early
writings, he articulated his critique of the religiously and politically
conservative implications of the then-reigning philosophy of Hegel, finding
there an acceptance of existing private property relationships and of the
alienation generated by them. Marx understood alienation as a state of radical
disharmony (1) among individuals, (2) between them and their own life activity,
or labor, and (3) between individuals and their system of production. Later, in
his masterwork Capital (1867, 1885, 1894), Marx employed Hegel’s method of
dialectic to generate an internal critique of the theory and practice of
capitalism, showing that, under assumptions (notably that human labor is the
source of economic value) found in such earlier theorists as Adam Smith, this
system must undergo increasingly severe crises, resulting in the eventual
seizure of control of the increasingly centralized means of production
(factories, large farms, etc.) from the relatively small class of capitalist proprietors
by the previously impoverished non-owners (the proletariat) in the interest of
a thenceforth classless society. Marx’s early writings, somewhat utopian in
tone, most never published during his lifetime, emphasize social ethics and
ontology. In them, he characterizes his position as a “humanism” and a
“naturalism.” In the Theses on Feuerbach, he charts a middle path between
Hegel’s idealist account of the nature of history as the selfunfolding of
spirit and what Marx regards as the ahistorical, mechanistic, and passive
materialist philosophy of Feuerbach; Marx proposes a conception of history as
forged by human activity, or praxis, within determinate material conditions
that vary by time and place. In later Marxism, this general position is often labeled
dialectical materialism. Marx began radically to question the nature of
philosophy, coming to view it as ideology, i.e., a thought system parading as
autonomous but in fact dependent on the material conditions of the society in
which it is produced. The tone of Capital is therefore on the whole less
philosophical and moralistic, more social scientific and tending toward
historical determinism, than that of the earlier writings, but punctuated by
bursts of indignation against the baneful effects of capitalism’s profit
orientation and references to the “society of associated producers” (socialism
or communism) that would, or could, replace capitalist society. His
enthusiastic predictions of immanent worldwide revolutionary changes, in
various letters, articles, and the famous Communist Manifesto (1848; jointly
authored with his close collaborator, Friedrich Engels), depart from the
generally more hypothetical character of the text of Capital itself. The
linchpin that perhaps best connects Marx’s earlier and later thought and
guarantees his enduring relevance as a social philosopher is his analysis of
the role of human labor power as a peculiar type of commodity within a system
of commodity exchange (his theory of surplus value). Labor’s peculiarity, according
to him, lies in its capacity actively to generate more exchange value than it
itself costs employers as subsistence wages. But to treat human beings as
profit-generating commodities risks neglecting to treat them as human beings. Marxism,
the philosophy of Karl Marx, or any of several systems of thought or approaches
to social criticism derived from Marx. The term is also applied, incorrectly,
to certain sociopolitical structures created by dominant Communist parties
during the mid-twentieth century. Karl Marx himself, apprised of the ideas of
certain French critics who invoked his name, remarked that he knew at least
that he was not a Marxist. The fact that his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, a
popularizer with a greater interest than Marx in the natural sciences, outlived
him and wrote, among other things, a “dialectics of nature” that purported to
discover certain universal natural laws, added to the confusion. Lenin, the
leading Russian Communist revolutionary, near the end of his life discovered
previously unacknowledged connections between Marx’s Capital (1867) and Hegel’s
Science of Logic (1812–16) and concluded (in his Philosophical Notebooks) that
Marxists for a half-century had not understood Marx. Specific political agendas
of, among others, the Marxist faction within the turn-of-the-century German
Social Democratic Party, the Bolshevik faction of Russian socialists led by
Lenin, and later governments and parties claiming allegiance to
“Marxist-Leninist principles” have contributed to reinterpretations. For
several decades in the Soviet Union and countries allied with it, a broad
agreement concerning fundamental Marxist doctrines was established and
politically enforced, resulting in a doctrinaire version labeled “orthodox
Marxism” and virtually ensuring the widespread, wholesale rejection of Marxism
as such when dissidents taught to accept this version as authentic Marxism came
to power. Marx never wrote a systematic exposition of his thought, which in any
case drastically changed emphases across time and included elements of history,
economics, and sociology as well as more traditional philosophical concerns. In
one letter he specifically warns against regarding his historical account of
Western capitalism as a transcendental analysis of the supposedly necessary
historical development of any and all societies at a certain time. It is thus
somewhat paradoxical that Marxism is often identified as a “totalizing” if not
“totalitarian” system by postmodernist philosophers who reject global theories
or “grand narratives” as inherently invalid. However, the evolution of Marxism
since Marx’s time helps explain this identification. That “orthodox” Marxism
would place heavy emphasis on historical determinism – the inevitability of a
certain general sequence of events leading to the replacement of capitalism by
a socialist economic system (in which, according to a formula in Marx’s
Critique of the Gotha Program, each person would be remunerated according to
his/her work) and eventually by a communist one (remuneration in accordance
with individual needs) – was foreshadowed by Plekhanov. In The Role of the
Individual in History, he portrayed individual idiosyncrasies as accidental:
e.g., had Napoleon not existed the general course of history would not have
turned out differently. In Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin offered
epistemological reinforcement for the notion that Marxism is the uniquely true
worldview by defending a “copy” or “reflection” theory of knowledge according
to which true concepts simply mirror objective reality, like photographs.
Elsewhere, however, he argued against “economism,” the inference that the
historical inevitability of communism’s victory obviated political activism.
Lenin instead maintained that, at least under the repressive political
conditions of czarist Russia, only a clandestine party of professional
revolutionaries, acting as the vanguard of the working class and in its
interests, could produce fundamental change. Later, during the long political
reign of Josef Stalin, the hegemonic Communist Party of the USSR was identified
as the supreme interpreter of these interests, thus justifying totalitarian
rule. So-called Western Marxism opposed this “orthodox” version, although the
writings of one of its foremost early representatives, Georg Lukacs, who
brilliantly perceived the close connection between Hegel’s philosophy and the
early thought of Marx before the unpublished manuscripts proving this
connection had been retrieved from archives, actually tended to reinforce both
the view that the party incarnated the ideal interests of the proletariat (see
his History and Class Consciousness) and an aesthetics favoring the art of
“socialist realism” over more experimental forms. His contemporary, Karl
Korsch, in Marxism as Philosophy, instead saw Marxism as above all a heuristic
method, pointing to salient phenomena (e.g., social class, material
conditioning) generally neglected by other philosophies. His counsel was in
effect followed by the Frankfurt School of critical theory, including Walter
Benjamin in the area of aesthetics, Theodor Adorno in social criticism, and
Wilhelm Reich in psychology. A spate of “new Marxisms” – the relative degrees
of their fidelity to Marx’s original thought cannot be weighed here –
developed, especially in the wake of the gradual rediscovery of Marx’s more
ethically oriented, less deterministic early writings. Among the names meriting
special mention in this context are Ernst Bloch, who explored Marxism’s
connection with utopian thinking; Herbert Marcuse, critic of the
“one-dimensionality” of industrial society; the Praxis school (after the name
of their journal and in view of their concern with analyzing social practices)
of Yugoslav philosophers; and the later Jean-Paul Sartre. Also worthy of note
are the writings, many of them composed in prison under Mussolini’s Italian
Fascist rule, of Antonio Gramsci, who stressed the role of cultural factors in
determining what is dominant politically and ideologically at any given time.
Simultaneous with the decline and fall of regimes in which “orthodox Marxism”
was officially privileged has been the recent development of new approaches,
loosely connected by virtue of their utilization of techniques favored by
British and American philosophers, collectively known as analytic Marxism.
Problems of justice, theories of history, and the questionable nature of Marx’s
theory of surplus value have been special concerns to these writers. This
development suggests that the current unfashionableness of Marxism in many
circles, due largely to its understandable but misleading identification with
the aforementioned regimes, is itself only a temporary phenomenon, even if
future Marxisms are likely to range even further from Marx’s own specific
concerns while still sharing his commitment to identifying, explaining, and
criticizing hierarchies of dominance and subordination, particularly those of
an economic order, in human society. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Ontological marxim.”
materia et forma. If anything characterizes
‘analytic’ philosophy, then it is presumably the emphasis placed on
analysis. But as history shows, there is a wide range of conceptions of
analysis, so such a characterization says nothing that would distinguish
analytic philosophy from much of what has either preceded or developed
alongside it. Given that the decompositional conception is usually offered
as the main conception, it might be thought that it is this that characterizes
analytic philosophy, even Oxonian 'informalists' like Strawson.But this
conception was prevalent in the early modern period, shared by both the British
Empiricists and Leibniz, for example. Given that Kant denied the
importance of de-compositional analysis, however, it might be suggested that
what characterizes analytic philosophy is the value it places on such
analysis. This might be true of G. E. Moore's early work, and of one
strand within analytic philosophy; but it is not generally true. What
characterizes analytic philosophy as it was founded by Frege and Russell is the
role played by logical analysis, which depended on the development of modern
logic. Although other and subsequent forms of analysis, such as
'linguistic' analysis, were less wedded to systems of FORMAL logic, the central
insight motivating logical analysis remained. Pappus's account of
method in ancient Greek geometry suggests that the regressive conception of
analysis was dominant at the time — however much other conceptions may also
have been implicitly involved.In the early modern period, the decompositional
conception became widespread.What characterizes analytic philosophy—or at least
that central strand that originates in the work of Frege and Russell—is the
recognition of what was called earlier the transformative or interpretive
dimension of analysis.Any analysis presupposes a particular framework of
interpretation, and work is done in interpreting what we are seeking to analyze
as part of the process of regression and decomposition. This may involve
transforming it in some way, in order for the resources of a given theory or
conceptual framework to be brought to bear. Euclidean geometry provides a
good illustration of this. But it is even more obvious in the case of
analytic geometry, where the geometrical problem is first ‘translated’ into the
language of algebra and arithmetic in order to solve it more easily.What
Descartes and Fermat did for analytic geometry, Frege and Russell did for
analytic PHILOSOPHY. Analytic philosophy is ‘analytic’ much more in the
way that analytic geometry (as Fermat's and Descartes's) is ‘analytic’ than in
the crude decompositional sense that Kant understood it. The
interpretive dimension of philosophical analysis can also be seen as
anticipated in medieval scholasticism and it is remarkable just how much of
modern concerns with propositions, meaning, reference, and so on, can be found
in the medieval literature. Interpretive analysis is also illustrated in
the nineteenth century by Bentham's conception of paraphrasis, which he
characterized as "that sort of exposition which may be afforded by
transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a
proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious
entity." Bentham, a palaeo-Griceian, applies the idea in ‘analyzing
away’ talk of ‘obligations’, and the anticipation that we can see here of
Russell's theory of descriptions has been noted by, among others, Wisdom and
Quine in ‘Five Milestones of Empiricism.'vide: Wisdom on Bentham as
palaeo-Griceian.What was crucial in analytic philosophy, however, was the development
of quantificational theory, which provided a far more powerful interpretive
system than anything that had hitherto been available. In the case of
Frege and Russell, the system into which statements were ‘translated’ was
predicate calculus, and the divergence that was thereby opened up between the
'matter' and the logical 'form' meant that the process of 'translation' (or
logical construction or deconstruction) itself became an issue of philosophical
concern. This induced greater self-consciousness about our use of language
and its potential to mislead us (the infamous implicaturums, which are neither
matter nor form -- they are IMPLICATED matter, and the philosopher may want to
arrive at some IMPLICATED form -- as 'the'), and inevitably raised semantic,
epistemological and metaphysical questions about the relationships between
language, logic, thought and reality which have been at the core of analytic
philosophy ever since. Both Frege and Russell (after the latter's
initial flirtation with then fashionable Hegelian Oxonian idealism -- "We
were all Hegelians then") were concerned to show, against Kant, that
arithmetic (or number theory, from Greek 'arithmos,' number -- if not geometry)
is a system of analytic and not synthetic truths, as Kant misthought. In
the Grundlagen, Frege offers a revised conception of analyticity, which
arguably endorses and generalizes Kant's logical as opposed to phenomenological
criterion, i.e., (ANL) rather than (ANO) (see the supplementary section on
Kant): (AN) A truth is analytic if its proof depends only on
general logical laws and definitions. The question of whether arithmetical
truths are analytic then comes down to the question of whether they can be
derived purely logically. This was the failure of Ramsey's logicist
project.Here we already have ‘transformation’, at the theoretical level —
involving a reinterpretation of the concept of analyticity.To demonstrate this,
Frege realized that he needed to develop logical theory in order to 'FORMALISE'
a mathematical statements, which typically involve multiple generality or
multiple quantification -- alla "The altogether nice girl loves the
one-at-at-a-time sailor" (e.g., ‘Every natural number has a
successor’, i.e. ‘For every natural number x there is another natural number y
that is the successor of x’). This development, by extending the use of
function-argument analysis in mathematics to logic and providing a notation for
quantification, is essentially the achievement of his Begriffsschrift,
where he not only created the first system of predicate calculus but also,
using it, succeeded in giving a logical analysis of mathematical induction (see
Frege FR, 47-78). In Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, Frege goes on to
provide a logical analysis of number statements (as in "Mary had two
little lambs; therefore she has one little lamb" -- "Mary has a
little lamb" -- "Mary has at least one lamb and at most one
lamb").
Frege's central idea is that a number statement contains an
assertion about a 'concept.'A statement such as Jupiter has four moons.is
to be understood NOT as *predicating* of *Jupiter* the property of having four
moons, but as predicating of the 'concept' "moon of Jupiter" the
second-level property " ... has at least and at most four instances,"
which can be logically defined. The significance of this construal can be
brought out by considering negative existential statements (which are
equivalent to number statements involving "0"). Take the
following negative existential statement: Unicorns do not
exist. Or Grice's"Pegasus does not exist.""A flying horse
does not exist."If we attempt to analyze this decompositionally, taking
the 'matter' to leads us to the 'form,' which as philosophers, is all we care
for, we find ourselves asking what these unicorns or this flying horse called
Pegasus are that have the property of non-existence!Martin, to provoke Quine,
called his cat 'Pegasus.'For Quine, x is Pegasus if x Pegasus-ises (Quine, to
abbreviate, speaks of 'pegasise,' which is "a solicism, at Oxford."We
may then be forced to posit the Meinongian subsistence — as opposed to
existence — of a unicorn -- cf. Warnock on 'Tigers exist' in "Metaphysics
in Logic" -- just as Meinong (in his ontological jungle, as Grice calls
it) and Russell did ('the author of Waverley does not exist -- he was invented
by the literary society"), in order for there to be something that is the
subject of our statement.
On the Fregean account, however, to deny that something exists is
to say that the corresponding concept has no instance -- it is not possible to
apply 'substitutional quantification.' (This leads to the paradox of
extensionalism, as Grice notes, in that all void predicates refer to the empty
set). There is no need to posit any mysterious object, unless like Locke,
we proceed empirically with complex ideas (that of a unicorn, or flying horse)
as simple ideas (horse, winged). The Fregean analysis of (0a) consists in
rephrasing it into (0b), which can then be readily FORMALISED as(0b) The
concept unicorn is not instantiated. (0c) ~(∃x) Fx. Similarly, to say that God
exists is to say that the concept God is (uniquely) instantiated, i.e., to deny
that the concept has 0 instances (or 2 or more instances). This is
actually Russell's example ("What does it mean that (Ex)God?")But cf.
Pears and Thomson, two collaborators with Grice in the reprint of an old
Aristotelian symposium, "Is existence a predicate?"On this view,
existence is no longer seen as a (first-level) predicate, but instead,
existential statements are analyzed in terms of the (second-level) predicate is
instantiated, represented by means of the existential quantifier. As Frege
notes, this offers a neat diagnosis of what is wrong with the ontological
argument, at least in its traditional form (GL, §53). All the problems
that arise if we try to apply decompositional analysis (at least straight off)
simply drop away, although an account is still needed, of course, of concepts
and quantifiers. The possibilities that this strategy of
‘translating’ 'MATTER' into 'FORM' opens up are enormous.We are no longer
forced to treat the 'MATTER' of a statement as a guide to 'FORM', and are
provided with a means of representing that form. This is the value of
logical analysis.It allows us to ‘analyze away’ problematic linguistic MATERIAL
or matter-expressions and explain what it is going on at the level of the FORM,
not the MATTERGrice calls this 'hylemorphism,' granting "it is confusing
in that we are talking 'eidos,' not 'morphe'." This strategy was employed,
most famously, in Russell's theory of descriptions (on 'the' and 'some') which
was a major motivation behind the ideas of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.SeeGrice,
"Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular"Although
subsequent philosophers were to question the assumption that there could ever
be a definitive logical analysis of a given statement, the idea that this or
that 'material' expression may be systematically misleading has
remained. To illustrate this, consider the following examples from
Ryle's essay ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’:
(Ua) Unpunctuality is reprehensible.Or from Grice's and Strawson's
seminar on Aristotle's Categories:Smith's disinteresteness and altruism are in
the other room.Banbury is an egoism. Egoism is reprehensible Banbury is malevolent.
Malevolence is rephrensible. Banbury is an altruism. Altruism and
cooperativeness are commendable. In terms of second-order predicate calculus.
If Banbury is altruist, Banbury is commendable. (Ta) Banbury hates
(the thought of) going to hospital. Ray Noble loves the very thought
of you. In each case, we might be tempted to make unnecessary 'reification,' or
subjectification, as Grice prefers (mocking 'nominalisation' -- a category
shift) taking ‘unpunctuality’ and ‘the thought of going to hospital’ as referring
to a thing, or more specifically a 'prote ousia,' or spatio-temporal
continuant. It is because of this that Ryle describes such expressions as
‘systematically misleading’. As Ryle later told Grice, "I would have
used 'implicaturally misleading,' but you hadn't yet coined the thing!"
(Ua) and (Ta) must therefore be rephrased: (Ub) Whoever is
unpunctual deserves that other people should reprove him for being
unpunctual. Although Grice might say that it is one harmless thing to
reprove 'interestedness' and another thing to recommend BANBURY himself, not
his disinterestedness. (Tb) Jones feels distressed when he thinks of what he
will undergo IF he goes to hospital. Or in more behaviouristic
terms: The dog salivates when he salivates that he will be given food.(Ryle
avoided 'thinking' like the rats). In this or that FORM of the MATTER,
there is no overt talk at all of ‘unpunctuality’ or ‘thoughts’, and hence
nothing to tempt us to posit the existence of any corresponding
entities. The problems that otherwise arise have thus been ‘analyzed
away’. At the time that he wrote ‘Systematically Misleading
Expressions’, Ryle too, assumed that every statement has a form -- even
Sraffa's gesture has a form -- that was to be exhibited correctly.But when he
gave up this assumption (and call himself and Strawson 'informalist') he did
not give up the motivating idea of conceptual analysis—to show what is wrong
with misleading expressions. In The Concept of Mind Ryle sought to explain
what he called the ‘category-mistake’ involved in talk of the mind as a kind of
‘Ghost in the Machine’. "I was so fascinated with this idea that when
they offered me the editorship of "Mind," on our first board meeting
I proposed we changed the name of the publication to "Ghost." They
objected, with a smile."Ryle's aim is to “'rectify' the conceptual
geography or botany of the knowledge which we already possess," an idea
that was to lead to the articulation of connective rather than 'reductive,'
alla Grice, if not reductionist, alla Churchland, conceptions of analysis, the
emphasis being placed on elucidating the relationships BETWEEN this or that
concepts without assuming that there is a privileged set of intrinsically basic
or prior concepts (v. Oxford Linguistic Philosophy). For Grice,
surely 'intend' is prior to 'mean,' and 'utterer' is prior to 'expression'. Yet
he is no reductionist. In "Negation," introspection and
incompatibility are prior to 'not.'In "Personal identity," memory is
prior to 'self.'Etc. Vide, Grice, "Conceptual analysis and the
defensible province of philosophy."Ryle says, "You might say that if
it's knowledge it cannot be rectified, but this is Oxford! Everything is
rectifiable!" What these varieties of conceptual analysis suggest, then,
is that what characterizes analysis in analytic philosophy is something far
richer than the mere ‘de-composition’ of a concept into its
‘constituents’. Although reductive is surely a necessity.The alternative
is to take the concept as a 'theoretical' thing introduced by Ramseyfied description
in this law of this theory.For things which are a matter of intuition, like all
the concepts Grice has philosophical intuitions for, you cannot apply the
theory-theory model. You need the 'reductive analysis.' And the analysis NEEDS
to be 'reductive' if it's to be analysis at all! But this is not to say that
the decompositional conception of analysis plays no role at all. It can be
found in Moore, for example.It might also be seen as reflected in the approach
to the analysis of concepts that seeks to specify the necessary and sufficient
conditions for their correct employment, as in Grice's infamous account
of 'mean' for which he lists Urmson and Strawson as challenging the
sufficiency, and himself as challenging the necessity! Conceptual analysis
in this way goes back to the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues -- and Grice
thought himself an English Socrates -- and Oxonian dialectic as Athenian
dialectic-- "Even if I never saw him bothering people with boring
philosophical puzzles."But it arguably reached its heyday with Grice.The
definition of ‘knowledge’ as ‘justified true belief’ is perhaps the second most
infamous example; and this definition was criticised in Gettier's classic essay
-- and again by Grice in the section on the causal theory of 'know' in WoW --
Way of Words.The specification of necessary and sufficient conditions may no
longer be seen as the primary aim of conceptual analysis, especially in the
case of philosophical concepts such as ‘knowledge’, which are fiercely
contested.But consideration of such conditions remains a useful tool in the
analytic philosopher's toolbag, along with the implicaturum, what Grice called
his "new shining tool" "even if it comes with a new shining
skid!"The use of ‘logical form,’ as Grice
and Strawson note, tends to be otiose. They sometimes just use ‘form.’ It’s
different from the ‘syntactic matter’ of the expression. Matter is strictly
what Ammonius uses to translate ‘hyle’ as applied to this case. When Aristotle
in Anal. Pr. Uses variable letters that’s the forma or eidos; when he doesn’t
(and retreats to ‘homo’, etc.) he is into ‘hyle,’ or ‘materia.’ What other form
is there? Grammatical? Surface versus deep structure? God knows. It’s not even
clear with Witters! Grice at least has a theory. You draw a skull to
communicate there is danger. So you are concerned with the logical form of
“there is danger.” An exploration on logical form can start and SHOULD INCLUDE
what Grice calls the ‘one-off predicament,” of an open GAIIB.” To use
Carruthers’s example and Blackburn: You draw an arrow to have your followers
choose one way on the fork of the road. The logical form is that of the
communicatum. The emissor means that his follower should follow the left path.
What is the logical form of this? It may be said that “p” has a simplex logical
form, the A is B – predicate calculus, or ‘predicative’ calculus, as Starwson
more traditionally puts it! Then there is molecular complex logical form with
‘negation,’ ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘if.’. you can’t put it in symbols, it’s not worth
saying. Oh, no, if you can put it in symbols, it’s not worth saying. Grice
loved the adage, “quod per litteras demonstrare volumus, universaliter
demonstramus.” material
adequacy, the property that belongs to a formal definition of a concept when
that definition characterizes or “captures” the extension (or material) of the
concept. Intuitively, a formal definition of a concept is materially adequate
if and only if it is neither too broad nor too narrow. Tarski advanced the
state of philosophical semantics by discovering the criterion of material
adequacy of truth definitions contained in his convention T. Material adequacy
contrasts with analytic adequacy, which belongs to definitions that provide a
faithful analysis. Defining an integer to be even if and only if it is the
product of two consecutive integers would be materially adequate but not
analytically adequate, whereas defining an integer to be even if and only if it
is a multiple of 2 would be both materially and analytically adequate.
Mccosh: Like Kant, a Scots philosopher, a
common sense realist who attempted to reconcile Christianity with evolution. A
prolific writer, McCosh was a pastor in Scotland and a professor at Queen’s
College, Belfast, before becoming president of the College of New Jersey (now
Princeton University). In The Intuitions of the Mind (1860) he argued that
while acts of intelligence begin with immediate knowledge of the self or of
external objects, they also exhibit intuitions in the spontaneous formation of
self-evident convictions about objects. In opposition to Kant and Hamilton,
McCosh treated intuitions not as forms imposed by minds on objects, but as
inductively ascertainable rules that minds follow in forming convictions after
perceiving objects. In his Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill’s Philosophy (1866)
McCosh criticized Mill for denying the existence of intuitions while assuming
their operation. In The Religious Aspects of Evolution (1885) McCosh defended
the design argument by equating Darwin’s chance variations with supernatural
design.
Mcdougall: Irish philosophical psychologist.
He was probably the first to define psychology as the science of behavior
(Physiological Psychology, 1905; Psychology: The Science of Behavior, 1912) and
he invented hormic (purposive) psychology. By the early twentieth century, as
psychology strove to become scientific, purpose had become a suspect concept,
but following Stout, McDougall argued that organisms possess an “intrinsic
power of self-determination,” making goal seeking the essential and defining
feature of behavior. In opposition to mechanistic and intellectualistic
psychologies, McDougall, again following Stout, proposed that innate instincts
(later, propensities) directly or indirectly motivate all behavior
(Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908). Unlike more familiar psychoanalytic
instincts, however, many of McDougall’s instincts were social in nature (e.g.
gregariousness, deference). Moreover, McDougall never regarded a person as
merely an assemblage of unconnected and quarreling motives, since people are
“integrated unities” guided by one supreme motive around which others are
organized. McDougall’s stress on behavior’s inherent purposiveness influenced
the behaviorist E. C. Tolman, but was otherwise roundly rejected by more
mechanistic behaviorists and empiricistically inclined sociologists. In his
later years, McDougall moved farther from mainstream thought by championing
Lamarckism and sponsoring research in parapsychology. Active in social causes,
McDougall was an advocate of eugenics (Is America Safe for Democracy?, 1921).
low-subjective contraster: in WoW: 140, Grice distinguishes between a subjective
contraster (such as “The pillar box seems red,” “I see that the pillar box is
red,” “I believe that the pillar box is red” and “I know that the pillar box is
red”) and an objective contraster (“The pillar box is red.”) Within these
subjective contraster, Grice proposes a sub-division between nonfactive
(“low-subjective”) and (“high-subjective”). Low-subjective contrasters are “The
pillar box seems red” and “I believe that the pillar box is red,” which do NOT
entail the corresponding objective contraster. The high-subjective contraster,
being factive or transparent, does. The entailment in the case of the
high-subjective contraster is explained via truth-coniditions: “A sees that the
pillar box is red” and “A knows that the pillar box is red” are analysed ‘iff’
the respective low-subjective contraster obtains (“The pillar box seems red,”
and “A believes that the pillar box is red”), the corresponding objective
contraster also obtains (“The pillar box is red”), and a third condition
specifying the objective contraster being the CAUSE of the low-subjective
contraster. Grice repeats his account of suprasegmental. Whereas in “Further
notes about logic and conversation,” he had focused on the accent on the
high-subjective contraster (“I KNOW”), he now focuses his attention on the
accent on the low subjective contraster. “I BELIEVE that the pillar box is
red.” It is the accented version that gives rise to the implicaturum, generated
by the utterer’s intention that the addressee’s will perceive some restraint or
guardedness on the part of the utterer of ‘going all the way’ to utter a claim
to ‘seeing’ or ‘knowing’, the
high-subjective contraster, but stopping short at the low-subjective
contraster.
martian
conversational implicaturum: “Oh, all the difference in the world!” Grice
converses with a Martian. About Martian x-s that the pillar box is
red. (upper x-ing organ) Martian y-s that the pillar box is red. (lower y-ing
organ). Grice: Is x-ing that the pillar box is red LIKE y-ing that the
pillar-box is red? Martian: Oh, no; there's all the difference in the world!
Analogy x smells sweet. x tastes sweet. Martian x-s the the pillar box is
red-x. Martian y-s that the pillar box is red-y. Martian x-s the pillar box is
medium red. Martian y-s the pillar box is light red.
Materialism: one of the twelve labours of
H. P. Grice. d’Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich, Baron, philosopher, a leading
materialist and prolific contributor to the Encyclopedia. He dharma d’Holbach,
Paul-Henri-Dietrich 231 231 was born in
the Rhenish Palatinate, settled in France at an early age, and read law at
Leiden. After inheriting an uncle’s wealth and title, he became a solicitor at
the Paris “Parlement” and a regular host of philosophical dinners attended by
the Encyclopedists and visitors of renown Gibbon, Hume, Smith, Sterne,
Priestley, Beccaria, Franklin. Knowledgeable in chemistry and mineralogy and
fluent in several languages, he tr. G. scientific works and English
anti-Christian pamphlets into . Basically, d’Holbach was a synthetic thinker,
powerful though not original, who systematized and radicalized Diderot’s
naturalism. Also drawing on Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Buffon, Helvétius,
and La Mettrie, his treatises were so irreligious and anticlerical that they
were published abroad anonymously or pseudonymously: Christianity Unveiled
1756, The Sacred Contagion 1768, Critical History of Jesus 1770, The Social
System 1773, and Universal Moral 1776. His masterpiece, the System of Nature
1770, a “Lucretian” compendium of eighteenth-century materialism, even shocked
Voltaire. D’Holbach derived everything from matter and motion, and upheld
universal necessity. The self-sustaining laws of nature are normative. Material
reality is therefore contrasted to metaphysical delusion, self-interest to
alienation, and earthly happiness to otherworldly optimism. More vindictive
than Toland’s, d’Holbach’s unmitigated critique of Christianity anticipated
Feuerbach, Strauss, Marx, and Nietzsche. He discredited supernatural
revelation, theism, deism, and pantheism as mythological, censured Christian
virtues as unnatural, branded piety as fanatical, and stigmatized clerical
ignorance, immorality, and despotism. Assuming that science liberates man from
religious hegemony, he advocated sensory and experimental knowledge. Believing
that society and education form man, he unfolded a mechanistic anthropology, a
eudaimonistic morality, and a secular, utilitarian social and political
program.
maximum: Grice uses ‘maximum’ variously. “Maximally effective
exchange of information.” Maximum is used in decision theory and in value
theory. Cfr. Kasher on maximin. “Maximally effective exchange of information”
(WOW: 28) is the exact phrase Grice uses, allowing it should be generalised. He
repeats the idea in “Epilogue.” Things did not change.
maximal consistent set, in formal logic,
any set of sentences S that is consistent – i.e., no contradiction is provable
from S – and maximally so – i.e., if T is consistent and S 0 T, then S % T. It
can be shown that if S is maximally consistent and s is a sentence in the same
language, then either s or - s (the negation of s) is in S. Thus, a maximally
consistent set is complete: it settles every question that can be raised in the
language.
maximin strategy, a strategy that
maximizes an agent’s minimum gain, or equivalently, minimizes his maximum loss.
Writers who work in terms of loss thus call such a strategy a minimax strategy.
The term ‘security strategy’, which avoids potential confusions, is now widely
used. For each action, its security level is its payoff under the worst-case
scenario. A security strategy is one with maximal security level. An agent’s
security strategy maximizes his expected utility if and only if (1) he is
certain that “nature” has his worst interests at heart and (2) he is certain
that nature will be certain of his strategy when choosing hers. The first
condition is satisfied in the case of a two-person zero-sum game where the
payoff structure is commonly known. In this situation, “nature” is the other
player, and her gain is equal to the first player’s loss. Obviously, these
conditions do not hold for all decision problems.
Maxwell’s pataphysics -- hammer: Scots
physicist who made pioneering contributions to the theory of electromagnetism,
the kinetic theory of gases, and the theory of color vision. His work on
electromagnetism is summarized in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
(1873). In 1871 he became Cambridge University’s first professor of
experimental physics and founded the Cavendish Laboratory, which he directed
until his death. Maxwell’s most important achievements were his field theory of
electromagnetism and the discovery of the equations that bear his name. The
field theory unified the laws of electricity and magnetism, identified light as
a transverse vibration of the electromagnetic ether, and predicted the
existence of radio waves. The fact that Maxwell’s equations are
Lorentz-invariant and contain the speed of light as a constant played a major
role in the genesis of the special theory of relativity. He arrived at his
theory by searching for a “consistent representation” of the ether, i.e., a
model of its inner workings consistent with the laws of mechanics. His search
for a consistent representation was unsuccessful, but his papers used
mechanical models and analogies to guide his thinking. Like Boltzmann, Maxwell
advocated the heuristic value of model building. Maxwell was also a pioneer in
statistical physics. His derivation of the laws governing the macroscopic
behavior of gases from assumptions about the random collisions of gas molecules
led directly to Boltzmann’s transport equation and the statistical analysis of
irreversibility. To show that the second law of thermodynamics is
probabilistic, Maxwell imagined a “neat-fingered” demon who could cause the
entropy of a gas to decrease by separating the faster-moving gas molecules from
the slower-moving ones.
Mead: philosopher, social theorist, and
social reformer. He was a member of the Chicago school of pragmatism, which
included figures such as James Hayden Tufts and John Dewey. Whitehead agreed
with Dewey’s assessment of Mead: “a seminal mind of the very first order.” Mead
was raised in a household with deep roots in New England puritanism, but he
eventually became a confirmed naturalist, convinced that modern science could
make the processes of nature intelligible. On his path to naturalism he studied
with the idealist Josiah Royce at Harvard. The German idealist tradition of
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (who were portrayed by Mead as Romantic
philosophers in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century) had a lasting
influence on his thought, even though he became a confirmed empiricist. Mead is
considered the progenitor of the school of symbolic interaction in sociology,
and is best known for his explanation of the genesis of the mind and the self
in terms of language development and role playing. A close friend of Jane
Addams, he viewed his theoretical work in this area as lending weight to his
progressive political convictions. Mead is often referred to as a social
behaviorist. He employed the categories of stimulus and response in order to
explain behavior, but contra behaviorists such as John B. Watson, Mead did not
dismiss conduct that was not observed by others. He examined the nature of
self-consciousness, whose development is depicted in Mind, Self, and Society,
from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. He also addressed behavior in
terms of the phases of an organism’s adjustment to its environment in The
Philosophy of the Act. His reputation as a theorist of the social development
of the self has tended to eclipse his original work in other areas of concern
to philosophers, e.g., ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of
science. Influenced by Darwin, Mead sought to understand nature, as well as
social relationships, in terms of the process of emergence. He emphasized that
qualitatively new forms of life arise through natural and intelligible
processes. When novel events occur the past is transformed, for the past has
now given rise to the qualitatively new, and it must be seen from a different
perspective. Between the arrival of the new order – which the novel event
instigates – and the old order, there is a phase of readjustment, a stage that
Mead describes as one of sociality. Mead’s views on these and related matters
are discussed in The Philosophy of the Present. Mead never published a
book-length work in philosophy. His unpublished manuscripts and students’ notes
were edited and published as the books cited above.
Communicatum: meaning, the conventional,
common, or standard sense of an expression, construction, or sentence in a
given language, or of a non-linguistic signal or symbol. Literal meaning is the
non-figurative, strict meaning an expression or sentence has in a language by
virtue of the dictionary meaning of its words and the import of its syntactic
constructions. Synonymy is sameness of literal meaning: ‘prestidigitator’ means
‘expert at sleight of hand’. It is said that meaning is what a good translation
preserves, and this may or may not be literal: in French ‘Où sont les neiges
d’antan?’ literally means ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ and figuratively
means ‘nothing lasts’. Signal-types and symbols have non-linguistic
conventional meaning: the white flag means truce; the lion means St. Mark. In
another sense, meaning is what a person intends to communicate by a particular
utterance – utterer’s meaning, as Grice called it, or speaker’s meaning, in
Stephen Schiffer’s term. A speaker’s meaning may or may not coincide with the
literal meaning of what is uttered, and it may be non-linguistic. Non-literal:
in saying “we will soon be in our tropical paradise,” Jane meant that they
would soon be in Antarctica. Literal: in saying “that’s deciduous,” she meant
that the tree loses its leaves every year. Non-linguistic: by shrugging, she
meant that she agreed. The literal meaning of a sentence typically does not
determine exactly what a speaker says in making a literal utterance: the
meaning of ‘she is praising me’ leaves open what John says in uttering it, e.g.
that Jane praises John at 12:00 p.m., Dec. 21, 1991. A not uncommon – but
theoretically loaded – way of accommodating this is to count the
context-specific things that speakers say as propositions, entities that can be
expressed in different languages and that are (on certain theories) the content
of what is said, believed, desired, and so on. On that assumption, a sentence’s
literal meaning is a context-independent rule, or function, that determines a
certain proposition (the content of what the speaker says) given the context of
utterance. David Kaplan has called such a rule or function a sentence’s
“character.” A sentence’s literal meaning also includes its potential for
performing certain illocutionary acts, in J. L. Austin’s term. The meaning of
an imperative sentence determines what orders, requests, and the like can
literally be expressed: ‘sit down there’ can be uttered literally by Jane to
request (or order or urge) John to sit down at 11:59 a.m. on a certain bench in
Santa Monica. Thus a sentence’s literal meaning involves both its character and
a constraint on illocutionary acts: it maps contexts onto illocutionary acts
that have (something like) determinate propositional contents. A context
includes the identity of speaker, hearer, time of utterance, and also aspects
of the speaker’s intentions. In ethics the distinction has flourished between
the expressive or emotive meaning of a word or sentence and its cognitive
meaning. The emotive meaning of an utterance or a term is the attitude it
expresses, the pejorative meaning of ‘chiseler’, say. An emotivist in ethics,
e.g. C. L. Stevenson, cited by Grice in “Meaning” for the Oxford Philosophical
Society, holds that the literal meaning of ‘it is good’ is identical with its
emotive meaning, the positive attitude it expresses. On Hare’s theory, the
literal meaning of ‘ought’ is its prescriptive meaning, the imperative force it
gives to certain sentences that contain it. Such “noncognitivist” theories can
allow that a term like ‘good’ also has non-literal descriptive meaning,
implying nonevaluative properties of an object. By contrast, cognitivists take
the literal meaning of an ethical term to be its cognitive meaning: ‘good’
stands for an objective property, and in asserting “it is good” one literally
expresses, not an attitude, but a true or false judgment. ’Cognitive meaning’
serves as well as any other term to capture what has been central in the theory
of meaning beyond ethics, the “factual” element in meaning that remains when we
abstract from its illocutionary and emotive aspects. It is what is shared by
‘there will be an eclipse tomorrow’ and ‘will there be an eclipse tomorrow?’.
This common element is often identified with a proposition (or a “character”),
but, once again, that is theoretically loaded. Although cognitive meaning has
been the preoccupation of the theory of meaning in the twentieth century, it is
difficult to define precisely in non-theoretical terms. Suppose we say that the
cognitive meaning of a sentence is ‘that aspect of its meaning which is capable
of being true or false’: there are non-truth-conditional theories of meaning
(see below) on which this would not capture the essentials. Suppose we say it
is ‘what is capable of being asserted’: an emotivist might allow that one can
assert that a thing is good. Still many philosophers have taken for granted
that they know cognitive meaning (under that name or not) well enough to
theorize about what it consists in, and it is the focus of what follows. The
oldest theories of meaning in modern philosophy are the
seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century idea theory (also called the ideational
theory) and image theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of words in
public language derives from the ideas or mental images that words are used to
express. As for what constitutes the representational properties of ideas,
Descartes held it to be a basic property of the mind, inexplicable, and Locke a
matter of resemblance (in some sense) between ideas and things. Contemporary
analytic philosophy speaks more of propositional attitudes – thoughts, beliefs,
intentions – than of ideas and images; and it speaks of the contents of such
attitudes: if Jane believes that there are lions in Africa, that belief has as
its content that there are lions in Africa. Virtually all philosophers agree
that propositional attitudes have some crucial connection with meaning. A
fundamental element of a theory of meaning is where it locates the basis of
meaning, in thought, in individual speech, or in social practices. (i) Meaning
may be held to derive entirely from the content of thoughts or propositional
attitudes, that mental content itself being constituted independently of public
linguistic meaning. (‘Constituted independently of’ does not imply ‘unshaped
by’.) (ii) It may be held that the contents of beliefs and communicative
intentions themselves derive in part from the meaning of overt speech, or even
from social practices. Then meaning would be jointly constituted by both
individual psychological and social linguistic facts. Theories of the first
sort include those in the style of Grice, according to which sentences’
meanings are determined by practices or implicit conventions that govern what
speakers mean when they use the relevant words and constructions. The emissor’s
meaning is explained in terms of certain propositional attitudes, namely the
emissor’s intentions to produce certain effects in his emissee. To mean that it
is raining and that the emissee is to close the door is to utter or to do
something (not necessarily linguistic) with the intention (very roughly) of
getting one’s emissee to believe that it is raining and go and close the door.
Theories of the emissor’s meaning have been elaborated at Oxford by H. P. Grice
(originally in a lecture to the Oxford Philosophical Society, inspired in part
by Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning – ‘meaning’ was not considered a
curricular topic in the Lit. Hum. programme he belonge in) and by Schiffer.
David Lewis has proposed that linguistic meaning is constituted by implicit
conventions that systematically associate sentences with speakers’ beliefs
rather than with communicative intentions. The contents of thought might be
held to be constitutive of linguistic meaning independently of communication.
Russell, and Wittgenstein in his early writings, wrote about meaning as if the
key thing is the propositional content of the belief or thought that a sentence
(somehow) expresses; they apparently regarded this as holding on an individual
basis and not essentially as deriving from communication intentions or social
practices. And Chomsky speaks of the point of language as being “the free
expression of thought.” Such views suggest that ‘linguistic meaning’ may stand
for two properties, one involving communication intentions and practices, the
other more intimately related to thinking and conceiving. By contrast, the
content of propositional attitudes and the meaning of overt speech might be
regarded as coordinate facts neither of which can obtain independently: to
interpret other people one must assign both content to their beliefs/intentions
and meaning to their utterances. This is explicit in Davidson’s
truth-conditional theory (see below); perhaps it is present also in the
post-Wittgensteinian notion of meaning as assertability conditions – e.g., in
the writings of Dummett. On still other accounts, linguistic meaning is
essentially social. Wittgenstein is interpreted by Kripke as holding in his
later writings that social rules are essential to meaning, on the grounds that
they alone explain the normative aspect of meaning, explain the fact that an
expression’s meaning determines that some uses are correct or others incorrect.
Another way in which meaning may be essentially social is Putnam’s “division of
linguistic labor”: the meanings of some terms, say in botany or cabinetmaking,
are set for the rest of us by specialists. The point might extend to quite
non-technical words, like ‘red’: a person’s use of it may be socially
deferential, in that the rule which determines what ‘red’ means in his mouth is
determined, not by his individual usage, but by the usage of some social group
to which he semantically defers. This has been argued by Tyler Burge to imply
that the contents of thoughts themselves are in part a matter of social facts.
Let us suppose there is a language L that contains no indexical terms, such as
‘now’, ‘I’, or demonstrative pronouns, but contains only proper names, common
nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, logical words. (No natural language is like
this; but the supposition simplifies what follows.) Theories of meaning differ considerably
in how they would specify the meaning of a sentence S of L. Here are the main
contenders. (i) Specify S’s truth conditions: S is true if and only if some
swans are black. (ii) Specify the proposition that S expresses: S means (the
proposition) that some swans are black. (iii) Specify S’s assertability
conditions: S is assertable if and only if blackswan-sightings occur or
black-swan-reports come in, etc. (iv) Translate S into that sentence of our
language which has the same use as S or the same conceptual role. Certain
theories, especially those that specify meanings in ways (i) and (ii), take the
compositionality of meaning as basic. Here is an elementary fact: a sentence’s
meaning is a function of the meanings of its component words and constructions,
and as a result we can utter and understand new sentences – old words and
constructions, new sentences. Frege’s theory of Bedeutung or reference,
especially his use of the notions of function and object, is about
compositionality. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein explains compositionality in
his picture theory of meaning and theory of truth-functions. According to
Wittgenstein, a sentence or proposition is a picture of a (possible) state of
affairs; terms correspond to non-linguistic elements, and those terms’
arrangements in sentences have the same form as arrangements of elements in the
states of affairs the sentences stand for. The leading truth-conditional theory
of meaning is the one advocated by Davidson, drawing on the work of Tarski.
Tarski showed that, for certain formalized languages, we can construct a finite
set of rules that entails, for each sentence S of the infinitely many sentences
of such a language, something of the form ‘S is true if and only if . . .’.
Those finitely statable rules, which taken together are sometimes called a
truth theory of the language, might entail ‘ “(x) (Rx P Bx)” is true if and
only if every raven is black’. They would do this by having separately assigned
interpretations to ‘R’, ‘B’, ‘P’, and ‘(x)’. Truth conditions are
compositionally determined in analogous ways for sentences, however complex.
Davidson proposes that Tarski’s device is applicable to natural languages and
that it explains, moreover, what meaning is, given the following setting.
Interpretation involves a principle of charity: interpreting a person N means
making the best possible sense of N, and this means assigning meanings so as to
maximize the overall truth of N’s utterances. A systematic interpretation of
N’s language can be taken to be a Tarski-style truth theory that (roughly)
maximizes the truth of N’s utterances. If such a truth theory implies that a
sentence S is true in N’s language if and only if some swans are black, then
that tells us the meaning of S in N’s language. A propositional theory of
meaning would accommodate compositionality thus: a finite set of rules, which
govern the terms and constructions of L, assigns (derivatively) a proposition
(putting aside ambiguity) to each sentence S of L by virtue of S’s terms and
constructions. If L contains indexicals, then such rules assign to each
sentence not a fully specific proposition but a ‘character’ in the above sense.
Propositions may be conceived in two ways: (a) as sets of possible
circumstances or “worlds” – then ‘Hesperus is hot’ in English is assigned the
set of possible worlds in which Hesperus is hot; and (b) as structured
combinations of elements – then ‘Hesperus is hot’ is assigned a certain ordered
pair of elements ‹M1,M2(. There are two theories about M1 and M2. They may be
the senses of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘(is) hot’, and then the ordered pair is a
“Fregean” proposition. They may be the references of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘(is) hot’,
and then the ordered pair is a “Russellian” proposition. This difference
reflects a fundamental dispute in twentieth-century philosophy of language. The
connotation or sense of a term is its “mode of presentation,” the way it
presents its denotation or reference. Terms with the same reference or
denotation may present their references differently and so differ in sense or
connotation. This is unproblematic for complex terms like ‘the capital of
Italy’ and ‘the city on the Tiber’, which refer to Rome via different
connotations. Controversy arises over simple terms, such as proper names and
common nouns. Frege distinguished sense and reference for all expressions; the
proper names ‘Phosphorus’ and ‘Hesperus’ express descriptive senses according
to how we understand them – [that bright starlike object visible before dawn in
the eastern sky . . .], [that bright starlike object visible after sunset in
the western sky . . .]; and they refer to Venus by virtue of those senses.
Russell held that ordinary proper names, such as ‘Romulus’, abbreviate definite
descriptions, and in this respect his view resembles Frege’s. But Russell also
held that, for those simple terms (not ‘Romulus’) into which statements are
analyzable, sense and reference are not distinct, and meanings are “Russellian”
propositions. (But Russell’s view of their constituents differs from
present-day views.) Kripke rejected the “Frege-Russell” view of ordinary proper
names, arguing that the reference of a proper name is determined, not by a
descriptive condition, but typically by a causal chain that links name and
reference – in the case of ‘Hesperus’ a partially perceptual relation perhaps,
in the case of ‘Aristotle’ a causal-historical relation. A proper name is
rather a rigid designator: any sentence of the form ‘Aristotle is . . . ‘
expresses a proposition that is true in a given possible world (or set of
circumstances) if and only if our (actual) Aristotle satisfies, in that world,
the condition ‘ . . . ‘. The “Frege-Russell” view by contrast incorporates in
the proposition, not the actual referent, but a descriptive condition
connotated by ‘Aristotle’ (the author of the Metaphysics, or the like), so that
the name’s reference differs in different worlds even when the descriptive
connotation is constant. (Someone else could have written the Metaphysics.)
Some recent philosophers have taken the rigid designator view to motivate the
stark thesis that meanings are Russellian propositions (or characters that map
contexts onto such propositions): in the above proposition/meaning ‹M1,M2(, M1
is simply the referent – the planet Venus – itself. This would be a referential
theory of meaning, one that equates meaning with reference. But we must
emphasize that the rigid designator view does not directly entail a referential
theory of meaning. What about the meanings of predicates? What sort of entity
is M2 above? Putnam and Kripke also argue an anti-descriptive point about
natural kind terms, predicates like ‘(is) gold’, ‘(is a) tiger’, ‘(is) hot’.
These are not equivalent to descriptions – ’gold’ does not mean ‘metal that is
yellow, malleable, etc.’ – but are rigid designators of underlying natural
kinds whose identities are discovered by science. On a referential theory of
meanings as Russellian propositions, the meaning of ‘gold’ is then a natural
kind. (A complication arises: the property or kind that ‘widow’ stands for
seems a good candidate for being the sense or connotation of ‘widow’, for what
one understands by it. The distinction between Russellian and Fregean
propositions is not then firm at every point.) On the standard sense-theory of
meanings as Fregean propositions, M1 and M2 are pure descriptive senses. But a
certain “neo-Fregean” view, suggested but not held by Gareth Evans, would count
M1 and M2 as object-dependent senses. For example, ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’
would rigidly designate the same object but have distinct senses that cannot be
specified without mention of that object. Note that, if proper names or natural
kind terms have meanings of either sort, their meanings vary from speaker to
speaker. A propositional account of meaning (or the corresponding account of
“character”) may be part of a broader theory of meaning; for example: a
Grice-type theory involving implicit conventions; (b) a theory that meaning
derives from an intimate connection of language and thought; (c) a theory that
invokes a principle of charity or the like in interpreting an individual’s
speech; (d) a social theory on which meaning cannot derive entirely from the
independently constituted contents of individuals’ thoughts or uses. A central
tradition in twentieth-century theory of meaning identifies meaning with
factors other than propositions (in the foregoing senses) and truth-conditions.
The meaning of a sentence is what one understands by it; and understanding a
sentence is knowing how to use it – knowing how to verify it and when to assert
it, or being able to think with it and to use it in inferences and practical
reasoning. There are competing theories here. In the 1930s, proponents of
logical positivism held a verification theory of meaning, whereby a sentence’s
or statement’s meaning consists in the conditions under which it can be
verified, certified as acceptable. This was motivated by the positivists’
empiricism together with their view of truth as a metaphysical or non-empirical
notion. A descendant of verificationism is the thesis, influenced by the later
Wittgenstein, that the meaning of a sentence consists in its assertability
conditions, the circumstances under which one is justified in asserting the
sentence. If justification and truth can diverge, as they appear to, then a
meaning meaning sentence’s assertability conditions can be distinct from (what
non-verificationists see as) its truth conditions. Dummett has argued that
assertability conditions are the basis of meaning and that truth-conditional
semantics rests on a mistake (and hence also propositional semantics in sense
[a] above). A problem with assertability theories is that, as is generally
acknowledged, compositional theories of the assertability conditions of
sentences are not easily constructed. A conceptual role theory of meaning (also
called conceptual role semantics) typically presupposes that we think in a
language of thought (an idea championed by Fodor), a system of internal states
structured like a language that may or may not be closely related to one’s
natural language. The conceptual role of a term is a matter of how thoughts
that contain the term are dispositionally related to other thoughts, to sensory
states, and to behavior. Hartry Field has pointed out that our Fregean
intuitions about ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are explained by those terms’
having distinct conceptual roles, without appeal to Fregean descriptive senses
or the like, and that this is compatible with those terms’ rigidly designating
the same object. This combination can be articulated in two ways. Gilbert
Harman proposes that meaning is “wide” conceptual role, so that conceptual role
incorporates not just inferential factors, etc., but also Kripke-Putnam
external reference relations. But there are also two-factor theories of
meaning, as proposed by Field among others, which recognize two strata of
meaning, one corresponding to how a person understands a term – its narrow
conceptual role, the other involving references, Russellian propositions, or
truth-conditions. As the language-of-thought view indicates, some concerns
about meaning have been taken over by theories of the content of thoughts or
propositional attitudes. A distinction is often made between the narrow content
of a thought and its wide content. If psychological explanation invokes only
“what is in the head,” and if thought contents are essential to psychological
explanation, there must be narrow content. Theories have appealed to the
“syntax” or conceptual roles or “characters” of internal sentences, as well as to
images and stereotypes. A thought’s wide content may then be regarded (as
motivated by the Kripke-Putnam arguments) as a Russellian proposition. The
naturalistic reference-relations that determine the elements of such
propositions are the focus of causal, “informational” and “teleological”
theories by Fodor, Dretske, and Ruth Millikan. Assertability theories and
conceptual role theories have been called use theories of meaning in a broad
sense that marks a contrast with truthconditional theories. On a use theory in
this broad sense, understanding meaning consists in knowing how to use a term
or sentence, or being disposed to use a term or sentence in response to certain
external or conceptual factors. But ‘use theory’ also refers to the doctrine of
the later writings of Wittgenstein, by whom theories of meaning that abstract
from the very large variety of interpersonal uses of language are declared a
philosopher’s mistake. The meanings of terms and sentences are a matter of the
language games in which they play roles; these are too various to have a common
structure that can be captured in a philosopher’s theory of meaning. Conceptual
role theories tend toward meaning holism, the thesis that a term’s meaning
cannot be abstracted from the entirety of its conceptual connections. On a
holistic view any belief or inferential connection involving a term is as much
a candidate for determining its meaning as any other. This could be avoided by
affirming the analytic–synthetic distinction, according to which some of a
term’s conceptual connections are constitutive of its meaning and others only
incidental. (‘Bachelors are unmarried’ versus ‘Bachelors have a tax
advantage’.) But many philosophers follow Quine in his skepticism about that
distinction. The implications of holism are drastic, for it strictly implies
that different people’s words cannot mean the same. In the philosophy of
science, meaning holism has been held to imply the incommensurability of
theories, according to which a scientific theory that replaces an earlier
theory cannot be held to contradict it and hence not to correct or to improve
on it – for the two theories’ apparently common terms would be equivocal.
Remedies might include, again, maintaining some sort of analytic–synthetic
distinction for scientific terms, or holding that conceptual role theories and
hence holism itself, as Field proposes, hold only intrapersonally, while taking
interpersonal and intertheoretic meaning comparisons to be referential and
truth-conditional. Even this, however, leads to difficult questions about the
interpretation of scientific theories. A radical position, associated with
Quine, identifies the meaning of a theory as a whole with its empirical
meaning, that is, the set of actual and possible sensory or perceptual situations
that would count as verifying the theory as a whole. This can be seen as a
successor to the verificationist theory, with theory replacing statement or
sentence. Articulations of meaning internal to a theory would then be spurious,
as would virtually all ordinary intuitions about meaning. This fits well
Quine’s skepticism about meaning, his thesis of the indeterminacy of
translation, according to which no objective facts distinguish a favored
translation of another language into ours from every apparently incorrect
translation. Many constructive theories of meaning may be seen as replies to
this and other skepticisms about the objective status of semantic facts. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “Meaning,” H. P. Grice, “Utterer’s meaning and intentions,” H. P.
Grice, “Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning,” H. P. Grice,
“Meaning revisited.”
H. P. Grice’s postulate of conversational
helpfulness.
H. P. Grice’s postulate of conversational
co-operation. Grice loved to botanise linguistically on ‘desideratum,’
‘objective,’ ‘postulate,’ ‘principle.’ “My favourite seems to be ‘postulate.’”
-- postŭlo , āvi, ātum, 1, v. a. posco, Which Lewis
and Short render as I.to ask, demand, require, request, desire (syn.: posco,
flagito, peto); constr. with aliquid, aliquid ab aliquo, aliquem aliquid, with
ut (ne), de, with inf., or absol. I. In gen.: “incipiunt postulare, poscere,
minari,” Cic. Verr. 2, 3, 34, § 78: “nemo inventus est tam audax, qui posceret,
nemo tam impudens qui postularet ut venderet,” id. ib. 2, 4, 20, § 44; cf. Liv.
2, 45; 3, 19: “tametsi causa postulat, tamen quia postulat, non flagitat,
praeteribo,” Cic. Quint. 3, 13: “postulabat autem magis quam petebat, ut,
etc.,” Curt. 4, 1, 8: “dehinc postulo, sive aequom est, te oro, ut, etc.,” Ter.
And. 1, 2, 19: “ita volo itaque postulo ut fiat,” id. ib. 3, 3, 18; Plaut. Aul.
4, 10, 27: “suom jus postulat,” Ter. Ad. 2, 1, 47; cf.: “aequom postulat, da
veniam,” id. And. 5, 3, 30; and: “quid est? num iniquom postulo?” id. Phorm. 2,
3, 64: “nunc hic dies alios mores postulat,” id. And. 1, 2, 18: “fidem
publicam,” Cic. Att. 2, 24, 2: “istud, quod postulas,” id. Rep. 1, 20, 33; id.
Lael. 2, 9: “ad senatum venire auxilium postulatum,” Caes. B. G. 1, 31:
“deliberandi sibi unum diem postulavit,” Cic. N. D. 1, 22, 60; cf.: “noctem
sibi ad deliberandum postulavit,” id. Sest. 34, 74: “postulo abs te, ut, etc.,”
Plaut. Capt. 5, 1, 18: “postulatur a te jam diu vel flagitatur potius
historia,” Cic. Leg. 1, 5: “quom maxime abs te postulo atque oro, ut, etc.,”
Ter. And. 5, 1, 4; and: “quidvis ab amico postulare,” Cic. Lael. 10, 35; cf. in
pass.: “cum aliquid ab amicis postularetur,” id. ib.: “orationes a me duas
postulas,” id. Att. 2, 7, 1: “quod principes civitatum a me postulassent,” id.
Fam. 3, 8, 5; cf. infra the passages with an object-clause.—With ut (ne):
“quodam modo postulat, ut, etc.,” Cic. Att. 10, 4, 2: “postulatum est, ut
Bibuli sententia divideretur,” id. Fam. 1, 2, 1 (for other examples with ut, v.
supra): “legatos ad Bocchum mittit postulatum, ne sine causā hostis populo
Romano fieret,” Sall. J. 83, 1.—With subj. alone: “qui postularent, eos qui
sibi Galliaeque bellum intulissent, sibi dederent,” Caes. B. G. 4, 16, 3.—With
de: “sapientes homines a senatu de foedere postulaverunt,” Cic. Balb. 15, 34:
“Ariovistus legatos ad eum mittit, quod antea de colloquio postulasset, id per
se fieri licere,” Caes. B. G. 1, 42.—With inf., freq. to be rendered, to wish,
like, want: qui lepide postulat alterum frustrari, Enn. ap. Gell. 18, 2, 7
(Sat. 32 Vahl.): “hic postulat se Romae absolvi, qui, etc.,” Cic. Verr. 2, 3,
60, § 138: “o facinus impudicum! quam liberam esse oporteat, servire
postulare,” Plaut. Rud. 2, 3, 62; id. Men. 2, 3, 88: “me ducere istis dictis
postulas?” Ter. And. 4, 1, 20; id. Eun. 1, 1, 16: “(lupinum) ne spargi quidem
postulat decidens sponte,” Plin. 18, 14, 36, § 135: “si me tibi praemandere
postulas,” Gell. 4, 1, 11.—With a double object: quas (sollicitudines) levare
tua te prudentia postulat, demands of you, Luccei. ap. Cic. Fam. 5, 14, 2.
—With nom. and inf.: “qui postulat deus credi,” Curt. 6, 11, 24.— II. In
partic., in jurid. lang. A. To summon, arraign before a court, to prosecute,
accuse, impeach (syn.: accuso, insimulo); constr. class. usu. with de and abl.,
post-Aug. also with gen.): “Gabinium tres adhuc factiones postulant: L.
Lentulus, qui jam de majestate postulavit,” Cic. Q. Fr. 3, 1, 5, § 15: “aliquem
apud praetorem de pecuniis repetundis,” id. Cornel. Fragm. 1: “aliquem
repetundis,” Tac. A. 3, 38: “aliquem majestatis,” id. ib. 1, 74: “aliquem repetundarum,”
Suet. Caes. 4: aliquem aliquā lege, Cael. ap. Cic. Fam. 8, 12, 3: “aliquem ex
aliquā causā reum,” Plin. 33, 2, 8, § 33: “aliquem impietatis reum,” Plin. Ep.
7, 33, 7: “aliquem injuriarum,” Suet. Aug. 56 fin.: “aliquem capitis,” Dig. 46,
1, 53: “qui (infames) postulare prohibentur,” Paul. Sent. 1, 2, 1.— B. To
demand a writ or leave to prosecute, from the prætor or other magistrate:
“postulare est desiderium suum vel amici sui in jure apud eum qui jurisdictioni
praeest exponere vel alterius desiderio contradicere, etc.,” Dig. 3, 1, 1; cf.
“this whole section: De postulando: in aliquem delationem nominis postulare,”
Cic. Div. in Caecil. 20, 64: “postulare servos in quaestionem,” id. Rosc. Am.
28, 77: “quaestionem,” Liv. 2, 29, 5.— C. For the usual expostulare, to
complain of one: “quom patrem adeas postulatum,” Plaut. Bacch. 3, 3, 38 (but in
id. Mil. 2, 6, 35, the correct read. is expostulare; v. Ritschl ad h. l.).—* D.
Postulare votum (lit. to ask a desire, i. e.), to vow, App. Flor. init.— E. Of
the seller, to demand a price, ask (post-class. for posco): “pro eis (libris)
trecentos Philippeos postulasse,” Lact. 1, 6, 10; cf.: “accipe victori populus
quod postulat aurum,” Juv. 7, 243. — III. Transf., of things. A. To contain,
measure: “jugerum sex modios seminis postulat,” Col. 2, 9, 17.— B. To need,
require: “cepina magis frequenter subactam postulat terram,” Col. 11, 3,
56.—Hence, po-stŭlātum , i, n.; usually in plur.: po-stŭlāta , ōrum, a demand,
request (class.): “intolerabilia postulata,” Cic. Fam. 12, 4, 1; id. Phil. 12,
12, 28: deferre postulata alicujus ad aliquem, Caes. B. C. 1, 9: “cognoscere de
postulatis alicujus,” id. B. G. 4, 11 fin.: “postulata facere,” Nep. Alcib. 8,
4.
“conversational postulate” – an otiosity
deviced by Lakoff and Gordon (or Gordon and Lakoff) after Carnap’s infamous meaning
postulate, a sentence that specifies part or all of the meaning of a predicate.
Meaning postulates would thus include explicit, contextual, and recursive
definitions, reduction sentences for dispositional predicates, and, more
generally, any sentences stating how the extensions of predicates are
interrelated by virtue of the meanings of those predicates. For example, any
reduction sentence of the form (x) (x has f / (x is malleable S x has y)) could
be a meaning postulate for the predicate ‘is malleable’. The notion of a
meaning postulate was introduced by Carnap, whose original interest stemmed
from a desire to explicate sentences that are analytic (“true by virtue of
meaning”) but not logically true. Where G is a set of such postulates, one
could say that A is analytic with respect to G if and only if A is a logical
consequence of G. On this account, e.g., the sentence ‘Jake is not a married
bachelor’ is analytic with respect to {’All bachelors are unmarried’}.
Mechanism.
A monster. But on p. 286 of WoW he speaks of mechanism, and psychological
mechanism. Or rather of this or that psychological mechanism to be BENEFICIAL
for a mouse that wants to eat a piece of cheese. He uses it twice, and it’s the
OPERATION of the mechanism which is beneficial. So a psychophysical
correspondence is desirable for the psychological mechanism to operate in a way
that is beneficial for the sentient creature. Later in that essay he now
applies ‘mechanism’ to communication, and he speak of a ‘communication
mechanism’ being beneficial. In particular he is having in mind Davidson’s
transcendental argument for the truth of the transmitted beliefs. “If all our
transfers involved mistaken beliefs, it is not clear that the communication
mechanism would be beneficial for the institution of ‘shared experience.’”
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “My twelve labours.”
mechanistic explanation, a kind of
explanation countenanced by views that range from the extreme position that all
natural phenomena can be explained entirely in terms of masses in motion of the
sort postulated in Newtonian mechanics, to little more than a commitment to
naturalistic explanations. Mechanism in its extreme form is clearly false
because numerous physical phenomena of the most ordinary sort cannot be
explained entirely in terms of masses in motion. Mechanics is only one small
part of physics. Historically, explanations were designated as mechanistic to
indicate that they included no reference to final causes or vital forces. In
this weak sense, all present-day scientific explanations are mechanistic. The
adequacy of mechanistic explanation is usually raised in connection with living
creatures, especially those capable of deliberate action. For example,
chromosomes lining up opposite their partners in preparation for meiosis looks
like anything but a purely mechanical process, and yet the more we discover
about the process, the more mechanistic it turns out to be. The mechanisms
responsible for meiosis arose through variation and selection and cannot be
totally understood without reference to the evolutionary process, but meiosis
as it takes place at any one time appears to be a purely mechanistic
physicochemical meaning, conceptual role theory of mechanistic explanation
process. Intentional behavior is the phenomenon that is most resistant to
explanation entirely in physicochemical terms. The problem is not that we do
not know enough about the functioning of the central nervous system but that no
matter how it turns out to work, we will be disinclined to explain human action
entirely in terms of physicochemical processes. The justification for this
disinclination tends to turn on what we mean when we describe people as
behaving intentionally. Even so, we may simply be mistaken to ascribe more to
human action than can be explained in terms of purely physicochemical
processes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Mechanism.”
Medina: Dominican theologian who taught
theology at Alcalá and then at Salamanca. His major works are commentaries on
Aquinas’s Summa theologica. Medina is often called the father of probabilism
but scholars disagree on the legitimacy of this attribution. Support for it is
contained in Medina’s commentary on Aquinas’s Prima secundae (1577). Medina
denies that it is sufficient for an opinion to be probable that there are
apparent reasons in its favor and that it is supported by many people. For then
all errors would be probable. Rather, an opinion is probable if it can be
followed without censure and reproof, as when wise persons state and support it
with excellent reasons. Medina suggests the use of these criteria in decisions
concerning moral dilemmas (Suma de casos morales [“Summa of Moral Questions”],
1580). P.Gar. Megarians, also called Megarics, a loose-knit group of Greek
philosophers active in the fourth and early third centuries B.C., whose work in
logic profoundly influenced the course of ancient philosophy. The name derives
from that of Megara, the hometown of Euclid (died c.365 B.C.; unrelated to the
later mathematician), who was an avid companion of Socrates and author of
(lost) Socratic dialogues. Little is recorded about his views, and his legacy
rests with his philosophical heirs. Most prominent of these was Eubulides, a
contemporary and critic of Aristotle; he devised a host of logical paradoxes,
including the liar and the sorites or heap paradoxes. To many this ingenuity
seemed sheer eristic, a label some applied to him. One of his associates,
Alexinus, was a leading critic of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, whose
arguments he twitted in incisive parodies. Stilpo (c.380–c.300 B.C.), a native
of Megara, was also famous for disputation but best known for his apatheia
(impassivity). Rivaling the Cynics as a preacher of self-reliance, he once
insisted, after his city and home were plundered, that he lost nothing of his
own since he retained his knowledge and virtue. Zeno the Stoic was one of many
followers he attracted. Most brilliant of the Megarians was Diodorus, nicknamed
Cronus or “Old Fogey” (fl. 300 B.C.), who had an enormous impact on Stoicism
and the skeptical Academy. Among the first explorers of propositional logic, he
and his associates were called “the dialecticians,” a label that referred not
to an organized school or set of doctrines but simply to their highly original
forms of reasoning. Diodorus defined the possible narrowly as what either is or
will be true, and the necessary broadly as what is true and will not be false.
Against his associate Philo, the first proponent of material implication, he maintained
that a conditional is true if and only if it is neverthe case that its
antecedent is true and its consequent false. He argued that matter is atomic
and that time and motion are likewise discrete. With an exhibitionist’s flair,
he demonstrated that meaning is conventional by naming his servants “But” and
“However.” Most celebrated is his Master (or Ruling) Argument, which turns on
three propositions: (1) Every truth about the past is necessary; (2) nothing
impossible follows from something possible; and (3) some things are possible
that neither are nor will be true. His aim was apparently to establish his
definition of possibility by showing that its negation in (3) is inconsistent
with (1) and (2), which he regarded as obvious. Various Stoics, objecting to
the implication of determinism here, sought to uphold a wider form of
possibility by overturning (1) or (2). Diodorus’s fame made him a target of
satire by eminent poets, and it is said that he expired from shame after
failing to solve on the spot a puzzle Stilpo posed at a party.
Meinong: Austrian philosopher and
psychologist, founder of Gegenstandstheorie, the theory of (existent and
nonexistent intended) objects. He was the target of Russell’s criticisms of the
idea of non-existent objects in his landmark essay “On Denoting” (1905).
Meinong, after eight years at the Vienna Gymnasium, enrolled in the University
of Vienna, studying German philology and history and completing a dissertation
on Arnold von Brescia. After this period he became interested in philosophy as
a result of his critical self-directed reading of Kant. At the suggestion of
his teacher Franz Brentano, he undertook a systematic investigation of Hume’s
empiricism, culminating in his first publications in philosophy, the “Hume-Studien,”
Meinong was appointed Professor Extraordinarius at Graz (receiving promotion to
Ordinarius), where he remained until his death. At Graz he established the
first laboratory for experimental psychology in Austria, and was occupied with
psychological as well as philosophical problems throughout his career. The Graz
school of phenomenological psychology and philosophical semantics, which
centered on Meinong and his students, made important contributions to object
theory in philosophical semantics, metaphysics, ontology, value theory,
epistemology, theory of evidence, possibility and probability, and the analysis
of emotion, imagination, and abstraction. Meinong’s object theory is based on a
version of Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis, that every psychological
state contains an intended object toward which the mental event (or, in a less
common terminology, a mental act) is semantically directed. Meinong, however,
rejects Brentano’s early view of the immanence of the intentional, maintaining
that thought is directed toward transcendent mind-independent existent or
non-existent objects. Meinong distinguishes between judgments about the being
(Sein) of intended objects of thought, and judgments about their “so-being,”
character, or nature (Sosein). He claims that every thought is intentionally
directed toward the transcendent mind-independent object the thought purports
to be “about,” which entails that in at least some cases contingently
non-existent and even impossible objects, for instance Berkeley’s golden
mountain and the round square, must be included as non-existent intended
objects in the object theory semantic domain. Meinong further maintains that an
intended object’s Sosein is independent of its Sein or ontological status, of
whether or not the object happens to exist. This means, contrary to what many
philosophers have supposed, that non-existent objects can truly possess the
constitutive properties predicated of them in thought. Meinong’s object theory
evolved over a period of years, and underwent many additions and revisions. In
its mature form, the theory includes the following principles: (1) Thought can
freely (even if falsely) assume the existence of any describable object
(principle of unrestricted free assumption, or unbeschränkten Annahmefreiheit
thesis); (2) Every thought is intentionally directed toward a transcendent,
mind-independent intended object (modified intentionality thesis); (3) Every
intended object has a nature, character, Sosein, “how-it-is,” “so-being,” or
“being thus-and-so,” regardless of its ontological status (independence of
Sosein from Sein thesis); (4) Being or non-being is not part of the Sosein of
any intended object, nor of an object considered in itself (indifference
thesis, or doctrine of the Aussersein of the homeless pure object); (5) There
are two modes of being or Sein for intended objects: (a) spatiotemporal
existence and (b) Platonic subsistence (Existenz/Bestand thesis); (6) There are
some intended objects that do not have Sein at all, but neither exist nor
subsist (objects of which it is true that there are no such objects). Object
theory, unlike extensionalist semantics, makes it possible, as in much of
ordinary and scientific thought and language, to refer to and truly predicate
properties of non-existent objects. There are many misconceptions about
Meinong’s theory, such as that reflected in the objection that Meinong is a
super-Platonist who inflates ontology with non-existent objects that
nevertheless have being in some sense, that object theory tolerates outright
logical inconsistency rather than mere incompatibility of properties in the
Soseine of impossible intended objects. Russell, in his reviews of Meinong’s
theory in 1904–05, raises the problem of the existent round square, which seems
to be existent by virtue of the independence of Sosein from Sein, and to be
non-existent by virtue of being globally and simultaneously both round and
square. Meinong’s response involves several complex distinctions, but it has
been observed that to avoid the difficulty he need only appeal to the
distinction between konstitutorisch or nuclear and ausserkonstitutorisch or
extranuclear properties, adopted from a suggestion by his student Ernst Mally
(1878–1944), according to which only ordinary nuclear properties like being
red, round, or ten centimeters tall are part of the Sosein of any object, to
the exclusion of categorical or extranuclear properties like being existent,
determinate, possible, or impossible. This avoids counterexamples like the
existent round square, because it limits the independence of Sosein from Sein
exclusively to nuclear properties,implying that neither the existent nor the
nonexistent round square can possibly have the (extranuclear) property of being
existent or nonexistent in their respective Soseine, and cannot be said truly
to have the properties of being existent or non-existent merely by free
assumption and the independence of Sosein from Sein.
meliorism: the view that the
world is neither completely good nor completely bad, and that incremental
progress or regress depend on human actions. By creative intelligence and
education we can improve the environment and social conditions. The position is
first attributed to George Eliot and William James. Whitehead suggested that
meliorism applies to God, who can both improve the world and draw sustenance
from human efforts to improve the world.
Melissus: Grecian philosopher,
traditionally classified as a member of the Eleatic School. He was also famous
as the victorious commander in a preemptive attack by the Samians on an
Athenian naval force (441 B.C.). Like Parmenides – who must have influenced
Melissus, even though there is no evidence the two ever met – Melissus argues
that “what-is” or “the real” cannot come into being out of nothing, cannot
perish into nothing, is homogeneous, and is unchanging. Indeed, he argues
explicitly (whereas Parmenides only implies) that there is only one such
entity, that there is no void, and that even spatial rearrangement
(metakosmesis) must be ruled out. But unlike Parmenides, Melissus deduces that
what-is is temporally infinite (in significant contrast to Parmenides,
regardless as to whether the latter held that what-is exists strictly in the
“now” or that it exists non-temporally). Moreover, Melissus argues that what-is
is spatially infinite (whereas Parmenides spoke of “bounds” and compared
what-is to a well-made ball). Significantly, Melissus repeatedly speaks of “the
One.” It is, then, in Melissus, more than in Parmenides or in Zeno, that we
find the emphasis on monism. In a corollary to his main argument, Melissus
argues that “if there were many things,” each would have to be – per
impossibile – exactly like “the One.” This remark has been interpreted as
issuing the challenge that was taken up by the atomists. But it is more
reasonable to read it as a philosophical strategist’s preemptive strike:
Melissus anticipates the move made in the pluralist systems of the second half
of the fifth century, viz., positing a plurality of eternal and unchanging
elements that undergo only spatial rearrangement.
Grice’s memory – Grice on temporary
mnemonic state. Grice remembers. Grice reminisces. "someone
hears a noise" iff "a (past) hearing of a nose is an
elemnent in a total temporary state which is a member of a series of total
temporary statess such that every member of the series would, given certain
conditions, contain as al element a MEMORY of some EXPERIENCE which is an
element in some previous member OR contains as an element some experience
a memory of which would, given certain conditions, occur as an element in some
subsequent member; there being no subject of members which is independent
from all the rest." The retention of, or the capacity to retain,
past experience or previously acquired information. There are two main
philosophical questions about memory: (1) In what does memory consist? and (2)
What constitutes knowing a fact on the basis of memory? Not all memory is
remembering facts: there is remembering one’s perceiving or feeling or acting
in a certain way – which, while it entails remembering the fact that one did
experience in that way, must be more than that. And not all remembering of
facts is knowledge of facts: an extremely hesitant attempt to remember an
address, if one gets it right, counts as remembering the address even if one is
too uncertain for this to count as knowing it. (1) Answers to the first
question agree on some obvious points: that memory requires (a) a present and
(b) a past state of, or event in, the subject, and (c) the right sort of
internal and causal relations between the two. Also, we must distinguish
between memory states (remembering for many years the name of one’s first-grade
teacher) and memory occurrences (recalling the name when asked). A memory state
is usually taken to be a disposition to display an appropriate memory
occurrence given a suitable stimulus. But philosophers disagree about further
specifics. On one theory (held by many empiricists from Hume to Russell, among
others, but now largely discredited), occurrent memory consists in images of
past experience (which have a special quality marking them as memory images)
and that memory of facts is read off such image memory. This overlooks the
point that people commonly remember facts without remembering when or how they
learned them. A more sophisticated theory of factual memory (popular nowadays)
holds that an occurrent memory of a fact requires, besides a past learning of
it, (i) some sort of present mental representation of it (perhaps a linguistic
one) and (ii) continuous storage between then and now of a representation of
it. But condition (i) may not be conceptually necessary: a disposition to dial
the right number when one wants to call home constitutes remembering the number
(provided it is appropriately linked causally to past learning of the number)
and manifesting that disposition is occurrently remembering the fact as to what
the number is even if one does not in the process mentally represent that fact.
Condition (ii) may also be too strong: it seems at least conceptually possible
that a causal link sufficient for memory should be secured by a relation that
does not involve anything continuous between the relevant past and present
occurrences (in The Analysis of Mind, Russell countenanced this possibility and
called it “mnemic causation”). (2) What must be added to remembering that p to
get a case of knowing it because one remembers it? We saw that one must not be
uncertain that p. Must one also have grounds for trusting one’s memory
impression (its seeming to one that one remembers) that p? How could one have
such grounds except by knowing them on the basis of memory? The facts one can
know not on the basis of memory are limited at most to what one presently
perceives and what one presently finds self-evident. If no memory belief
qualifies as knowledge unless it is supported by memory knowledge of the
reliability of one’s memory, then the process of qualifying as memory knowledge
cannot succeed: there would be an endless chain, or loop, of facts – this belief
is memory knowledge if and only if this other belief is, which is if and only
if this other one is, and so on – which never becomes a set that entails that
any belief is memory knowledge. On the basis of such reasoning a skeptic might
deny the possibility of memory knowledge. We may avoid this consequence without
going to the lax extreme of allowing that any correct memory impression is
knowledge; we can impose the (frequently satisfied) requirement that one not
have reasons specific to the particular case for believing that one’s memory
impression might be unreliable. Finally, remembering that p becomes memory
knowledge that p only if one believes that p because it seems to one that one
remembers it. One might remember that p and confidently believe that p, but if
one has no memory impression of having previously learned it, or one has such
an impression but does not trust it and believes that p only for other reasons
(or no reason), then one should not be counted as knowing that p on the basis
of memory. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Memory and personal identity.” H. P. Grice,
“Benjamin on Broad on ‘remembering’”
Mendel, Austrian discoverer of the basic
‘laws’ of heredity. An Augustinian monk who conducted plant-breeding
experiments in a monastery garden in Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic), Mendel
discovered that certain characters of a common variety of garden pea are
transmitted in a strikingly regular way. The characters with which he dealt
occur in two distinct states, e.g., pods that are smooth or ridged. In
characters such as these, one state is dominant to its recessive partner, i.e.,
when varieties of each sort are crossed, all the offspring exhibit the dominant
character. However, when the offspring of these crosses are themselves crossed,
the result is a ratio of three dominants to one recessive. In modern terms,
pairs of genes (alleles) separate at reproduction (segregation) and each
offspring receives only one member of each pair. Of equal importance, the
recessive character reappears unaffected by its temporary suppression. Alleles
remain pure. Mendel also noted that the pairs of characters that he studied
assort independently of each other, i.e., if two pairs of characters are
followed through successive crosses, no statistical correlations in their transmission
can be found. As genetics developed after the turn of the century, the simple
“laws” that Mendel had set out were expanded and altered. Only a relatively few
characters exhibit two distinct states, one dominant to the other. In many, the
heterozygote exhibits an intermediate state. In addition, genes do not exist in
isolation from each other but together on chromosomes. Only those genes that
reside on different pairs of chromosomes assort in total independence of each
other. During his research, Mendel corresponded with Karl von Nägeli (1817–91),
a major authority in plant hybridization. Von Nägeli urged Mendel to cross
varieties of the common hawkweed. When Mendel took his advice, he failed to
discover the hereditary patterns that he had found in garden peas. In 1871
Mendel ceased his research to take charge of his monastery. In 1900 Hugo de
Vries (1848–1935) stumbled upon several instances of three-to-one ratios while
developing his own theory of the origin of species. No sooner did he publish his
results than two young biologists announced independent discovery of what came
to be known as Mendel’s laws. The founders of modern genetics abandoned
attempts to work out the complexities of embryological development and
concentrated just on transmission. As a result of several unfortunate
misunderstandings, early Mendelian geneticists thought that their theory of
genetics was incompatible with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Eventually,
however, the two theories were merged to form the synthetic theory of
evolution. In the process, R. A. Fisher (1890–1962) questioned the veracity of
Mendel’s research, arguing that the only way that Mendel could have gotten data
as good as he did was by sanitizing it. Present-day historians view all of the
preceding events in a very different light. The science of heredity that
developed at the turn of the century was so different from anything that Mendel
had in mind that Mendel hardly warrants being considered its father. The
neglect of Mendel’s work is made to seem so problematic only by reading later
developments back into Mendel’s original paper. Like de Vries, Mendel was
interested primarily in developing a theory of the origin of species. The
results of Mendel’s research on the hawkweed brought into question the generalizability
of the regularities that he had found in peas, but they supported his theory of
species formation through hybridization. Similarly, the rediscovery of Mendel’s
laws can be viewed as an instance of multiple, simultaneous discovery only by
ignoring important differences in the views expressed by these authors.
Finally, Mendel certainly did not mindlessly organize and report his data, but
the methods that he used can be construed as questionable only in contrast to
an overly empirical, inductive view of science. Perhaps Mendel was no
Mendelian, but he was not a fraud either.
Mendelssohn, M.: German philosopher known
as “the Jewish Socrates.” He began as a Bible and Talmud scholar. After moving
to Berlin he learned Latin and German, and became a close friend of Lessing,
who modeled the Jew in his play Nathan the Wise after him. Mendelssohn began
writing on major philosophical topics of the day, and won a prize from the
Berlin Academy in 1764. He was actively engaged in discussions about
aesthetics, psychology, and religion, and offered an empirical, subjectivist
view that was very popular at the time. His most famous writings are
Morgenstunden (Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God, 1785),
Phaedon (Phaedo, or on the Immortality of the Soul, 1767), and Jerusalem
(1783). He contended that one could prove the existence of God and the
immortality of the soul. He accepted the ontological argument and the argument
from design. In Phaedo he argued that since the soul is a simple substance it
is indestructible. Kant criticized his arguments in the first Critique.
Mendelssohn was pressed by the Swiss scientist Lavater to explain why he, as a
reasonable man, did not accept Christianity. At first he ignored the challenge,
but finally set forth his philosophical views about religion and Judaism in
Jerusalem, where he insisted that Judaism is not a set of doctrines but a set
of practices. Reasonable persons can accept that there is a universal religion
of reason, and there are practices that God has ordained that the Jews follow.
Mendelssohn was a strong advocate of religious toleration and separation of
church and state. His views played an important part in the emancipation of the
Jews, and in the Jewish Enlightenment that flowered in Germany at the beginning
of the nineteenth century.
mens rea versus mens casta – actus reus
versus actus castus -- One of the two main prerequisites, along with “actus
reus” for prima facie liability to criminal punishment in the English legal
systems. To be punishable in such systems, one must not only have performed a
legally prohibited action, such as killing another human being; one must have
done so with a culpable state of mind, or mens rea. Such culpable mental states
are of three kinds: they are either motivational states of purpose, cognitive
states of belief, or the non-mental state of negligence. To illustrate each of
these with respect to the act of killing: a killer may kill either having
another’s death as ultimate purpose, or as mediate purpose on the way to achieving
some further, ultimate end. Alternatively, the killer may act believing to a
practical certainty that his act will result in another’s death, even though
such death is an unwanted side effect, or he may believe that there is a
substantial and unjustified risk that his act will cause another’s death. The
actor may also be only negligent, which is to take an unreasonable risk of
another’s death even if the actor is not aware either of such risk or of the
lack of justification for taking it. Mens rea usually does not have to do with
any awareness by the actor that the act done is either morally wrong or legally
prohibited. Neither does mens rea have to do with any emotional state of guilt
or remorse, either while one is acting or afterward. Sometimes in its older
usages the term is taken to include the absence of excuses as well as the
mental states necessary for prima facie liability; in such a usage, the
requirement is helpfully labeled “general mens rea,” and the requirement above
discussed is labeled “special mens rea.”
“Mentalese” – Grice on ‘modest mentalism’
-- the language of thought (the title of an essay by Fodor) or of “brain
writing” (a term of Dennett’s); specifically, a languagelike medium of
representation in which the contents of mental events are supposedly expressed
or recorded. (The term was probably coined by Wilfrid Sellars, with whose views
it was first associated.) If what one believes are propositions, then it is
tempting to propose that believing something is having the Mentalese expression
of that proposition somehow written in the relevant place in one’s mind or
brain. Thinking a thought, at least on those occasions when we think
“wordlessly” (without formulating our thoughts in sentences or phrases composed
of words of a public language), thus appears to be a matter of creating a
short-lived Mentalese expression in a special arena or work space in the mind.
In a further application of the concept, the process of coming to understand a
sentence of natural language can be viewed as one of translating the sentence
into Mentalese. It has often been argued that this view of understanding only
postpones the difficult questions of meaning, for it leaves unanswered the
question of how Mentalese expressions come to have the meanings they do. There
have been frequent attempts to develop versions of the hypothesis that mental
activity is conducted in Mentalese, and just as frequent criticisms of these
attempts. Some critics deny there is anything properly called representation in
the mind or brain at all; others claim that the system of representation used
by the brain is not enough like a natural language to be called a language.
Even among defenders of Mentalese, it has seldom been claimed that all brains
“speak” the same Mentalese.
mentalism: Cfr. ‘psychism,’ animism.’ ‘spiritualism,’
cfr. Grice’s modest mentalism; any theory that posits explicitly mental events
and processes, where ‘mental’ means exhibiting intentionality, not necessarily
being immaterial or non-physical. A mentalistic theory is couched in terms of
belief, desire, thinking, feeling, hoping, etc. A scrupulously non-mentalistic
theory would be couched entirely in extensional terms: it would refer only to
behavior or to neurophysiological states and events. The attack on mentalism by
behaviorists was led by B. F. Skinner, whose criticisms did not all depend on
the assumption that mentalists were dualists, and the subsequent rise of
cognitive science has restored a sort of mentalism (a “thoroughly modern
mentalism,” as Fodor has called it) that is explicitly materialistic. Refs.: H.
P. Grice, “Myro’s modest mentalism.
mentatum: Grice prefers psi-transmission. He knows that ‘mentatum’
sounds too much like ‘mind,’ and the mind is part of the ‘rational soul,’ not
even encompassing the rational pratical soul. If perhaps Grice was unhappy
about the artificial flavour to saying that a word is a sign, Grice surely
should have checked with all the Grecian-Roman cognates of mean, as in his
favourite memorative-memorable distinction, and the many Grecian realisations,
or with Old Roman mentire and mentare. Lewis and Short have
“mentĭor,” f. mentire, L and S note, is prob. from root men-, whence mens and
memini, q. v. The original meaning, they say, is to invent, hence, but
alla Umberto Eco with sign, mentire comes to mean in later use what Grice (if
not the Grecians) holds is the opposite of mean. Short and Lewis render mentire
as to lie, cheat, deceive, etc., to pretend, to declare falsely: mentior nisi
or si mentior, a form of asseveration, I am a liar, if, etc.: But also,
animistically (modest mentalism?) of things, as endowed with a mind. L and S go
on: to deceive, impose upon, to deceive ones self, mistake, to lie or speak
falsely about, to assert falsely, make a false promise about; to feign,
counterfeit, imitate a shape, nature, etc.: to devise a falsehood, to
assume falsely, to promise falsely, to invent, feign, of a poetical
fiction: “ita mentitur (sc. Homerus), Trop., of inanim. grammatical
Subjects, as in Semel fac illud, mentitur tua quod subinde tussis, Do what your
cough keeps falsely promising, i. e. die, Mart. 5, 39, 6. Do what your cough
means! =imp. die!; hence, mentĭens, a fallacy, sophism: quomodo
mentientem, quem ψευδόμενον vocant, dissolvas;” mentītus, imitated, counterfeit,
feigned (poet.): “mentita tela;” For “mentior,” indeed, there is a Griceian implicaturum
involving rational control. The rendition of mentire as to lie stems from a
figurative shift from to be mindful, or inventive, to have second
thoughts" to "to lie, conjure up". But Grice would also have a
look at cognate “memini,” since this is also cognate with “mind,” “mens,” and
covers subtler instances of mean, as in Latinate, “mention,” as in Grices
“use-mention” distinction. mĕmĭni, cognate with "mean" and German
"meinen," to think = Grecian ὑπομένειν, await (cf. Schiffer,
"remnants of meaning," if I think, I hesitate, and therefore re-main,
cf. Grecian μεν- in μένω, Μέντωρ; μαν- in μαίνομαι, μάντις; μνᾶ- in μιμνήσκω,
etc.; cf.: maneo, or manere, as in remain. The idea, as Schiffer well
knows or means, being that if you think, you hesitate, and therefore, wait and
remain], moneo, reminiscor [cf. reminiscence], mens, Minerva, etc. which L and
S render as “to remember, recollect, to think of, be mindful of a
thing; not to have forgotten a person or thing, to bear in
mind (syn.: reminiscor, recordor).” Surely with a relative clause,
and to make mention of, to mention a thing, either in speaking or
writing (rare but class.). Hence. mĕmĭnens, mindful And then Grice would
have a look at moneo, as in adMONish, also cognate is “mŏnĕo,” monere,
causative from the root "men;" whence memini, q. v., mens (mind),
mentio (mention); lit. to cause to think, to re-mind, put in mind of, bring to
ones recollection; to admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach (syn.: hortor,
suadeo, doceo). L and S are Griceian if not Grecian when they note that
‘monere’ can be used "without the accessory notion [implicaturum or
entanglement, that is] of reminding or admonishing, in gen., to teach,
instruct, tell, inform, point out; also, to announce, predict,
foretell, even if also to punish, chastise (only in Tacitus): “puerili verbere moneri.” And surely,
since he loved to re-minisced, Grice would have allowed to just earlier on just
minisced. Short and Lewis indeed have rĕmĭniscor, which, as they point out,
features the root men; whence mens, memini; and which they compare to
comminiscere, v. comminiscor, to recall to mind, recollect, remember (syn.
recordor), often used by the Old Romans with with Grices beloved
that-clause, for sure. For what is the good of reminiscing or
comminiscing, if you cannot reminisce that Austin always reminded Grice that
skipping the dictionary was his big mistake! If Grice uses mention, cognate
with mean, he loved commenting Aristotle. And commentare is, again, cognate
with mean. As opposed to the development of the root in Grecian, or English, in
Roman the root for mens is quite represented in many Latinate cognates. But a
Roman, if not a Grecian, would perhaps be puzzled by a Grice claiming, by
intuition, to retrieve the necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of
this or that expression. When the Roman is told that the Griceian did it for
fun, he understands, and joins in the fun! Indeed, hardly a natural kind in the
architecture of the world, but one that fascinated Grice and the Grecian
philosophers before him! Communication.
Mercier: philosopher, a formative figure
in NeoThomism and founder of the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie at Louvain.
Created at the request of Pope Leo XIII, Mercier’s institute treated Aquinas as
a subject of historical research and as a philosopher relevant to modern
thought. His approach to Neo-Thomism was distinctive for its direct response to
the epistemological challenges posed by idealism, rationalism, and positivism.
Mercier’ epistemology was termed a criteriology; it intended to defend the
certitude of the intellect against skepticism by providing an account of the
motives and rules that guide judgment. Truth is affirmed by intellectual
judgment by conforming itself not to the thing-in-itself but to its abstract
apprehension. Since the certitude of judgment is a state of the cognitive
faculty in the human soul, Mercier considered criteriology as psychology; see
Critériologie générale ou Théorie générale de la certitude (1906), Origins of
Contemporary Psychology (trans. 1918), and Manual of Scholastic Philosophy
(trans. 1917–18).
mereology: The mereological implicaturum. Grice. "In a burst of inspiration,
Leśniewski coins "mereology" on a Tuesday evening in March 1927, from
the Grecian "μέρος," Polish for "part." From Leśniewski's Journal -- translation
from the Polish by Grice:
"Dear Anne, I have just coined a word. MEREOLOGY. I want to refer to a FORMA, not
informal as in Husserl, which is in German, anyway (his section, "On the
whole and the parts") theory of part-whole. I hope you love it! Love, L. --- "Leśniewski's tutee, another Pole, Alfred Tarski, in his
Appendix E to Woodger oversimplified, out of envey's Leśniewski's
formalism." "But then more loyal tutees (and tutees of tutees) of
Lesniewski elaborated this "Polish mereology." "For a good selection of the literature on
Polish mereology, see Srzednicki and Rickey (1984). For a survey of Polish
mereology, see Simons (1987). Since 1980 or so, however, research on Polish
mereology has been almost entirely historical in nature." Which is just as well. The theory of the
totum and the pars. -- parts. Typically, a mereological theory employs notions
such as the following: “proper part,” “mproper part,” “overlapping” (having a
part in common), disjoint (not overlapping), mereological product (the
“intersection” of overlapping objects), mereological sum (a collection of parts),
mereological difference, the universal sum, mereological complement, and atom
(that which has no proper parts). A formal mereology is an axiomatic system.
Goodman’s “Calculus of Individuals” is compatible with Nominalism, i.e., no
reference is made to sets, properties, or any other abstract entity. Goodman
hopes that his mereology, with its many parallels to set theory, may provide an
alternative to set theory as a foundation for mathematics. Fundamental and
controversial implications of Goodman’s theories include their extensionality
and collectivism. An extensional theory implies that for any individuals, x and
y, x % y provided x and y have the same proper parts. One reason extensionality
is controversial is that it rules out an object’s acquiring or losing a part,
and therefore is inconsistent with commonsense beliefs such as that a car has a
new tire or that a table has lost a sliver of wood. A second reason for
controversy is that extensionality is incompatible with the belief that a
statue and the piece of bronze of which it is made have the same parts and yet
are diverse objects. Collectivism implies that any individuals, no matter how
scattered, have a mereological sum or constitute an object. Moreover, according
to collectivism, assembling or disassembling parts does not affect the
existence of things, i.e., nothing is created or destroyed by assembly or
disassembly, respectively. Thus, collectivism is incompatible with commonsense
beliefs such as that when a watch is disassembled, it is destroyed, or that
when certain parts are assembled, a watch is created. Because the
aforementioned formal theories shun modality, they lack the resources to
express the thesis that a whole has each of its parts necessarily. This thesis
of mereological essentialism has recently been defended by Roderick Chisholm.
meritum, a meritarian is one who asserts
the relevance of individual merit, as an independent justificatory condition,
in attempts to design social structures or distribute goods. ‘Meritarianism’ is
a recently coined term in social and political philosophy, closely related to
‘meritocracy’, and used to identify a range of related concerns that supplement
or oppose egalitarian, utilitarian, and contractarian principles and principles
based on entitlement, right, interest, and need, among others. For example, one
can have a pressing need for an Olympic medal but not merit it; one can have
the money to buy a masterpiece but not be worthy of it; one can have the right
to a certain benefit but not deserve it. Meritarians assert that considerations
of desert are always relevant and sometimes decisive in such cases. What counts
as merit, and how important should it be in moral, social, and political
decisions? Answers to these questions serve to distinguish one meritarian from
another, and sometimes to blur the distinctions between the meritarian position
and others. Merit may refer to any of these: comparative rank, capacities,
abilities, effort, intention, or achievement. Moreover, there is a relevance
condition to be met: to say that highest honors in a race should go to the most
deserving is presumably to say that the honors should go to those with the
relevant sort of merit – speed, e.g., rather than grace. Further, meritarians
may differ about the strength of the merit principle, and how various political
or social structures should be influenced by it.
meritocracy, in ordinary usage, a system
in which advancement is based on ability and achievement, or one in which
leadership roles are held by talented achievers. The term may also refer to an
elite group of talented achievers. In philosophical usage, the term’s meaning
is similar: a meritocracy is a scheme of social organization in which essential
offices, and perhaps careers and jobs of all sorts are (a) open only to those
who have the relevant qualifications for successful performance in them, or (b)
awarded only to the candidates who are likely to perform the best, or (c)
managed so that people advance in and retain their offices and jobs solely on
the basis of the quality of their performance in them, or (d) all of the above.
Merleau-Ponty: philosopher disliked by
Austin, loved by Grice, and described by Paul Ricoeur as “the greatest of the
French phenomenologists.” MerleauPonty occupied the chair of child psychology
and pedagogy at the Sorbonne and was later professor of philosophy at the
Collège de France. His sudden death preceded completion of an important
manuscript; this was later edited and published by Claude Lefort under the
title The Visible and the Invisible. The relation between the late, unfinished
work and his early Phenomenology of Perception (1945) has received much
scholarly discussion. While some commentators see a significant shift in
direction in his later thought, others insist on continuity throughout his
work. Thus, the exact significance of his philosophy, which in his life was
called both a philosophy of ambiguity and an ambiguous philosophy, retains to
this day its essential ambiguity. With his compatriot and friend, Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty was responsible for introducing the phenomenology of Edmund
Husserl into France. Impressed above all by the later Husserl and by Husserl’s
notion of the life-world (Lebenswelt), Merleau-Ponty combined Husserl’s
transcendental approach to epistemological issues with an existential
orientation derived from Heidegger and Marcel. Going even further than
Heidegger, who had himself sought to go beyond Husserl by “existentializing”
Husserl’s Transcendental Ego (referring to it as Dasein), MerleauPonty sought to
emphasize not only the existential (worldly) nature of the human subject but,
above all, its bodily nature. Thus his philosophy could be characterized as a
philosophy of the lived body or the body subject (le corps propre). Although
Nietzsche called attention to the all-importance of the body, it was
MerleauPonty who first made the body the central theme of a detailed
philosophical analysis. This provided an original perspective from which to
rethink such perennial philosophical issues as the nature of knowledge,
freedom, time (temporality), language, and intersubjectivity. Especially in his
early work, Merleau-Ponty battled against absolutist thought (“la pensée de
l’absolu”), stressing the insurmountable ambiguity and contingency of all
meaning and truth. An archopponent of Cartesian rationalism, he was an early
and ardent spokesman for that position now called antifoundationalism.
Merleau-Ponty’s major early work, the Phenomenology of Perception, is best
known for its central thesis concerning “the primacy of perception.” In this
lengthy study he argued that all the “higher” functions of consciousness (e.g.,
intellection, volition) are rooted in and depend upon the subject’s
prereflective, bodily existence, i.e., perception (“All consciousness is perceptual,
even the consciousness of ourselves”). MerleauPonty maintained, however, that
perception had never been adequately conceptualized by traditional philosophy.
Thus the book was to a large extent a dialectical confrontation with what he
took to be the two main forms of objective thinking – intellectualism and
empiricism – both of which, he argued, ignored the phenomenon of perception.
His principal goal was to get beyond the intellectual constructs of traditional
philosophy (such as sense-data) and to effect “a return to the phenomena,” to
the world as we actually experience it as embodied subjects prior to all
theorizing. His main argument (directed against mainline philosophy) was that
the lived body is not an object in the world, distinct from the knowing subject
(as in Descartes), but is the subject’s own point of view on the world; the
body is itself the original knowing subject (albeit a nonor prepersonal,
“anonymous” subject), from which all other forms of knowledge derive, even that
of geometry. As a phenomenological (or, as he also said, “archaeological”)
attempt to unearth the basic (corporeal) modalities of human existence,
emphasizing the rootedness (enracinement) of the personal subject in the
obscure and ambiguous life of the body and, in this way, the insurpassable
contingency of all meaning, the Phenomenology was immediately and widely
recognized as a major statement of French existentialism. In his subsequent
work in the late 1940s and the 1950s, in many shorter essays and articles,
Merleau-Ponty spelled out in greater detail the philosophical consequences of
“the primacy of perception.” These writings sought to respond to widespread
objections that by “grounding” all intellectual and cultural acquisitions in
the prereflective and prepersonal life of the body, the Phenomenology of
Perception results in a kind of reductionism and anti-intellectualism and
teaches only a “bad ambiguity,” i.e., completely undermines the notions of
reason and truth. By shifting his attention from the phenomenon of perception
to that of (creative) expression, his aim was to work out a “good ambiguity” by
showing how “communication with others and thought take up and go beyond the
realm of perception which initiated us to the truth.” His announced goal after
the Phenomenology was “working out in a rigorous way the philosophical
foundations” of a theory of truth and a theory of intersubjectivity (including
a theory of history). No such large-scale work (a sequel, as it were, to the
Phenomenology) ever saw the light of day, although in pursuing this project he
reflected on subjects as diverse as painting, literary language, Saussurian
linguistics, structuralist anthropology, politics, history, the human sciences,
psychoanalysis, contemporary science (including biology), and the philosophy of
nature. Toward the end of his life, however, MerleauPonty did begin work on a
projected large-scale manuscript, the remnants of which were published
posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible. A remarkable feature of this
work (as Claude Lefort has pointed out) is the resolute way in which
Merleau-Ponty appears to be groping for a new philosophical language. His
express concerns in this abortive manuscript are explicitly ontological (as
opposed to the more limited phenomenological concerns of his early work), and
he consistently tries to avoid the subject (consciousness)–object language of
the philosophy of consciousness (inherited from Husserl’s transcendental
idealism) that characterized the Phenomenology of Perception. Although much of
Merleau-Ponty’s later thought was a response to the later Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty sets himself apart from Heidegger in this unfinished work by
claiming that the only ontology possible is an indirect one that can have no
direct access to Being itself. Indeed, had he completed it, Merleau-Ponty’s new
ontology would probably have been one in which, as Lefort has remarked, “the
word Being would not have to be uttered.” He was always keenly attuned to “the
sensible world”; the key term in his ontological thinking is not so much
‘Being’ as it is ‘the flesh’, a term with no equivalent in the history of
philosophy. What traditional philosophy referred to as “subject” and “object”
were not two distinct sorts of reality, but merely “differentiations of one
sole and massive adhesion to Being [Nature] which is the flesh.” By viewing the
perceiving subject as “a coiling over of the visible upon the visible,”
Merleau-Ponty was attempting to overcome the subject–object dichotomy of modern
philosophy, which raised the intractable problems of the external world and
other minds. With the notion of the flesh he believed he could finally overcome
the solipsism of modern philosophy and had discovered the basis for a genuine
intersubjectivity (conceived of as basically an intercorporeity). Does ‘flesh’
signify something significantly different from ‘body’ in Merleau-Ponty’s
earlier thought? Did his growing concern with ontology (and the question of
nature) signal abandonment of his earlier phenomenology (to which the question
of nature is foreign)? This has remained a principal subject of conflicting
interpretations in Merleau-Ponty scholarship. As illustrated by his last,
unfinished work, Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre as a whole is fragmentary. He always
insisted that true philosophy is the enemy of the system, and he disavowed
closure and completion. While Heidegger has had numerous disciples and
epigones, it is difficult to imagine what a “Merleau-Ponty school of
philosophy” would be. This is not to deny that Merleau-Ponty’s work has exerted
considerable influence. Although he was relegated to a kind of intellectual
purgatory in France almost immediately upon his death, the work of his
poststructuralist successors such as Foucault and Jacques Derrida betrays a
great debt to his previous struggles with philosophical modernity. And in
Germany, Great Britain, and, above all, North America, Merleau-Ponty has
continued to be a source of philosophical inspiration and the subject of
extensive scholarship. Although his work does not presume to answer the key
questions of existence, it is a salient model of philosophy conceived of as
unremitting interrogation. It is this questioning (“zetetic”) attitude,
combined with a non-dogmatic humanism, that continues to speak not only to
philosophers but also to a wide audience among practitioners of the human
sciences (phenomenological psychology being a particularly noteworthy example).
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception is unpopular
at Oxford,” J. L. Austin, “What Merleau-Ponty thinks he perceives.”
Mersenne: he compiled massive works on
philosophy, mathematics, music, and natural science, and conducted an enormous
correspondence with such figures as Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes. He
translated Galileo’s Mechanics and Herbert of Cherbury’s De Veritate and
arranged for publication of Hobbes’s De Cive. He is best known for gathering
the objections published with Descartes’s Meditations. Mersenne served a
function in the rise of modern philosophy and science that is today served by
professional journals and associations. His works contain attacks on deists,
atheists, libertines, and skeptics; but he also presents mitigated skepticism
as a practical method for attaining scientific knowledge. He did not believe
that we can attain knowledge of inner essences, but argued – by displaying it –
that we have an immense amount of knowledge about the material world adequate
to our needs. Like Gassendi, Mersenne advocated mechanistic explanations in
science, and following Galileo, he proposed mathematical models of material
phenomena. Like the Epicureans, he believed that mechanism was adequate to save
the phenomena. He thus rejected Aristotelian forms and occult powers. Mersenne
was another of the great philosopher-priests of the seventeenth century who
believed that to increase scientific knowledge is to know and serve God.
merton: merton holds a portrait of H. P. Grice. And the
association is closer. Grice was sometime Harmsworth Scholar at Merton. It was
at Merton he got the acquaintance with S. Watson, later historian at St.
John’s. Merton is the see of the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. What does that
mean? It means that the Lit. Hum. covers more than philosophy. Grice was Lit.
Hum. (Phil.), which means that his focus was on this ‘sub-faculty.’ The faculty
itself is for Lit. Hum. in general, and it is not held anywhere specifically.
Grice loved Ryle’s games with this:: “Oxford is a universale, with St. John’s
being a particulare which can become your sense-datum.’
meta-ethics. “philosophia moralis” was te traditional label – until
Nowell-Smith. Hare is professor of moral philosophy, not meta-ethics. Strictly,
‘philosophia practica’ as opposed to ‘philosophia speculativa’. Philosophia speculativa is distinguished
from philosophia
practica; the former is further differentiated into physica,
mathematica, and theologia; the latter into moralis, oeconomica and
politica. Surely the philosophical mode does not change
when he goes into ethics or other disciplines. Philosophy is ENTIRE. Ethics relates
to metaphysics, but this does not mean that the philosopher is a moralist. In
this respect, unlike, say Philippa Foot, Grice remains a meta-ethicist. Grice
is ‘meta-ethically’ an futilitarian, since he provides a utilitarian backing of
Kantian rationalism, within his empiricist, naturalist, temperament. For Grice
it is complicated, since there is an ethical or practical side even to an
eschatological argument. Grice’s views on ethics are Oxonian. At Oxford,
meta-ethics is a generational thing: there’s Grice, and the palaeo-Gricieans,
and the post-Gricieans. There’s Hampshire, and Hare, and Nowell-Smith, and
Warnock. P. H. Nowell Smith felt overwhelmed by Grice’s cleverness and they
would hardly engage in meta-ethical questions. But Nowell Smith felt that Grice
was ‘too clever.’ Grice objected Hare’s use of descriptivism and Strawsons use
of definite descriptor. Grice preferred to say “the the.”. “Surely Hare is
wrong when sticking with his anti-descriptivist diatribe. Even his dictum is
descriptive!” Grice was amused that it all started with Abbott BEFORE 1879,
since Abbott’s first attempt was entitled, “Kant’s theory of ethics, or
practical philosophy” (1873). ”! Grices explorations on morals are language
based. With a substantial knowledge of the classical languages (that are so
good at verb systems and modes like the optative, that English lacks), Grice
explores modals like should, (Hampshire) ought to (Hare) and, must
(Grice ‒ necessity). Grice is well aware of Hares reflections on the neustic
qualifications on the phrastic. The imperative has usually been one source for
the philosophers concern with the language of morals. Grice attempts to
balance this with a similar exploration on good, now regarded as the
value-paradeigmatic notion par excellence. We cannot understand, to echo
Strawson, the concept of a person unless we understand the concept of a good
person, i.e. the philosopher’s conception of a good person. Morals
is very Oxonian. There were in Grices time only three chairs of philosophy at
Oxford: the three W: the Waynflete chair of metaphysical philosophy, the
Wykeham chair of logic (not philosophy, really), and the White chair of moral
philosophy. Later, the Wilde chair of philosophical psychology was
created. Grice was familiar with Austin’s cavalier attitude to morals as
Whites professor of moral philosophy, succeeding Kneale. When Hare
succeeds Austin, Grice knows that it is time to play with the neustic implicaturum! Grices
approach to morals is very meta-ethical and starts with a fastidious (to use
Blackburns characterisation, not mine!) exploration of modes related to
propositional phrases involving should, ought to, and must. For Hampshire,
should is the moral word par excellence. For Hare, it is ought. For
Grice, it is only must that preserves that sort of necessity that, as a Kantian
rationalist, he is looking for. However, Grice hastens to add that whatever
hell say about the buletic, practical or boulomaic must must also apply to the
doxastic must, as in What goes up must come down. That he did not hesitate to
use necessity operators is clear from his axiomatic treatment, undertaken with
Code, on Aristotelian categories of izzing and hazzing. To understand
Grices view on ethics, we should return to the idea of creature construction in
more detail. Suppose we are genitors-demigods-designing living creatures,
creatures Grice calls Ps. To design a type of P is to specify a diagram and
table for that type plus evaluative procedures, if any. The design is
implemented in animal stuff-flesh and bones typically. Let us focus on one type
of P-a very sophisticated type that Grice, borrowing from Locke, calls very
intelligent rational Ps. Let me be a little more explicit, and a great deal
more speculative, about the possible relation to ethics of my programme for
philosophical psychology. I shall suppose that the genitorial programme has
been realized to the point at which we have designed a class of Ps which,
nearly following Locke, I might call very intelligent rational Ps. These Ps
will be capable of putting themselves in the genitorial position, of asking
how, if they were constructing themselves with a view to their own survival,
they would execute this task; and, if we have done our work aright, their
answer will be the same as ours . We might, indeed, envisage the contents of a
highly general practical manual, which these Ps would be in a position to
compile. The contents of the initial manual would have various kinds of
generality which are connected with familiar discussions of universalizability.
The Ps have, so far, been endowed only with the characteristics which belong to
the genitorial justified psychological theory; so the manual will have to be
formulated in terms of that theory, together with the concepts involved in the
very general description of livingconditions which have been used to set up
that theory; the manual will therefore have conceptual generality. There will
be no way of singling out a special subclass of addressees, so the injunctions
of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any very intelligent
rational P, and will thus have generality of form. And since the manual can be
thought of as being composed by each of the so far indistinguishable Ps, no P
would include in the manual injunctions prescribing a certain line of conduct
in circumstances to which he was not likely to be Subjects; nor indeed could he
do so even if he would. So the circumstances for which conduct is prescribed
could be presumed to be such as to be satisfied, from time to time, by any addressee;
the manual, then, will have generality of application. Such a manual might,
perhaps, without ineptitude be called an immanuel; and the very intelligent
rational Ps, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it,
might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course). Refs.: Most of
Grice’s theorizing on ethics counts as ‘meta-ethic,’ especially in connection
with R. M. Hare, but also with less prescriptivist Oxonian philosophers such as
Nowell-Smith, with his bestseller for Penguin, Austin, Warnock, and Hampshire.
Keywords then are ‘ethic,’ and ‘moral.’ There are many essays on both Kantotle,
i.e. on Aristotle and Kant. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
meta-language: versus object-language –
where Russell actually means thing-language (German: meta-sprache und
ding-sprache). In formal semantics, a language used to describe another
language (the object language). The object language may be either a natural
language or a formal language. The goal of a formal semantic theory is to provide
an axiomatic or otherwise systematic theory of meaning for the object language.
The metalanguage is used to specify the object language’s symbols and formation
rules, which determine its grammatical sentences or well-formed formulas, and
to assign meanings or interpretations to these sentences or formulas. For
example, in an extensional semantics, the metalanguage is used to assign
denotations to the singular terms, extensions to the general terms, and truth
conditions to sentences. The standard format for assigning truth conditions, as
in Tarski’s formulation of his “semantical conception of truth,” is a
T-sentence, which takes the form ‘S is true if and only if p.’ Davidson adapted
this format to the purposes of his truth-theoretic account of meaning. Examples
of T-sentences, with English as the metalanguage, are ‘ “La neige est blanche”
is true if and only if snow is white’, where the object langauge is French and
the homophonic (Davidson) ‘“Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is
white’, where the object language is English as well. Although for formal
purposes the distinction between metalanguage and object language must be
maintained, in practice one can use a langauge to talk about expressions in the
very same language. One can, in Carnap’s terms, shift 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999
7:42 AM Page 560 from the material mode to the formal mode, e.g. from ‘Every
veterinarian is an animal doctor’ to ‘ “Veterinarian” means “animal doctor”.’
This shift is important in discussions of synonymy and of the analytic–synthetic
distinction. Carnap’s distinction corresponds to the use–mention distinction.
We are speaking in the formal mode – we are mentioning a linguistic expression
– when we ascribe a property to a word or other expression type, such as its
spelling, pronunciation, meaning, or grammatical category, or when we speak of
an expression token as misspelled, mispronounced, or misused. We are speaking
in the material mode when we say “Reims is hard to find” but in the formal mode
when we say “ ‘Reims’ is hard to pronounce.”
Triviality: Grice: “Austin once confessed
that he felt it was unworthy of a philosopher to spend his time on
trivialities, but what was he to do?” –
metaphilosophy, the theory of the nature
of philosophy, especially its goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions.
First-order philosophical inquiry includes such disciplines as epistemology,
ontology, ethics, and value theory. It thus constitutes the main activity of
philosophers, past and present. The philosophical study of firstorder philosophical
inquiry raises philosophical inquiry to a higher order. Such higher-order
inquiry is metaphilosophy. The first-order philosophical discipline of (e.g.)
epistemology has the nature of knowledge as its main focus, but that discipline
can itself be the focus of higher-order philosophical inquiry. The latter focus
yields a species of metaphilosophy called metaepistemology. Two other prominent
species are metaethics and metaontology. Each such branch of metaphilosophy
studies the goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions of a first-order
philosophical discipline. Typical metaphilosophical topics include (a) the
conditions under which a claim is philosophical rather than non-philosophical,
and (b) the conditions under which a first-order philosophical claim is either
meaningful, true, or warranted. Metaepistemology, e.g., pursues not the nature
of knowledge directly, but rather the conditions under which claims are
genuinely epistemological and the conditions under which epistemological claims
are either meaningful, or true, or warranted. The distinction between
philosophy and metaphilosophy has an analogue in the familiar distinction
between mathematics and metamathematics. Questions about the autonomy,
objectivity, relativity, and modal status of philosophical claims arise in
metaphilosophy. Questions about autonomy concern the relationship of philosophy
to such disciplines as those constituting the natural and social sciences. For
instance, is philosophy methodologically independent of the natural sciences?
Questions about objectivity and relativity concern the kind of truth and
warrant available to philosophical claims. For instance, are philosophical
truths characteristically, or ever, made true by mind-independent phenomena in
the way that typical claims of the natural sciences supposedly are? Or, are
philosophical truths unavoidably conventional, being fully determined by (and
thus altogether relative to) linguistic conventions? Are they analytic rather
than synthetic truths, and is knowledge of them a priori rather than a
posteriori? Questions about modal status consider whether philosophical claims
are necessary rather than contingent. Are philosophical claims necessarily true
or false, in contrast to the contingent claims of the natural sciences? The
foregoing questions identify major areas of controversy in contemporary
metaphilosophy.
Metaphoricum implicaturum: Grice, “You’re
the cream in my coffee” – “You’re the salt in my stew” – “You’re the starch in
my collar” – “You’re the lace in my shoe.” metaphor, a figure of speech (or a
trope) in which a word or phrase that literally denotes one thing is used to
denote another, thereby implicitly comparing the two things. In the normal use
of the sentence ‘The Mississippi is a river’, ‘river’ is used literally – or as
some would prefer to say, used in its literal sense. By contrast, if one
assertively uttered “Time is a river,” one would be using ‘river’
metaphorically – or be using it in a metaphorical sense. Metaphor has been a
topic of philosophical discussion since Aristotle; in fact, it has almost
certainly been more discussed by philosophers than all the other tropes
together. Two themes are prominent in the discussions up to the nineteenth
century. One is that metaphors, along with all the other tropes, are
decorations of speech; hence the phrase ‘figures of speech’. Metaphors are
adornments or figurations. They do not contribute to the cognitive meaning of
the discourse; instead they lend it color, vividness, emotional impact, etc.
Thus it was characteristic of the Enlightenment and proto-Enlightenment
philosophers – Hobbes and Locke are good examples – to insist that though
philosophers may sometimes have good reason to communicate their thought with
metaphors, they themselves should do their thinking entirely without metaphors.
The other theme prominent in discussions of metaphor up to the nineteenth
century is that metaphors are, so far as their cognitive force is concerned,
elliptical similes. The cognitive force of ‘Time is a river’, when ‘river’ in
that sentence is used metaphorically, is the same as ‘Time is like a river’.
What characterizes almost all theories of metaphor from the time of the
Romantics up through our own century is the rejection of both these traditional
themes. Metaphors – so it has been argued – are not cognitively dispensable
decorations. They contribute to the cognitive meaning of our discourse; and
they are indispensable, not only to religious discourse, but to ordinary, and
even scientific, discourse, not to mention poetic. Nietzsche, indeed, went so
far as to argue that all speech is metaphorical. And though no consensus has
yet emerged on how and what metaphors contribute to meaning, nor how we
recognize what they contribute, nearconsensus has emerged on the thesis that
they do not work as elliptical similes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why it is not the
case that you’re the cream in my coffee.”
Aristkantian
metaphysical deduction: cf. the transcendental club. or argument. transcendental argument Metaphysics, epistemology An
argument that starts from some accepted experience or fact to prove that there
must be something which is beyond experience but which is a necessary condition
for making the accepted experience or fact possible. The goal of a
transcendental argument is to establish the transcendental dialectic truth of this precondition. If there is
something X of which Y is a necessary condition, then Y must be true. This form
of argument became prominent in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where he argued
that the existence of some fundamental a priori concepts, namely the
categories, and of space and time as pure forms of sensibility, are necessary
to make experience possible. In contemporary philosophy, transcendental
arguments are widely proposed as a way of refuting skepticism. Wittgenstein
used this form of argument to reject the possibility of a private language that
only the speaker could understand. Peter Strawson employs a transcendental
argument to prove the perception-independent existence of material particulars
and to reject a skeptical attitude toward the existence of other minds. There
is disagreement about the kind of necessity involved in transcendental
arguments, and Barry Stroud has raised important questions about the
possibility of transcendental arguments succeeding. “A transcendental argument
attempts to prove q by proving it is part of any correct explanation of p, by
proving it a precondition of p’s possibility.” Nozick Philosophical
Explanations transcendental deduction Metaphysics, epistemology, ethics,
aesthetics For Kant, the argument to prove that certain a priori concepts are
legitimately, universally, necessarily, and exclusively applicable to objects
of experience. Kant employed this form of argument to establish the legitimacy
of space and time as the forms of intuition, of the claims of the moral law in
the Critique of Practical Reason, and of the claims of the aesthetic judgment
of taste in the Critique of Judgement. However, the most influential example of
this form of argument appeared in the Critique of Pure Reason as the
transcendental deduction of the categories. The metaphysical deduction set out
the origin and character of the categories, and the task of the transcendental
deduction was to demonstrate that these a priori concepts do apply to objects
of experience and hence to prove the objective validity of the categories. The
strategy of the proof is to show that objects can be thought of only by means
of the categories. In sensibility, objects are subject to the forms of space
and time. In understanding, experienced
objects must stand under the conditions of the transcendental unity of
apperception. Because these conditions require the determination of objects by
the pure concepts of the understanding, there can be no experience that is not
subject to the categories. The categories, therefore, are justified in their
application to appearances as conditions of the possibility of experience. In
the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant extensively
rewrote the transcendental deduction, although he held that the result remained
the same. The first version emphasized the subjective unity of consciousness,
while the second version stressed the objective character of the unity, and it
is therefore possible to distinguish between a subjective and objective
deduction. The second version was meant to clarify the argument, but remained
extremely difficult to interpret and assess. The presence of the two versions
of this fundamental argument makes interpretation even more demanding.
Generally speaking, European philosophers prefer the subjective version, while
Anglo-American philosophers prefer the objective version. The transcendental
deduction of the categories was a revolutionary development in modern
philosophy. It was the main device by which Kant sought to overcome the errors
and limitations of both rationalism and empiricism and propelled philosophy
into a new phase. “The explanation of the manner in which concepts can thus
relate a priori to objects I entitle their transcendental deduction.” Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason. metaphysical realism, in the widest sense, the view
that (a) there are real objects (usually the view is concerned with
spatiotemporal objects), (b) they exist independently of our experience or our
knowledge of them, and (c) they have properties and enter into relations
independently of the concepts with which we understand them or of the language
with which we describe them. Anti-realism is any view that rejects one or more
of these three theses, though if (a) is rejected the rejection of (b) and (c)
follows trivially. (If it merely denies the existence of material things, then
its traditional name is ‘idealism.’) Metaphysical realism, in all of its three
parts, is shared by common sense, the sciences, and most philosophers. The
chief objection to it is that we can form no conception of real objects, as
understood by it, since any such conception must rest on the concepts we
already have and on our language and experience. To accept the objection seems
to imply that we can have no knowledge of real objects as they are in
themselves, and that truth must not be understood as correspondence to such
objects. But this itself has an even farther reaching consequence: either (i)
we should accept the seemingly absurd view that there are no real objects
(since the objection equally well applies to minds and their states, to
concepts and words, to properties and relations, to experiences, etc.), for we
should hardly believe in the reality of something of which we can form no
conception at all; or (ii) we must face the seemingly hopeless task of a
drastic change in what we mean by ‘reality’, ‘concept’, ‘experience’,
‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, and much else. On the other hand, the objection may be
held to reduce to a mere tautology, amounting to ‘We (can) know reality only as
we (can) know it’, and then it may be argued that no substantive thesis, which
anti-realism claims to be, is derivable from a mere tautology. Yet even if the
objection is a tautology, it serves to force us to avoid a simplistic view of
our cognitive relationship to the world. In discussions of universals,
metaphysical realism is the view that there are universals, and usually is
contrasted with nominalism. But this either precludes a standard third alternative,
namely conceptualism, or simply presupposes that concepts are general words
(adjectives, common nouns, verbs) or uses of such words. If this presupposition
is accepted, then indeed conceptualism would be the same as nominalism, but
this should be argued, not legislated verbally. Traditional conceptualism holds
that concepts are particular mental entities, or at least mental dispositions,
that serve the classificatory function that universals have been supposed to
serve and also explain the classificatory function that general words
undoubtedly also serve. -- metaphysics, most generally, the philosophical
investigation of the nature, constitution, and structure of reality. It is
broader in scope than science, e.g., physics and even cosmology (the science of
the nature, structure, and origin of the universe as a whole), since one of its
traditional concerns is the existence of non-physical entities, e.g., God. It
is also more fundamental, since it investigates questions science does not
address but the answers to which it presupposes. Are there, for instance,
physical objects at all, and does every event have a cause? So understood,
metaphysics was rejected by positivism on the ground that its statements are
“cognitively meaningless” since they are not empirically verifiable. More
recent philosophers, such as Quine, reject metaphysics on the ground that
science alone provides genuine knowledge. In The Metaphysics of Logical
Positivism (1954), Bergmann argued that logical positivism, and any view such
as Quine’s, presupposes a metaphysical theory. And the positivists’ criterion
of cognitive meaning was never formulated in a way satisfactory even to them. A
successor of the positivist attitude toward metaphysics is Grice’s tutee at St.
John’s – for his Logic Paper for the PPE -- P. F. Strawson’s preference (especially
in Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics) for what he calls
descriptive metaphysics, which is “content to describe the actual structure of
our thought about the world,” as contrasted with revisionary metaphysics, which
is “concerned to produce a better structure.” The view, sometimes considered
scientific (but an assumption rather than an argued theory), that all that
there is, is spatiotemporal (a part of “nature”) and is knowable only through
the methods of the sciences, is itself a metaphysics, namely metaphysical
naturalism (not to be confused with natural philosophy). It is not part of
science itself. In its most general sense, metaphysics may seem to coincide
with philosophy as a whole, since anything philosophy investigates is
presumably a part of reality, e.g., knowledge, values, and valid reasoning. But
it is useful to reserve the investigation of such more specific topics for
distinct branches of philosophy, e.g., epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and
logic, since they raise problems peculiar to themselves. Perhaps the most
familiar question in metaphysics is whether there are only material entities –
materialism – or only mental entities, i.e., minds and their states – idealism
– or both – dualism. Here ‘entity’ has its broadest sense: anything real. More
specific questions of metaphysics concern the existence and nature of certain
individuals – also called particulars – (e.g., God), or certain properties
(e.g., are there properties that nothing exemplifies?) or relations (e.g., is
there a relation of causation that is a necessary connection rather than a mere
regular conjunction between events?). The nature of space and time is another
important example of such a more specific topic. Are space and time peculiar
individuals that “contain” ordinary individuals, or are they just systems of
relations between individual things, such as being (spatially) higher or
(temporally) prior. Whatever the answer, space and time are what render a world
out of the totality of entities that are parts of it. Since on any account of
knowledge, our knowledge of the world is extremely limited, concerning both its
spatial and temporal dimensions and its inner constitution, we must allow for
an indefinite number of possible ways the world may be, might have been, or
will be. And this thought gives rise to the idea of an indefinite number of
possible worlds. This idea is useful in making vivid our understanding of the
nature of necessary truth (a necessarily true proposition is one that is true
in all possible worlds) and thus is commonly employed in modal logic. But the
idea can also make possible worlds seem real, a highly controversial doctrine.
The notion of a spatiotemporal world is commonly that employed in discussions
of the socalled issue of realism versus anti-realism, although this issue has
also been raised with respect to universals, values, and numbers, which are not
usually considered spatiotemporal. While there is no clear sense in asserting
that nothing is real, there seems to be a clear sense in asserting that there
is no spatiotemporal world, especially if it is added that there are minds and
their ideas. This was Berkeley’s view. But contemporary philosophers who raise
questions about the reality of the spatiotemporal world are not comfortable
with Berkeleyan minds and ideas and usually just somewhat vaguely speak of
“ourselves” and our “representations.” The latter are themselves often
understood as material (states of our brains), a clearly inconsistent position
for anyone denying the reality of the spatiotemporal world. Usually, the
contemporary anti-realist does not actually deny it but rather adopts a view
resembling Kant’s transcendental idealism. Our only conception of the world,
the anti-realist would argue, rests on our perceptual and conceptual faculties,
including our language. But then what reason do we have to think that this
conception is true, that it corresponds to the world as the world is in itself?
Had our faculties and language been different, surely we would have had very
different conceptions of the world. And very different conceptions of it are
possible even in terms of our present faculties, as seems to be shown by the
fact that very different scientific theories can be supported by exactly the
same data. So far, we do not have anti-realism proper. But it is only a short
step to it: if our conception of an independent spatiotemporal world is
necessarily subjective, then we have no good reason for supposing that there is
such a world, especially since it seems selfcontradictory to speak of a
conception that is independent of our conceptual faculties. It is clear that
this question, like almost all the questions of general metaphysics, is at
least in part epistemological. Metaphysics can also be understood in a more
definite sense, suggested by Aristotle’s notion (in his Metaphysics, the title
of which was given by an early editor of his works, not by Aristotle himself)
of “first philosophy,” namely, the study of being qua being, i.e., of the most
general and necessary characteristics that anything must have in order to count
as a being, an entity (ens). Sometimes ‘ontology’ is used in this sense, but
this is by no means common practice, ‘ontology’ being often used as a synonym of
‘metaphysics’. Examples of criteria (each of which is a major topic in
metaphysics) that anything must meet in order to count as a being, an entity,
are the following. (A) Every entity must be either an individual thing (e.g.,
Socrates and this book), or a property (e.g., Socrates’ color and the shape of
this book), or a relation (e.g., marriage and the distance between two cities),
or an event (e.g., Socrates’ death), or a state of affairs (e.g., Socrates’
having died), or a set (e.g., the set of Greek philosophers). These kinds of
entities are usually called categories, and metaphysics is very much concerned
with the question whether these are the only categories, or whether there are
others, or whether some of them are not ultimate because they are reducible to
others (e.g., events to states of affairs, or individual things to temporal
series of events). (B) The existence, or being, of a thing is what makes it an
entity. (C) Whatever has identity and is distinct from everything else is an
entity. (D) The nature of the “connection” between an entity and its properties
and relations is what makes it an entity. Every entity must have properties and
perhaps must enter into relations with at least some other entities. (E) Every
entity must be logically self-consistent. It is noteworthy that after
announcing his project of first philosophy, Aristotle immediately embarked on a
defense of the law of non-contradiction. Concerning (A) we may ask (i) whether
at least some individual things (particulars) are substances, in the
Aristotelian sense, i.e., enduring through time and changes in their properties
and relations, or whether all individual things are momentary. In that case,
the individuals of common sense (e.g., this book) are really temporal series of
momentary individuals, perhaps events such as the book’s being on a table at a
specific instant. We may also ask (ii) whether any entity has essential
properties, i.e., properties without which it would not exist, or whether all
properties are accidental, in the sense that the entity could exist even if it
lost the property in question. We may ask (iii) whether properties and
relations are particulars or universals, e.g., whether the color of this page
and the color of the next page, which (let us assume) are exactly alike, are
two distinct entities, each with its separate spatial location, or whether they
are identical and thus one entity that is exemplified by, perhaps even located
in, the two pages. Concerning (B), we may ask whether existence is itself a
property. If it is, how is it to be understood, and if it is not, how are we to
understand ‘x exists’ and ‘x does not exist’, which seem crucial to everyday
and scientific discourse, just as the thoughts they express seem crucial to
everyday and scientific thinking? Should we countenance, as Meinong did,
objects having no existence, e.g. golden mountains, even though we can talk and
think about them? We can talk and think about a golden mountain and even claim
that it is true that the mountain is golden, while knowing all along that what
we are thinking and talking about does not exist. If we do not construe
non-existent objects as something, then we are committed to the somewhat
startling view that everything exists. Concerning (C) we may ask how to
construe informative identity statements, such as, to use Frege’s example, ‘The
Evening Star is identical with the Morning Star’. This contrasts with trivial
and perhaps degenerate statements, such as ‘The Evening Star is identical with
the Evening Star’, which are almost never made in ordinary or scientific
discourse. The former are essential to any coherent, systematic cognition (even
to everyday recognition of persons and places). Yet they are puzzling. We
cannot say that they assert of two things that they are one, even though
ordinary language suggests precisely this. Neither can we just say that they
assert that a certain thing is identical with itself, for this view would be
obviously false if the statements are informative. The fact that Frege’s
example includes definite descriptions (‘the Evening Star’, ‘the Morning Star’)
is irrelevant, contrary to Russell’s view. Informative identity statements can
also have as their subject terms proper names and even demonstrative pronouns
(e.g., ‘Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus’ and ‘This [the shape of this
page] is identical with that [the shape of the next page]’), the reference of
which is established not by description but ostensively, perhaps by actual
pointing. Concerning (D) we can ask about the nature of the relationship,
usually called instantiation or exemplification, between an entity and its
properties and relations. Surely, there is such a relationship. But it can
hardly be like an ordinary relation such as marriage that connects things of
the same kind. And we can ask what is the connection between that relation and
the entities it relates, e.g., the individual thing on one hand and its
properties and relations on the other. Raising this question seems to lead to
an infinite regress, as Bradley held; for the supposed connection is yet
another relation to be connected with something else. But how do we avoid the
regress? Surely, an individual thing and its properties and relations are not
unrelated items. They have a certain unity. But what is its character? Moreover,
we can hardly identify the individual thing except by reference to its
properties and relations. Yet if we say, as some have, that it is nothing but a
bundle of its properties and relations, could there not be another bundle of
exactly the same properties and relations, yet distinct from the first one?
(This question concerns the so-called problem of individuation, as well as the
principle of the identity of indiscernibles.) If an individual is something
other than its properties and relations (e.g., what has been called a bare
particular), it would seem to be unobservable and thus perhaps unknowable.
Concerning (E), virtually no philosopher has questioned the law of
non-contradiction. But there are important questions about its status. Is it
merely a linguistic convention? Some have held this, but it seems quite
implausible. Is the law of non-contradiction a deep truth about being qua
being? If it is, (E) connects closely with (B) and (C), for we can think of the
concepts of self-consistency, identity, and existence as the most fundamental
metaphysical concepts. They are also fundamental to logic, but logic, even if
ultimately grounded in metaphysics, has a rich additional subject matter
(sometimes merging with that of mathematics) and therefore is properly regarded
as a separate branch of philosophy. The word ‘metaphysics’ has also been used
in at least two other senses: first, the investigation of entities and states
of affairs “transcending” human experience, in particular, the existence of
God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will (this was Kant’s
conception of the sort of metaphysics that, according to him, required
“critique”); and second, the investigation of any alleged supernatural or
occult phenomena, such as ghosts and telekinesis. The first sense is properly
philosophical, though seldom occurring today. The second is strictly popular,
since the relevant supernatural phenomena are most questionable on both
philosophical and scientific grounds. They should not be confused with the
subject matter of philosophical theology, which may be thought of as part of
metaphysics in the general philosophical sense, though it was included by
Aristotle in the subject matter of metaphysics in his sense of the study of
being qua being. Refs.: H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, “Seminars on
Aristotle’s Categoriae,” Oxford.
metaphysical wisdom: J. London-born philosopher, cited by H. P. Grice in his
third programme lecture on Metaphysics. “Wisdom used to say that metaphysics is
nonsense, but INTERESTING nonsense.” Some more “contemporary” accounts of
“metaphysics” sound, on the face of it at least, very different from either of
these. Consider, for example, from the
OTHER place, John Wisdom's description of a metaphysical, shall we say,
‘statement’ – I prefer ‘utterance’ or pronouncement! Wisdom says that a metaphysical, shall we
say, ‘proposition’ is, characteristically, a sort of illuminating falsehood, a
pointed paradox, which uses what Wisdom calls ‘ordinary language’ in a
disturbing, baffling, and even shocking way, but not otiosely, but in order to
make your tutee aware of a hidden difference or a hidden resemblance between
this thing and that thing – a difference and a resemblance hidden by our
ordinary ways of “talking.” The
metaphysician renders what is clear, obscure.
And the metaphysician MUST retort to some EXTRA-ordinary language, as
Wisdom calls it! Of course, to be fair
to Wisdom and the OTHER place, Wisdom does not claim this to be a complete
characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one. Since Wisdom loves a figure of speech and a
figure of thought! Perhaps what Wisdom
claims should *itself* be seen as an illuminating paradox, a meta-meta-physical
one! In any case, its relation to
Aristotle's, or, closer to us, F. H. Bradley's, account of the matter is not
obvious, is it? But perhaps a relation
CAN be established. Certainly not every
metaphysical statement is a paradox serving to call attention to an usually
unnoticed difference or resemblance.
For many a metaphysical statement is so obscure (or unperspicuous, as I
prefer) that it takes long training, usually at Oxford, before the
metaphysician’s meaning can be grasped.
A paradox, such as Socrates’s, must operate with this or that familiar
concept. For the essence of a paradox is
that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock your tutee when he is
standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations. Nevertheless there IS a connection between
“metaphysics” and Wisdom's kind of paradox.
He is not speaking otiosely!
Suppose we consider the paradox:
i. Everyone is really always alone.
Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram -- rather a flat
one - about the human condition. The implicaturum, via hyperbole, is “I am
being witty.” The pronouncement (i) might be said, at least, to minimise the
difference between “being BY oneself” and “being WITH other people,”
Heidegger’s “Mit-Sein.” But now consider
the pronouncement (i), not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a
certain kind of “metaphysical” argument: by a “metaphysical” argument to the
effect that what passes for “knowledge” of the other's mental or psychological
process is, at best, an unverifiable conjecture, since the mind (or soul) and
the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind (or soul, as
Aristotle would prefer, ‘psyche’) is always withdrawn behind the screen of its
bodily manifestations, as Witters would have it. (Not in vain Wisdom calls
himself or hisself a disciple of Witters!)
When this solitude-affirming paradox, (i) is seen in the context of a
general theory about the soul and the body and the possibilities and limits of
so-called “knowledge” (as in “Knowledge of other minds,” to use Wisdom’s
fashionable sobriquet), when it is seen as embodying such a “metaphysical”
theory, indeed the paradox BECOMES clearly a “metaphysical” statement. But the fact that the statement or
proposition is most clearly seen as “metaphysical” in such a setting does not
mean that there is no “metaphysics” at all in it when it is deprived of the
setting. (Cf. my “The general theory of context.”). An utterance like (ii) Everyone is alone. invites us to change, for a moment at least
and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at and talking about things,
and hints (or the metaphysician implicates rather) that the changed view the
tutee gets is the truer, the profounder, view.
Cf. Cook Wilson, “What we know we know,” as delighting this air marshal.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, “The nature of metaphysics:
the Third-Programme Lectures for 1953.”
methodological holism, also called
metaphysical holism, the thesis that with respect to some system there is
explanatory emergence, i.e., the laws of the more complex situations in the
system are not deducible by way of any composition laws or laws of coexistence
from the laws of the simpler or simplest situation(s). Explanatory emergence
may exist in a system for any of the following reasons: that at some more
complex level a variable interacts that does not do so at simpler levels, that
a property of the “whole” interacts with properties of the “parts,” that the
relevant variables interact by different laws at more complex levels owing to
the complexity of the levels, or (the limiting case) that strict lawfulness
breaks down at some more complex level. Thus, explanatory emergence does not
presuppose descriptive emergence, the thesis that there are properties of
“wholes” (or more complex situations) that cannot be defined through the
properties of the “parts” (or simpler situations). The opposite of
methodological holism is methodological individualism, also called explanatory
reductionism, according to which all laws of the “whole” (or more complex
situations) can be deduced from a combination of the laws of the simpler or
simplest situation(s) and either some composition laws or laws of coexistence
(depending on whether or not there is descriptive emergence). Methodological
individualists need not deny that there may be significant lawful connections
among properties of the “whole,” but must insist that all such properties are
either definable through, or connected by laws of coexistence with, properties
of the “parts.”
middle knowledge, knowledge of a
particular kind of propositions, now usually called “counterfactuals of
freedom,” first attributed to God by Molina. These propositions state,
concerning each possible free creature God could create, what that creature
would do in each situation of (libertarian) free choice in which it could
possibly find itself. The claim that God knows these propositions offers
important theological advantages; it helps in explaining both how God can have
foreknowledge of free actions and how God can maintain close providential
control over a world containing libertarian freedom. Opponents of middle
knowledge typically argue that it is impossible for there to be true counterfactuals
of freedom.
Middle Platonism, the period of Platonism
between Antiochus of Ascalon (c.130–68 B.C.) and Plotinus (A.D. 204–70),
characterized by a rejection of the skeptical stance of the New Academy and by
a gradual advance, with many individual variations, toward a comprehensive
dogmatic position on metaphysical principles, while exhibiting a certain
latitude, as between Stoicizing and Peripateticizing positions, in the sphere
of ethics. Antiochus himself was much influenced by Stoic materialism (though
disagreeing with the Stoics in ethics), but in the next generation a
neo-Pythagorean influence made itself felt, generating the mix of doctrines
that one may most properly term Middle Platonic. From Eudorus of Alexandria
(fl. c.25 B.C.) on, a transcendental, two-world metaphysic prevailed, featuring
a supreme god, or Monad, a secondary creator god, and a world soul, with which
came a significant change in ethics, substituting, as an ‘end of goods’
(telos), “likeness to God” (from Plato, Theaetetus 176b), for the Stoicizing
“assimilation to nature” of Antiochus. Our view of the period is hampered by a
lack of surviving texts, but it is plain that, in the absence of a central
validating authority (the Academy as an institution seems to have perished in
the wake of the capture of Athens by Mithridates in 88 B.C.), a considerable
variety of doctrine prevailed among individual Platonists and schools of
Platonists, particularly in relation to a preference for Aristotelian or Stoic
principles of ethics. Most known activity occurred in the late first and second
centuries A.D. Chief figures in this period are Plutarch of Chaeronea (c.45–125),
Calvenus Taurus (fl. c.145), and Atticus (fl. c.175), whose activity centered
on Athens (though Plutarch remained loyal to Chaeronea in Boeotia); Gaius (fl.
c.100) and Albinus (fl. c.130) – not to be identified with “Alcinous,” author
of the Didaskalikos; the rhetorician Apuleius of Madaura (fl. c.150), who also
composed a useful treatise on the life and doctrines of Plato; and the
neo-Pythagoreans Moderatus of Gades (fl. c.90), Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl.
c.140), and Numenius (fl. c.150), who do not, however, constitute a “school.”
Good evidence for an earlier stage of Middle Platonism is provided by the
Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c.25 B.C.–A.D. 50). Perhaps the single
most important figure for the later Platonism of Plotinus and his successors is
Numenius, of whose works we have only fragments. His speculations on the nature
of the first principle, however, do seem to have been a stimulus to Plotinus in
his postulation of a supraessential One. Plutarch is important as a literary
figure, though most of his serious philosophical works are lost; and the
handbooks of Alcinous and Apuleius are significant for our understanding of
second-century Platonism.
Middle Vitters: Grice: “Phrase used by H.
P. Grice to refer to the middle period of Vitters’s philosophy. Vitters lived
54 years. The first Vitters goes from 0 to the third of his life. The latter
Vitters go to the last third. The middle Vitters is the middle Vitters.”
Plantinga, in revenge, refers to “the middle grice” as the pig in the middle of
the trio. Refs.: Grice, “Strawson’s love for the middle Vitters.”
Miletusians, or Ionian Miletusians, or Milesians,
the pre-Socratic philosophers of Miletus, a Grecian city-state on the Ionian
coast of Asia Minor. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes produced the earliest philosophies,
stressing an “arche” or material source from which the cosmos and all things in
it were generated: water for Thales, and then there’s air, fire, and earth –
the fifth Grice called the ‘quintessentia.’
Mill: Scots-born philosopher (“One should
take grice to one mill but not to the mill –“ Grice --) and social theorist. He
applied the utilitarianism of his contemporary Bentham to such social matters
as systems of education and government, law and penal systems, and colonial
policy. He also advocated the associationism of Hume. Mill was an influential
thinker in early nineteenth-century London, but his most important role in the
history of philosophy was the influence he had on his son, J. S. Mill. He
raised his more famous son as a living experiment in his associationist theory
of education. His utilitarian views were developed and extended by J. S. Mill,
while his associationism was also adopted by his son and became a precursor of
the latter’s phenomenalism.
Mill, Scots London-born empiricist
philosopher and utilitarian social reformer. He was the son of Mill, a leading
defender of Bentham’s utilitarianism, and an advocate of reforms based on that
philosophy. Mill was educated by his father (and thus “at Oxford we always
considered him an outsider!” – Grice) in accordance with the principles of the
associationist psychology adopted by the Benthamites and deriving from David Hartley,
and was raised with the expectation that he would become a defender of the
principles of the Benthamite school. Mill begins the study of Grecian at three
and Roman at eight, and later assisted Mill in educating his brothers. He went
to France to learn the language (“sc. French --” Grice ), and studied chemistry
and mathematics at Montpellier. He wrote regularly for the Westminster Review,
the Benthamite journal. He underwent a mental crisis that lasted some months.
This he later attributed to his rigid education; in any case he emerged from a
period of deep depression still advocating utilitarianism but in a very much
revised version. Mill visits Paris during the revolution, meeting Lafayette and
other popular leaders, and was introduced to the writings of Saint-Simon and
Comte. He also met Harriet Taylor, to whom he immediately became devoted. They
married only in 1851, when Taylor died. He joined the India House headquarters
of the East India Company, serving as an examiner until the company was
dissolved in 1858 in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny. Mill sat in
Parliament. Harriet dies and is buried at Avignon, where Mill thereafter
regularly resided for half of each year. Mill’s major works are his “System of
Logic, Deductive and Inductive,” “Political Economy,” “On Liberty,”
“Utilitarianism,” in Fraser’s Magazine, “The Subjection of Women” – Grice: “I
wrote a paper for Hardie on this. His only comment was: ‘what do you mean by
‘of’?” --; “An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy,” and
“Religion.” His writing style is excellent, and his history of his own mental
development, the “Autobiography” is a major Victorian literary text. His main
opponents philosophically are Whewell and Hamilton, and it is safe to say that
after Mill their intuitionism in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and ethics
could no longer be defended. Mill’s own views were later to be eclipsed by
those of such Oxonian lumaries as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and the other
Oxonian Hegelian idealists (Bosanquet, Pater). His views in metaphysics and
philosophy of science have been revived and defended by Russell and the logical
positivists, while his utilitarian ethics has regained its status as one of the
major ethical theories. His social philosophy deeply infuenced the Fabians and
other groups on the English left; its impact continues. Mill was brought up on
the basis of, and to believe in, the strict utilitarianism of his father. His
own development largely consisted in his attempts to broaden it, to include a
larger and more sympathetic view of human nature, and to humanize its program
to fit this broader view of human beings. In his own view, no doubt largely
correct, he did not so much reject his father’s principles as fill in the gaps
and eliminate rigidities and crudities. He continued throughout his life his
father’s concern to propagate principles conceived as essential to promoting
human happiness. These extended from moral principles to principles of
political economy to principles of logic and metaphysics. Mill’s vision of the
human being was rooted in the psychological theories he defended. Arguing against
the intuitionism of Reid and Whewell, he extended the associationism of his
father. On this theory, ideas have their genetic antecedents in sensation, a
complex idea being generated out of a unique set of simple, elementary ideas,
through associations based on regular patterns in the presented sensations.
Psychological analysis reveals the elementary parts of ideas and is thus the
means for investigating the causal origins of our ideas. The elder Mill
followed Locke in conceiving analysis on the model of definition, so that the
psychological elements are present in the idea they compose and the idea is
nothing but its associated elements. Mill emerged from his mental crisis with
the recognition that mental states are often more than the sum of the ideas that
are their genetic antecedents. On the revised model of analysis, the analytical
elements are not actually present in the idea, but are present only
dispositionally, ready to be recovered by association under the analytical set.
Moreover, it is words that are defined, not ideas, though words become general
only by becoming associated with ideas. Analysis thus became an empirical task,
rather than something settled a priori according to one’s metaphysical
predispositions, as it had been for Mill’s predecessors. The revised psychology
allowed the younger Mill to account empirically in a much more subtle way than
could the earlier associationists for the variations in our states of feeling.
Thus, for example, the original motive to action is simple sensations of
pleasure, but through association things originally desired as means become
associated with pleasure and thereby become desirable as ends, as parts of
one’s pleasure. But these acquired motives are not merely the sum of the simple
pleasures that make them up; they are more than the sum of those genetic
antecedents. Thus, while Mill holds with his father that persons seek to
maximize their pleasures, unlike his father he also holds that not all ends are
selfish, and that pleasures are not only quantitatively but also qualitatively
distinct. In ethics, then, Mill can hold with the intuitionists that our moral
sentiments are qualitatively distinct from the lower pleasures, while denying
the intuitionist conclusion that they are innate. Mill urges, with his father
and Bentham, that the basic moral norm is the principle of utility, that an
action is right provided it maximizes human welfare. Persons always act to
maximize their own pleasure, but the general human welfare can be among the
pleasures they seek. Mill’s position thus does not have the problems that the
apparently egoistic psychology of his father created. The only issue is whether
a person ought to maximize human welfare, whether he ought to be the sort of
person who is so motivated. Mill’s own ethics is that this is indeed what one
ought to be, and he tries to bring this state of human being about in others by
example, and by urging them to expand the range of their human sympathy through
poetry like that of Wordsworth, through reading the great moral teachers such
as Jesus and Socrates, and by other means of moral improvement. Mill also
offers an argument in defense of the principle of utility. Against those who,
like Whewell, argue that there is no basic right to pleasure, he argues that as
a matter of psychological fact, people seek only pleasure, and concludes that
it is therefore pointless to suggest that they ought to do anything other than
this. The test of experience thus excludes ends other than pleasure. This is a
plausible argument. Less plausible is his further argument that since each
seeks her own pleasure, the general good is the (ultimate) aim of all. This
latter argument unfortunately presupposes the invalid premise that the law for
a whole follows from laws about the individual parts of the whole. Other moral
rules can be justified by their utility and the test of experience. For
example, such principles of justice as the rules of property and of promise
keeping are justified by their role in serving certain fundamental human needs.
Exceptions to such secondary rules can be justified by appeal to the principle
of utility. But there is also utility in not requiring in every application a
lengthy utilitarian calculation, which provides an objective justification for
overlooking what might be, objectively considered in terms of the principle of
utility, an exception to a secondary rule. Logic and philosophy of science. The
test of experience is also brought to bear on norms other than those of
morality, e.g., those of logic and philosophy of science. Mill argues, against
the rationalists, that science is not demonstrative from intuited premises.
Reason in the sense of deductive logic is not a logic of proof but a logic of
consistency. The basic axioms of any science are derived through generalization
from experience. The axioms are generic and delimit a range of possible
hypotheses about the specific subject matter to which they are applied. It is
then the task of experiment and, more generally, observation to eliminate the
false and determine which hypothesis is true. The axioms, the most generic of
which is the law of the uniformity of nature, are arrived at not by this sort
of process of elimination but by induction by simple enumeration: Mill argues
plausibly that on the basis of experience this method becomes more reliable the
more generic is the hypothesis that it is used to justify. But like Hume, Mill
holds that for any generalization from experience the evidence can never be
sufficient to eliminate all possibility of doubt. Explanation for Mill, as for
the logical positivists, is by subsumption under matter-of-fact
generalizations. Causal generalizations that state sufficient or necessary and
sufficient conditions are more desirable as explanations than mere
regularities. Still more desirable is a law or body of laws that gives
necessary and sufficient conditions for any state of a system, i.e., a body of
laws for which there are no explanatory gaps. As for explanation of laws, this
can proceed either by filling in gaps or by subsuming the law under a generic
theory that unifies the laws of several areas. Mill argues that in the social
sciences the subject matter is too complex to apply the normal methods of
experiment. But he also rejects the purely deductive method of the Benthamite political
economists such as his father and David Ricardo. Rather, one must deduce the
laws for wholes, i.e., the laws of economics and sociology, from the laws for
the parts, i.e., the laws of psychology, and then test these derived laws
against the accumulated data of history. Mill got the idea for this methodology
of the social sciences from Comte, but unfortunately it is vitiated by the
false idea, already noted, that one can deduce without any further premise the
laws for wholes from the laws for the parts. Subsequent methodologists of the
social sciences have come to substitute the more reasonable methods of
statistics for this invalid method Mill proposes. Mill’s account of scientific
method does work well for empirical sciences, such as the chemistry of his day.
He was able to show, too, that it made good sense of a great deal of physics,
though it is arguable that it cannot do justice to theories that explain the
atomic and subatomic structure of matter – something Mill himself was prepared
to acknowledge. He also attempted to apply his views to geometry, and even more
implausibly, to arithmetic. In these areas, he was certainly bested by Whewell,
and the world had to wait for the logical work of Russell and Whitehead before
a reasonable empiricist account of these areas became available. Metaphysics.
The starting point of all inference is the sort of observation we make through
our senses, and since we know by experience that we have no ideas that do not
derive from sense experience, it follows that we cannot conceive a world beyond
what we know by sense. To be sure, we can form generic concepts, such as that
of an event, which enable us to form concepts of entities that we cannot
experience, e.g., the concept of the tiny speck of sand that stopped my watch
or the concept of the event that is the cause of my present sensation. Mill
held that what we know of the laws of sensation is sufficient to make it
reasonable to suppose that the immediate cause of one’s present sensation is
the state of one’s nervous system. Our concept of an objective physical object
is also of this sort; it is the set of events that jointly constitute a
permanent possible cause of sensation. It is our inductive knowledge of laws
that justifies our beliefs that there are entities that fall under these
concepts. The point is that these entities, while unsensed, are (we reasonably
believe) part of the world we know by means of our senses. The contrast is to
such things as the substances and transcendent Ideas of rationalists, or the God
of religious believers, entities that can be known only by means that go beyond
sense and inductive inferences therefrom. Mill remained essentially
pre-Darwinian, and was willing to allow the plausibility of the hypothesis that
there is an intelligent designer for the perceived order in the universe. But
this has the status of a scientific hypothesis rather than a belief in a
substance or a personal God transcending the world of experience and time.
Whewell, at once the defender of rationalist ideas for science and for ethics
and the defender of established religion, is a special object for Mill’s scorn.
Social and political thought. While Mill is respectful of the teachings of
religious leaders such as Jesus, the institutions of religion, like those of government
and of the economy, are all to be subjected to criticism based on the principle
of utility: Do they contribute to human welfare? Are there any alternatives
that could do better? Thus, Mill argues that a free-market economy has many
benefits but that the defects, in terms of poverty for many, that result from
private ownership of the means of production may imply that we should institute
the alternative of socialism or public ownership of the means of production. He
similarly argues for the utility of liberty as a social institution: under such
a social order individuality will be encouraged, and this individuality in turn
tends to produce innovations in knowledge, technology, and morality that
contribute significantly to improving the general welfare. Conversely,
institutions and traditions that stifle individuality, as religious
institutions often do, should gradually be reformed. Similar considerations
argue on the one hand for democratic representative government and on the other
for a legal system of rights that can defend individuals from the tyranny of
public opinion and of the majority. Status of women. Among the things for which
Mill campaigned were women’s rights, women’s suffrage, and equal access for
women to education and to occupations. He could not escape his age and
continued to hold that it was undesirable for a woman to work to help support
her family. While he disagreed with his father and Bentham that all motives are
egoistic and self-interested, he nonetheless held that in most affairs of
economics and government such motives are dominant. He was therefore led to
disagree with his father that votes for women are unnecessary since the male
can speak for the family. Women’s votes are needed precisely to check the
pursuit of male self-interest. More generally, equality is essential if the
interests of the family as such are to be served, rather than making the family
serve male self-interest as had hitherto been the case. Changing the relation
between men and women to one of equality will force both parties to curb their
self-interest and broaden their social sympathies to include others. Women’s
suffrage is an essential step toward the moral improvement of humankind. Grice:
“I am fascinated by how Griceian Mill can be.” “In
treating of the ‘proposition,’ some considerations of a comparatively
elementary nature respecting its form must be premised,and the ‘import’ which
the emisor conveyed by a token of an expression of a ‘proposition’ – for one
cannot communicate but that the cat
is on the mat -- . A proposition is a move in the conversational game in which
a feature (P) is predicated of the subject (S) – The S is P – The subject and
the predicate – as in “Strawson’s dog is shaggy” -- are all that is necessarily
required to make up a proposition. But as we can not conclude from merely
seeing two “Strawson’s dog” and “shaggy” put together, that “Strawson’s dog” is
the subject and “shaggy” the predicate, that is, that the predicate is intended
to be ‘predicated’ of the subject, it is necessary that there should be some
mode or form of indicating that such is, in Griceian parlance, the ‘intention,’
sc. some sign to signal this predication – my father says that as I was growing
up, I would say “dog shaggy” – The explicit communication of a predication is
sometimes done by a slight alteration of the expression that is the predicate
or the expression that is the subject – sc., a ‘casus’ – even if it is ‘rectum’
– or ‘obliquum’ -- inflectum.” Grice:
“The example Mill gives is “Fire burns.”” “The change from ‘burn’ to ‘burns’
shows that the emisor intends to predicate the predicate “burn” of the subject “fire.”
But this function is more commonly fulfilled by the copula, which serves the
purporse of the sign of predication, “est,” (or by nothing at all as in my
beloved Grecian! “Anthropos logikos,” -- when the predication is, again to use
Griceian parlance, ‘intended.’” Grice: “Mill gives the example, ‘The king of
France is smooth.” “It may seem to be implied, or implicated – implicatum,
implicaturum -- not only that the quality ‘smooth’ can be predicated of the
king of France, but moreover that there is a King of France. Grice: “Mill
notes: ‘It’s different with ‘It is not the case that the king of France is
smooth’”. “This, however should not rush us to think that ‘is’ is aequi-vocal,
and that it can be ‘copula’ AND ‘praedicatum’, e. g. ‘… is a spatio-temporal
continuant.’ Grice: “Mill then gives my example: ‘Pegasus is [in Grecian
mythology – i. e. Pegasus is *believed* to exist by this or that Grecian mythographer],
but does not exist.’” “A flying horse is a fiction of some Grecian poets.” Grice:
“Mill hastens to add that the annulation of the implicaturum is implicit or
contextual.” “By uttering ‘A flying horse is a Griceian allegory’ the emisor
cannot possibly implicate that a flying horse is a spatio-temporal continuant,
since by uttering the proposition itself the emisor is expressly asserting that
the thing has no real existence.” “Many volumes might be filled” – Grice: “And
will be filled by Strawson!” -- with the frivolous speculations concerning the nature
of being (ƒø D½, øPÃw±, ens, entitas, essentia, and the like), which have
arisen from overlooking the implicaturum of ‘est’; from supposing that when by
uttering “S est P” the emisor communicates that S is a spatio-temporal
continuant. when by uttering it, the emisor communicates that the S is some *specified*
thing, a horse and a flier, to be a phantom, a mythological construct, or the
invention of the journalists (like Marmaduke Bloggs, who climbed Mt. Everest on
hands and knees) even to be a nonentity (as a squared circle) it must still, at
bottom, answer to the same idea; and that a proposition must be found for it
which shall suit all these cases. The fog which rises from this very narrow
spot diffuses itself over the whole surface of ontology. Yet it becomes us not
to triumph over the great intellect of Ariskant because we are now able to
preserve ourselves from many errors into which he, perhaps inevitably, fell.
The fire-teazer of a steam-engine produces by his exertions far greater effects
than Milo of Crotona could, but he is not therefore a stronger man. The
Grecians – like some uneducated Englishman -- seldom knew any language but their
own! This render it far more difficult for *them* than it is for us, to acquire
a readiness in detecting the implicaturum. One of the advantages of having
accurately studied Grecian and Roman at Clifton, especially of those languages
which Ariskant used as the vehicle of his thought, is the practical lesson we
learn respecting the implicaturm, by finding that the same expression in
Grecian, say (e. g. ‘is’) corresponds, on different occasions, to a different
expression in Gricese, say (i. e. ‘hazz’). When not thus exercised, even the
strongest understandings find it difficult to believe that things which fall
under a class, have not in some respect or other a common nature; and often
expend much labour very unprofitably (as is frequently done by Ariskant) in a
vain attempt to discover in what this common nature consists. But, the habit
once formed, intellects much inferior are capable of detecting even an
impicaturum which is common or generalised to Grecian and Griceses: and it is
surprising that this sous-entendu or impicaturum now under consideration, though
it is ordinary at Oxford as well as in the ancient, should have been overlooked
by almost every philosopher until Grice. Grice: “Mill was proud of Mill.” “The
quantity of futilitarian speculation which had been caused by a misapprehension
of the nature of the copula, is hinted at by Hobbes; but my father is the first
who distinctly characterized the implicaturm, and point out to me how many
errors in the received systems of philosophy it has had to answer for. It has,
indeed, misled the moderns scarcely less than the ancients, though their
mistakes, because our understandings are not yet so completely emancipated from
their influence, do not appear equally irrational. Refs.: H. P.
Grice, “Grice to the Mill,” L. G. Wilton, “Mill’s mentalism,” for the Grice Club.
Grice treasured Hardie’s invocation of Mill’s method during a traffic incident
on the HIhg. Mill’s methods, procedures for discovering necessary conditions,
sufficient conditions, and necessary and sufficient conditions, where these
terms are used as follows: if whenever A then B (e.g., whenever there is a fire
then oxygen is present), then B is a necessary (causal) condition for A; and if
whenever C then D (e.g., whenever sugar is in water, then it dissolves), then C
is a sufficient (causal) condition for D. Method of agreement. Given a pair of
hypotheses about necessary conditions, e.g., (1) whenever A then B1 whenever A
then B2, then an observation of an individual that is A but not B2 will
eliminate the second alternative as false, enabling one to conclude that the
uneliminated hypothesis is true. This method for discovering necessary
conditions is called the method of agreement. To illustrate the method of
agreement, suppose several people have all become ill upon eating potato salad
at a restaurant, but have in other respects had quite different meals, some
having meat, some vegetables, some desserts. Being ill and not eating meat
eliminates the latter as the cause; being ill and not eating dessert eliminates
the latter as cause; and so on. It is the condition in which the individuals
who are ill agree that is not eliminated. We therefore conclude that this is
the cause or necessary condition for the illness. Method of difference.
Similarly, with respect to the pair of hypotheses concerning sufficient
conditions, e.g., (2) whenever C1 then D whenever C2 then D, an individual that
is C1 but not D will eliminate the first hypothesis and enable one to conclude
that the second is true. This is the method of difference. A simple change will
often yield an example of an inference to a sufficient condition by the method
of difference. If something changes from C1 to C2, and also thereupon changes
from notD to D, one can conclude that C2, in respect of which the instances
differ, is the cause of D. Thus, Becquerel discovered that burns can be caused
by radium, i.e., proximity to radium is a sufficient but not necessary
condition for being burned, when he inferred that the radium he carried in a
bottle in his pocket was the cause of a burn on his leg by noting that the
presence of the radium was the only relevant causal difference between the time
when the burn was present and the earlier time when it was not. Clearly, both
methods can be generalized to cover any finite number of hypotheses in the set
of alternatives. The two methods can be combined in the joint method of
agreement and difference to yield the discovery of conditions that are both
necessary and sufficient. Sometimes it is possible to eliminate an alternative,
not on the basis of observation, but on the basis of previously inferred laws.
If we know by previous inductions that no C2 is D, then observation is not
needed to eliminate the second hypothesis of (2), and we can infer that what
remains, or the residue, gives us the sufficient condition for D. Where an
alternative is eliminated by previous inductions, we are said to use the method
of residues. The methods may be generalized to cover quantitative laws. A cause
of Q may be taken not to be a necessary and sufficient condition, but a factor
P on whose magnitude the magnitude of Q functionally depends. If P varies when
Q varies, then one can use methods of elimination to infer that P causes Q.
This has been called the method of concomitant variation. More complicated
methods are needed to infer what precisely is the function that correlates the
two magnitudes. Clearly, if we are to conclude that one of (1) is true on the
basis of the given data, we need an additional premise to the effect that there
is at least one necessary condition for B and it is among the set consisting of
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existence claim here is known as a principle of determinism and the delimited
range of alternatives is known as a principle of limited variety. Similar
principles are needed for the other methods. Such principles are clearly
empirical, and must be given prior inductive support if the methods of
elimination are to be conclusive. In practice, generic scientific theories
provide these principles to guide the experimenter. Thus, on the basis of the
observations that justified Kepler’s laws, Newton was able to eliminate all
hypotheses concerning the force that moved the planets about the sun save the
inverse square law, provided that he also assumed as applying to this specific
sort of system the generic theoretical framework established by his three laws
of motion, which asserted that there exists a force accounting for the motion
of the planets (determinism) and that this force satisfies certain conditions,
e.g., the action-reaction law (limited variety). The eliminative methods
constitute the basic logic of the experimental method in science. They were
first elaborated by Francis Bacon (see J. Weinberg, Abstraction, Relation, and
Induction, 1965). They were restated by Hume, elaborated by J. F. W. Herschel,
and located centrally in scientific methodology by J. S. Mill. Their structure
was studied from the perspective of modern developments in logic by Keynes, W.
E. Johnson, and especially Broad. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice to the Mill,” G.
L. Brook, “Mill’s Mentalism”, Sutherland, “Mill in Dodgson’s Semiotics.”
Iconicity and mimesis. Grice: “If it
hurts, you involuntarily go ‘Ouch.’ ‘Ouch’ can voluntarily become a vehicle for
communication, under voluntary control. But we must allow for any expression to
become a vehicle for communication, even if there is no iconic or mimetic
association -- (from Greek mimesis, ‘imitation’), the modeling of one thing on
another, or the presenting of one thing by another; imitation. The concept
played a central role in the account formulated by Plato and Aristotle of what
we would now call the fine arts. The poet, the dramatist, the painter, the
musician, the sculptor, all compose a mimesis of reality. Though Plato, in his
account of painting, definitely had in mind that the painter imitates physical
reality, the general concept of mimesis used by Plato and Aristotle is usually
better translated by ‘representation’ than by ‘imitation’: it belongs to the
nature of the work of art to represent, to re-present, reality. This
representational or mimetic theory of art remained far and away the dominant
theory in the West until the rise of Romanticism – though by no means everyone
agreed with Plato that it is concrete items of physical reality that the artist
represents. The hold of the mimetic theory was broken by the insistence of the
Romantics that, rather than the work of art being an imitation, it is the
artist who, in his or her creative activity, imitates Nature or God by composing
an autonomous object. Few contemporary theorists of art would say that the
essence of art is to represent; the mimetic theory is all but dead. In part
this is a reflection of the power of the Romantic alternative to the mimetic
theory; in part it is a reflection of the rise to prominence over the last
century of nonobjective, abstract painting and sculpture and of “absolute”
instrumental music. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of representation has not
ceased to draw the attention of theorists. In recent years three quite
different general theories of representation have appeared: Nelson Goodman’s
(The Languages of Art), Nicholas Wolterstorff’s (Works and Worlds of Art), and
Kendall Walton’s (Mimesis as Make-Believe). Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aristotle’s
mimesis and Paget’s ta-ta theory of communication.”
Paget: author beloved by Grice, inventor
of the ta-ta theory of communication.
The bellow -- “Ouch” – Grice’s theory of
communication in “Meaning revisited.” Grice’s paradox of the ta-ta. Why would a
simulation of pain be taken as a sign of pain if the sendee recognises that the
emisor is simulating a ‘causally provoked,’ rather than under voluntary
control, expression of pain. Grice’s wording is subtle and good. “Stage one in
the operation involves the supposition that the creature actually voluntarily
produces a certain sort of behaviour which is such that its nonvoluntary
production would be evidence that the creature is, let us say, in pain.” Cf.
Ockham, ‘risus naturaliter significat interiorem laetitiam.’ But the laughter
does NOT resemble the inner joy. There is natural causality, but not iconicity.
So what Grice and Ockham are after is ‘artificial laughter’ which does imitate
(mimic) natural laughter. “Risus significat naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.”
“Risus voluntaries significat NON-naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.” Ockham
wants to say that it is via the iconicity of the artificial laughter that the
communication is effected. So if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, non-natural
communication recapitulates natural communication. “Risus voluntarius
non-significat naturaliter (via risus involutarius significans naturaliter)
interiorem laetitiam. “The kinds of
cases of this which come most obviously to mind will be cases of faking or
deception.” “A creature normally voluntarily produces behaviour not only when,
but *because*, its nonvoluntary production would be evidence that the creature
is in a certain state, with the effect that the rest of the world, other
creatures around, treat the production, which is in fact voluntary, as if it
were a nonvoluntary production.” “That is, they come to just the same
conclusion about the creature’s being in the state in question, the signalled state.”
Note Grice’s technical use of Shannon’s ‘signal.’ “The purpose of the creature’s producing the
behaviour voluntarily would be so that the rest of the world should think that
it is in the state which the nonvoluntary production would signify.” Note that at this point, while it is behaviour
that signifies – the metabolia has to apply ultimately to the emisor. So that
it is the creature who signifies – or it signifies. The fact that Grice uses
‘it’ for the creature is telling – For, if Grice claims that only rational Homo
sapiens can communicate, Homo sapiens is an ‘it.’ “In stage two not only does creature X produce
this behaviour voluntarily, instead of nonvoluntarily, as in the primitive
state.” By primitive he means Stage 0. “… but we also assume that it is
*recognised* by another creature Y, involved with X in some transaction, as
being the voluntary production of certain form of behaviour the nonvoluntary
production of which evidences, say, pain.” So again, there is no iconicity. Does
the “Ouch” in Stage 0 ‘imitate’ the pain. How can ‘pain,’ which is a state of
the soul, be ‘imitated’ via a physical, material, medium? There are ways. Pain
may involve some discomfort in the soul. The cry, “Ouch,” involuntary,
‘imitates this disturbance or discomfort. But what about inner joy and the
laughter. Ape studies have demonstrated that the show of teeth is a sign of
agreession. It’s not Mona Lisa’s smile. So Mona Lisa’s inner joy is signified
by her smile. Is this iconic? Is there a resemblance or imitation here? Yes.
Because the inner joy is the opposite of discomfort, and the distended muscles
around the mouth resemble the distended state of the immaterial soul of Mona
Lisa. As a functionalist, Grice was also interested in the input. What makes
Mona Lisa smile? What makes you to utter “Ouch” when you step on a thorn? Is
the disturbance (of pain, since this is the example Grice uses) or the
distension of joy resemble the external stimulus? Yes. Because a thorn on the
ground is NOT to be there – it is a disturbance of the environment. Looking at
Leonardo da Vinci who actually is commanding, “Smile!” is enough of a stimulus
for “The Gioconda” to become what Italians call ‘the gioconda.’ “That is, creature X is now supposed not just
to simulate pain-behaviour, but also to be recognised as simulating
pain-behaviour.” “The import of the recognition by Y that the production is
voluntary UNDERMINES, of course, any tendency on the part of Y to come to the
conclusion that creature X is in pain.” “So, one might ask, what would be
required to restore the situation: what COULD be ADDED which would be an
‘antidote,’ so to speak, to the dissolution on the part of Y of the idea that X
is in pain?” “A first step in this direction would be to go to what we might
think of as stage three.” “Here, we suppose that creature Y not only recognises
that the behaviour is voluntary on the part of X, but also recognises that X
*intends* Y to recognise HIS [no longer its] behaviour as voluntary.” “That is,
we have now undermined the idea that this is a straightforward piece of
deception.” “Deceiving consists in trying to get a creature to accept certain
things AS SIGNS [but cf. Grice on words not being signs in ‘Meaning’] as
something or other without knowing that this is a faked case.” “Here, however, we would have a sort of perverse
faked case, in which something is faked but at the same time a clear indication
is put in that the faking has been done.” Cf. Warhol on Campbell soup and why Aristotle
found ‘mimesis’ so key “Creature Y can be thought of as initially BAFFLED by
this conflicting performance.” “There is this creature, as it were, simulating
pain, but announcing, in a certain sense, that this is what IT [again it, not
he] is doing.” “What on earth can IT be up to?” “It seems to me that if Y does
raise the question of why X should be doing this, it might first come up with
the idea that X is engaging in some form of play or make-believe, a game to
which, since X’s behaviour is seemingly directed TOWARDS Y [alla Kurt Lewin], Y
is EXPECTED OR INTENDED to make some appropriate contribution. “Cases
susceptible of such an interpretation I regard as belonging to stage four.” “But,
we may suppose, there might be cases which could NOT be handled in this way.” “If
Y is to be expected to be a fellow-participant with X in some form of play, it
ought to be possible for Y to recognise what kind of contribution Y [the sendee
– the signalee] is supposed to make; and we can envisage the possibility that Y
has no clue on which to base such recognition, or again that though SOME form
of contribution seems to be SUGGESTED, when Y obliges by coming up with it, X,
instead of producing further pain-behaviour, gets cross and perhaps repeats its
original, and now problematic, performance.” [“Ouch!”]. “We now reach stage five, at which Y supposes
not that X is engaged in play, but that what X is doing is trying to get Y to
believe OR ACCEPT THAT X *is* in pain.” That is, not just faking that he is in
pain, but faking that he is in pain because he IS in pain. Surely the pain
cannot be that GROSS if he has time to consider all this! So “communicating
pain” applies to “MINOR pain,” which the Epicureans called “communicable pains”
(like a tooth-ache – Vitters after reading Diels, came up with the idea that
Marius was wrong and that a tooth-pain is NOT communicable! “: that is, trying to get Y to believe in or
accept the presence of that state in X which the produced behaviour, when
produced NONVOLUNTARILY, in in fact a natural sign of, naturally means.” Here
the under-metabolis is avoidable: “when produced nonvolutarily, in in fact THE
EFFECT OF, or the consequence of.” And if you want to avoid ending a sentence
with a preposition: “that STATE in X of which the produced behaviour is the
CONSEQUENCE or EFFECT. CAUSATUM. The causans-causatum distinction. “More specifically, one might say that at stage
five, creature Y recognises that creature X in the first place INTENDS that Y recognise
the production of the sign of pain (of what is USUALLY the sign of pain) to be
voluntary, and further intends that Y should regard this first intention I1 as
being a sufficient reason for Y to BELIEVE that X is in pain.” But would that
expectation occur in a one-off predicament? “And that X has these intentions because
he has the additional further INTENTION I3 that Y should not MERELY have
sufficient REASON for believing that X is in pain, but should actually [and
AND] believe it.” This substep shows that for Grice it’s the INFLUENCING and
being influenced by others (or the institution of decision), rather than the
exchange of information (giving and receiving information), which is basic. The
protreptic, not the exhibitive. “Whether or not in these circumstances X will
not merely recognise that X intends, in a certain rather QUEER way, to get Y to
believe that X is in pain, whether Y not only recognises this but actually goes
on to believe that X is in pain, would presumably DEPEND on a FURTHER SET OF
CONDITIONS which can be summed up under the general heading that Y should
regard X as TRUSTWORTHY [as a good meta-faker!] in one or another of perhaps a
variety of ways.” This is Grice’s nod to G. J. Warnock’s complex analysis of
the variety of ways in which one can be said to be ‘trustworthy’ – last chapter
of ‘trustworthiness in conversation,’ in Warnock’s brilliant, “The object of
morality.” “For example, suppose Y thinks that, either in general or at least
in THIS type of CASE [this token, a one-off predicament? Not likely!] X would
NOT want Y to believe that X is in pain UNLESS [to use R. Hall and H. L. A.
Hart’s favourite excluder defeater] X really WERE in pain.” [Cf. Hardie, “Why
do you use the subjunctive?” “Were Hardie to be here, I would respond!” –
Grice]. “Suppose also (this would perhaps not apply to a case of pain but might
apply to THE COMMUNICATION of other states [what is communicated is ONLY a
state of the soul] that Y also believes that X is trustworthy, not just in the
sense of not being malignant [malevolent, ill-willed, maleficent], but also in
the sense of being, as it were, in general [semiotically] responsible, for
example, being the sort of creature, who takes adequate trouble to make sure
that what HE [not it] is trying to get the other creature to believe is in fact
the case.” Sill, “’I have a toothache” never entails that the emisor has a
toothache! – a sign is anything we can lie with!” (Eco). “… and who is not
careless, negligent, or rash.” “Then, given the general fulfilment of the idea
that Y regards X either in general or in this particular case of being
trustworthy in this kind of competent, careful, way, one would regard it as
RATIONAL [reasonable] not only for Y to recognise these intentions on the part
of X that Y should have certain beliefs about X’s being in pain, but also for Y
actually to pass to adopting these beliefs.” Stage six annuls mimesis, or lifts the requirement of mimesis – “we relax this
requirement.” “As Judith Baker suggests, it would be unmanly to utter (or ‘let
out’) a (natural) bellow!” Here Grice speaks of the decibels of the emission of
the bellow – as indicating this or that degree of pain. But what about “It’s
raining.” We have a state of affairs (not necessarily a state in the soul of the
emissor). So by relaxing the requirement, the emissor chooses a behaviour which
is “suggestive, in some recognizable way” with the state of affairs of rain
“without the performance having to be the causal effect of (or ‘response to,’
as Grice also has it) that state of affairs, sc. that it is raining. The connection becomes “non-natural,” or
‘artificial’: any link will do – as long as the correlation is OBVIOUS,
pre-arranged, or foreknown. – ‘one-off predicament’. There are problems with
‘stage zero’ and ‘stage six.’ When it comes to stage zero, Grice is supposing,
obviously that a state of affairs is the CAUSE of some behaviour in a creature
– since there is no interpretant – the phenomenon may very obliquely called
‘semiotic.’ “If a tree falls in the wood and nobody is listening…” – So stage
zero need not involve a mimetic aspect. Since stage one involves ‘pain,’ i.e.
the proposition that ‘X is in pain,’ as Grice has it. Or as we would have it,
‘A is in pain’ or ‘The emisor is in pain.’ Althought he uses the metaphor of
the play where B is expected or intended to make an appropriate contribution or
move in the game, it is one of action, he will have to accept that ‘The emisor
is in pain’ and act appropriately. But Grice is not at all interested in the
cycle of what B might do – as Gardiner is, when he talks of a ‘conversational
dyad.’ Grice explores the conversational ‘dyad’ in his Oxford lectures on the
conversational imlicaturum. A poetic line might not do but: “A: I’m out of
gas.” B: “There’s a garage round the corner.” – is the conversational dyad. In
B’s behaviour, we come to see that he has accepted that A is out of gas. And
his ‘appropriate contribution’ in the game goes beyond that acceptance – he
makes a ‘sentence’ move (“There is a garage round the corner.”). So strictly a
conversational implicaturum is the communicatum by the second item in a
conversational dyad. Now there are connections to be made between stage zero
and stage six. Why? Well, because stage six is intended to broaden the range of
propositions that are communicated to be OTHER than a ‘state’ in the emisor – X
is in pain --. But Grice does not elaborate on the ‘essential psychological
attitude’ requirement. Even if we require this requirement – Grice considers
two requirements. The requirement he is interested in relaxing is that of the
CAUSAL connection – he keeps using ‘natural’ misleadingly --. But can he get
rid of it so easily? Because in stage six, if the emisor wants to communicate
that the cat is on the mat, or that it is raining, it will be via his BELIEF
that the cat is on the mat or that it is raining. The cat being on the mat or
it being raining would CAUSE the emisor to have that belief. Believing is the
CAUSAL consequence. Grice makes a comparison between the mimesis or resemblance
of a bellow produced voluntarily or not – and expands on the decibels. The
‘information’ one may derive at stage 0 of hearing an emisor (who is unaware
that he is being observed) is one that is such and such – and it is decoded by
de-correlating the decibels of the bellow. More decibels, higher pain. There is
a co-relation here. Grice ventures that perhaps that’s too much information (he
is following someone’s else objection). Why would not X just ‘let out a natural
bellow.’ Grice states there are – OBVIOUSLY – varioius reasons why he would not
– the ‘obviously’ implicates the objection is silly (typical tutee behaviour). The first is charming. Grice, seeing the
gender of the tutee, says that it woud be UNMANLY for A to let out a natural
bellow. He realizes that ‘unmanly’ may be considered ‘artless sexism’ (this is
the late mid-70s, and in the provinces!) – So he turns the ‘unmanly’ into the
charmingly Oxonian, “ or otherwise uncreaturely.” – which is a genial piece of
ironic coinage! Surely ‘manly’ and ‘unmanly,’ if it relates to ‘Homo sapiens,’
need not carry a sexist implicaturum. Another answer to the obvious objection
that Grice gives relates to the level of informativeness – the ‘artificial’ (as
he calls it) – His argument is that if one takes Aristotle’s seriously, and the
‘artificial bellow’ is to ‘imitate’ the ‘natural bellow,’ it may not replicate
ALL THE ‘FEATURES’ – which is the expression Grice uses -- he means semiotic distinctive feature --. So
he does not have to calculate the ‘artificial bellow’ to correlate exactly to
the quantity of decibels that the ‘natural bellow’ does. This is important from
a CAUSAL point of view, or in terms of Grice’s causal theory of behaviour. A
specific pain (prooked by Stimulus S1) gives the RESPONSE R2 – with decibels
D1. A different stimulus S2 woud give a different RESPONSE R2, with different
decibels D2. So Grice is exploring the possibility of variance here. In a
causal involuntary scenario, there is nothing the creature can do. The stimulus
Sn will produce the creature Cn to be such that its response is Rn (where Rn is
a response with decibels – this being the semiotic distinctive feature Fn – Dn.
When it comes to the ‘artificial bellow,’ the emisor’s only point is to express
the proposition, ‘I am in pain,’ and not ‘I am in pain such that it causes a
natural bellow of decibels Dn,” which would flout the conversational postulate
of conversational fortitude. The overinformativeness would baffle the sendee,
if not the sender). At this point there is a break in the narrative, and Grice,
in a typical Oxonian way, goes on to say, “But then, we might just as well
relax the requirement that the proposition concerns a state of the sender.” He
gives no specific example, but refers to a ‘state of affairs’ which does NOT
involve a state of the sender – AND ONE TO WHICH, HOWEVER, THE SENDER RESPONDS
with a behaviour. I. e. the state of the affairs, whatever it is, is the
stimulus, and the creature’s behaviour is the response. While ‘The cat is on
the mat’ or ‘It is raining’ does NOT obviously ‘communicate’ that the sender
BELIEVES that to be, the ‘behaviour’ which is the response to the external
state of affairs is mediated by this state – this is pure functionalism. So, in
getting at stage six – due to the objection by his tutee – he must go back to
stage zero. Now, he adds MANY CRUCIAL features with these relaxations of the
requirements. Basically he is getting at GRICESE. And what he says is very
jocular. He knows he is lecturing to ‘service professionals,’ not philosophers,
so he keep adding irritating notes for them (but which we philosophers find
charming), “and we get to something like what people are getting at (correctly,
I would hope) when they speak of a semiotic system!” These characteristics are
elaborated under ‘gricese’ – But in teleological terms they can even be
ordered. What is the order that Grice uses? At this stage, he has already
considered in detail the progression, with his ‘the dog is shaggy,’ so we know
where he is getting at – but he does not want to get philosophically technical
at the lecture. He is aiming then at compositionality. There is utterance-whole
and utterance-part, or as he prefers ‘complete utterance’ and ‘non-complete
utterance’. ‘dog’ and ‘shaggy’ would be non-complete. So the external ‘state of
affairs’ is Grice’s seeing that Strawson’s dog is shaggy and wanting to
communicate this to Pears (Grice co-wrote an essay only with two Englishmen,
these being Strawson and Pears – ‘The three Englishmen’s essay,’ as he called
it’ --. So there is a state of affairs, pretty harmless, Strawson’s dog is
being shaggy – perhaps he needs a haircut, or some brooming. “Shaggy” derives
from ‘shag’ plus –y, as in ‘’twas brillig.’ – so this tells that it is an
adjectival or attribute predication – of the feature of being ‘shaggy’ to
‘dog.’ When the Anglo-Saxons first used ‘dog’ – the Anglo-Saxon ‘Adam,’ he
should have used ‘hound’. Grice is not concerned at the point with ‘dog,’ since
he KNOWS that Strawson’s dog is “Fido” – dogs being characteristically faithful
and the Strawsons not being very original – “I kid” --. In this case, we need a
‘communication function.’ The sender perceives that Fido is shaggy and forms
the proposition ‘Fido is shaggy.’ This is via his belief, caused by his seeing
that Fido is shaggy. He COMPOSES a complete utterance. He could just utter,
elliptically, ‘shaggy’ – but under quieter circumstances, he manages to
PREDICATE ‘shagginess’ to Strawson’s dog – and comes out with “Fido is shaggy.”
That is all the ‘syntactics’ that Gricese needs (Palmer, “Remember when all we
had to care about was nouns and verbs?”) (Strictly, “I miss the good old days
when all we had to care was nouns and verbs”). Well here we have a ‘verb,’
“is,” and a noun – “nomen adjectivum” – or ‘adjective noun’, shaggy. Grice is
suggesting that the lexicon (or corpus) is hardly relevant. What is important
is the syntax. Having had to read Chomsky under Austin’s tutelage (they spent
four Saturday mornings with the Mouton paperback, and Grice would later send a
letter of recommendation on one of his tutees for study with Chomsky overseas).
But Grice has also read Peano. So he needs a set of FINITE set of formation
rules – that will produce an INFINITE SET of ‘sentences’ where Grice highers
the decibels when he says ‘infinite,’ hoping it will upset the rare
Whiteheadian philosopher in the audience! Having come up with “Fido is shaggy,’
the sender sends it to the sendee. “Any link will do” – The link is ‘arranged’
somehow – arranged simpliciter in a one-off predicament, or pre-arranged in
two-off predicament, etc. Stages 2, 3, 4, and 5 – have all to do with
‘trustworthy’ – which would one think otiose seeing that Sir John Lyons has
said that prevarication in the golden plover and the Homo sapiens is an
essential feature of language! (But we are at the Oxford of Warnock!). So, the
sender sends “Fido is shaggy,’ and Pears gets it. He takes Grice to be
expressing his belief that Strawson’s dog is shaggy, and comes not only to
accept that Grice believes this, but to accept that Strawson’s dog is shaggy.
As it happens, Pears recommends a bar of soap to make his hairs at least look
‘cuter.’ Refs.: H. P. Grice, “A teleological model of communication.”
minimal transformationalism. Grice was proud that his system PIROTESE ‘allowed for the
most minimal transformations.” transformational
grammar Philosophy of language The most powerful of the three kinds of grammar
distinguished by Chomsky. The other two are finite-state grammar and
phrasestructure grammar. Transformational grammar is a replacement for
phrase-structure grammar that (1) analyzes only the constituents in the
structure of a sentence; (2) provides a set of phrase-structure rules that
generate abstract phrase-structure representations; (and 3) holds that the
simplest sentences are produced according to these rules. Transformational
grammar provides a further set of transformational rules to show that all
complex sentences are formed from simple elements. These rules manipulate
elements and otherwise rearrange structures to give the surface structures of
sentences. Whereas phrase-structure rules only change one symbol to another in
a sentence, transformational rules show that items of a given grammatical form
can be transformed into items of a different grammatical form. For example,
they can show the transformation of negative sentences into positive ones,
question sentences into affirmative ones and passive sentences into active
ones. Transformational grammar is presented as an improvement over other forms
of grammar and provides a model to account for the ability of a speaker to
generate new sentences on the basis of limited data. “The central idea of
transformational grammar is determined by repeated application of certain
formal operations called ‘grammatical transformations’ to objects of a more
elementary sort.” Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
miracle, an extraordinary
event brought about by God. In the medieval understanding of nature, objects
have certain natural powers and tendencies to exercise those powers under
certain circumstances. Stones have the power to fall to the ground, and the
tendency to exercise that power when liberated from a height. A miracle is then
an extraordinary event in that it is not brought about by any object exercising
its natural powers – e.g., a liberated stone rising in the air – but brought
about directly by God. In the modern understanding of nature, there are just
events (states of objects) and laws of nature that determine which events
follow which other events. There is a law of nature that heavy bodies when
liberated fall to the ground. A miracle is then a “violation” of a law of
nature by God. We must understand by a law a principle that determines what
happens unless there is intervention from outside the natural order, and by a
“violation” such an intervention. There are then three problems in identifying
a miracle. The first is to determine whether an event of some kind, if it
occurred, would be a violation of a law of nature (beyond the natural power of
objects to bring about). To know this we must know what are the laws of nature.
The second problem is to find out whether such an event did occur on a
particular occasion. Our own memories, the testimony of witnesses, and physical
traces will be the historical evidence of this, but they can mislead. And the
evidence from what happened on other occasions that some law L is a law of
nature is evidence supporting the view that on the occasion in question L was
operative, and so there was no violation. Hume claimed that in practice there
has never been enough historical evidence for a miracle to outweigh the latter
kind of counterevidence. Finally, it must be shown that God was the cause of
the violation. For that we need grounds from natural theology for believing
that there is a God and that this is the sort of occasion on which he is likely
to intervene in nature.
misfire: used by Grice in Meaning Revisited. Cf.
Austin. “When the utterance is a misfire, the procedure which we purport to
invoke is disallowed or is botched: and our act (marrying, etc.) is void or
without effect, etc. We speak of our act as a purported act, or perhaps an
attempt, or we use such an expression as ‘went through a form of marriaage’ by
contrast with ‘married.’ If somebody issues a performative utterance, and the
utterance is classed as a misfire because the procedure invoked is not
accepted , it is presumably persons other than the speaker who do not
accept it (at least if the speaker is speaking seriously ). What would be
an ex- ample ? Consider ‘I divorce you*, said to a wife by her
husband in a Christian country, and both being Chris- tians rather than
Mohammedans. In this case it might be said, ‘nevertheless he has not
(successfully) divorced her: we admit only some other verbal or
non-verbal pro- cedure’; or even possibly ‘we (we) do not admit any
procedure at all for effecting divorce — marriage is indis- soluble’.
This may be carried so far that we reject what may be called a whole code
of procedure, e.g. the code of honour involving duelling: for example, a
challenge may be issued by ‘my seconds will call on you’, which is
equivalent to ‘ I challenge you’, and we merely shrug it off The general
position is exploited in the unhappy story of Don Quixote. Of
course, it will be evident that it is comparatively simple if we never
admit any ‘such’ procedure at all — that is, any procedure at all for
doing that sort of thing, or that procedure anyway for doing that
particular thing. But equally possible are the cases where we do
sometimes — in certain circumstances or at certain hands — accept
n n^A/'Q/1n U UlUVlfU u plUVWUiV/, ULIL
UW 111 T\llt 1 n nrttT at* amaiitvwifnnaati at* af
ULIL 111 ttllj UL1U/1 L/llCUllli3Lail\/^ KJL CIL other
hands. And here we may often be in doubt (as in 28
Horn to do things with Words the naming example
above) whether an infelicity should be brought into our present class A.
i or rather into A. 2 (or even B. i or B. 2). For example, at a party,
you say, when picking sides, ‘I pick George’: George grunts ‘I’m
not playing.’ Has George been picked? Un- doubtedly, the situation is an
unhappy one. Well, we may say, you have not picked George, whether
because there is no convention that you can pick people who aren’t
playing or because George in the circumstances is an inappropriate object
for the procedure of picking. Or on a desert island you may say to me ‘Go
and pick up wood’; and I may say 4 1 don’t take orders from you’ or
‘you’re not entitled to give me orders’ — I do not take orders from you
when you try to ‘assert your authority’ (which I might fall in with but
may not) on a desert island, as opposed to the case when you are the captain
on a ship and therefore genuinely have authority.
missum: If Grice uses psi-transmission (and
emission, when he speaks of ‘pain,’ and the decibels of the emission of a
bellow) he also uses transmission, and mission, transmissum, and missum. Grice
was out on a mission. Grice uses ‘emissor,’ but then there’s the ‘missor.’ This
is in key with modern communication theory as instituted by Shannon. The
‘missor’ ‘sends’ a ‘message’ to a recipient – or missee. But be careful, he may
miss it. In any case, it shows that e-missor is a compound of ‘ex-‘ plus
‘missor,’ so that makes sense. It transliterates Grice’s ut-terer (which
literally means ‘out-erer’). And then there’s the prolatum, from proferre,
which has the professor, as professing that p, that is. As someone said, if H.
P. Girce were to present a talk to the Oxford Philosophical Society he would
possibly call it “Messaging.” c. 1300,
"a communication transmitted via a messenger, a notice sent through some
agency," from Old French message "message,
news, tidings, embassy" (11c.), from Medieval Latin missaticum, from Latin missus "a sending away,
sending, dispatching; a throwing, hurling," noun use of past participle
of mittere "to
release, let go; send, throw" (see mission). The Latin word is glossed in Old English by ærende. Specific religious sense of
"divinely inspired communication via a prophet" (1540s) led to
transferred sense of "the broad meaning (of something)," which is
attested by 1828. To get the message "understand" is by 1960.
m’naghten: a rule in England’s
law defining legal insanity for purposes of creating a defense to criminal
liability: legal insanity is any defect of reason, due to disease of the mind,
that causes an accused criminal either not to know the nature and quality of
his act, or not to know that his act was morally or legally wrong. Adopted in
the Edward Drummond-M’Naghten case in England in 1843, the rule harks back to
the responsibility test for children, which was whether they were mature enough
to know the difference between right and wrong. The rule is alternatively
viewed today as being either a test of a human being’s general status as a
moral agent or a test of when an admitted moral agent is nonetheless excused
because of either factual or moral/legal mistakes. On the first (or status)
interpretation of the rule, the insane are exempted from criminal liability
because they, like young children, lack the rational agency essential to moral
personhood. On the second (or mistake) interpretation of the rule, the insane are
exempted from criminal liability because they instantiate the accepted moral
excuses of mistake or ignorance. Refs.: H. P. Grice and H. L. A. Hart, ‘Legal
rules;’ D. F. Pears, “Motivated irrationality.”
mnemic
causation,
a type of causation in which, in order to explain the proximate cause of an
organism’s behaviour, it is necessary to specify not only the present state of
the organism and the present stimuli operating upon it, but also this or that
past experience of the organism. The term was introduced by Russell in The
Analysis of Mind, and borrowed, but never returned, by Grice for his Lockeian
logical construction of personal identity or “I” in terms of an chain of
mnemonic temporary states. “Unlike Russell, I distinguish between the mnemic
and the mnemonic.”
mode of co-relation: a technical jargon, under ‘mode’ – although Grice uses ‘c’
to abbreviate it, and sometimes speaks of ‘way’ of ‘co-relation’ – but ‘mode’
was his favourite. Grice is not sure
whether ‘mode’ ‘of’ and ‘correlation’ are the appropriate terms. Grice speaks
of an associative mode of correlation – vide associatum. He also speaks of a
conventional mode of correlation (or is it mode of conventional correlation) –
vide non-conventional, and he speaks of an iconic mode of correlation, vide
non-iconic. Indeed he speaks once of ‘conventional correlation’ TO THE
ASSOCIATED specific response. So the
mode is rather otiose. In the context when he uses ‘conventional correlation’
TO THE ASSOCIATED specific response, he uses ‘way’ rather than mode – Grice
wants ‘conventional correlation’ TO THE ASSOCIATED specific RESPONSE to be just
one way, or mode. There’s ASSOCIATIVE correlation, and iconic correlation, and
‘etc.’ Strictly, as he puts it, this or that correlation is this or that
provision of a way in which the expressum is correlated to a specific response.
When symbolizing he uses the informal “correlated in way c with response r’ –
having said that ‘c’ stands for ‘mode of correlation.’ But ‘mode sounds too
pretentious, hence his retreat to the more flowing ‘way.’
model
theory:
H. P. Grice, “A conversational model.” Grice:
“Since the object of the present exercise, is to provide a bit of
theory which will explain, for a certain family of cases, why is it
that a particular implicaturum is present, I would suggest that
the final test of the adequacy and utility of this model should be:
can it be used to construct an explanation of the presence of such an
implicaturum, and is it more comprehensive and more economical than any rival?
is the no doubt pre-theoretical explanation which one would be
prompted to give of such an implicaturum consistent with, or better still a
favourable pointer towards the requirements involved in the model? cf.
Sidonius: Far otherwise: whoever disputes with you will find those protagonists
of heresy, the Stoics, Cynics, and Peripatetics, shattered with their own arms
and their own engines; for their heathen followers, if they resist the
doctrine and spirit of Christianity, will, under your teaching, be caught
in their own familiar entanglements, and fall headlong into their
own toils; the barbed syllogism of your arguments will hook the
glib tongues of the casuists, and it is you who will tie
up their slippery questions in categorical clews, after the
manner of a clever physician, who, when compelled by reasoned thought, prepares
antidotes for poison even from a serpent.qvin potivs experietvr qvisqve
conflixerit stoicos cynicos peripateticos hæresiarchas propriis armis propriis
qvoqve concvti machinamentis nam sectatores eorum Christiano dogmati ac sensvi
si repvgnaverint mox te magistro ligati vernaculis implicaturis in
retia sua præcipites implagabvntur syllogismis tuæ propositionis vncatis
volvbilem tergiversantvm lingvam inhamantibvs dum spiris categoricis lubricas
qvæstiones tv potivs innodas acrivm more medicorvm qui remedivm contra venena
cum ratio compellit et de serpente conficivnt.” Grice: “Since the object of the
present exercise, is to provide a bit of theory which will explain,
for a certain family of cases, why is it that a particular
conversational implicaturum is present, I would suggest that
the final tess of the adequacy
and utility of this MODEL should be various. First: can the model be used to
construct an explanation (argumentum) of the presence of this or that
conversational implicaturum? Second, is the model it more comprehensive than
any rival in providing this explanation? Third, is the model more economical
than any rival in providing this explanation? Fourth, is the no
doubt pre-theoretical (antecedent) explanation which one would be
prompted to give of such a conversational implicaturum consistent with the
requirements involved in the model. Fifth: is the no doubt pre-threoretical
(antecedent) explanation which one would be prompted to give of such a
conversational implciaturum better
still, a favourable POINTER towards the requirements involved in the model? Cf.
Sidonius: Far otherwise: whoever disputes with you will find those protagonists
of heresy, the Stoics, Cynics, and Peripatetics, shattered with their own arms
and their own engines; for their heathen followers, if they resist the
doctrine and spirit of Christianity, will, under your teaching, be caught
in their own familiar entanglements, and fall headlong into their own toils;
the barbed syllogism of your arguments will hook the glib tongues of
the casuists, and it is you who will tie up their slippery
questions in categorical clews, after the manner of a clever
physician, who, when compelled by reasoned thought, prepares antidotes for
poison even from a serpent -- qvin potivs experietvr qvisqve conflixerit
stoicos cynicos peripateticos hæresiarchas propriis armis propriis qvoqve
concvti machinamentis nam sectatores eorum Christiano dogmati ac sensvi si
repvgnaverint mox te magistro ligati vernacvlis implicatvris in retia
sva præcipites implagabvntur syllogismis tuæ propositionis vncatis volvbilem
tergiversantvm lingvam inhamantibvs dum spiris categoricis lvbricas qvæstiones
tv potivs innodas acrivm more medicorvm qui remedivm contra venena cvm ratio
compellit et de serpente conficivnt. qvin
potivs experietvr qvisqve conflixerit stoicos cynicos peripateticos
hæresiarchas propriis armis propriis qvoqve concvti machinamentis nam
sectatores eorum Christiano dogmati ac sensvi si repvgnaverint mox te
magistro ligati vernacvlis IMPILICATVRIS in retia sva præcipites
implagabvntur syllogismis tuæ propositionis vncatis volvbilem tergiversantvm
lingvam inhamantibvs dum spiris categoricis lubricas qvæstiones tv potivs
innodas acrivm more medicorvm qui remedivm contra venena cvm ratio compellit et
de serpente conficivnt. So Grice has the phenomenon: the conversational
implcaturum – the qualifying adjective is crucial, since surely he is not
interested in non-conventional NON-conversational implicatura derived from
moral maxims! --. And then he needs a MODEL – that of the principle or
postulate of conversational benevolence. It fits the various requirements.
First: the model can be used to construct an explanation (argumentum) of the
presence of this or that conversational implicaturum. Second, REQUIREMENT OF
PHILOSOPHICAL GENERALITY -- the model is
more comprehensive than any rival. Third, the OCCAM requirement: the model is
more ECONOMICAL than any rival – in what sense? – “in providing this explanation”
of this or that conversational implicaturum. Fourth, the J. L. Austin
requirement, this or that requirement involved in the model is SURELY
consistent with the no doubt pre-theoretical antecedent explanation
(argumentum) that one would be prompted to give. Fifth, the second J. L. Austin
requirement: towards this or that requirement involved in the model the
no-doubt pre-theoretical (antecedent) explanation (argument) that one would be
prompted to give is, better still, a favourable pointer. Grice’s oversuse of
‘model’ is due to Max Black, who understands model theory as a branch of philosophical
semantics that deals with the connection between a language and its
interpretations or structures. Basic to it is the characterization of the
conditions under which a sentence is true in structure. It is confusing that
the term ‘model’ itself is used slightly differently: a model for a sentence is
a structure for the language of the sentence in which it is true. Model theory
was originally developed for explicitly constructed, formal languages, with the
purpose of studying foundational questions of mathematics, but was later
applied to the semantical analysis of empirical theories, a development
initiated by the Dutch philosopher Evert Beth, and of natural languages, as in
Montague grammar. More recently, in situation theory, we find a theory of
semantics in which not the concept of truth in a structure, but that of
information carried by a statement about a situation, is central. The term
‘model theory’ came into use in the 0s, with the work on first-order model
theory by Tarski, but some of the most central results of the field date from
before that time. The history of the field is complicated by the fact that in
the 0s and 0s, when the first model-theoretic findings were obtained, the
separation between first-order logic and its extensions was not yet completed.
Thus, in 5, there appeared an article by Leopold Löwenheim, containing the
first version of what is now called the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. Löwenheim proved
that every satisfiable sentence has a countable model, but he did not yet work
in firstorder logic as we now understand it. One of the first who did so was
the Norwegian logician Thoralf Skolem, who showed in 0 that a set of
first-order sentences that has a model, has a countable model, one form of the
LöwenheimSkolem theorem. Skolem argued that logic was first-order logic and
that first-order logic was the proper basis for metamathematical
investigations, fully accepting the relativity of set-theoretic notions in
first-order logic. Within philosophy this thesis is still dominant, but in the
end it has not prevailed in mathematical logic. In 0 Kurt Gödel solved an open
problem of Hilbert-Ackermann and proved a completeness theorem for first-order
logic. This immediately led to another important model-theoretic result, the
compactness theorem: if every finite subset of a set of sentences has a model
then the set has a model. A good source for information about the model theory
of first-order logic, or classical model theory, is still Model Theory by C. C.
Chang and H. J. Keisler 3. When the separation between first-order logic and
stronger logics had been completed and the model theory of first-order logic
had become a mature field, logicians undertook in the late 0s the study of
extended model theory, the model theory of extensions of first-order logic:
first of cardinality quantifiers, later of infinitary languages and of
fragments of second-order logic. With so many examples of logics around where sometimes classical theorems did
generalize, sometimes not Per Lindström
showed in 9 what sets first-order logic apart from its extensions: it is the
strongest logic that is both compact and satisfies the LöwenheimSkolem theorem.
This work has been the beginning of a study of the relations between various
properties logics may possess, the so-called abstract model. Refs.: H. P.
Grice, “The postulate of conversational co-operation,” Oxford.
modus: Grice was an expert on mode. There is one mode too many.
If Grice found ‘senses’ obsolete (“Sense are not to be multiplied beyond
necessity”), he was always ready to welcome a new mode – e. g. the quessertive
--. or mode. ἔγκλισις , enclisis, mood of a verb, D.H.Comp.6, D.T.638.7, A.D. Synt.248.14,
etc.Many times, under ‘mode,’ Grice describes what others call ‘aspect.’ Surely
‘tense’ did not affect him much, except when it concerned “=”. But when it came
to modes, he included ‘aspect,’ so there’s the optative, the imperative, the
indicative, the informational, and then the future intentional and the future
indicative, and the subjunctive, and the way they interact with the praesens,
praeteritum and futurum, and wih the axis of what Aristotle called ‘teleios’
and ‘ateleios,’ indefinite and definite, or ‘perfectum, and ‘imperfectum, ‘but
better ‘definitum’ and ‘indefinitum.’ Grice
uses psi-asrisk, to be read asterisk-sub-psi. He is not concerned with
specficics. All the specifics the philosopher can take or rather ‘assume’ as
‘given.’ The category of mode translates ‘tropos,’ modus. Kant wrongly assumed
it was Modalitat, which irritated Grice so much that he echoed Kant as saying
‘manner’! Grice is a modista. He sometimes uses ‘modus,’ after Abbott. The
earliest record is of course “Meaning.” After elucidating what he calls
‘informative cases,’ he moves to ‘imperative’ ones. Grice agreed with Thomas
Urquhart that English needed a few more moods! Grice’s seven modes.Thirteenthly,
In lieu of six moods which other languages have at most, this one injoyeth
seven in its conjugable words. Ayer had said that non-indicative utterances
are hardly significant. Grice had been freely using the very English not
Latinate ‘mood’ until Moravcsik, of all people, corrects him: What you
mean ain’t a mood. I shall call it mode just to please you, J. M. E. The
sergeant is to muster the men at dawn is a perfect imperative. They shall not
pass is a perfect intentional. A version of this essay was presented in a
conference whose proceedings were published, except for Grices essay, due to
technical complications, viz. his idiosyncratic use of idiosyncratic
symbology! By mode Grice means indicative or imperative. Following
Davidson, Grice attaches probability to the indicative, via the doxastic, and
desirability to the indicative, via the buletic-boulomaic. He also
allows for mixed utterances. Probability is qualified with a suboperator
indicating a degree d; ditto for desirability, degree d. In some of the drafts,
Grice kept using mode until Moravsik suggested to him that mode was a better
choice, seeing that Grices modality had little to do with what other authors
were referring to as mood. Probability, desirability, and modality, modality, desirability,
and probability; modality, probability, desirability. He would use mode
operator. Modality is the more correct term, for things like should, ought,
and must, in that order. One sense. The doxastic modals are correlated to
probability. The buletic or boulomaic modals are correlated to
desirability. There is probability to a degree d. But there is also
desirability to a degree d. They both combine in Grices attempt to
show how Kants categorical imperative reduces to the hypothetical or
suppositional. Kant uses modality in a way that Grice disfavours, preferring
modus. Grice is aware of the use by Kant of modality qua category in the reduction
by Kant to four of the original ten categories in Aristotle). The Jeffrey-style
entitled Probability, desirability, and mode operators finds Grice at his
formal-dress best. It predates the Kant lectures and it got into so much detail
that Grice had to leave it at that. So abstract it hurts. Going further than
Davidson, Grice argues that structures expressing probability and desirability
are not merely analogous. They can both be replaced by more complex structures
containing a common element. Generalising over attitudes using the symbol ψ,
which he had used before, repr. WoW:v, Grice proposes G ψ that p. Further,
Grice uses i as a dummy for sub-divisions of psychological attitudes. Grice
uses Op supra i sub α, read: operation supra i sub alpha, as Grice was fastidious
enough to provide reading versions for these, and where α is a dummy taking the
place of either A or B, i. e. Davidsons prima facie or desirably, and probably.
In all this, Grice keeps using the primitive !, where a more detailed symbolism
would have it correspond exactly to Freges composite turnstile (horizontal
stroke of thought and vertical stroke of assertoric force, Urteilstrich) that
Grice of course also uses, and for which it is proposed, then: !─p. There are
generalising movements here but also merely specificatory ones. α is not
generalised. α is a dummy to serve as a blanket for this or that
specifications. On the other hand, ψ is indeed generalised. As for i, is it
generalising or specificatory? i is a dummy for specifications, so it is not really
generalising. But Grice generalises over specifications. Grice wants to find
buletic, boulomaic or volitive as he prefers when he does not prefer the Greek
root for both his protreptic and exhibitive versions (operator supra
exhibitive, autophoric, and operator supra protreptic, or hetero-phoric). Note
that Grice (WoW:110) uses the asterisk * as a dummy for either assertoric,
i.e., Freges turnstile, and non-assertoric, the !─ the imperative turnstile, if
you wish. The operators A are not mode operators; they are such that they
represent some degree (d) or measure of acceptability or justification. Grice
prefers acceptability because it connects with accepting that which is a
psychological, souly attitude, if a general one. Thus, Grice wants to
have It is desirable that p and It is believable that p as
understood, each, by the concatenation of three elements. The first element is
the A-type operator. The second element is the protreptic-type operator. The
third element is the phrastic, root, content, or proposition itself. It is
desirable that p and It is believable that p share the
utterer-oriented-type operator and the neustic or proposition. They only differ
at the protreptic-type operator (buletic/volitive/boulomaic or
judicative/doxastic). Grice uses + for concatenation, but it is best to use ^,
just to echo who knows who. Grice speaks in that mimeo (which he delivers in
Texas, and is known as Grices Performadillo talk ‒ Armadillo + Performative) of
various things. Grice speaks, transparently enough, of acceptance: V-acceptance
and J-acceptance. V not for Victory but for volitional, and J for judicative.
The fact that both end with -acceptance would accept you to believe that both
are forms of acceptance. Grice irritatingly uses 1 to mean the doxastic, and 2
to mean the bulematic. At Princeton in Method, he defines the doxastic in terms
of the buletic and cares to do otherwise, i. e. define the buletic in terms of
the doxastic. So whenever he wrote buletic read doxastic, and vice versa. One
may omits this arithmetic when reporting on Grices use. Grice uses two further
numerals, though: 3 and 4. These, one may decipher – one finds oneself as an
archeologist in Tutankamons burial ground, as this or that relexive attitude.
Thus, 3, i. e. ψ3, where we need the general operator ψ, not just
specificatory dummy, but the idea that we accept something simpliciter. ψ3
stands for the attitude of buletically accepting an or utterance: doxastically
accepting that p or doxastically accepting that ~p. Why we should be concerned
with ~p is something to consider. G wants to decide whether to believe p
or not. I find that very Griceian. Suppose I am told that there is a volcano in
Iceland. Why would I not want to believe it? It seems that one may want to
decide whether to believe p or not when p involves a tacit appeal to value.
But, as Grice notes, even when it does not involve value, Grice still needs
trust and volition to reign supreme. On the other hand, theres 4, as attached
to an attitude, ψ4. This stands for an attitude of buletically accepting an or
utterance: buletically accepting that p, or G buletically accepting that ~p, i.
e. G wants to decide whether to will, now that p or not. This indeed is
crucial, since, for Grice, morality, as with Kantotle, does cash in desire, the
buletic. Grice smokes. He wills to smoke. But does he will to will to smoke?
Possibly yes. Does he will to will to will to smoke? Regardless of what Grice
wills, one may claim this holds for a serious imperatives (not Thou shalt not
reek, but Thou shalt not kill, say) or for any p if you must (because if you
know that p causes cancer (p stands for a proposition involving cigarette) you
should know you are killing yourself. But then time also kills, so what gives?
So I would submit that, for Kant, the categoric imperative is one which allows
for an indefinite chain, not of chain-smokers, but of good-willers. If, for
some p, we find that at some stage, the P does not will that he wills that he
wills that he wills that, p can not be universalisable. This is proposed in an
essay referred to in The Philosophers Index but Marlboro Cigarettes took no
notice. One may go on to note Grices obsession on make believe. If I say, I
utter expression e because the utterer wants his addressee to believe that the
utterer believes that p, there is utterer and addresse, i. e. there are two
people here ‒ or any soul-endowed creature ‒ for Grices
squarrel means things to Grice. It even implicates. It miaows to me while I was
in bed. He utters miaow. He means that he is hungry, he means (via implicaturum)
that he wants a nut (as provided by me). On another occasion he miaowes
explicating, The door is closed, and implicating Open it, idiot. On the other
hand, an Andy-Capps cartoon read: When budgies get sarcastic Wild-life
programmes are repeating One may note that one can want some other person
to hold an attitude. Grice uses U or G1 for utterer and A or G2 for addressee.
These are merely roles. The important formalism is indeed G1 and G2. G1 is a
Griceish utterer-person; G2 is the other person, G1s addressee. Grice dislikes
a menage a trois, apparently, for he seldom symbolises a third party, G3. So, G
ψ-3-A that p is 1 just in case G ψ2(G ψ1 that p) or G ψ1 that ~p is 1. And here
the utterers addressee, G2 features: G1 ψ³ protreptically that p is 1 just
in case G buletically accepts ψ² (G buletically accepts ψ² (G doxastically
accepts ψ1 that p, or G doxastically accepts ψ1 that ~p))) is 1. Grice seems to
be happy with having reached four sets of operators, corresponding to four sets
of propositional attitudes, and for which Grice provides the paraphrases. The
first set is the doxastic proper. It is what Grice has as doxastic,and which
is, strictly, either indicative, of the utterers doxastic, exhibitive state, as
it were, or properly informative, if addressed to the addressee A, which is
different from U himself, for surely one rarely informs oneself. The second is
the buletic proper. What Grice dubs volitive, but sometimes he prefers the
Grecian root. This is again either self- or utterer-addressed, or
utterer-oriented, or auto-phoric, and it is intentional, or it is
other-addressed, or addressee-addressed, or addressee- oriented, or
hetero-phoric, and it is imperative, for surely one may not always say to
oneself, Dont smoke, idiot!. The third is the doxastic-interrogative, or
doxastic-erotetic. One may expand on ? here is minimal compared to the
vagaries of what I called the !─ (non-doxastic or buletic turnstile), and which
may be symbolised by ?─p, where ?─ stands for the erotetic turnstile. Geachs
and Althams erotetic somehow Grice ignores, as he more often uses the Latinate
interrogative. Lewis and Short have “interrŏgātĭo,” which they render as “a
questioning, inquiry, examination, interrogation;” “sententia per
interrogationem, Quint. 8, 5, 5; instare interrogation; testium; insidiosa; litteris
inclusæ; verbis obligatio fit ex interrogatione et responsione; as rhet. fig.,
Quint. 9, 2, 15; 9, 3, 98. B. A syllogism: recte genus hoc interrogationis
ignavum ac iners nominatum est, Cic. Fat. 13; Sen. Ep. 87 med. Surely more
people know what interrogative means what erotetic means, he would not say ‒
but he would. This attitude comes again in two varieties: self-addressed or
utterer-oriented, reflective (Should I go?) or again, addresee-addressed, or
addressee-oriented, imperative, as in Should you go?, with a strong hint that
the utterer is expecting is addressee to make up his mind in the proceeding,
not just inform the utterer. Last but not least, there is the fourth kind, the
buletic-cum-erotetic. Here again, there is one varietiy which is
reflective, autophoric, as Grice prefers, utterer-addressed, or
utterer-oriented, or inquisitive (for which Ill think of a Greek pantomime), or
addressee-addressed, or addressee-oriented. Grice regrets that Greek (and
Latin, of which he had less ‒ cfr. Shakespeare who had none) fares better in
this respect the Oxonian that would please Austen, if not Austin, or Maucalay,
and certainly not Urquhart -- his language has twelve parts of speech: each
declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven genders (including god,
goddess, man, woman, animal, etc.); and conjugable in eleven tenses, seven
moods, and four voices.These vocal mannerisms will result in the production of
some pretty barbarous English sentences; but we must remember that what I shall
be trying to do, in uttering such sentences, will be to represent supposedly
underlying structure; if that is ones aim, one can hardly expect that ones
speech-forms will be such as to excite the approval of, let us say, Jane Austen
or Lord Macaulay. Cf. the quessertive, or quessertion, possibly iterable,
that Grice cherished. But then you cant have everything. Where would you put
it? Grice: The modal implicaturum.
Grice sees two different, though connected questions about
mode. First, there is the obvious demand for a characterisation, or
partial characterisation, of this or that mode as it emerges in this or that
conversational move, which is plausible to regard as modes primary habitat)
both at the level of the explicatum or the implicaturum, for surely an
indicative conversational move may be the vehicle of an imperatival implicaturum.
A second, question is how, and to what extent, the representation of mode
(Hares neustic) which is suitable for application to this or that
conversational move may be legitimately exported into philosophical psychology,
or rather, may be grounded on questions of philosophical psychology, matters of
this or that psychological state, stance, or attitude (notably desire and
belief, and their species). We need to consider the second question, the
philosophico- psychological question, since, if the general rationality
operator is to read as something like acceptability, as in U accepts, or A
accepts, the appearance of this or that mode within its scope of accepting is
proper only if it may properly occur within the scope of a generic
psychological verb I accept that . Lewis and Short have “accepto,” “v. freq.
a. accipio,” which Short and Lewis render as “to take, receive, accept,”
“argentum,” Plaut. Ps. 2, 2, 32; so Quint. 12, 7, 9; Curt. 4, 6, 5; Dig. 34, 1,
9: “jugum,” to submit to, Sil. Ital. 7, 41. But in Plin. 36, 25, 64, the correct
read. is coeptavere; v. Sillig. a. h. l. The easiest way Grice finds to expound
his ideas on the first question is by reference to a schematic table or diagram
(Some have complained that I seldom use a board, but I will today. Grice
at this point reiterates his temporary contempt for the use/mention
distinction, which which Strawson is obsessed. Perhaps Grices contempt is due
to Strawsons obsession. Grices exposition would make the hair stand on end in
the soul of a person especially sensitive in this area. And Im talking to you,
Sir Peter! (He is on the second row). But Grices guess is that the
only historical philosophical mistake properly attributable to use/mention
confusion is Russells argument against Frege in On denoting, and that there is
virtually always an acceptable way of eliminating disregard of the use-mention
distinction in a particular case, though the substitutes are usually lengthy,
obscure, and tedious. Grice makes three initial assumptions.
He avails himself of two species of acceptance, Namesly, volitive
acceptance and judicative acceptance, which he, on occasion, calls respectively
willing that p and willing that p. These are to be thought of as
technical or semi-technical, theoretical or semi-theoretical, though each is a state
which approximates to what we vulgarly call thinking that p and wanting that p,
especially in the way in which we can speak of a beast such as a little
squarrel as thinking or wanting something ‒ a nut, poor darling
little thing. Grice here treats each will and judge (and accept) as a
primitive. The proper interpretation would be determined by the role of
each in a folk-psychological theory (or sequence of folk-psychological
theories), of the type the Wilde reader in mental philosophy favours at Oxford,
designed to account for the behaviours of members of the animal kingdom, at
different levels of psychological complexity (some classes of creatures being
more complex than others, of course). As Grice suggests in Us meaning,
sentence-meaning, and word-meaning, at least at the point at which (Schema Of
Procedure-Specifiers For Mood-Operators) in ones syntactico-semantical
theory of Pirotese or Griceish, one is introducing this or that mode (and
possibly earlier), the proper form to use is a specifier for this or that
resultant procedure. Such a specifier is of the general form, For the
utterer U to utter x if C, where the blank is replaced by the appropriate
condition. Since in the preceding scheme x represents an utterance or
expression, and not a sentence or open sentence, there is no guarantee that
this or that actual sentence in Pirotese or Griceish contains a perspicuous and
unambiguous modal representation. A sentence may correspond to more than
one modal structure. The sentence is structurally ambiguous (multiplex
in meaning ‒ under the proviso that senses are not to be multiplied
beyond necessity) and will have more than one reading, or parsing, as every
schoolboy at Clifton knows when translating viva voce from Greek or Latin, as
the case might be. The general form of a procedure-specifier for a modal
operator involves a main clause and an antecedent clause, which follows if. In
the schematic representation of the main clause, U represents an utterer, A his
addressee, p the radix or neustic; and Opi represents that operator whose
number is i (1, 2, 3, or 4), e.g g., Op3A represents Operator 3A, which,
since ?⊢ appears in the
Operator column for 3A) would be ?A ⊢ p. This reminds one of Grandys
quessertions, for he did think they were iterable (possibly)). The
antecedent clause consists of a sequence whose elements are a preamble, as it
were, or preface, or prefix, a supplement to a differential (which is present
only in a B-type, or addressee-oriented case), a differential, and a
radix. The preamble, which is always present, is invariant, and
reads: The U U wills (that) A A judges (that) U (For surely meaning is a species of intending
is a species of willing that, alla Prichard, Whites professor,
Corpus). The supplement, if present, is also invariant. And the idea
behind its varying presence or absence is connected, in the first instance,
with the volitive mode. The difference between an ordinary expression of
intention ‒ such as I shall not fail, or They shall not
pass ‒ and an ordinary imperative (Like Be a little kinder to
him) is accommodated by treating each as a sub-mode of the volitive mode,
relates to willing that p) In the intentional case (I shall not fail), the
utterer U is concerned to reveal to his addressee A that he (the utterer U)
wills that p. In the imperative case (They shall not pass), the utterer U is
concerned to reveal to his addressee A that the utterer U wills that the
addresee A will that p. In each case, of course, it is to be
presumed that willing that p will have its standard outcome, viz., the
actualization, or realisation, or direction of fit, of the radix (from expression
to world, downwards). There is a corresponding distinction between two uses of
an indicative. The utterer U may be declaring or affirming that p, in
an exhibitive way, with the primary intention to get his addressee A to judge
that the utterer judges that p. Or the U is telling (in a protreptic way)
ones addressee that p, that is to say, hoping to get his addressee to
judge that p. In the case of an indicative, unlike that of a volitive, there is
no explicit pair of devices which would ordinarily be thought of as sub-mode
marker. The recognition of the sub-mode is implicated, and comes from
context, from the vocative use of the Names of the addressee, from the presence
of a speech-act verb, or from a sentence-adverbial phrase (like for your
information, so that you know, etc.). But Grice has already, in his
initial assumptions, allowed for such a situation. The
exhibitive-protreptic distinction or autophoric-heterophoric distinction, seems
to Grice to be also discernible in the interrogative mode (?). Each differentials
is associated with, and serve to distinguish, each of the two basic modes
(volitive or judicative) and, apart from one detail in the case of the
interrogative mode, is invariant between autophoric-exhibitive) and
heterophoric-protreptic sub-modes of any of the two basic modes. They are
merely unsupplemented or supplemented, the former for an exhibitive sub-mode
and the latter for a protreptic sub-mode. The radix needs (one hopes) no
further explanation, except that it might be useful to bear in mind that Grice
does not stipulated that the radix for an intentional (buletic exhibitive
utterer-based) incorporate a reference to the utterer, or be in the first
person, nor that the radix for an imperative (buletic protreptic
addressee-based) incorporate a reference of the addresee, and be in the second
person. They shall not pass is a legitimate intentional, as is You shall
not get away with it; and The sergeant is to muster the men at dawn, as uttered
said by the captain to the lieutenant) is a perfectly good
imperative. Grice gives in full the two specifiers derived from the
schema. U to utter to A autophoric-exhibitive ⊢ p if U wills that A judges that U judges
p. Again, U to utter to A ! heterophoric-protreptic p if U wills that A A
judges that U wills that A wills that p. Since, of the states denoted by
each differential, only willing that p and judging that p are strictly cases of
accepting that p, and Grices ultimate purpose of his introducing this
characterization of mode is to reach a general account of expressions which are
to be conjoined, according to his proposal, with an acceptability operator, the
first two numbered rows of the figure are (at most) what he has a direct use
for. But since it is of some importance to Grice that his treatment of
mode should be (and should be thought to be) on the right lines, he adds a
partial account of the interrogative mode. There are two varieties of
interrogatives, a yes/no interrogatives (e. g. Is his face clean? Is the king
of France bald? Is virtue a fire-shovel?) and x-interrogatives, on which Grice
qua philosopher was particularly interested, v. his The that and the why.
(Who killed Cock Robin?, Where has my beloved gone?, How did he fix
it?). The specifiers derivable from the schema provide only for yes/no interrogatives,
though the figure could be quite easily amended so as to yield a restricted but
very large class of x-interrogatives. Grice indicates how this could be
done. The distinction between a buletic and a doxastic interrogative
corresponds with the difference between a case in which the utterer U indicates
that he is, in one way or another, concerned to obtain information (Is he at
home?), and a case in which the utterer U indicates that he is concerned to
settle a problem about what he is to do ‒ Am I to leave the door open?, Shall I
go on reading? or, with an heterophoric Subjects, Is the prisoner to be released?
This difference is fairly well represented in grammar, and much better
represented in the grammars of some other languages. The
hetero-phoric-cum-protreptic/auto-phoric-cum- exhibitive difference may
not marked at all in this or that grammar, but it should be marked in Pirotese.
This or that sub-mode is, however, often quite easily detectable. There is
usually a recognizable difference between a case in which the utterer A says,
musingly or reflectively, Is he to be trusted? ‒ a case in which the
utterer might say that he is just wondering ‒ and a case in which he
utters a token of the same sentence as an enquiry. Similarly, one can usually
tell whether an utterer A who utters Shall I accept the invitation? is
just trying to make up his mind, or is trying to get advice or instruction from
his addressee. The employment of the variable α needs to be
explained. Grice borrows a little from an obscure branch of logic, once
(but maybe no longer) practised, called, Grice thinks, proto-thetic ‒ Why?
Because it deals with this or that first principle or axiom, or thesis), the
main rite in which is to quantify over, or through, this or that connective. α
is to have as its two substituents positively and negatively, which may modify
either will or judge, negatively willing or negatively judging that p is
judging or willing that ~p. The quantifier (∃1α) . . . has to be treated
substitutionally. If, for example, I ask someone whether John killed Cock
Robin (protreptic case), I do not want the addressee merely to will that I have
a particular logical quality in mind which I believe to apply. I want the
addressee to have one of the Qualities in mind which he wants me to believe to apply. To
meet this demand, supplementation must drag back the quantifier. To extend
the schema so as to provide specifiers for a single x-interrogative (i. e., a
question like What did the butler see? rather than a question like Who went
where with whom at 4 oclock yesterday afternoon?), we need just a little
extra apparatus. We need to be able to superscribe a W in each
interrogative operator e.g., together with the proviso that a radix which
follows a superscribed operator must be an open radix, which contains one or
more occurrences of just one free variable. And we need a chameleon
variable λ, to occur only in this or that quantifier. (∃λ).Fx is to be regarded as a way of
writing (∃x)Fx. (∃λ)Fy is a way of writing (∃y)Fy. To provide a specifier for a x-superscribed
operator, we simply delete the appearances of α in the specifier for the
corresponding un-superscribed operator, inserting instead the quantifier (∃1λ) () at the position previously
occupied by (∃1α) (). E.g.
the specifiers for Who killed Cock Robin?, used as an enquiry, would be: U to
utter to A killed Cock Robin if U wills
A to judge U to will that (∃1λ) (A should will that U judges (x killed Cock Robin)); in
which (∃1λ) takes on the
shape (∃1x) since x is
the free variable within its scope. Grice compares his buletic-doxastic
distinction to prohairesis/doxa distinction by Aristotle in Ethica Nichomachea.
Perhaps his simplest formalisation is via subscripts: I will-b but will-d not.
Refs.: The main references are given above under ‘desirability.’ The most
systematic treatment is the excursus in “Aspects,” Clarendon. BANC.
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